Democracy in the European Union
The process of European integration has given rise to a new object of study theEuropean society. Several old questions concerning citizenship, democracy, govern-ment and institutions must be raised anew, this time at the European level. These arenot only academic issues, but also major political concerns at European and memberstate level.
There are fears that transfers of power to European institutions produce a char-acteristically new and worrying form of democratic decit. The recent rejection ofthe Constitutional Treaty in France and the Netherlands suggests that this demo-cratic decit is beginning to impact on the Unions legitimacy, further endangeringthe European project of ever closer union.
How can this crisis be overcome, and in which direction should the EuropeanUnion be moving? This new volume
takes a closer look at the Unions democratic decit in an effort to establish itsprecise character and location;
scrutinizes top-down institutional opportunity structures for participation, theactors that are shaping bottom-up mobilization, and the ideologies and dis-courses that are informing attempts to generalize political claims beyond thenational level;
provides a detailed insight into the scope and character of participatory practicein decision-making, the structure and visions of the European political class, andthe role of civil society organizations and trans-national movements;
looks at the debate on the EU as a community of values, as well as views aboutEurope in the new member states.
This book will be of strong interest to students and researchers of the EuropeanUnion, European politics and European studies, as well as those concerned withmore theoretical aspects of governance and the public sphere.
Liana Giorgi is Vice-Director of the Interdisciplinary Centre for ComparativeResearch in the Social Sciences (ICCR), Austria.
Ingmar von Homeyer is a Senior Fellow at Ecologic, the Institute for Internationaland European Environmental Policy, Berlin/Brussels.
Wayne Parsons is Professor of Public Policy and Head of Department at QueenMary College, University of London, UK.
Routledge Advances in European Politics
1 Russian Messianism
Third Rome, Revolution,Communism and after
Peter J. S. Duncan
2 European Integration and the
Postmodern Condition
Governance, Democracy, Identity
Peter van Ham
3 Nationalism in Italian
Politics
The Stories of the Northern
League, 19802000
Damian Tambini
4 International Intervention in the
Balkans since 1995Edited by Peter Siani-Davies
5 Widening the European
Union
The Politics of Institutional
Change and Reform
Edited by Bernard Steunenberg
6 Institutional Challenges in the
European Union
Edited by Madeleine Hosli, Adrian
van Deemen and Mika Widgren
7 Europe Unbound
Enlarging and Reshaping the
Boundaries of the European UnionEdited by Jan Zielonka
8 Ethnic Cleansing in the Balkans
Nationalism and the Destruction ofTradition
Cathie Carmichael
9 Democracy and Enlargement in
Post-Communist Europe
The Democratisation of the
General Public in Fifteen Central
and Eastern European countries,19911998
Christian W. Haerpfer
10 Private Sector Involvement in the
Euro
The Power of Ideas
Stefan Collignon and
Daniela Schwarzer
11 Europe
A Nietzschean Perspective
Stefan Elbe
12 European Union and
E-Voting
Addressing the EuropeanParliaments Internet Voting
Challenge
Edited by Alexander H. Trechsel
and Fernando Mendez
13 European Union Council
Presidencies
A Comparative PerspectiveEdited by Ole Elgstrom
14 European Governance and
Supranational Institutions
Making States Comply
Jonas Tallberg
15 European Union, NATO and
Russia
Martin Smith and
Graham Timmins
16 Business, the State and
Economic PolicyThe Case of Italy
G. Grant Amyot
17 Europeanization and
Transnational States
Comparing Nordic Central
Governments
Bengt Jacobsson, Per Lgreid and
Ove K. Pedersen
18 European Union Enlargement
A Comparative History
Edited by Wolfram Kaiser and
Jurgen Elvert
19 GibraltarBritish or Spanish?
Peter Gold
20 Gendering Spanish Democracy
Monica Threlfall,
Christine Cousins and
Celia Valiente
21 European Union Negotiations
Processes, Networks and
Negotiations
Edited by Ole Elgstrom and
Christer Jonsson
22 Evaluating Euro-Mediterranean
RelationsStephen C. Calleya
23 The Changing Face of European
Identity
A Seven-nation Study of
(Supra)National AttachmentsEdited by Richard Robyn
24 Governing Europe
Discourse, Governmentality and
European Integration
William Walters and
Jens Henrik Haahr
25 Territory and Terror
Conicting Nationalisms in the
Basque Country
Jan Mansvelt Beck
26 Multilateralism, German Foreign
Policy and Central Europe
Claus Hofhansel
27 Popular Protest in East Germany
Gareth Dale
28 Germanys Foreign Policy
Towards Poland and the Czech
Republic
Ostpolitik RevistedKarl Cordell and Stefan Wolff
29 Kosovo
The Politics of Identity and Space
Denisa Kostovicova
30 The Politics of European Union
EnlargementTheoretical Approaches
Edited by Frank Schimmelfennig
and Ulrich Sedelmeier
31 Europeanizing Social
Democracy?
The Rise of the Party of European
SocialistsSimon Lightfoot
32 Conict and Change in EU
Budgetary Politics
Johannes Lindner
33 Gibraltar, Identity and Empire
E. G. Archer
34 Governance Stories
Mark Bevir and R. A. W Rhodes
35 Britain and the Balkans
1991 until the PresentCarole Hodge
36 The Eastern Enlargement of
the European Union
John OBrennan
37 Values and Principles in
European Union Foreign PolicyEdited by Sonia Lucarelli and
Ian Manners
38 European Union and the
Making of a Wider Northern
Europe
Pami Aalto
39 Democracy in the European
Union
Towards the Emergence of a Public
SphereEdited by Liana Giorgi,
Ingmar von Homeyer and
Wayne Parsons
40 European Union Peacebuilding
and Policing
Michael Merlingen with
Rasa Ostraukaite
41. The Conservative Party and
European Integration since 1945
At the Heart of Europe?
N.J. Crowson
42. E-Government in Europe
Re-booting the stateEdited by Paul G. Nixon and
Vassiliki N. Koutrakou
Democracy in theEuropean UnionTowards the emergence of a public sphere
Edited by Liana Giorgi,Ingmar von Homeyer and Wayne Parsons
First published 2006by Routledge2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canadaby Routledge270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
# 2006 Liana Giorgi, Ingmar von Homeyer and Wayne Parsons for selection and editorialmatter; the individual contributors, their contributions
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in anyform or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication DataDemocracy in the European Union: towards the emergence of a public sphere /edited by Liana Giorgi, Ingmar von Homeyer, and Wayne Parsons.
p. cm. (Routledge advances in European politics; 39)Includes bibliographical references and index.1. DemocracyEuropean Union countries. 2. Political participation ;
European Union countries. 3. European Union. I. Giorgi, Liana. II. Homeyer,Ingmar von. III. Parsons, Wayne. IV. Series.JN40.D475 2006341.2422dc22
2005037154
ISBN10: 0415369096
ISBN13: 9780415369091
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006.To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledgescollection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.
