Professor Philippe C. Schmitter was Professor of Political Science at the European University Institute in Florence, Department of Political and Social Sciences until September 2004. He was then nominated Professorial Fellow at the same Institution. He is now Emeritus of the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute. His current work is on the political characteristics of the emerging Euro-polity, on the consolidation of democracy in Southern and Eastern countries, and on the possibility of post-liberal democracy in Western Europe and North America.
Florin Zubascu: Since 2008 Europe faces a deep crisis that has many implications for how the EU and democracy in the EU will develop. Is this crisis an opportunity for improvement, and if so, what are the steps that have to be made in this direction?
Philippe Schmitter: Crises are nothing new in the case of the EU. In fact, crises are precisely what have been driving the European integration. There were a series of these crises and in each case the answer was more integration. We call this in our jargon a spillover. So the EU has expanded, and at least in principle this crisis could be a good thing for the integration and for the EU itself. But it is not a good thing. What we should focus on is the relationship between the EU crisis, the Euro crisis, and the crisis of democracy in Europe. In principle, these crises are disconnected; at least historically they have not occurred in that sequence. Nevertheless, they’re connected.
FZ: But what is so different about the current crisis?
PS: The first difference is that this crisis was triggered from outside of the European Union. This is not a crisis of European Integration, but it is a crisis of the world capitalist system that began in the United States, and then had successive impacts on other countries, especially on Europe. Whereas previous crises were more endogenous, they were more part of the integration process itself, and always the solution was to resolve the crises within the family. Crises came as a result of integration and unequal distribution of benefits. In this case the timing and the nature of the crisis came from outside. Secondly, this crisis has what we call in or jargon a cumulative impact. Previous crises of the EU, beginning with the open seat of Charles de Gaulle, were such that the main actors of the crisis were different. In our jargon, we call this a pluralist form of crisis: those who were in favor of expansion were not the same as the group against expansion. This time the crisis is cumulative. There is a bunch of winners, that happen to be there in the north, and there’s a bunch of losers in the south, with Eastern Europe somewhere in between. In a cumulative crisis, the polarization is much greater and it is more difficult to come to compromise type of solutions.
In the case of the EU, the problem is that this crisis is exogenous, but even more important, the timing of this crisis and it origins are different. I think that there would have been a euro crisis anyway, because of the design of monetary integration: the monetary integration did not include financial and budgetary integration. The crisis would have happened, but much later had it not been for the timing of the American crisis. That set it off earlier. Monetary integration was not driven by the integration process itself. It was driven by the German unification. Monetary integration was the price that Germany had to pay for acquiring East Germany. It had to give up the Deutsche Mark. That was the deal that was more or less enforced by Mitterrand and Thatcher. Even though European institutions were not designed to resolve the problem of German reunification, but they were there and they were used for that purpose.
FZ: The European institutions are able to deal with this crisis, and to make it a “good crisis”?
PS: In its historical development, the EU did not replicate the usual institutional pattern that we find at the national level. The usual pattern is that integration occurs around a core area, Paris or London for example. And that doesn’t happen in the case of the EU. As the EU builds institutions, the institutions are not all part of the same core. So you have the central bank with a great deal of autonomy, you have other regulatory agencies; you have also institutions that overlap with each other. The president of council of ministers, the president of the European council, the president of the European Commission, I forgot how many presidents. It’s just ridiculous but it’s there. The institutional structure of the EU is very badly designed to respond to this crisis. So the main question is not what you do, but how do you do it? Who takes these responsibilities or “compétences”? The answer of the euro crisis is to increase “les compétences” of European institutions. But of which the European institutions will have its “competences” increased?
