Rebuilding European Democracy

Resistance and Renewal in an Illiberal Age

Richard Youngs

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780755639731
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Démocratie

In recent years serious concerns emerged over the state of European democracy. Many democracy indices are reporting a year-on-year drift towards less liberal politics in the countries of the European Union. Polls regularly suggest that the voters are coming to question democratic norms more seriously than for many decades. Here, Richard Youngs assesses these risks as many analysts, journalists and politicians stressed the danger of Europe descending into an era of conflict, driven by xenophobic nationalism and nativist authoritarians slowly dismantling liberal democratic rights. In 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic has intensified these fears. There is another side of the democratic equation, however. Youngs argues that governments, EU institutions, political parties, citizens and civil society organisations have gradually begun to push back in defence of democracy. With each chapter, Youngs shows how many governmental, political and social actors have developed responses to Europe's democratic malaise at multiple levels. Europe's democracy problems have been grave and far-reaching. Yet, a spirit of democratic resistance has slowly taken shape. This book argues that the pro-democratic fightback may be belated, but it is real and has assumed significant traction with various types of democratic reform underway, including citizen initiatives, political-party changes, digital activism and EU-level responses.

1 Introduction

During the 2010s, serious concerns emerged over the state of European democracy. Indices measuring democratic quality reported year-on-year declines across countries of the European Union (EU). Governments began chipping away at civic freedoms and democratic checks and balances. In a small number of European countries, overtly authoritarian dynamics took root and illiberal populist parties gained ground. Polls regularly suggested that voters came to question democratic norms more seriously than they had for many decades. The EU faced a series of crises that accentuated citizens’ feeling that they had little democratic sway over decisions made in Brussels. Cutting across all these developments, digital technology increasingly appeared to be more of a threat than an enabler of personal freedom and democratic vitality.

Against this unsettling backdrop, many analysts, journalists and politicians stressed the danger of Europe descending into an era of conflict, driven by xenophobic nationalism and nativist authoritarians slowly dismantling liberal democratic rights. In 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic intensified these fears as the emergency led governments to take on far-reaching executive powers and restrict many democratic freedoms. While most of these restrictions were temporary and clearly justified in the fight against the virus, this new crisis raised the spectre of further damage to European democracy. In short, for many years perspectives on European democracy have been strikingly downbeat.

There is another side of the democratic equation, however. Citizens, civil society organizations, political parties, governments and EU institutions have gradually begun to push back in defence of democracy. Many governmental, political and social actors have developed responses to Europe’s democratic malaise at multiple levels – from the local through to the national and EU levels. Europe’s democracy problems have been grave and far-reaching. Yet, a spirit of democratic resistance has slowly taken shape.

This book argues that the pro-democratic fight back may be belated, but it is real and has assumed significant traction. Efforts to rebuild European democracy have emerged at several different levels. Civic movements, national and subnational authorities, political parties and EU policymakers have all moved to upgrade their formal commitments to defend and rethink democracy. Many of them have redoubled such efforts in the wake of Covid-19. These different initiatives have not been strong or effective enough entirely to quell Europe’s political ill health, but they offer the promise of meaningful democratic renewal. The book argues that this needs to be advanced further in particular through more ambitious citizen-oriented political innovation.

Beyond democratic pessimism

The book examines the different forms this democratic rebuilding has taken and assesses their significance. It proceeds from the belief that a focus on democratic responses is essential to move current debate into a necessary next stage of analysis. For many years, analysts have focused mainly on stressing the scale of Europe’s democratic weaknesses. From the mid-2010s a raft of books and articles appeared dissecting what experts feared was democracy’s imminent collapse, its terminal crisis, its de-consolidation, its defeat to a forbidding return of nationalist authoritarianism across Europe. On an almost daily basis, articles and opinion pieces have appeared lamenting the precarious state of European democracy. ¹