(Print Edition)
Contents
List of illustrations
Notes on contributors ix
Acknowledgements xi
1 Introduction: the political sociology of the European public sphere 1
JOHN CROWLEY AND LIANA GIORGI
2 Democratization and the European Union 24LIANA GIORGI
3 Participatory governance in the European Union 43
INGMARVON HOMEYER
4 The emergence of a European political class 79
ELISE FERON, JOHN CROWLEY AND LIANA GIORGI
5 The anti-globalization movement and the European agenda 115
ELISE FERON
6 The European Union as a Community of Values 135
LIANA GIORGI, NIKI RODOUSAKIS, MARISOL GARCIA AND
MARTIN PETERSON
7 EU accession and the public sphere in new member states: thecase of the Czech Republic 157
MICHAL ILLNER, DANIEL CERMAK, TOMAS KOSTELECKY AND
JANA STACHOVA
8 Conclusion: what future for European integration and democracy? 180
WAYNE PARSONS
Bibliography 199Index 209
viii
Illustrations
Figures
4.1 Map of the European political class 85
7.1 Public support for the Czech Republics application formembership of the EU by education 167
7.2 Public support for the Czech Republics application for
membership of the EU by party preference. 168
7.3 Public support for the Czech Republics membership of the
EU; voting likelihoods in the accession referendum 169
Tables
3.1 Case specic overview of conditions for participation 48
3.2 Effects on participation 74
4.1a Educational background of respondents by gender 91
4.1b Educational background of respondents by nationality 91
4.1c Educational background of respondents by political afliation 91
4.2 Experience studying and working abroad 93
4.3 Multiple mandates and current position 95
4.4 No mandate in the past or future 964.5 Re-election rates among elected MEPs following June 2004
elections 97
4.6 Share of holding ofcial positions at national level 98
4.7 Euro-enthusiasm (or Euro-scepticism) index 107
4.8 Political disenchantment index 108
4.9a European political ideologies by nationality of respondent 110
4.9b European political ideologies by politics of respondent 110
7.1 Answers to the question Do you think that you have enoughinformation about the accession process? 161
7.2 Support for Czech political parties 175
Contributors
Daniel Cermak is doctoral student at the Institute of Sociology, Academy of
Sciences of the Czech Republic.
John Crowley is Senior Programme Specialist at UNESCO, Editor of the
International Social Science Journal, and Executive Director of the
Centre Interdisciplinaire de Recherche (CIR-Paris).
Elise Feron is lecturer at the Institute of Political Science of the Universityof Lille, and Senior Research Fellow at the Centre Interdisciplinaire de
Recherche (CIR) in Paris.
Marisol Garcia is Assistant Professor at the University of Barcelona.
Liana Giorgi is Vice-Director of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Compara-
tive Research in the Social Sciences (ICCR) in Vienna.
Ingmar von Homeyer is a senior fellow at Ecologic, Institute for Interna-
tional and European Environmental Policy, Berlin.
Michal Illner is Senior Scholar at the Institute of Sociology, Academy of
Sciences of the Czech Republic, Department of Local and Regional Studies.
Tomas Kostelecky is Senior Scholar at the Institute of Sociology, Academy
of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Department of Local and RegionalStudies.
Wayne Parsons is Professor of Public Policy at Queen Mary College, Uni-
versity of London.
Martin Peterson is Professor at the universities of Bergen, Norway, and
Goteburg, Sweden and member of the Globalisation Committee of the
Swedish Research Council.
Niki Rodousakis is a research fellow at the Interdisciplinary Centre for
Comparative Research in the Social Sciences (ICCR) in Vienna.
Jana Stachova is doctoral student at the Institute of Sociology, Academy ofSciences of the Czech Republic.
x Contributors
Acknowledgements
The research reported in this volume was carried out in the framework
of the EU RTD Framework Programme project The European Public
Sphere: Assembling Information that Allows the Monitoring of European
Democracy (EUROPUB) (Fifth RTD Framework Programme Improving
Human Research Potential and the Socio-Economic Knowledge Base).
1 Introduction
The political sociology of the Europeanpublic sphere
John Crowley and Liana Giorgi
At the beginning of the twenty-rst century, the European Union nds itself
at the crossroads. On the one hand, the ambitious European project of ever
closer collaboration has signicantly advanced through the Eastern enlar-
gement and the ever growing scope of economic integration. On the other
hand, institutional and implementation decits place serious barriers to
further integration and raise, more urgently than before, the question of
political integration including its desirability and feasibility. The rejection
of the Constitutional Treaty by the French and Dutch publics in 2005, aswell as the ongoing budgetary crisis, testify to a serious legitimacy crisis.
How can this crisis be overcome and where is or should the European
Union be moving towards?
There are three distinct narratives responses to this question. The rst
considers further efcient and effective integration to be possible only once
a political integration framework has been agreed upon and put into place.
Institutional reform is a term used to refer to these considerations, yet
ultimately this is also a discussion about the EU political multi-level gov-ernance system, a possible Constitution and, for some, a state model. The
second narrative with regard to the EU legitimacy crisis emphasizes the
absence of a symbolically unifying European identity or Europeanness
among EU citizens and sees the legitimacy decit closely linked to an iden-
tity decit. According to the proponents of this narrative, as long as EU
citizens are rst and foremost nationals, pledging their solidarity to those
like them within their national territorial boundaries and identifying their
national territory as the only legitimate sphere for politics, the EU as apolity will remain decient. For this reason, it might be more sensible to
concentrate any institutional reform efforts to rendering the EU an efcient
expert-led international cooperation framework for making policy rather
than politics. The third narrative links the legitimacy crisis to a democratic
decit: the reason why the European Union and the European integration
project is not genuinely recognized as both lawful and justiable has to do
with the fact that it is non-transparent and unaccountable vis-a`-vis its citi-
zens, hence undemocratic. Overcoming the legitimacy decit thus requiresovercoming the democratic decit.
These three narratives are not exclusive of each other. However, in
the present ofcial and academic discourse they tend to represent distinct
views about what to emphasize or prioritize in either policy or research
about European integration in the near- to mid-term future. This discoursefragmentation is to blame at least in part for the emerging impasse in
European studies faced with increasing disciplinary and thematic over-
specialization. It is also a barrier with regard to envisioning futures for
European integration.
This book tries to break with this tradition. The starting point of our
analysis has been that there is indeed an organic link between the European
Unions legitimacy and democratic decit, but that this is not the problem
alone of any specic institution, a set of institutional rules or any singlelevel of analysis. We need to scrutinize political institutions and rules (or the
lack thereof) as much as policy processes, citizens concerns or patterns of
participation (or the lack thereof). Such an approach requires a robust the-
oretical and normative framework in order to avoid that it spirals into a
nave discourse of the a bit of everything (and ultimately nothing) type.
For us this is provided by the model of a strong democracy as delineated
by the notion of the public sphere. The objective of this introductory chapter
is to outline this model and relate it to the individual chapters of the book.
Models of democracy and key considerations
The idea that it is helpful to approach the theory of democracy from the
perspective of a range of competing models is a familiar one. In a widely
quoted book, David Held (1996) proposes a series of distinctions between
ten generic models.
The Greek idea of citizenship: democracy is dened as the direct politicalparticipation of (a very low number) of citizens.
Republicanism and self-government: individual liberty is dened in poli-tical terms the active citizen, after being replaced by the religious
man, appears again in political theory.
Liberal democracy: individual liberty is not political but private andeconomical; the intervention of the state must be limited in the economy
and in private lives. Direct (Marxist) democracy threatens the concept of modern politics
and presupposes in its canonical form the withering away of the state.
The technocratic and administrative conception of democracy emphasizesthe importance of experts and centralized power. Elites are far from
citizens who do not take part in political decisions; deliberation and
parliaments are under the domination of party competition. Social and
political conicts are weaker, although freedom of opinions is high.
Pluralism is characterized by the balance of powers and respect ofminorities as well as different opinions; moreover, the political system is
2 John Crowley and Liana Giorgi
composed of various political parties and is based on the separation of
powers.
Legal democracy underscores the role of the constitution and theseparation of powers; it favours minimal state intervention in private lifeand in the economy as well as a strong civil society; it seeks to restrict
the role of interest groups and supports weak collectivism.
Participatory democracy seeks the promotion of individual liberty, ofself-development and of a collective awareness of common issues
through the direct citizen participation in the regulation of the key
institutions of society.
Democratic autonomy: equal rights and duties for individuals: they areconsidered as free and equal provided they do not threaten the freedomof others.
Cosmopolitan democracy is characterized by the reform of national andinternational governing institutions and the evolution of governance;
similar processes of globalization characterize the economy and the
civil society.
