The constant issue for a United Europe.

A case which, constitutes one of the most recent examples of political and democratic crisis in the EU member states and has been causing a significant headache in Brussels, is the case of Poland and the veto issued by Hungary. The EU was always standing for two main ideas, the protection of human rights and the separation of powers, not only as European ideals but also as mandatory criteria for the member states to join the Union.

But in the case of Poland, things got a little bit different after the win of the right-wing, catholic-conservative party PIS in the Polish parliamentary elections with a clear majority. At that time the whole of Europe witnessed a corrupted takeover of the judicial branch, the dismissals of 11,330 public servants for political reasons and the implementation of fines and hostile policies in any opposition media or news organization, that was not biased towards the governmental policies (Vox, 2018). When the EU and the European Commission decided to intervene by initiating Article 7.1, to suspend the fundamental voting rights of the government of Poland in the European Council. This ‘intervention’ reached a dead-end and could not be applied for the simple reason of the existence of the unanimity rule implemented by another member state, which also faces democratic issues similar to those of Poland and specifically by Victor Orban’s government of Hungary (Vox, 2018).

I believe this case here constitutes a key example of many things. Unfortunately, we do not have the ‘luxury’ to refer to an existential crisis of Europe’s democratic ideals, but we can clearly see the issues of the implementation of a unanimity rule, which we rarely observe in democratic function and institution, compared to the majoritarian rule. democracy is based and evolved by the majority rule (Bellamy, 2012), the rule of majority decisions, and not a unanimous rule that emerges from a committee, even if that unanimous decision may serve a so-called greater good of the people of Europe. Even though we are not talking about demos but rather for representatives and governments, on the one hand, this is the basis of representative democracy, and on the other hand, we can understandably see the interests of nations states colliding with the common goals of the EU. Of course, anyone could imply that this could happen to a state parliament too, where a party would just function with the only goal of accomplishing their interests rather than the greater good. They may be right, but with this example, I specifically want to underline how difficult and maybe impossible it is to discuss a European demos and how this idea gets easily contradicted by the idea of the nation-states that constitute the EU. Raising the following query, it is discovered that maybe the discussion for an EU following the democratic model of a nation-state and thus having a homogenous demos in this form, is almost impossible, something that will also be discussed while by Nicolaidis idea of Demoi-cracy (Nicolaidis, 2012). To put this question differently, is it necessary to draw the conclusion of the inevitable separation between a nation-state democracy and the existence of anything different, necessary operating as an international organization? Or can we believe and hope in the existence of a cosmopolitan democracy between nations states or another way to avoid the non-demos argument? These questions will also be examined and answered afterwards, but prior to that, I deem as necessary to refer to more evidence regarding the issue of non-demos in the EU.

It would be more than helpful to have a look at same consecutive researches, which are also quoted by Bellamy (Bellamy, 2012), from a research regarding the identification of citizens with an EU or European identity in general (Wallström & Sørensen, 2008). Some of these results show us such low levels of identification in some member states in the EU identity that Bellamy calls them rightfully as “prima facie evidence” of the no-demos argument (Bellamy, 2012). According to the following results, only 10% of the so-called EU demos possess a strong sense of EU identity, and the results become even more devastating with only 3% viewing themselves “as Europeans pure and simple” and maybe as an answer to the previous polish example only 7% “consider their European identity as more important than their national one” (Wallström & Sørensen, 2008). As appalling as these results may seem for a European Union advocate and probably for the EU institutions, who conducted the research, I believe they prove in the most obvious way that EU is facing a crucial issue regarding the identification and therefore even the existence of a demos, meaning the form of people that a democracy desperately needs in order to operate ‘of’ and ‘by’ the people. In my opinion, these empirical data work as a proof for the existence of a democratic deficit regarding the so-many times mentioned no-demos argument. The argument that describes the issue of the non-existence of a solid and homogeneous group of citizens of the EU, who identify themselves mainly as Europeans, and even if these citizens exist, they certainly constitute a small ‘minority’ in many of the member states.

