South By North Strategies, Ltd.

Crooked Timber considers the impact that the European Union’s “democracy deficit” is having on its response to the economic crisis.

… European politicians have preferred to integrate by stealth rather than public debate. But they cannot do that any more. They have tried repeatedly, and failed repeatedly, to treat the rolling crisis as another, albeit much more complicated, technocratic problem, which can be solved through the usual kind of technocratic solution. As they started to do this, European Union governance shifted from the so-called “Community method” (under which decisions were taken by rough consensus among the member states, with the Commission acting as a kind of neutral buffer), to Angela Merkel’s Union method in which the member states were supposed to take decisions on their own. This in turn hasn’t worked out very well (Germany and France disagree on quite a lot), leading to the effective governance of the European Union by the European Central Bank (what might be called, for all its perplexities, the “ECB method”). Each of these steps has led to an ever greater remove between actual decision making and democratic control. But, when you are asking people to accept a fundamentally different way of ordering politics than the one that they are used to, lack of democratic input is a problem. What is being debated at the moment is not a technocratic fix to Europe’s problems of economic stability. It is a long term set of institutional arrangements which, if they succeed, will shape Europe’s politics for generations to come, and if they fail will likely take the world economy down with them.