The details of the above classication might be discussed at length, but its
purpose is to provide a conceptual mapping rather than a catalogue. Wecannot, of course, choose the model that best suits us or any particular
political situation; but we can sharpen our approach to practical or theore-
tical political problems by taking account of its contrasts. Each of the ten
models summarizes some salient features of a real political system and also
gives an account of the language in which its citizens have sought to make
sense of it. Furthermore, identifying the models, even if they are regarded
merely as ideal-types, points to the tensions between them and to the prac-
tical and theoretical issues that may be at stake in adopting or emphasizingone or the other. To describe democracy in terms of competitive elitism (as
did Schumpeter, for instance) is to reject competing descriptions (in
Schumpeters case, mainly in participatory terms) as unrealistic, and thus to
circumscribe the range or scope of real-world democracy. Even if polemical
considerations did not intervene, in other words, analytical options would
carry normative baggage; in addition, democracy has been a persistently
contested notion since its modern re-emergence as a possible real-world
model in the eighteenth century. Mapping models of democracy thus helpsto clarify what is actually at stake in analytical and normative quarrels
about democracy.
Using Helds own approach, a series of issues appear to have particular
signicance in driving competing interpretations of the supercially
straightforward idea of democracy as the rule of the people:
The place of the state within the overall conception of democracy andpolitics, which can be generalized as the signicance given to deliberateordering (via authoritative command) as distinct from more or less
Introduction 3
spontaneous self-ordering (via the unintended consequences of interac-
tion) as a template for collective existence. The importance given to civil
society (however named) in democratic theory is a converse criterion.
The scale of political action, which relates closely to its nature and pur-pose. If politics is conceived in terms of the collective reexive life of a
people, then the scale of politics will naturally tend to be thought of as
unitary and uniform (e.g. in the modern context, by reference to the
nation-state). Conversely, if politics is envisaged primarily in terms of
problem-solving, there are likely to be as many scales or arenas of poli-
tical authority and action as there are problems: politics will therefore be
neither unitary nor uniform, and the nation-state as indeed the strong
normative idea of the people will tend to be regarded as a ratherarbitrary historical inheritance rather than a necessary political template.
The processes that make up politics: a wide range of perspectives exist,from an emphasis on struggles and power relations to a privileging
of dialogue and deliberation, with bargaining or negotiation models
occupying a notional intermediate position.
The subject matter or scope of politics. To say that the people should ruleis not to specify over what they should rule (simply that no one else
should rule, strictly speaking, over anything); even to say that politics isabout solving problems is not to prejudge which problems are political.
In the contemporary context, this issue points in three crucial directions,
all of which remain profoundly controversial. First, what should be the
link between the economy and politics? Second, are human rights a
political issue, or an intangible framework within which politics must
operate? Third, is there a conceptual limit (e.g. the limits of the human
body, however dened) beyond which democratic politics cannot go
without self-destructing? Needless to say, none of these questions is infact dichotomous, and all sophisticated positions occupy some kind of
middle ground. But the polar opposites are, nonetheless, the structuring
factors of public debate.
The nature of the people: whom does the people include, and whomdoes it exclude? On what is membership of the people conditional? What
sense are we to make of the suspicion about the people that underlies
traditional rejections of democracy as a viable template for government?
Needless to say, these questions intersect with considerations about theterritorial scale of political authority: patterns of inclusion and exclusion
appear very differently if politics is circumscribed a priori by territoriality
or merely contingently related to it, in the sense that many (but not all)
issues that political systems need to deal with are themselves inherently
territorial. Also of crucial signicance in this respect are such institu-
tional questions as rules for decision making and the existence of a
status, possibly including specic rights and capacities, for minorities.
The nature of political judgement. Again, this overlaps to a considerableextent with consideration of the nature of the people, but is nonetheless a
4 John Crowley and Liana Giorgi
distinct question. To regard political capacity as an aspect of common sense,
a skill that can be learned in principle by everyone, an aspect of character
that itself may or may not be universally accessible, a gift that is likely to
be rare and to ourish unpredictably, or a correlate of some kind ofhierarchically ordered wisdom, is to offer vastly different interpretations
of what membership of a political community entails. Undoubtedly, the
democratic temper tended to conne the debate to a fairly limited con-
trast between political judgement as common sense and citizenship as
popular education, but it would be misleading to view the other histori-
cally attested positions as having solely antiquarian signicance. Current
debates about the role of (especially scientic) expertise within democratic
polities clearly show the survival of traditional issues and categories.
What is important about these issues is that none can plausibly be regarded
as foreclosed by common sense or theoretical logic. Arguably, all possible
answers to all of them capture something of empirical signicance about
observable political systems, as well as something of normative signicance
about the fundamental idea of democracy. It is, in that sense, not simply an
accident of the history of political thought that the various competing gen-
eric models have emerged and survived through centuries of debate. Allow-ing for the vagaries of intellectual fashion, they sketch the conceptual
universe of democratic thinking.
Strong democracy and the concept of the public sphere
Central to our understanding of a strong democracy is the notion of a
public sphere. In discussions on democracy, and drawing in particular from
the civic republican tradition, the term public sphere or public space isused to refer to the scope of citizen interaction found in democratic socie-
ties. It is, to use Habermas (1989) terminology, the publicly relevant pri-
vate sphere of interaction: here, individuals relate to one another not in
terms of market transactions, nor in terms of power relations, but rather as
politically equal citizens (subjects) of a polity.
A public sphere delineates that space in which citizens come together to
discuss and debate issues of common or public concern. The public space
thus dened is easy to imagine and also realize in the ancient city republicor the local level of contemporary societies. It is much more difcult to
bring about in metropolitan areas or the trans-national multi-lingual con-
text. It is for this reason perhaps that contemporary discussion on the
public space in general, and the European public space in particular, is very
communication-centred, concerned with the role of the media in modern
democracies and the potential of new communication technologies, like the
internet, to provide virtual public spaces that can effectively replace real
(physical) public spaces. Our approach in this book has been to focus on thepublic sphere as a guiding principle in democratic polities making necessary
Introduction 5
the establishment and maintenance of public spaces, rather than a single
public space. Our overall aim has been to judge the links between these
multiple public spaces across different territorial levels of government, and
especially across member states, and how these impact on each other and onthe European level of governance.
A democratic polity centred on the public sphere has the following char-
acteristics with reference to the six key questions identied in the previous
section as central to democratic theory, i.e. the role of the state, the scale of
political action, the processes that make up politics, the scope of politics,
the nature of the people and the nature of political judgement:
A democratic polity centred on the public sphere relates to an idea ofgovernment as authoritative command and emphasizes transparency
of rule understood democratically as self-rule. Whether the state is a
necessary framework in this respect is a matter of vigorous debate, but it
is at least clear that in so far as the traditional territorial state is regar-
ded as obsolete, the solution is to be sought in a hierarchically ordered
scheme of territorial scales, i.e. in some form of federalism.
Politics expresses the collective reexive life of a people. It is engaged inproblem-solving only (albeit necessarily) to the extent that such collectivelife brings the people up against problems, which become so only
within the democratic process itself.
Deliberation is the fundamental democratic process. Bargaining andpower struggles are acceptable only to the extent that they are norma-
tively subordinate to deliberation and, ideally, set within an institutional
framework where they can be regulated by deliberation.
The subject matter of politics is indeterminate. However, a properlyordered democracy will be such that, at any time, the limits of politicalcompetence will be quite sharply drawn. In Habermas (1999) well
known phrase, sovereignty and human rights are co-originary.
The people includes, in principle, all those affected by the decisions takenin the course of the democratic process. The absolute minimum principle
of inclusion is, of course, that all those who are subject to laws enacted
democratically should participate equally in the process of deliberation
and enactment.
Political judgement is a skill that can be learned by anyone, and is indeeduniversally acquired in the context of socialization and education.
Undoubtedly, some people may be less effectively taught; and, possibly,
some may prove inherently more skilful. But neither of these distinctions
offers any ground for distinguishing either in principle or in practice
between those endowed with and devoid of political capacity.