Richard Bellamy also mentions the view of many EU advocates who believe that identification will be improved through participation (Bellamy, 2012). I personally think that this argument is illogical, since the lack of identification with a European vision and a common goal is the main reason that the participation remains extremely low, no matter the election process or how much the politicians ‘advertise’ the European elections as something of significant importance. So, participation cannot be succeeded without identification in the first place. The lack of participation is just one of the many consequences that exist through the lack of identification and the absence of a European demos. The results of another research that Bellamy uses in his text proves this time the fact of the low participation in the European elections for the representatives in the European parliament. (Bellamy, 2012). According to that research participation in European elections as an average usually runs below 50% and, in some countries, even 25% (Bellamy, 2012) If we check the participation results from the recent European parliamentary elections of 2019 we will see average participation of 50.56%, which may be higher from the previous European elections of 2014 (42.61%), but nevertheless still means that almost one in two European citizens does not participate in the elections (European Parliament, 2019). A percentage that would definitely be dramatically shocking for a national election. Other results are even more ‘shocking’ in member states like Croatia, where the participation percentage was 29.85% in Slovakia 22.74% or in Portugal 30.75% (European Parliament, 2019) These results stand as clear evidence of the lack of European identification in the sense of an EU demos or even a community.

These results also prove wrong some optimistic EU advocates like Hix, who believe that despite the cultural and the ethnical differences between people the left-right divide exists inside the European parliament as a common factor that can unite the voters and the European citizens, driven by different ideologies (Hix, 2008). Indeed, this is true, we can see many ideological divisions and unification between various parties of the member-states, but this does not necessarily mean that operates as a common factor or a reason for voters to be more active in the European elections or to start identifying themselves more under a common European identity. We can clearly see that not only from the participation results analyzed earlier but also from the fact that these ideological divisions exist in countries all over the world, e.g. the division between conservatives and liberals in the United States. These ideological divisions do not provide any foundation for the creation of a common European identity, or at least they do not have any significance, since they exist all over the world, in democratic countries with a representative parliamentary system. The same thing goes for those who might imply that the sharing of some standard principles regarding human rights or the environment could be the key to a common EU identity (Bellamy, 2012). Not only the participation results prove them wrong again. In addition, most of the time ‘abstract’ principles have different interpretations, and they are totally dependent on the constitution of each country. I do not deny the active role of EU in developing policies in favour of the environment or the implementation of fines to the member states that violate some of the environmental standards, but again I will underline that these policies are also shared by many non-EU countries like Canada or the United States. Also, we saw in the example of Poland that some governments violated human rights and fundamental democratic ideals like freedom of the press or judicial independence, something that would seem unthinkable for other EU member states, like Germany.

Last but not least, as Bellamy refers too, a crucial issue for the common identification of the EU citizens is also the ‘language barrier’ and even the geographical distance and position of the EU institutions (Bellamy, 2012). It is true that despite the informal use of English as the ‘unofficial’ language of Europe still the use of several different languages definitely acts as an impediment for the creation of a demos. Bellamy gives the example of a multilingual country like Belgium (Bellamy, 2012). In which the central government is weak, and the regional government is strong due to the language and the ethnical differences between Flemish and Walloons. As for the geographical distance and the position of EU institutions it is more than evident that some countries, which have a considerable number of EU institutions, will definetely identify more with the EU identity rather than any other country which has a significant distance from any of the institutions. The people of Belgium for example, have a more significant connection and understanding towards the EU institutions since many of the EU institutions are based on Brussels, this fact can be observed in the participation percentages between Belgium and Cyprus, In the recent 2019 European elections Belgium had a participation percentage of 88.47%, this could be due to the proximity of EU institutions in Brussels. On the other hand, the percentage of participation in Cyprus was 44.99%, a country that has a significant distance from every EU institution (European Parliament, 2019). Having examined many arguments and evidence, we see a lack of identification with the EU, which leads to the lack of an EU demos and thus to the existence of a democratic deficit in EU, according to the definition of democracy being ‘of’ and ‘by’ the people. We shall now examine some alternatives suggestions towards the deficit and its existence.