In the previous crises the issue of democratic deficit was relatively unimportant. After each one of these spillovers they increased the powers of the European Parliament. So the problem is that this answer was not a good answer. Nobody paid any attention to this and turnout in the European elections decreased. Therefore the paradox: you increase the power of an institution and less and less people pay attention to it. This time, not only that the increase of powers is much greater but it goes to the absolute core of what it means to govern, namely taxation, budgets and borrowing. “No representation without taxation” is kind of an American thing but it captures an universal democratic demand. All of the increases of “competences” that are now being slowly put into place; but none of them includes an increase in democracy. Surely, people talk about the need for democratizing the EU, and Barroso even dared to pronounce the famous “F-word” – federalism.
FZ: Isn’t it that this democratic deficit might have something to do with the lack of a proper public sphere?
PS: That is not entirely true. This crisis has produced an enormous public space. Everybody, at a certain level, is talking about Europe now. There is a public space, but the problem is that there are no public institutions in that space. And the main institutions that have to fill that space, or should fill it, are political parties. There are no political parties in that public space.
FZ: Many argue that European political parties cannot function properly as long as EU MPs are still voting along the lines of their national parties. Now, at the EU level interest groups have taken the place of political parties in acting as proxies for political representation. In this context, what would be the next step for consolidating the European party system?
PS: Your description is accurate. The question is, does it have to remain that way? European elections and especially the financing of European elections and the nomination of candidates for European elections have been very deliberately focused on subsidizing and encouraging national parties.
There are such things as Euro Parties but they do no function as parties, possibly with the exception of the Greens and maybe the Pirate Party. There are confederations of parties in the EU parliament, but they don’t have members, they don’t raise funds themselves and they don’t nominate candidates. But that doesn’t have to be. That it is the way this system emerged because of the pressures at the national level, but you could imagine that someone had begun to talk about a common program, a nomination process for candidates that is supranational rather than national.
But political parties are in a deeper crisis at the national level. So the idea of creating meaningful political parties on that scale is very ambitions, when the parties at the national level are losing members, are losing the loyalty of voters, and generally becoming the least trusted institution. Look what just happened in the Italian elections: a complete collapse of a national party system. The space is there whether or not it will be filled or it will be influenced by the mobilization of interest groups and social movements, or by proper political parties.
PS: Traditionally, political parties have been based on a particular cleavage structure, mainly social class (left and right), also religion and other factors. Depending on the country, you get a variety of party systems because of the cleavage patterns. You have ethnic cleavages between Basques and Catalans. But the problem is that those cleavages are no longer as sensitive, as salient to citizens as they used to be. Forget about the cleavage between Catholics and Protestants; you can even forget about this center – periphery cleavage. These cleavages are not as salient as they used to be, but nothing has replaced them. What we have now is a much more fragmented cleavage structure. Certainly environmental issues could revive. But it is not clear where we are in terms of positioning ourselves as individuals on environmental issues, ad this is why this cleavage pattern does not encourage the creation of political parties.
FZ: Wouldn’t it be necessary to develop a public space where more issues are discussed, beyond the crisis and environmental issues? What role do language barriers play in these matters?
PS: I think that the language barrier has been over estimated. Habermas when he started talking about that, assumed that you needed some kind of face to face space where people can actually talk to each other in mutually intelligible languages. But he’s changed his mind and he’s absolutely right, because Portuguese and Finns can talk to each other on the same issues by talking in Finnish and in Portuguese in their respective mass-media. They even can take similar sides or opposite sides in their respective languages. So that is what the European public space will look like. Not to mention of course that when it comes to EU institutions everything is done in English. Let’s face it! When you get into a committee room in Brussels no one even mentions that you have to use English; you just take it for granted. At that level there is a language: is English. Basta! But, at the mass level there is a public space in which people are engaged in taking positions and listening to arguments etc., in different languages through the media and through translation. So it is just possible that an article in a Finnish newspaper gets translated and appears in a Portuguese newspaper. It happens.
FZ: Also, the EU has the problem of representation and contestation for political leadership. In short the EU is led by bureaucrats. How do we solve this problem? Do we opt for a federal solution? Unimportant EU leaders, such as the Romanian president, talk a lot about the United States of Europe.
PS: The Romanian president is stuck in a time warp of the 1950s. Churchill mentioned the United States of Europe but that was the fifties. Forget about that; that is just ridiculous.