While such a model is fairly determinate in the context of democratic
thinking and is in particular clearly and sharply opposed to other inuentialdemocratic modes of thinking, such as Schumpeterian elitist pluralism or
6 John Crowley and Liana Giorgi
Hayekian liberalism, it still offers considerable scope for variation. If pub-
licity-oriented democracy has a generic name in contemporary political
theory it is republicanism, and in order to clarify how this analysis can
contribute to a sharper conceptualization of the idea of a public sphere inthe specically European context, it is useful to specify some of the dis-
tinctions between varieties of republicanism. These refer ultimately to four
main titular gures: Aristotle, Machiavelli, Rousseau and Kant. It would be
mistake, however, to conclude that there are four distinct varieties of
republicanism: on the one hand it is possible, to a certain extent, to com-
bine several of the above inuences (notably, of course, Rousseau and
Kant); and on the other hand, important recent gures (most notably
Arendt) have contributed to a redistribution of some of the classic issues. Asurvey of republicanism would be quite beyond the scope of this intro-
ductory chapter, and the suggestions offered here, along with the theorists
chosen, are mainly illustrative.
Strong democracy structured by institutions
Benjamin Barber, drawing inspiration primarily from Rousseau and to a
lesser extent from Aristotle, offers a theory (and a prescription) of strongdemocracy as a way of life structured by institutions (Barber 1984, 1988).
The current crisis of democracy, for example, is analysed by Barber in terms
of the erosion of democratic institutions, including education, the public
media and the state generally, particularly under the pernicious inuence of
contemporary modes of globalization (Barber 1995). Neither liberalism nor
tribalism can be faithful solutions because the notions of individuals and of
communities are not solutions in themselves. It is not old-fashioned to
believe in politics, including in concrete and pragmatic politics rather thanideal politics. This is why both the idea and especially the structures of
democracy should be improved: the representative institutions on which
Europe depends have drifted away from citizens. Liberty, in Barbers char-
acteristically republican view, is distinctively political: it involves essentially
the capacity to act together, and only in a subsidiary sense the capacity to
protect myself from the encroachments of others. The existence of liberty
as a tangible and situated good depends on the stability of national political
institutions and on our capacity to modernize them and help them to playtheir role. Education the key to what Barber, in a striking phrase, idealizes
as the aristocracy of everyone (Barber 1992) but also nationalism and
religion are means of making this goal attainable. Politics does not mean
trying to nd absolute truth or justice but making everyday choices taking
reality into account: there are no a priori solutions. Political liberty thus
entails being a responsive and responsible politician or citizen. This is why
the state is not inherently far from citizens, or to be feared as liberals and
conservatives tend to: state and citizens can work together to change theworld in the name of common political participation.
Introduction 7
Undoubtedly, the common will of citizens, that is to say their collective
feeling of membership, based on a common participation in the building of
political society, a feeling of sovereignty, should be taken into account. As
Aristotle wrote, men are political animals. Although each country has itsown political culture and traditions, the remarks above can and should
be applied in all Western societies. Europe would not be ill advised to take
inspiration from local participation in American society and to encourage
political powers to be less centralized. Moreover, contemporary immigra-
tion and multiculturalism can help us to nd political answers to the new
identity claims which could mean the improvement of civic faith. Follow-
ing Habermas, Barber argues that democracy is fed by a collective feeling of
membership in a common (political) society. To welcome otherness there-fore entails building a common citizenship based on responsibility, popular
sovereignty, political will and strong participatory institutions.
A sense of community through political action
Although clearly within it in a generic sense, Barber expresses scepticism
about the republican tradition as expressed in contemporary political
theory, precisely because of its traditional character. He is concerned, inparticular, that contemporary Machiavellianism may lack an adequate
understanding of the public and of citizenship, and that the inuence of
Arendt tends to be uncomfortably anti-modernist. Other contemporary
republicans, on the contrary, take Arendt and/or Machiavelli as their key
reference points. Etienne Tassin (1999), for instance, thinks that philosophy
is very useful to politics because it allows men to understand common life
in politics. This does not mean that an absolute truth conditions politics as
individual and collective actions, but that understanding the political con-dition of individuals implies nding the sense of living together, which is
not easy precisely because both events and political decisions are uncertain.
Historicism must be banished, as well as relativism. As a consequence, a
public political sphere of actions must be created and nourished to give
politics a concrete dimension, to help it to be close to individuals and
encourage them to participate in it. But, as Arendt said, since political
action is much more than work (the goal of which is private, individual
survival) because it gives sense to common life, common belonging to theworld and pluralism have the same foundations. We must not avoid the
concrete world, reality, because politics is praxis. Once we have plurality, we
have to build a political community of citizenship, that is to say the imple-
mentation of common and deliberative political action.
Pluralism means mutual recognition and shared culture, whereas collec-
tive political action implies citizenship, political action and power, which is
the opposite of domination, of strength. Moreover, the political sphere is a
public sphere, it is not just a common and shared national or culturalsphere, as the latter concerns a limited number of people and the former the
8 John Crowley and Liana Giorgi
whole political community of citizens. Tassin (1999) has specically applied
this argument to the emergence of a European polity and has logically, on
the basis of this interpretation of what publicity entails, expressed scepti-
cism about the conceptual basis of a European public sphere. Politicalaction gives the individuals their real common identity. Furthermore, poli-
tical judgement is collective and reinforces the common sense of the com-
munity. Thus, the common world is composed of individuals who, as
individuals, judge politically and, as a consequence, give a common sense to
the political action which is part of the judgement. Tassin refers to Arendts
interpretation of Kant, who considered that such a collective political jud-
gement created a feeling of universality and cosmopolitan citizens.
Tassin criticizes sovereignty because it implies submission and the absenceof common world, of freedom and of pluralism. As a matter of fact, power
cannot belong to an individual or to a restricted group of people, it does
not imply relationships, even between institutions and men. It belongs to
the whole political community, even when some people represent other people
within the political sphere. Indeed, the political sphere is fragile, because
politics is fragile, indeterminate, threatened: time is abolished except in the
concepts of beginning and promise. Politics exists only in collective action,
in deliberation which does not have specic goals except itself. Politicalpower is, by denition, useless as it aims only at making individuals work
together and take collective decisions for their common world. It does not
aim at reaching a consensus, contrary to what Habermas claims, because
politics is not government. More concretely, according to Tassin, there should
be a balance of powers, because the law does not submit individuals, it rather
links them to each other. Procedures, communication between people within
the public sphere are not the point: the feeling of belonging to the same
political community is much more crucial. Politics is an institution. Thecommon world both conditions citizenship and gives it its meaning. Indivi-
duals are equals and independent, but they are also linked to each other
through a fragile common feeling of membership and responsibility, and
through the idea of political confrontation by virtue of the res publica.
Beyond liberalism to emphasize civic virtues
By contrast with both Barber and Tassin, John Pocock (1975) offers aninterpretation of republicanism in which Machiavelli is perhaps the most
powerful inuence. Underlining Barbers point that modernity is one of the
things at stake in debate within republicanism, Pocock qualies the exces-
sively positive image of modernity understood in terms of open societies,
private liberties, political rights, liberal economy and peace, by offering a
critical historiography of liberalism. Politics in Western countries has been
reduced to private interests and pluralism for more than thirty years. What
we have forgotten are the key questions of living together and commonprinciples. This is why Machiavelli is a model for many authors for whom
Introduction 9
politics means civic virtues and political ideals, i.e. political freedom, prop-
erly understood. For Pocock, Machiavelli plays a major role in the Amer-
ican imagination of nation building, which cannot be reduced to political
and economical liberalism. He argues for a civic and humanistic denitionof politics: people are citizens before being traders. And virtue means that
people work together for their common destinies through a stable and plur-
alistic political order in which all can recognize themselves. Such a repub-
lican order is based on autonomy, civicness, limited specialization of
political functions, and active participation of all citizens in politics. In
Pococks opinion, the debate on modernity must take into account indivi-
dual rights and the limitation of political authority, but discussion of poli-
tics cannot be restricted to such liberal concerns.According to Quentin Skinner (1978) and others (for example, Alasdair
MacIntyre), there is a moral gap between the liberal conception of politics
and the Aristotelian political tradition. The conception of negative liberty,
for instance, has made political liberty a negative notion something is
lacking. One of the claims about political liberty in this line of thinking
links freedom to self-government, to civic virtues (personal liberty is linked
with the notion of public service). This means that only some well dened
ends deserve to be pursued. Another claim is that freedom implies con-straints: freedom depends on our willingness and capacity to maintain civic
virtues. Virtue is thus a constraint; we must force ourselves to be free (which
explicitly relates Rousseau to the tradition under discussion). The supposed
tension between individual rights and duties may thus be simply a mis-
placed liberal obsession. In fact, according to Skinner, real freedom, based
on political participation, is not an obligation, since humans are naturally
social (Aristotle); moreover, they are moral beings with human purposes. As
a consequence, human freedom may be a positive notion. This is whyhumans need to create a political association in order to realize their nature
and liberty.
