With European elections coming up in a few short months I’d like to spend some time discussing European democracy and the missing ingredient without which true democracy cannot exist. I want to start by saying that you should vote in the European elections, however boring and irrelevant they seem as they do actually have an impact. Furthermore, as voter turnout tends to be low in European elections your vote is more valuable than in national elections.
European elections are strange, after all you vote for a national party which is simultaneously a part of a larger European party grouping which are fairly loose, which have room for considerable differences between member parties. Germany’s Christian Democratic CDU, Hungary’s national-conservative populist Fidesz, and Sweden’s liberal-conservative Moderaterna have distinctive views and might not be a functioning coalition government in a single state but seems to without many major issues work as a functioning party group in the European Parliament. I personally find it strange to vote for single party which is only one part of a larger party group given that party group like the European People’s Party (EPP) or the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats. As mentioned previously party groupings tend to be inclusive and broad which makes the outcome from a vote for example EPP ambiguous for the voter. Does a vote for EPP result in national-conservative policies or liberal-conservative policies, or perhaps Christian Democratic policies? I don’t know and given the, at least in my experience, minimal media coverage of decisions taken by the European Parliament this makes it difficult for voters to hold policymakers accountable for their decisions, which is one of the primary functions in a democracy. Still, that’s hardly the only problem with this attempted pan-EU democratic political system.
Perhaps the greatest problem I foresee with a pan-EU parliamentary system is that there is no true EU demos. Demos is the Greek word for common people which in this context means a unified voter base. To explain what I mean, the American demos is Americans and the demos for Bavaria is the Bavarians. The reason that there is no true EU demos is that no one is from the EU, the Eu has hundreds of millions of inhabitants but no one says they’re from the EU they say they’re from Romania or Portugal etc. This becomes a problem when political decisions are to be made which have a zero-sum total, i.e. for someone to gain someone else has to lose. I’d wager most Americans would see a crisis in say Texas as an American crisis rather than a Texan crisis but the same cannot be said within the EU. Finns don’t want to have to pay for Greece’s debts and the Polish don’t want to help Bulgaria by accepting migrants without getting something in return. Until there’s a sense of European identity there cannot be an EU demos or a European federation as there probably won’t be any European solidarity which is essential for a democracy to function properly.
Without a sense of European identity I fear that there will be a lot of voting based on a percived national interest by voters in EU elections, i.e. this party/policy/individual will benefit my country therefore I vote for it instead of considering what's best for the EU. This creates several problems, first off it could create political fault lines across geographical regions. For example northern European countries tend to be in favour of free trade unlike say France which could become a bitter conflict if it seems based on nationality or if it appears that voters from some countries bunch up on other countries. Furthermore seats in the European parliament are determined by population so if a party/policy/individual is poular in France, Germany and Italy it's almost guaranteed to be passed. This is a broader problem in the EU than in the European parliament, but I digress. I posit that if there were a sense of European identity these shortcoming could be overcome but as it stands currently it seems that the dream of a European democratic federation is incredibly unlikely.
Please share your thoughts on the subject on Twitter and if you liked this blog post you might be interested in this blog post I wrote about Brexit. Check back late at Sunday night for the next blog post!
Photo by Artur Roman from Pexels
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