EVOLUTIONARY DEMOCRACY

Tom Bentley

Tom Bentley is Director of Demos.

Europe as a whole lacks a credible democratic forum in which serious questions about its political destiny can be aired. Jan Zielonka, Democracy and Enlargement The long term economic and political impact of enlargement is unknown. Heather Grabbe, The Constellations of Europe (Centre for European Reform 2004) These two comments, one drawn from this collection and another from an authoritative survey of the state of the Union as 10 new members join, capture between them the tension and the challenge facing Europe as a political community. The challenge reflects the deliberately open ended strategy taken by the EUs post-war founding fathers. Concerned as they were to safeguard democracy from the threat of all-out war and the Soviet menace to the East, they established a process of institutionbuilding in which governance became separated from democratic participation. While the EU has acquired much of the apparatus of constitutional democracy, it has done so in a way that keeps institutional power and popular mandate only weakly connected.

INTERDEPENDENCE AND ITS DISCONTENTS

As several essays in The Democratic Papers point out, this disconnection now exacerbates Europes problems of effectiveness and legitimacy in chronic ways. But it also means that the EU represents a unique innovation in governance; a loose, dynamic, fluid set of mutual commitments and open-ended relationships, knitted together not just by treaty obligations but by millions of cross-cutting ties, which gradually strengthen a more permanent set of rules and common realities. The result is a new form of statehood where security rests on mutual interdependence and transparency, rather than any balance between separate powers. Decisions are achieved through collaborative problem solving, even as member states continue to act as competitors in key fields. As many of our authors make clear, however, this form of governance is messy as well as unique. It sows confusion and sometimes fosters resentment, because it lacks clear or legitimate governance principles. Over the last fifty years, it has been more successful at technocracy than it has at democracy. It lacks boundaries, and also now a compelling vision. As a result, it is suffering a crisis of legitimacy at exactly the same time as it is being recognised and mimicked as a form of regional governance for the twenty-first century.

* The discussion of interdependence and its implications for governance here originatesin the work of my colleague Paul Skidmore.

Fostering interdependence through transparency, mutual commitment and higher levels of exchange turns out to be a governance strategy well suited to the conditions now shaping the wider world.* Alongside choice and opportunity, many of our greatest fears and problems arise from the interconnected nature of the society around us. We can see ever more visibly that the flows of people, knowledge and wealth permitted by these connections constrain our freedom as much as they enable it. With the freedom for millions to fly all over the world every day comes the danger of disease epidemics like the SARS virus spreading faster and further than ever imaginable a few decades ago. With the freedom to communicate and access information more easily through the Internet comes increasing vulnerability to new kinds of subversive behaviour, from computer viruses and identity theft to the coordination of terrorism or crime. Unadulterated sovereignty within national borders is impossible, for tyrants and representatives alike. With the freedom to increase
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* Tom Bentley, The Self-Creating Society, Renewal (Vol 12 No 1, 2004)

our material wealth through the expansion of a carbon-fuelled economy come growing threats of catastrophic environmental damage. Europes interdependence and openness make it vulnerable. But its fluidity and size also make it possible to imagine solutions at scale which might not be possible for individual states, or where the costs of solutions would be prohibitive. Although much of the world is struggling with the costs of liberty and the constraints of interdependence, the ties that actually bind us together often seem invisible. Very few of us understand the workings of the internet, the intricacies of global weather systems, or the dynamics of capital flows. Equally, very few of us understand the pillars of European law, the workings of intergovernmental conferences or the impact of EU regulation upon our everyday lives. Why would we? We have recently ended a century in which a western view of the individual as separate from his or her environment, liberated from tradition and from oppressive institutions, seemed to have triumphed. The new sense of collective unease, of being exposed to the ills and sharing the fate of others with whom we cannot communicate or identify, flows in part from the fact that we cannot access, comprehend or influence the hidden connections which bind us together. This sense of exposure encourages the idea that the world is increasingly ungovernable; that authority in any form is in decline; and that our institutions are engaged in a permanent struggle to resist an overwhelming pressure towards chaos. Very often, this is not the case. Most people in industrialised countries live more secure, comfortable and often contented lives than ever. But that is not their perception. This helps us to make sense of one of the most important and puzzling paradoxes of modern politics: the profound disconnection between our high levels of contentment and optimism about our own lives, and our almost equally intense despair at the prospects for society as a whole. This trend is empirically consistent across many countries. In our personal lives we can freely exercise choice over more and more of the factors that define who we are as individuals our identities, relationships, family structures, lifestyles, careers, culture and consumption habits. We have become authors of our own scripts.* But, by the same token, our ability to influence our surroundings through collective action often seems that much more remote. Large institutions are unwieldy and often unpopular. Collective solidarity is more difficult to sustain as people become