A whole cluster of different trends combined to unleash this wave of writings and fretful warnings. Hungary has moved incrementally from democracy to illiberal democracy and in the last several years towards outright authoritarianism. Since 2015, the Polish government has in a similar vein overturned several core areas of democratic politics. Though these two cases are the most visible and dramatic face of European democratic erosion, political illiberalism has also taken root across other parts of Europe. Chaotic and splenetic politics in the UK led analysts to couch Brexit as another part of European democratic meltdown. Polling seemed to suggest that European citizens have lost faith in democratic values, while external actors have also menaced democracy through digital means. Most recently, the Covid-19 emergency has clearly put additional strains on democratic systems as European governments have struggled to devise effective medical, economic and social responses.

As the political and analytical conversation has been mainly about the defensive fragility of Europe’s democracy, the next stage of analysis needs to shift to the question of how different actors across Europe have sought to address the threats to democracy. Experts have exhaustively mapped out the extent of the problems; more systematic attention also needs to be given to responses. After all, despite so many apocalyptically dire predictions, European democracy has in most countries largely stood its ground. In some ways, European politics have even taken their first, tentative steps along a path of healthy democratic renovation. The book asks whether these efforts have been sufficient to turn democracy’s tide in a more favourable direction.

Mapping democratic renovation

This book offers an overview of these efforts to rebuild democracy across Europe; its geographical scope is EU member states and the UK (an EU member until 2020). The aim is to uncover emergent democratic practices and critically assess them. I categorically do not mean to suggest that democratic regression has run its course, nor do I minimize its ongoing reach and gravity. The goal is to ask what is being done to counter democratic decay and what these reform efforts portend for the future of European democracy.

The analysis distinguishes between two slightly different democratic dynamics. One dynamic can be defined as democratic resistance: new strategies that seek to defend core democratic norms against overtly non-democratic threats. The other can be termed democratic renewal: policies and initiatives aiming to change and improve democracy in a more qualitative sense. The book defines the overall agenda of rebuilding democracy as encompassing these two separate but overlapping dynamics. Actors have pursued a combination of the two as they try both to defend and rethink democratic practices across Europe. The different chapters examine the balance and complex relationship between these two dynamics of resistance and renewal.

Conceptually, the book seeks to add analytical ordering to the study of democratic resistance and renewal. Experts have devised analytical frameworks to describe and explain democratic decay – this has become one of the richest fields of endeavour in political science in recent years. This book seeks an equivalent kind of analytical typology for the inverse dynamics of democratic resistance and renewal. The underlying premise is that something of an analytical paradigm shift is due. For years, theorists debated competing models of democratization; in the current era, they moved into theorizing democratic backsliding. Looking to the future, work will also be needed that begins thinking analytically about democratic resistance and renewal.

I adopt a multiple-level analytical framework that covers the various ways in which democratic practice is conceived and pursued. The approach is actor-centred as it examines the policies and strategies that have lately been adopted by a range of different actors across Europe – in effect, disaggregating the different levels at which democratic efforts have emerged. The successive chapters centre on actors’ different visions, preferences and calculations of self-interest in the democratic strategies they pursue rather than assuming that democratic improvement is a matter of neutral, procedural change. I work upwards from this granular look at how different bodies are enacting democratic resistance and renewal to reflect on higher-level conceptual concerns over democracy.

The book examines in turn six emerging dimensions of democratic renovation, moving upwards from the grassroots through to the European level:

- citizens’ mobilization to defend and reinvent democracy;

- European governments’ initiatives for democratic consultation and participation;

- political parties’ efforts to renew their contribution to European democracy;

- different actors’ strategies to restore the democratic potential of the digital sphere;

- the EU’s moves to take firmer action against systemic threats to democracy; and

- different actors’ efforts to open up new routes to European-level democratic accountability.