In the classical republican tradition (Machiavelli, Harrington, Milton),
the condition for freedom thus understood is to abolish absolutism in order
to live in a free state. The benets of living in free states, from the Machia-
vellian perspective, are civic greatness and wealth, and also personal lib-
erty (individuals remain free to pursue their private ends, whatever they
are). In order to maintain individual liberties, we must promote the respublica, a self-governing republic, which implies that citizens cultivate civic
virtue, the will to serve the common good, to improve the freedom of the
community. The required qualities are courage, determination to defend our
country against foreign conquerors, and prudence; and the required insti-
tutional conditions, which in some ways are even more difcult to establish,
are guarantees that political decisions are taken by the entire political body
and the avoidance of corruption. The means are the coercive power of the
law, but not in a Hobbesian sense. For Machiavelli, the priority is to protectindividual liberties and avoid servitude.
10 John Crowley and Liana Giorgi
Republican thinkers in what is often called the classical tradition thus
connect social freedom with self-government, but also link the idea of per-
sonal liberty to that of virtuous public service. That the preservation of
individual liberty should imply coercion and constraint (duties which mayhave to be enforced) is only supercially paradoxical (pace liberalism)
because our ends, being indeterminate, are not always moral (pace Aris-
totle). There is nothing contradictory in proposing to place moral con-
straints on oneself. Today, it is commonly said (or wished) that there are
many areas of public life where increased participation may improve the
accountability of our representatives. But the most important goal is not to
build a genuine democracy based on power to the people. Rather, we
must rst of all put our duties before our rights to warrant the latter.
Dialogue towards rational consensus
Jurgen Habermas (1999) self-consciously relates himself to the republican
tradition, but derives it primarily from Kant, with the added inuence of
Rousseau. His interpretation is thus signicantly different from both Bar-
bers straightforward Rousseauism and classical Machiavellianism, and
also conicts on a number of points with the Arendtian tradition. Further-more, his sustained attention to the post-metaphysical fact of pluralism
places him in a closer and more internal connection to liberalism (e.g.
Rawls) than most republicans for whom, indeed, liberalism is often the
main conceptual adversary. Habermas himself would argue that his theories
offer a synthesis of liberalism and republicanism and reveal many of the
supposed oppositions between them to be bogus. While we may not accept
that conclusion, it is clear enough that it conveniently summarizes his
overarching intellectual objectives.Habermas conceptual framework seeks to combine law, justice, democ-
racy and rights. Therefore, morality is a key concept, as well as a law which
is to be procedural and discursively grounded. This project is bound to
create a common and participatory political sphere, a common feeling of
membership in the same political community. Habermas does not agree
with Arendt, who thought that conict more exactly peaceful conict
was the key to democracy and in a sense even its ultimate goal. According
to him, pluralism, differences of opinions and values (e.g. different concep-tions of the good) can be handled only through rational consensus, not
conict. The consensus, in turn, cannot be strictly substantive (in the post-
metaphysical context), but must have a procedural character. Referring to
Kant, Habermas insists on the importance of dialogue and considerations
of differences, while rejecting communitarianism. Habermas also seeks to
bridge or at least narrow the gap between democracy and rights in stressing
the importance of commonly shared values, which implies that laws should
be self-imposed and binding in order to reconcile legal and factual equality(the discourse principle links self-legislation to law).
Introduction 11
European democracy in terms of publicity
Why give a democratic model centred on the public sphere ideology pre-
cedence for the European Union? There are two main reasons for this. Our
argument is rst, that this model has some kind of normative priority;
second that that there are specic reasons within the dynamics of the
emerging European polity for competing models to be less likely to be
available here than at the national level.
Normative considerations
What is most distinctive about the civic republican model as a general the-
oretical approach to democracy is that it is premised on scepticism about
the two fundamental processes that lie behind the most practically sig-
nicant competing models: aggregation and delegation.
The aggregative principle states that, citizens preferences being diverse,often conicting, chaotically uncoordinated and imperfectly known, the
political process must offer processes for them to be bundled (by setting a
manageable agenda framed by issues on which people can adopt a fairly
limited range of relevant and possibly sharply conicting positions) as
well as decision procedures that ensure that, on the whole, policies (dened
as choices among bundled positions) that are opposed by the majority or by
powerful vocal minorities are not implemented. The principle of delegation,
which is compatible with the rst though not necessarily combined with it,states that politics is, for technical reasons, subject to the same general laws
of division of labour as all other forms of collective human activity.
Competence, taste, ability, ambition, along with various random factors,
lead some to concern themselves with the management of public affairs and
others to be passive or indifferent. Not only is there nothing wrong with
this it is actually more efcient in producing the public good than a
participatory system where everyone tries to do a bit of everything. It fol-
lows that it is both likely and desirable for democratic systems (dened forthese purposes as systems where everyones voice counts for something and
everyones vote counts equally) to develop mechanisms for efcient division
of political labour. Representative institutions, political parties, opinion polls
and the mass media are among the characteristic institutions of delegation
democracy in this respect.
It is a reasonable summary to regard contemporary democratic systems
as relying, on the whole, on a combination of aggregation and delegation, in
the sense that their characteristic institutions depend on both principles andthat the standard justications offered of them depend on claims about the
mutually supportive operation of delegation and aggregation. At the theo-
retical level, the Schumpeterian model of competitive elite liberalism is an
ideal-type in this regard. The question, then, is what might be wrong with
this generic model and what might lead us, in spite of its undoubted
12 John Crowley and Liana Giorgi
descriptive usefulness, to give normative priority to civic republicanism? The
answer lies in two sets of considerations that are entirely familiar from the
literature, but the signicance of which nonetheless needs to be appreciated.
First, the formal justication of aggregation is open to a series of dama-ging objections. Voting paradoxes are sufciently familiar not to require
detailed discussion here. Sufce it to mention Kenneth Arrows impossi-
bility theorem which, generalizing Condorcets paradox, shows that the
conditions required for voting procedures to produce collectively stable
decisions in terms of xed prior preferences are, theoretically, highly
restrictive. In addition, as a model of democracy considered substantively
rather than formally, aggregation is open to the challenge that, by con-
sidering preferences to be xed and largely independent from the politicalprocess, it excludes any idea of citizenship as participation in a process of
collective self-determination. It is not necessary to subscribe to the strong view
that, in the words of Pierre Bourdieu (1980), public opinion does not exist in
order to justify scepticism about the stability, coherence and even signicance
of opinions expressed publicly. But, if preferences are in some sense inde-
terminate, the very idea of aggregation becomes largely meaningless.
Second, and to a large extent independently, the idea that delegation as a
principle of political organization might be justied in democratic termscomes up against some fairly massive issues of political sociology. At a
formal level, democratic delegation requires both a robust conception of
public opinion regarded as not essentially exposed to manipulation in the
context of elite competition and an elite that is fairly open, or at the very
least not entirely endogamous. There is extensive evidence that really exist-
ing democracies tend to violate both conditions indeed, arguably, the his-
torical trend in so far as there is one is towards increasing violation.