* Geoff Mulgan in Network Logic: who governs in an interconnected world? (eds Helen McCarthy, Paul Miller and Paul Skidmore, Demos 2004)

COMMON CAUSES

more and more attached to their flexible lifestyles. The rules and institutions of governance, on which we rely to support individual freedom and opportunity, struggle to cope with the conflicts and instability brought about by greater interconnectedness. The rise of far-right political parties in many European countries can be seen as a reaction to these changes, a response to the apparent or perceived paralysis of traditional politics in the face of economic insecurity, social breakdown and uncontrolled migration from the developing world. Government evolved in order to protect people from chaos. As Geoff Mulgan recently argued, States have their origins as protections against risk: protection from invasion and attack, then in the 19th century from disease, and later still protection from poverty and unemployment.* Yet in responding to todays risks and threats, we are hobbled by hostility to institutional coercion. The growing diversity and fragmentation of our societies makes it more difficult to achieve the public consent on which effective government depends. As Thomas Hobbes argued, freedom is not a natural condition of human life; it is made possible through institutions that manage and mitigate conflict so that we can coexist and thrive in societies of millions of people. This is the task achieved by much of Europes governance framework, unwieldy though it is. But it suffers from its diffuse and partially invisible nature.

Europe is struggling to adapt to its own successes: the complexity created by enlargement, and the regional power rekindled by postwar economic growth. It is doing so against a social, economic and cultural backdrop that is increasingly anti-political. Not only does European politics and identity have to develop in a context where the traditional features of statehood are not present, but the peace and prosperity in which so many want to join have also undermined the traditional sources of class identity and political mobilisation. The trend of decreasing voter turnout and declining party identity is strikingly consistent across industrialised societies. The result is that, just as states formerly controlled by the Soviet bloc struggle to nurture democratic systems, affluent western European nations are encountering their own crisis of disengagement. This, it seems, sums up the greatest threat to democracy and political legitimacy in Europe at every level: that the diversity fuelled

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EXPERIMENT AND EVOLVE

To function properly, democracy presumes and requires the existence of political community. The forms, rights and duties of citizenship literally create the community of citizens held together by common membership going beyond other forms of identity or association. This is Europes problem, as Kalypso Nikolaidis makes

