The European Union as a Complex Democracy

Daniel Innerarity

1. AN INTELLIGIBILITY DEFICIT

It has been said that an Englishman was praising the operation of a certain device, and a Frenchman objected: 'Yes, that works well in practice, but does it work well in theory'? It is not very appropriate to tell a joke reproducing national stereotypes of a Europe that is so often blocked by its national shortsightedness, but it may be useful in order to explain what I intend to say. My hypothesis is that the EU is living a 'theoretical moment'; that is, a moment where conceptual innovation is essential if we want to escape from the deadlock we are in, which is, first of all, a conceptual deficit. The current moment seems to agree with that character of the opera Così fan tutte by Mozart, who claimed that everything needs philosophy. It is true that the European integration crisis cannot be solved with good theory alone, but we will not emerge from the current crisis without a clarification of what is at stake. We need to talk more about concepts than about mechanisms and leaders. New ideas and not financial or institutional engineering solutions will take us out of the crisis; it is less a matter of political will than a matter of understanding what is really at stake. It is not so much a problem that can be solved through institutional procedures and leadership, but a crisis that must be well diagnosed so that the basic concepts of democracy can be reconsidered in the context of that new and complex reality that is the European Union. All of this must take place in a globalised world where profound social and political changes are taking place.

Among the many deficits attributed to the EU, one of the least denounced – though not less important – is the intelligibility deficit. There are big controversies as to whether Europe is democratic or fair, representative or efficient; but there is no doubt that it is currently almost impossible for anybody to understand. Europe has lost its national sovereigns and has not substituted a European one, replacing them by a machine that can be consensual or asymmetrical, depending on the situation, a machine that avoids conflicts and enshrines irresponsibility. Europe will not make sense until there is a narrative that can be understood and accepted by its citizens. (This narrative may even justify its relative distance, the element of delegation or complexity that inevitably accompanies it.) For these reasons, I maintain that the EU must be understood as a complex democracy, not based on the models of democracy related to the nation-state, and therefore, with great potentialities when it comes to thinking about how to politically organize more difficult, open and complex spaces.

Why a philosophy of the European Union? One could object that we do not lack theories and that my statement actually hides the 'exclusive competence' desire shown by other disciplines. There have been some claims about the importance of philosophy for the development of an appropriate concept of the European Union (Friese and Wagner 2002; Olsen 2004), but there are also those who believe that European constitutionalism is over-theorised (Krisch 2005, 326; Schütze 2009, vii) or that integration is not so much a problem of theoretical reflection but of empirical observation, 'a process that must be understood rather than philosophically built' (Müller 2003, 69).

I understand the distrust that arises when we are confronted with excessively theoretical approaches that usually wander comfortably through the theoretical space and avoid institutional design or the complexity of the political game. But if political philosophy has any ambition, it is to breach that gap between theory and practice, between normative and descriptive, which is a sign of exhaustion shown by theories about Europe. A consequence of this rupture is the lack of cooperation or of an interdisciplinary approach among philosophy, law, and the political and social sciences. Some lack proximity to the institutional praxis, while others lack theoretical development; some disciplines have such a normative horizon that they forget the social conditions needed to move theories into practice, while others suffer from a limited interest in the theories of democracy or in the history of concepts, and that lack of interest is repaid with a perplexity hidden by an excess of empirical studies with little significance.

Moravscik (2006) is right when he states that there is an excessive presence of normative theories in European studies but, in my opinion, there is a more radical problem: a dichotomy between factual and normative theories, which has turned this field into a battle between realists without many hopes and idealists with little knowledge. What we probably need the most is a theory of Europe that is neither a simple description of the institutional mechanism nor a vague cosmopolitan haze. And that is precisely the site where philosophy still has a lot to say. The polarization between theory and practice, between normative approaches and an empirical point of view, between disciplines dealing with values and those that move more comfortably among functional realities, has given rise to many different controversies inside human and social sciences. This dissociation is both a problem and a symptom, and we will not make Europe's reality comprehensible if we do not institute a certain assessment horizon. But we cannot do so if we keep a level of exhortative speech that seems to care very little about the real game of interests, the weight of our historical past or the multiple determining factors that limit political action within a space of deep interdependences. Given the current status of European integration, we should not await a mere description of facts or an abstract normative model when it comes to political...