There are many kinds of federalism, but certainly the EU is not going to have American style federalism. Almost everybody agrees that is going to be some kind of federalism that looks like the Swiss or the Canadian model rather than the American one. The question is what kind of infrastructure you can build on the present institutions. Whether you call it federalism or not I don’t give a damn, and I argue that is a mistake to call it federalism. We need a new word and I have proposed a few but no one is paying attention, so we need something else. Because federalism has a history and it creates reactions which are not necessary. Let’s forget about that word. There are of course these crazy proposals in my view to elect a president of Europe. That’s a huge mistake.
I think that is pretty clear that the proper route is some form of parlamentarization of Europe in which the European parliament will be responsible for choosing the president of the commission and then maybe the European Council will be responsible for choosing the president of the Council, and somehow there will be a division of labor between the two. So, I think that it is true that you do need a more coherent if not centralized structure, simply for symbolic purposes.
There are too damn many presidents and they’re tripping over each other, but presumably that is just temporary and in the process of democratization I suspect that it will take a more parliamentary route. Also, I think that the European parliament will choose a prime minister of the commission. In a sense the council of ministers will become a senate and the parliament will become a real parliament, in a parliamentary sense; something a bit like semi-presidentialism.
FZ: What kind of impact this kind of arrangement would have on the hypothetical “European party system”?
PS: Territoriality as a basis for representation remains pretty much important. You might imagine the development of new kinds of territorial units that are on the borders between countries. You could imagine that these units could take some form of transnational regions. But what is desirable, is the emergence of a two party system in Europe where you have low levels of internal discipline, in which one party is in favor of more integration and the other favors less integration. In that system you can imagine some other small and extreme parties. But how you get there? And this particular crisis is going to be a good crisis for this purpose?
I wrote an article forty years ago that describes something exactly like the present crisis and I called it the “transcending crisis”. This transcending crisis was supposed to be the crisis that drove the EU from economic to political integration and part of that was supposed to be the formation of a genuine European party system, but it just hasn’t happened yet. This crisis was not as good as I imagined it.
FZ: There are a number of separatist movements in places like Cataluna and Scotland. How these conflicts affect the EU and the European identity? Can “the European identity” solve these problems?
PS: There was a brief moment in which lots of people, mainly academics, talked about l’Europe des régions. So in a utopian Europe there would be no Germany, there would be Lander. The main problem of political integration in Europe is that some countries are too big. Every big country would divided in 15 of 23 Lander and those Lander have considerable autonomy and then you would put them together as a European political unit. That is not going to happen. Even if it would happen people would not trust it. Dividing Germany in 23 Lander and dissolving the German federal government is not going to happen and if it is going to happen people will not trust it. We have to deal with existing borders. The problem with les régions is that their definition varies so much. The so called Committee of the Regions has been a complete failure as far as I can tell. They have done nothing. We’re stuck with those national borders and with the internal divisions of those borders. Basta!
FZ: My last question refers to the expansion of the EU. How far do you think that the European Union should go towards the east?
PS: There are two answers. Any academic who wanted to start something called European identity could get money from the commission, but no one found it. We don’t know what European identity is. But then you could say that the identity is a bunch of principles. Those principles apply well outside of Europe. Rule of law, democracy, and the usual suspects are not European anymore. In that conception Europe has no boundaries and it simply should be a set of countries which accept and practice a certain set of principles: democracy, rule of law, capitalism and so on. But then Uruguay is more European than most of the members of the EU for that matter. The other conception is to stop where we are and just say that we have enough problems already: 27 states is a lot. To me those are the two alternatives. I cannot see an intermediate solution except of course for the Balkans, the membership of Croatia which I think is already decided, Serbia, maybe Macedonia, and I don’t know what they’re going to do about Kosovo. Obviously there is a part there that poses serious security problems but at some point I don’t see how those countries can be denied membership.
Florin Zubascu
Department of Political Science
Romania
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