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by global change, wealth and communication will undermine the capacity of European peoples to participate in common action and make common causes. In this atmosphere, insularity and fear can play too strong a role in determining politics and policy. Yet our political leaders are actively hampered by their lack of community. Political mobilisation depends literally on making common cause. As Simon Hix and others point out, the dividing lines of European politics are too patterned, too vague, for citizens to be able to pick out clear choices between different options. The European layer of governance looks much more like a permanent technocracy than a representative community, especially given that most of its senior posts require a lifetime in either politics or public administration as entry qualifications. In the absence of pre-existing common cause, politics is best at mobilising people through risk and threat. Given the sacrifice and inconvenience of participation, not to mention taxation or military service, these risks have graphically to be made real. Two world wars in the twentieth century demonstrated the need for a transnational community. Europe had successfully exported the consequences of its own five-hundred-year tradition of instability and warfare. But two generations of peace and prosperity have undone that common threat. The twenty-first century risks to security and sustainability may be direct and frightening, but they are also diffuse, unpredictable, and difficult to defend against with the traditional machinery of states and armies. The goal of ever closer union is difficult to sustain a priori in the face of such change. New generations, rightly, require new justifications for intertwining their prospects and their sovereignty with those of others. But, for the reasons set out above, Europe has ducked this challenge. In doing so, it has allowed itself to be represented by some as the other from which citizens need protection: the bureaucratic bogeyman of nationalist myth, chiming with forms of paranoid delusion about international conspiracy and world government that have travelled with us for centuries.

powerfully clear: the EU is an expression of Europes interdependence, but without explicit bonds of political community linking its citizens through the institutions and practices of government. Like its economies, Europes governance is constantly trying to evolve. But the models of democracy that we rely on are static, functional, impossible to apply to the diversity and `complexity of the pan-European scene. The Unions core countries have escaped the citizenship of blood and soil, as Michael Ignatieff described it, though many newer members are still rooted in both. We are also moving on from the forms of social citizenship created and sustained by the twentieth century welfare state. Europe now faces the challenge of making a postmodern form of citizenship meaningful to its peoples, while acknowledging that the definition of progress will vary widely, be mediated by national and local histories, and require a direct sense of involvement and authorship to be widely and authentically owned by citizens. The presumption of linear progress, in which liberal democracies with market economies attained higher states of collective being which others should follow and mimic, is invalidated by the requirements of democratic legitimacy. Instead, we should be looking for more nuanced narratives of change and progress in which the evolution of democratic and political cultures is intertwined with economic governance and transition, with cultural history and with civil leadership. That is why the future of European democracy rests far more on an evolutionary paradigm of development than on the linear incrementalism of todays modernisation blueprints. Evolutionary change requires an understanding of whole systems and their complex interrelationships. It thrives on productive diversity, using adaptation and deviation as resources for improvement and experimentation. It takes habitat and history seriously as determinants of the constraints within which current efforts take place. And it is prepared to leave past structures or methods behind as obsolete after disruptive innovation, rather than seeking to build eternally on the foundations created by past practices. The Europe surveyed by the authors of The Democratic Papers is diverse, fluid and dynamic; they show how the reality refuses to be contained by any single governance paradigm. We need to shape a shared understanding of democracy able to encompass that range, and to help equip us to meet common challenges within it. Such a system of governance is far more likely to evolve out of myriad,

interconnecting lines of collaboration and joint action than from fixed vertical structures. It is likely to lean far more heavily on cultures of expectation or civic participation, on entrepreneurial leadership and on institutional transparency than it is on creating formal constitutional articles and routines. Of course new structures, validating mechanisms and formal decisions will be needed. But how they come together depends on an evolutionary process. Rather than waiting for a European demos to be created where there is none, the task should be collectively to craft the space in which it can emerge. For as Nikolaidis says, democracy does not have to be pursued only through the institutions of government; the existing peoples of Europe can forge new, lateral relationships unmediated by governance, and in this process new political identities will emerge. Public space through which to engage, exchange, communicate and learn is a pre-requisite for a community capable of taking decisions in its own long-term interest. Such a space can be pursued by many actors, in the civil and social realm as well that of states. As it emerges, the challenge will for formal politics to adapt in ways that both reflect and nourish it. Two centuries ago, as the last great wave of democratic republicanism was being born, Thomas Paine suggested in The Rights of Man: There is existing in man, a mass of sense lying in a dormant state, and which unless something excites it into action, will descend with him, in that condition, to the grave. In a confused, diverse and pregnant period of world politics, European democratic politics must find new ways to excite this mass of sense among men and women with a far wider range of concerns and possibilities.

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