Europe has a ‘democracy
deficit’ on both the Left and the Right
BY Slavoj Žižek
Sometimes faces become symbols
of the anonymous forces behind them. Was not the stupidly smiling face of
Eurogroup President Jeroen Dijsselbloem the symbol of the European Union’s
brutal pressure on Greece? Recently, the Transatlantic Trade & Investment
Partnership (TTIP)—the European cousin of the Trans-Pacific
Partnership—acquired a new symbol: the cold face of E.U. trade commissioner Cecilia Malmström,
who responded to massive public opposition to TTIP this way: “I do
not take my mandate from the European people.”
Now a third such symbol has
emerged: Frans Timmermans, the first vice president of the European Commission,
who, on Dec. 23, 2015, scolded the Polish government for adopting a new law
that subordinates Poland’s constitutional court to the authority of government.
Timmermans also condemned
the law that allows the Polish parliament to replace all executives at the
country’s public television and radio companies. In an immediate rebuke, Polish
nationalists warned
Brussels “to exercise more restraint in instructing and cautioning the
parliament and the government of a sovereign and democratic state.”
From the standard left-liberal
view, it is inappropriate to put these three names into the same series:
Dijsselbloem and Malmström personify the pressure of the Brussels bureaucrats
(without democratic legitimization) on democratically elected governments,
while Timmermans intervened to protect basic democratic institutions (judicial
independence and a free press). It may appear obscene to compare the brutal
neoliberal pressure on Greece with the justified criticism of Poland, but did
the Polish government’s reaction not hit the mark? Timmermans did indeed
pressure a democratically elected government of a sovereign state.
Recently, when I was answering
questions from the readers of Süddeutsche Zeitung about the refugee crisis, the
question that attracted the most attention concerned democracy—but with a
right-wing populist twist. When Angela Merkel famously invited hundreds of
thousands of refugees into Germany, what gave her the right? My point here is
not to support anti-immigrant populists, but to point out the limits of
democratic legitimization. The same goes for those who advocate the radical
opening of the borders: Are they aware that, since our democracies are
nation-state democracies, their demand equals a suspension of democracy—in
other words, that a gigantic change should be allowed without democratic
consultation?
We encounter here the old
dilemma: What happens to democracy if the majority is inclined to vote for
racist and sexist laws? It’s easy to imagine a democratized Europe with a much
more engaged citizenry in which the majority of governments are formed by
anti-immigrant populist parties. I am not afraid to conclude that emancipatory
politics should not be bound a priori by formal-democratic procedures of
legitimization.
Of course, no privileged
political agent knows inherently what is best for the people and has the right
to impose its decisions on the people against their will (as the Stalinist
Communist Party did). However, when the will of the majoity clearly violates
basic emancipatory freedoms, one has not only the right but also the duty to
oppose that majority. This is not reason to despise democratic elections—only
to insist that they are not per se an indication of Truth. As a rule, elections
reflect the conventional wisdom determined by the hegemonic ideology.
Left critics of the European
Union thus find themselves in a predicament: They deplore the “democracy
deficit” of the European Union and propose plans to make the decision making in
Brussels more transparent, but they support the “non-democratic” Brussels
administrators when they exert pressure on democratically legitimized “fascist”
tendencies. What lies behind this contradiction is the Big Bad Wolf of the
European liberal Left: the threat of a new Fascism embodied in anti-immigrant
right-wing populism. This strawman is perceived as the principal enemy against
which we should all unite, from (whatever remains of) the radical Left to
mainstream liberal democrats (including E.U. administrators like Timmermans).
Europe is portrayed as a continent regressing toward a new Fascism that feeds
on the paranoiac hatred and fear of the external ethnic-religious enemy (mostly
Muslims). While this new fascism is dominant in some post-Communist East
European countries (Hungary, Poland, etc.), it is getting stronger in many
other E.U. countries where the view is that the Muslim refugee invasion poses a
threat to European civilization.
But is this really fascism?
The term is all too often used to avoid detailed analysis. The Dutch politician
Pim Fortuyn, killed in early May 2002, two weeks before he was expected to gain
one-fifth of the vote, was a paradoxical figure: a right-wing populist whose
personal attributes and opinions (for the most part) were almost perfectly
“politically correct”: He was gay, had good personal relations with many
immigrants and possessed an innate sense of irony, etc.—in short, he was a
good, tolerant liberal with regard to everything except his basic political
stance. He opposed fundamentalist immigrants because of their lack of tolerance
toward homosexuality, women’s rights, religious differences, etc. What he
embodied was thus the intersection between rightist populism and liberal
political correctness. Perhaps he had to die because he was living proof that
the dichotomy between right-wing populism and liberal tolerance is a false
one—that we are dealing with two sides of the same coin.
Many leftist liberals, like
Jürgen Habermas, idealize a “democratic” European Union that never existed.
Recent E.U. policy is nothing more than a desperate attempt to make Europe fit
for global capitalism. The usual Left-liberal critique of the European
Union—it’s basically okay, just with a “democracy deficit”—betrays the same
naïveté as those critics of former-Communist countries who supported the
Communists but bemoaned the lack of democracy. In both cases, the democracy
deficit is a necessary part of the structure.
In a reference to the likely
election of Syriza in Greece, in December 2014, the Financial Times published a
column headlined: “Eurozone’s weakest link is the voters.” In the Pink Lady’s
ideal world, Europe gets rid of this “weakest link” and experts gain the power
to directly impose economic measures. If elections take place, their function
is to confirm the consensus of experts.
As Eurocrat and former prime
minister of Italy Mario Monti put it: “Those who govern must not allow
themselves to be completely bound by parliamentarians.”
The only way to counteract the
“democratic deficit” of global capitalism would be through some transnational
entity. But the nation-state cannot serve as a democratic bulwark against
global capitalism for two reasons: First, it is a priori in a weak position at
a time when the economy functions as a global force; second, to do so, a
sovereign nation-state is obliged to mobilize nationalist ideology and thus
opens itself up to rightist populism. Poland and Hungary are today two such
nationstates opposing globalization.
This brings us to what is the
principal contradiction of global capitalism: Imposing a global political order
that would correspond to a global capitalist economy is structurally
impossible, and not because it is empirically difficult to organize global
elections or to establish global institutions. The reason is that the global
market is not a neutral, universal machine with the same rules for everybody.
It requires a vast network of exceptions, violations of its own rules,
extra-economic (military) interventions and so forth. So while our economy is
more and more global, what is “repressed” from the anonymous global economy
returns in politics: archaic fixations and particular (ethnic, religious,
cultural) identities. This tension defines our predicament today: The global,
free circulation of commodities is accompanied by growing social divisions.
Commodities circulate more and more freely, but people are kept apart by new
walls, from physical walls (such as in the West Bank and between the United
States and Mexico) to reasserted ethnic and religious identities.
Does this mean that we should
bypass the topic of democratizing Europe as a blind alley? On the contrary, it
means that, precisely because of its central significance, we should approach
it in a more radical way.
The problem is more
substantial: How do we transform the basic coordinates of our social life, from
our economy to our culture, so that democracy as free, collective
decision-making becomes actual—not just a ritual of legitimizing decisions made
elsewhere?
Slavoj Žižek, a Slovenian
philosopher and psychoanalyst, is a senior researcher at the the Institute for
Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London. He has also been a visiting
professor at more than 10 universities around the world. Žižek is the author of
many books, including Living in the End Times, First As Tragedy, Then As Farce,
The Year of Dreaming Dangerously and Trouble in Paradise.
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