Legitimacy Crisis in Europe
Look at how internal issues (values issues in the Member States, reduced soft power due to previous crises) affect its external attractiveness
Use case study examples from Eastern Neighborhood partners such as Moldova, Ukraine etc.
- What is the issue with the EU’s internal legitimacy?
- Is the EU, therefore, losing its attractiveness?
The debates about the democratic legitimacy of the European Union (EU) have persisted over the decades. The sovereign debt and euro crisis depict some of the factors that threaten the legitimacy of the EU. Further, the Britain’s exit from the EU (popularly known as the Brexit) indicated the participation in the EU relies on the results and expectations of the member countries, and hence is reversible. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the political conundrum which currently challenges the EU by demeaning its legitimacy in the Eastern neighborhood. The paper also examines the current political position of this entity and the impact on its attractiveness. The political crisis experienced by the member countries forms the basis of analyzing the EU’s legitimacy and its prospects.
The EU has frequently been portrayed as a prime supporter of democratization to its Eastern neighborhood through the European Neighborhood Policy (ENP). The EU’s perception of good neighborliness has impacted legitimacy, especially regarding the internal issues and values in the member states, which is based on the ideologies of values and objectives, strategies and instruments, characteristics, and relationships (Jansson, 2018). While the EU persistently emphasizes the ENP’s character of a shared project, the issue of legitimacy remains substandard and questionable. Such follows the notion that the ENP’s objectives entail developing a special relationship between the EU and its member countries, leading to prosperity, security, and good neighborliness. However, some countries may make decisions that demand a more significant differentiation in the relationships between the EU and the members to respond to the needs and expectations of individual partners while protecting the EU’s strategic interests (Jansson, 2018). In this consideration, the interests of the involved party’s may clash and hence degrade the legitimacy of the union in its pursuit to achieve its goals. Therefore, the legitimacy of the EU becomes difficult to ascertain for and hence remains democratically ineffective.
What is the issue with the EU’s internal legitimacy?
The European Community has remained a highly contested political entity over the years. However, the recent past has experienced the debates regarding the role and the future of the EU, focused on its legitimacy. A critical democratic legitimacy challenge faced by the EU entails its institutional-constitutional which is arguably built into the integration process. Surprisingly, the process of democratization of the EU has dragged since its inception and, basically, a matter of ‘catching up’ (Fossum, 2016). The process has been driven by the expert and executives who enjoy the privileged process-access through the prominent role of the council configuration sin EU decision-making whose roles are strengthened with the increased salience of the European council and the high competence in the council secretariat Fossum, 2016). Suggestively, the member states feel that legitimacy has taken ages to get acquired and while there are no European public sphere and democratic demos, these members feel deceived. Further, the EU system suggestively lacks a connection with the citizens through the integration process. In other words, the EU lacks the institutional hardware that makes the citizens understand their rights as members of the community and have their opinions and interests adequately represented and reflected in the EU’s procedures, symbols, and policy substance (Rashkova, 2020). Some research suggests that the executives enjoy top-notch roles that empower them to exercise an authoritative kind of leadership while neglecting the traditional principles of the union. Such initiates a lack of trust by the member states that exercise democracy and poise to deprive them of their legal rights.
The need to improve the legitimacy of the EU is a familiar theme of the various proposal and reports for its reform over the years. Suggestively, the legitimacy of the EU is primarily undermined following the lack of focus to achieve economically efficient results and instead focusing on institutional processes and structures. However, legitimacy is achieved through a democratic process which is essentially absent in the European Union system (Rashkova, 2020). the EU is allegedly exercising a great deal of power, limiting its boundaries to its sphere of competence. Yet, the powers cannot be justified by reference to the typical structures and processes of the democratic state. While the EU is not a state as described through its mode of governance and political structure, it assumes a great deal of state powers. It exhibits various characteristics that distinguish it from a typical intergovernmental organization of independent states (De Búrca, 1996). The EU has wide and loosely defined regulatory and legislative powers, and its law directly impacts the actors throughout the union. Such prompts the unelected law-making bodies like the court of justice and the Commission to exist without democratic legitimacy and, hence, partially accountable to their decisions. As the member states lose a lot of their power to the EU, their constitutional structures constitute an indirect source of legitimacy of community power.
Over the past decades, the European Union’s internal structure has become somewhat democratic. Such is depicted through the more extraordinary powers possessed by the European Parliament in the recent past, compared to the 1990s (De Búrca, 1996). However, it is hard to sustain the fiction that the ordinary citizens have a meaningful opportunity to contribute ideas to what happens in Brussels. In other words, the mechanism for incorporating the views of people to public policy remains indirect. For instance, in Germany, the citizens participate in national elections to vote for a particular party. Later the country’s political party leaders indulge in a complicated process to negotiate and assess which party would form the government and elect a chancellor. The chancellor then appoints the ministers to lead various legislations. These ministers would later go to Brussels severally during the year to meet their peers from the EU member states where they pass legislation based on proposals made by the unelected European Commission (Fossum, 2017). Principally, the European Parliament is responsible for providing democratic counterweight to the representatives of national governments who dominate the European Council (Schmidt, 2015). In this essence, it is clear that democracy is suppressed and that the citizen’s rights and opinions are underrated by making them cast their votes which eventually may not count in the final decision-making of choosing the leaders. Besides, the increasing rise of authoritarian populism across Italian, European, and German citizens fail to share their sovereignty with the free citizens of other democratic states but rather share with the aspiring dictators (Schmidt, 2015). Such initiates a crisis aimed to benefit some states the expense of the others.