Specic European considerations
The general normative priority of the characteristic features of civic repub-
licanism takes on a specic signicance at the European level. Elite plural-
ism in historically established democracies can rely on a dense web of
institutions, practices, and background values and preconceptions, that
correct some of the bias inherent in the principles of aggregation and dele-
gation. On the one hand, some idea of the public interest is embedded innationhood and statehood: this may be imperfectly articulated and far from
consensual, but it nonetheless remains a background resource that reduces
the need for the formal institutions of political authority to produce their
own legitimacy within the terms of their own operation. On the other hand,
and in many ways more importantly, political authority is only one aspect
of a whole web of regulation that corresponds to what we might call soci-
etal governance.
Institutional density undoubtedly sharply distinguishes the EU from itsmember states. Whatever one may think of elite pluralism or its corporatist
Introduction 13
variants in normative terms, it is abundantly clear that the background
resources on which it can rely at national level are signicantly lacking at
European level. The lack of a common language is merely one aspect of this
decit, and in many ways not the most important. Of more profound sig-nicance is a degree of institutional fragmentation that is a barrier to the
emergence of a shared political culture and, simultaneously, a major factor
in the absence of a focused political agenda. Comparison with cohesive
federal states perhaps brings this contrast into sharper relief. The United
States has regional political systems embedded both in institutions and in
an available language of identity. But there is unquestionably a national
political system that serves to organize patterns of regional variation, and
furthermore one that, inside the Beltway, is highly cohesive. In so far as theEU can be considered from the same perspective, the situation is almost
precisely the opposite. In other words, it is the thickness and self-contained
nature of the characteristic institutional systems of each of the member
states, rather than any substantive difference between them, that best
accounts for the unquestionably and correlative thinness of the EU.
These facts are very familiar, but their signicance seems not to be ade-
quately appreciated. It is striking that even a defender of the EU such as
Jacques Delors has gone on record as regarding four policy areas as beinginherently inappropriate for Europeanization: education, culture, social
welfare, and law and order. In light of earlier comments, this list looks very
like an enumeration of what is institutionally constitutive of state-centred
nationhood; its effect, if taken seriously, is certainly to entrench an irre-
ducible difference between the member states, which remain heirs to the
nation-state tradition and continue to reect it in modied form, and the
EU, which cannot aspire to the same degree of institutional and symbolic
cohesiveness. It follows that, unless the democratic decit is taken to be anecessary feature of Europeanization which implies that, as Euro-sceptics
would claim, a choice must be made between democracy and Europe the
EU must, for structural reasons, draw more on the distinctive resources of
civic republicanism than the member states. Publicity may be a background
resource at national level; it cannot be at European level. It is to this extent
that consideration of the specic features of the political integration of
Europe reinforces the general normative arguments for a generically civic
republican approach to the assessment of contemporary democracy.The reader will note that we consistently avoid considering the problem
of democracy at European level as one of identity that emphasizes the
symbolic elements (passports, anthems, ags and the other paraphernalia of
nationhood). It is often presented in public debate if not also in academic
contributions that subscription to a form of European collective identity
could possibly overcome both the actual and the perceived democratic def-
icit. In other words, the democratic decit is closely related to an identity
decit. However, rather than formulating such an identity at the symboliclevel, it is both more theoretically coherent and more practically plausible to
14 John Crowley and Liana Giorgi
relate it to the democratic process itself. This idea that democracy might be
self-legitimizing is a little more plausible. If people are given procedures that
enable them to be genuinely citizens, then they will tend to act as citizens
and feel themselves to be truly members of a political community. Intui-tively, a public sphere or space is one in which genuine citizenship is possi-
ble. Adequate democratic procedures would thus promote a sense of
identication, and vice-versa, leading to a virtuous cycle of truly European
citizenship.
The public sphere as a sociological process
The previous sections tell us what a public sphere would look like and whythe EU is unlikely to be democratic without one. What they do not tell us is
how public spheres emerge in general. The question is what sociological
features might guarantee, or less ambitiously permit, the emergence and
stability of a public sphere structured by a language of political justication
based on impartial argument that serves as a regulatory ideal. The point is
not, of course, that political actors cease to have distinctive interests, values
and identities when speaking or acting publicly. They cannot, and even if
they could there would be no normative reason to demand it of them.Rather the regulatory language is one that enables actors to know what
kinds of arguments count as good and what things cannot be said in public
without discrediting a claim and its author. In a very formal sense, such
criteria are indistinguishable from political correctness, which may be
understood in a very derogatory way. For public language to have normative
signicance, therefore, some standard of conformity to the public interest
needs to be available at least in principle. To make this requirement positive
would be highly implausible: indeed, we should be suspicious of anyattempt to dene the public interest independently from the democratic
process itself. It is more plausible, however, as a negative constraint: the
idea of the public interest equips us with tools to detect arguments, whether
explicit or implied by claims advanced, that are prima facie bad in the sense
that they are designed solely to use public means to obtain private advan-
tage. In democratic terms, obviously, such a language can be neither chosen
nor imposed; it necessarily emerges, and one would expect it on general
sociological grounds to emerge as an aspect of procedures and processes inwhich it is embedded and to which it gives meaning. Publicity, understood
in terms of public accountability (accountability in public and account-
ability to the idea of the public), is simply a convenient and sociologically
resonant name for this kind of evaluative language.
The rst feature of publicity is what Habermas (1996) puts at the centre
of his analysis: the fact that the public sphere relates politics to law. Law-
making involves dening general rules for persons and circumstances
unknown, or at least imperfectly known. It means shifting attention frombargaining about resource sharing for any specic issue to deliberating
Introduction 15
about rules to guide resource sharing more generally. The planning and use
of physical infrastructure, such as housing and leisure facilities, offer
numerous examples. Such infrastructure obviously occupies specic spaces,
and issues of access and quality are themselves highly localized. It may,however, be more politically effective to mobilize at a higher level. In that
case, one would expect to encounter the claim that the state should provide
(or order the council to provide) resource x for group Y. However, forms of
mobilization that succeed in federating a durable coalition usually have a
rather different character, expressing more abstract, more generalizable in
a word, more political concerns. Typically, the revised claim is that law A
should be passed in order to guarantee equitable access to resource x (or
some broader class X of resources) for all groups (including, of course, Y).In other words, claims that are legislative in the generic sense that they are
about the rules of politics are political in a way that typically does not make
sense locally because the local is by denition not so much a space as a
sub-space. It is of its nature to be embedded in a larger-scale entity. The
complexity of Europe, on the other hand, is underlined by the fact that the
member states are neither strictly autonomous, nor merely local with
regard to the EU.
What is important sociologically is that the politicization of claims, andthe corresponding shift from bargaining to deliberation, depend on the
dynamics of mobilization rather than on the good intentions of the actors
involved. Otherwise, the idea of a public sphere would be purely wishful
thinking. Whether the dynamics of mobilization sufce to impose delibera-
tion on actors who do not have an interest in generalizing and politicizing
their claims is, however, doubtful. The process sketched with reference to
the nationalization of local claims depends crucially on the comparative
weakness of the initial mobilization and the structural necessity to changescale, because of the lack of legislative capacity at the local level. Pure bar-
gaining may be a perfectly stable format for other kinds of claims. Haber-
mas himself would of course argue that the dynamics of argument even
within a bargaining format force the participants towards deliberation.
But this is inadequate, since it leaves willingness to participate in good-faith
argument ungrounded within the dynamics of mobilization.
The problem for a sociological analysis of the public sphere is, therefore,
to specify the structural conditions that make participation in deliberation arational political strategy even for actors who are unreasonable in the
Rawlsian sense that they are not motivated by a desire for just cooperation.
Such conditions cannot, of course, provide guarantees, or even impose
enforceable constraints on political participation. Arguably, indeed, democ-
racy depends on the absence of guarantees or constraints of this kind. The
conditions are simply those that make it more probable that membership of
a society organized as a political community should take the form of parti-
cipation based on public-spiritedness in other words what one wouldusually call, for normative purposes, citizenship.
