Of the People: Democracy, the Eurozone Crisis, and Lincoln’s Threshold Criterion

This article was written for a general audience and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the Berlin Journal, the house magazine of the American Academy in Berlin (AAB). It is based on my Daimler Lecture given at the AAB on February 8, 2012. This brief piece reflects on the Eurozone crisis from the more general standpoint of the difficulties of establishing democratic legitimacy for supranational decision-making in the European Union (EU). To structure the discussion, I analyze the EU according to Lincoln’s famous formulation from the Gettysburg Address: democracy is “government of the people, by the people, [and] for the people.” The effort to “democratize” the EU has made significant strides along the final two of Lincoln’s dimensions — what are often called “input" and "output" legitimacy. But, as a matter of political culture and popular experience, the EU has failed to meet Lincoln’s threshold criterion, “government of the people,” or what we might call "demos legitimacy." This refers to the historical identity between a population and a set of governing institutions; that is, to the political-cultural perception that the institutions of government are genuinely the people’s own, which they have historically constituted for the purpose of self-government over time. Europeans may favor integration for all sorts of instrumental and even idealistic reasons, but they do not yet experience it as their own. It remains, alas, a fundamentally distant, bureaucratic, and juristocratic construct. This political-cultural reality poses a major problem for resolving the Eurozone crisis. Increasingly it is becoming clear that some form of pooling of national debts through so-called Eurobonds (for which all member states in the Eurozone would be jointly and severally liable) may be the only viable way to save the common currency in its current form. However, because control over the national debt is understood in certain key countries like Germany as a core prerogative of democratic self-government on the national level, there will likely be great political-cultural resistance (not to mention judicial opposition) to relinquishing this power. And even if the functional demands of this crisis may yet force Europeans to attempt to supranationalize some of its member states’ debts in some way (at least if it wants the common currency to survive), it is quite unclear how stable the resulting institutional settlement would be. In a system where democratic and constitutional legitimacy remains fundamentally national, but significant normative power is increasingly supranationalized, it must be recognized that there are limits to the EU’s legitimacy, as the Eurozone crisis is sadly demonstrating. Integration is good for certain things but not others. It might be very good for harmonizing regulatory standards across borders. But denationalizing taxing, spending, and most importantly borrowing power to any significant degree, as some argue is the only way to solve the Eurozone crisis, may yet prove a step too far. What this suggests is that the common currency was not just flawed economically (although economists never tire of pointing out that the countries of the Eurozone — and certainly Germany and Greece — do not constitute what they call an “optimal currency area”). Rather, it was also flawed politically, culturally, and thus ultimately constitutionally, in terms of its lack of a foundation in “demos-legitimacy,” or the sense of “government of the people.”