21 October 2013

Jan-Werner Mueller: How Europe could face its own shutdown

An alliance of anti-EU parties led by the Front National's Marine Le Pen could take Europe into its own shutdown, writes Mueller in the Guardian. European citizens will not get different policies, but paralysis.

Blueprints for making the EU more democratic have often focused on giving even more powers to MEPs – on the naïve assumption that the parliament would always automatically be pro-European. But what if it is captured by a European version of the Tea Party, a group that campaigns in the name of the principle that government itself is the problem? The Italian prime minister, Enrico Letta, warned in an interview with the New York Times that mainstream, pro-Europe parties must win at least 70 per cent of the seats to avoid a "nightmarish legislature".

Letta's warning sounds very much like the EU establishment confirming the very reasons why populists condemn it: voters are allowed more democracy, as long as it remains a democracy without real choices – or so populists would charge. Hence it is important to be clear where the dangers lie exactly. Not every party that criticises the euro is anti-EU (think of the Alternative for Germany party). However, a significant number of truly anti-EU parties are simply destructive and suffer from fundamental contradictions. They claim democratic legitimacy on the basis of votes they received in elections to the European parliament and at the same time deny that the latter is democratic. They just want to shut the whole thing down (but ideally keep the money and the prestige that comes with the job).

As an illuminating study by Marley Morris has shown, anti-Europeans do little real work in the legislature, preferring to grandstand in plenary sessions – UKIP is a champion of this approach. Many of these parties – concentrated in the Europe of Freedom and Democracy (EFD) group, a kind of International of nationalists – offer no coherent policy platform.

Marine Le Pen's Front National (leading in French polls for the May 2014 European elections) and Geert Wilders' anti-immigration and anti-Islam party in The Netherlands are attempting to forge a pan-European anti-EU alliance. They might campaign more effectively together, but are also likely to make things even more chaotic: some populist parties will want nothing to do with the racism associated with them. On one level this incoherence is a good thing, as is the fact that even within the far right, alliances have regularly broken down.

So unless they truly want a dysfunctional EU, European citizens should think twice before they vote for such parties. They will not get different policies, but paralysis. There are real alternatives – even to austerity – and there is a genuine left-right spectrum of options in the parliament, more so than in many national parliaments. It is democratically legitimate to want to protest – but it is also important to take oneself and one's vote seriously. Shutdown is for political teenagers, not for adults.

Full article

© The Guardian