16 John Crowley and Liana Giorgi
The sociology of political participation, of which work inspired by the
theories of Pierre Bourdieu is exemplary, is generally regarded as and to a
real extent is self-consciously constituted as a critique of and alternative
to the idealism of Habermas and other proponents of Offentlichkeit. WhatBourdieu calls the political eld (champ politique) coincides empirically
with the public sphere: it is characterized by the mobilization of resources,
the expression of interests and the articulation of justicatory language
(Bourdieu 2000). It is the forum in which membership of a society orga-
nized as political community is constituted the forum, in other words, of
citizenship. In Bourdieus interpretation, however, the political eld is also
the point where political domination converges, in mutually reinforcing
ways, with economic and symbolic domination to arrange and justifyunequal participation. It is the place, in other words, where domination
dresses up as citizenship. As people confronted with cross-dressing tend to,
Bourdieu views this with a mixture of technical admiration and moral
revulsion.
At rst sight, no two things could be more different than a public sphere
and a political eld. In fact they are, pace both Bourdieu and Habermas,
mutually reinforcing. What prevents citizenship being simply a sham in the
political eld is the competitive pressure to which those who attempt tomonopolize it are subjected. And what prevents the public sphere being
merely wishful thinking is precisely the same competitive pressure. What
develops, in other words, is an uneasy balance between the tendency of
public-spiritedness to emerge from cynical politics and the tendency of even
the most idealistic politics to close in on itself. This balance, like citizenship
itself, is a question of empirical degree: there are no knock-down argu-
ments, sociological or quasi-transcendental. Effectively, a public sphere is an
open political eld: one from which nothing is excluded a priori and inwhich practical limits to inclusion can be overcome if people care about
them enough. If it did acquire closure in any of these respects, it would
cease, ultimately, to be public in the full sense of the word. Meaningful
citizenship is the correlate of such openness.
The most crucial point to be noted about this outline characterization is
that it makes the emergence of a public sphere a matter of degree. Publicity
is not either present or absent; it is more or less signicant within a political
system. Its signicance grows as a wider range of actors and issues areregulated by publicity, and conversely declines when larger sections of the
political process are condoned off from the kind of normative assessment
that republican citizenship entails. More formally, it may be useful to dis-
tinguish for these purposes between three dimensions of openness that are,
in principle, fairly independent, and the impact of which on the strong idea
of publicity is cumulative. Furthermore, the three dimensions summarize
the thrust of the extensive research on the forms and implications of poli-
tical exclusion especially the subtle exclusion that affects those who areformally included as citizens, but whose concerns remain unheard and
Introduction 17
unrecognized. The rst dimension of openness is in terms of persons. A
genuinely public sphere would be open in principle to all and, in practice,
would offer a sufciently wide range of options and relevant resources
including opportunities to establish innovative coalitions for no one to bestructurally excluded. The democratic ideal, of course, would demand truly
equal access, but this standard is so exacting that it is of little assistance in
assessing real-world systems that are, to varying degrees, imperfect. The
second dimension of openness is in terms of issues. A genuinely public
sphere would be indeterminate with respect to questions that can be raised
and problems that matter. At any point in time, a political community will
tend to rely on a broadly shared common sense within which some things
are not political, not topics for public discussion, not recognized as thingsat all. This is normatively acceptable so long as that common sense is
provisional not in the sense that all actors submit it to reexive criticism
(which would be incompatible with the very idea of common sense) but,
much more simply that nothing prevents it being challenged at any time by
any one. Again, it would be absurdly exacting and ultimately self-defeating
to insist that everything must always be up for grabs, but the principle of
publicity does give us the critical resources to be sceptical of things that are
persistently and routinely taken for granted. The third, and in some respectsmost challenging, dimension of openness is in terms of modes of discourse.
One interpretation of publicity associates it closely with a particular kind of
public intervention one based on impartiality and reasoned argument
from general principles and abstract concerns. It is a familiar nding of
critical sociology, especially from a feminist perspective, that such rules of
engagement even if only at the level of entrenched common sense are
highly exclusive. A necessary corollary of openness to persons and issues is
that discourse is not regulated other than by the requirements of delibera-tion itself, and we might indeed add, against Habermas own views on the
communicative process, that civility as a condition of open-endedness is a far
more appropriate standard here than rationality as a condition of consensus.
Arguably, the public sphere might benet hugely from the deliberate foster-
ing of non-standard forms of engagement, precisely because our taken-for-
granted notions of impartiality carry heavy unacknowledged baggage.
Contents and structure of this book
Let us start by summarizing the theoretical argument of the previous sec-
tions. This is that the democratic model centred on the public sphere, which
should and is being given precedence for the European Union by reason of
the latters institutional thinness, implies a twofold focus on citizenship:
from the top-down perspective, on the institutional opportunity structures
for participation and, more specically, their openness with regard to per-
sons, issues or modes of discourse; from the bottom-up perspective, on theforces and actors that are shaping mobilization and, in turn, the generalization
18 John Crowley and Liana Giorgi
of political claims beyond the national, hence at the European level. At the
same time, a public sphere is not clearly delineated in that it either exists or
it is absent. Its emergence is rather a matter of degree: a strong European
democracy is that in which the public sphere plays a signicant role; a weakEuropean democracy is that where the opposite is the case.
This theoretical argument provided the basis for the research that is
documented in this volume. All of the contributors in this volume worked
together over a period of three years studying public debates and instances
of participation across policy domains and several countries, as well as at
the level of the EU supra-national institutions, in an attempt to both
document and analyse the emergence of the European public sphere and its
degree of signicance. Our research design was guided by two principalconsiderations that follow directly from our theoretical argument: First,
that in order to tap on the emergence of the European public sphere it is
necessary to look into the decision structures and procedures, and examine
to what extent these allow for the contestation of decision-making by citi-
zens and their representatives. Second, that insofar as the consolidation of
the European public sphere depends equally, if not more signicantly, on
the ability of relevant intermediaries civil society organizations, political
parties or social partner organizations to Europeanize political claims,assessing the degree and scope of the European public sphere implies that
we have to look into the patterns of mobilization and narratives of these
actors. Accordingly, the contributions to this volume deal respectively with
opportunity structures for participation (Chapter 3), the emergence of new
European actors (Chapters 4 and 5), and the latters narratives on the
European Union at the supra-national and national levels (Chapters 6 and
7). Chapter 2 places this research in the context of the democratic audit
scholarship. Following this short overview, let us take a closer look at theindividual chapters.
In search of a methodological framework that would allow us to measure
and monitor the degree to which publicity informs European democracy,
Liana Giorgi, in Chapter 2, suggests that it might be more reasonable to
think about these questions in terms of democratization. Even in the
absence of supra-national institutions such as those of the European Union,
contemporary societies would still be facing democratic challenges by
reason of the complexity brought about by the growing inter-dependenciesbetween territorial and societal levels of governance, within as well as
beyond the nation-state. The extension of the scope of the democratic audit
scholarship to consider ever more social and political institutions supports
this view. From this perspective, it is more reasonable to think about
democratic practices in terms of governance mode rather than in demo-
cratic modelling terms. As argued earlier in this chapter, contemporary
democratic systems tend to rely on a combination of aggregation and dele-
gation to arrive at collective decisions, and following our theoretical argu-ments, deliberative procedures are or should be gaining in signicance in a
Introduction 19
democratic framework centred on the public sphere. Giorgi extends this line
of reasoning to apply to the institutional level. In turn, this means that
monitoring democracy in order to assess the degree of its openness in terms
of publicity must not only be carried out at different territorial levels andacross different societal institutions, but also with the overall objective of
establishing the extent to which different procedural modes for aggregating
or integrating citizen interests are used and with what effect. This is the
approach subsequently adopted in Chapter 3.
Based on the results of an empirical study across several European policy
domains, Ingmar von Homeyer (Chapter 3) is able to show that there is a
signicant variation across policy domains with regard to both the institu-
tional opportunity structures for participation and the total intensity ofparticipatory practice as such. However these two dimensions do not stand
in an obvious direct relationship. In other words, participatory practice is
not determined alone by the opportunity structures for participation, nor
do the latter, when they exist, always lead to the desired democratic input in
the decision process. The relationship is much more complex and needs to
take into account various factors and primarily the decision procedures at
work both at the European and national levels, the competencies of Eur-
opean institutions as compared to their counterparts at national level, thedegree of felt common affectedness of the key issues under consideration, as
well as the existence of key civil society organizations with strong advocacy
coalitions. Indeed, argues von Homeyer, the latter two factors carry a far
greater weight than the former. In other words, participatory governance is
more likely to emerge in those areas that deal with themes which are per-
ceived as shared across Europe and where there are key civil society or other
organizations that mobilize at the European level. Interestingly, the degree
to which interest organizations mobilize at the European level stands oftenin inverse relationship to the degree of organizational embededness of these
actors at the national level. In other words, the more nationally embedded
institutional actors are, the less they are likely to mobilize at the European
level. For instance, the degree of European mobilization of environmental
organizations is far greater than that of trade unions even though social
policy issues display as high a level of common affectedness as questions
related to environmental sustainability. The fact that social policy themes
such as employment have till recently been diverted from public attention bydealing with them through the open method of coordination corroborates
the tendency of long-established interest organizations at national level to
work by lobbying national governments or in concert with other national
interest organizations. To this should be added that on key sensitive topics,
like social and welfare policy, national governments act as gatekeepers when
it comes to launching or deepening European debates.
These ndings lead von Homeyer to advance three principal propositions
with far-reaching implications with regard to how to promote participatorygovernance. The rst is that the issue of modications of decision-rules or
20 John Crowley and Liana Giorgi
stronger EU competencies is far less important than generally thought.
Modications to decision-rules with regard to EU supra-national institu-
tions might be necessary for efciency purposes. They are, however, not key
for participatory governance. The second proposition is that timing has animportant effect on the emergence (or not) of participatory governance.
From the perspective of civil society organizations, this of course means
that it is important to remain always on the alert, seeking to capitalize on
windows of opportunity that facilitate specic concerns being publicized
widely. From the top-down perspective of state institutions seeking to pro-
mote participatory governance and assuming that this is indeed sincerely
aspired to it implies that a reactive mechanism ought to be structured
into consultation or participation procedures in order to encourage thearticulation of concerns and demands as input to decision-making. Finally,
the third proposition is that Europeanization begins at the national level
and is directly linked to the desire and ability of national actors and stake-
holders to attach a European dimension to political claims.
That this Europeanization of political claims is only happening at a slow
pace is shown by the research reported in Chapter 4, which deals with the
(European) political class. In Chapter 4, Elise Feron, John Crowley and
Liana Giorgi report on the results of an attitudinal survey carried outamong members of the European political class. These are persons holding
or aspiring to a political ofce at European or national level or working in
political functions for institutions dealing with European affairs. Our
respondents can be distinguished between Euro-sceptics and Euro-enthusiasts,
whereby Euro-scepticism is far more widespread than Euro-enthusiasm, which
is mainly to be found among Swedish respondents and members of the
Green and Liberal parties. At the same time, we nd across the political
spectrum a majority being disillusioned with mainstream representativepolitics. More signicantly, however, we nd a complete dissonance with
regard to the future of the European Union and of the project of political
integration. This dissonance exists within national delegations as well as
within political groupings. Only a minority (less than one quarter) appear to
favour some form of federalism for the EU. The rest are equally divided
between a model of cooperative intergovernmentalism and a view that sees
no role for either the European Parliament or national elected ofcials and
which we have termed, following Dahrendorf, glocalism.In other words, even though debates in Europe increasingly come to dis-
play a shared policy language, as shown by von Homeyer in Chapter 3,
debates about Europe have yet to nd a shared political language and their
representatives, as shown by Feron et al. in Chapter 4. This dissonance or
the lack of a unifying European ideology across the political spectrum or of
unifying European political ideologies within political parties might explain
the continuing legitimacy decit of European institutions and the European
Union as a whole, which in the medium- to long-term can aggravate itsdemocratic decit or harm the nascent European public sphere.
Introduction 21
In Chapter 5, Elise Feron looks at another emerging European political
actor, namely the anti-globalization movement. The future of the European
Union as a political system and its policies are also central concerns for the
anti-globalization movement. The set of movements that gather under thebanner of anti-globalization (or advocating a different type of globaliza-
tion) are not primarily targeting the European Union through their mobili-
zation; rather they are using EU institutions, events or policies to bring
forward specic concerns. By so doing they have been both favouring and
accompanying the growth of the European public sphere and have con-
tributed to renewing the old repertoire traditionally used by social move-
ments at the European level. Perhaps more importantly they speak for the
existence of a European civil society and for its desire to take a more activerole in decision-making.
In Chapter 6, Liana Giorgi, Niki Rodousakis, Marisol Garcia and
Martin Peterson take a closer look at the debate on the European Union as
a community of values. The latter exemplies many of the challenges and
contradictions entailed in the European political integration project and in
turn, explains the difculties with ideological design. This debate, they
argue, is neither new nor straightforward, yet until recently the natural
tendency within European institutions has been to relegate it to expertcommittees and keep it away from the public sphere, probably because it
was judged as potentially explosive. Giorgi et al. argue that there are three
distinct narratives on the European Union as a community of values and
that the ultimate choice for one or the other narrative or, more realistically,
their combination, will determine both the character and scope of European
political integration as well as the disposition of the European public
sphere. The rst narrative links European values with democratic principles
but is ultimately about the future of national sovereignty. The second nar-rative seeks the enlargement of European values to include social values and
more, specically, the commitment of the EU to full employment, a social
market economy and the welfare state. Despite the establishment of a Eur-
opean social agenda and a European Employment Strategy, not much pro-
gress could be made in this respect the main reason for this was the lack
of agreement concerning the division of competencies between supra-
national and national institutions. Finally, probably the most explosive of
the three narratives concerning the EU as a community of values, is thatwhich attaches a cultural dimension to European values. The key question
here is the extent to which European identity should and could transcend
nationalist aspirations centred on cultural and religious homogeneity.
In Chapter 7, the nal thematic chapter of this book, Michal Illner,
Daniel Cermak, Tomas Kostelecky and Jana Stachova take a look at one of
the new member states and illustrate, with reference to the referendum in
the Czech Republic regarding EU accession, how overall approval for EU
membership need not coincide with acceptance of the political project ofEuropean integration. Even though Czech citizens voted in favour of EU
22 John Crowley and Liana Giorgi
accession by a clear majority, a juxtaposition of the referendum results with
electoral results and the results of attitudinal/sociological surveys carried
out at around the same time shows that this yes to the European Union
was far from being enthusiastic. An equivalent amount of caution is prob-ably called for when assessing the referendum results in France and the
Netherlands regarding the Constitutional Treaty. A yes can mean different
things to different people just like a no. Perhaps more importantly, what a
yes might imply in terms of a democratic political system has still to be
specied. The debate has in fact just begun.
Introduction 23
2 Democratization and the EuropeanUnion
Liana Giorgi
The territorial scale and resulting complexity of trans-national democracies
renders these fragile with regard to democratic standards and practices.
Multi-level and exible governance mechanisms may appear as extending
the opportunity structures for stakeholder and citizen participation in deci-
sion-making, but assuring this materializes implies submitting these new
institutional structures to democratic scrutiny. Social institutions in
advanced democracies tend to substitute real with virtual representation
and participation with technical expertise. This could lead to the transfor-mation of advanced democracies into modern forms of guardianship. One
way to avoid this is through comprehensive democratic auditing that asserts,
rather than negates, the signicance of mainstream criteria for democratic
political systems and decision processes.
A democratic assessment of the European Union political system as
representing a trans-national form of democracy-in-the-making must be
carried out at different territorial levels. The emergence of a supranational
actor does not make national democracy (and assessment) obsolete, itrather presupposes it. Furthermore, in advanced democratic societies, like
the European Union, democratic assessment must be extended to cover
social institutions like civil society, the media and economic corporations, as
well as policy domains. EU democratic auditing is best thought of as a
nested activity that pulls together information from different sources and
levels of government and concentrates on comparisons across territorial l