Combining these different strands, the book offers a composite picture of European democracy. It understands democracy to include liberal, representative, participative, deliberative, direct, digital and transnational dimensions; it understands that countries move along a continuum of democratic quality that encompasses these multiple dimensions.² Analysts and practitioners most commonly focus on one bit of the democracy puzzle. Some are concerned with party systems and the growth of new political parties, some monitor EU level mechanisms relating to the rule of law, some home in on the mechanics of deliberative forums and others are preoccupied with digital issues. This book aims at a more all-inclusive understanding of trends in European democracy. It explores different levels of democratic rebuilding within a single account and sets them analytically alongside each other.

The book is concerned with mapping what is happening at the level of practical action rather than making the abstract case for one particular kind of democracy; it is not a work of normative political theory. My angle is mainly to explore how different actors themselves conceive and articulate their reform efforts. The book asks whether current reform initiatives offer ways of adding valuable mass-participative, civic, deliberative, direct, digital and supranational elements to existing democratic practice. In assessing these efforts, it works largely within the template of liberal-representative democracy; it does not foreground radical, non-liberal forms of democracy within its understanding of resistance and renewal (Chapter 2 unpacks the complex relationship between illiberalism and wider democratic trends). Having said this, the book charts ambitious efforts at far-reaching democratic renewal, and a central theme running through the chapters is that a blurred line often exists between a desire to improve existing democratic practices and an aim more deeply to challenge these.

The focus is very specifically on strategies that different actors have developed directly to defend or enhance democracy. This follows suggestions that analytical debate must do more to understand constantly unfolding channels of democratic change rather than simply comparing fixed end-state political ideals.³ The book is not a generic call for deeper democracy, but a measured look at the good and bad in already-existing attempts to mitigate democratic decay. It does not cover every area of policy change connected to democratic quality, and its remit is not the question of what drives illiberal populism, as this has already received exhaustive attention in recent years. Rather, the focus is on policies and initiatives more directly related to democratic renewal. In short, I look at changes to democratic process not particular policies: that is, to the input not output side of European democracy.

What potential for rebuilding European democracy?

The book finds that efforts to rebuild European democracy have gained significant traction in recent years. This incipient democratic renovation has taken shape at multiple levels: mobilized citizens, civil society organizations, political parties, local authorities, national governments and EU institutions have all made contributions to holding democracy’s depletion at bay. Of these different levels of change, the most resolute, dynamic and innovative strategies have come from Europe’s civic sphere.

While the chapters uncover these varied and wide-ranging elements of democratic resistance and renewal, they also reveal the limits to reform. The book adopts a critical perspective in suggesting that many of Europe’s emerging strategies of democratic fight back remain modest in their scale, ambition and impact. All levels and types of reform have displayed serious shortcomings and none has fulfilled its potential. In particular, many formal governmental reforms have been cautious and more cosmetic than democratically transformational. Leftist, centrist and rightist political forces have all been guilty of limiting or undermining reform efforts. The book notes a democratic paradox in the fact that populism’s rise has both spurred and discouraged reform. Likewise, the Covid-19 pandemic has both galvanized many pro-democratic initiatives and undercut some of the momentum behind Europe’s democratic renewal. Overall, democratic resistance and renewal have gathered much momentum but are still tentative in many areas.

The concluding chapter weighs the achievements and merits of each type of democratic rebuilding. It argues that less restrained forms of democratic resistance and renewal are needed beyond the reforms that have occurred in recent years. These need, in particular, to build in more innovative and unfettered forms of citizen participation, although in a way that adds to existing liberal-representative dynamics rather than subverting these. This form of democratic rebuilding requires above all that the different levels of resistance and renewal work in closer harmony with each other than has been the case to date. The book’s composite analytical framework helps reveal the need to connect together different sites of democratic regeneration. Without such joined-up reform efforts, Europe’s democratic rejuvenation will remain partial and incomplete – and the forces of democratic erosion and democratic renewal will continue to clash in uncertain ways.

1 Amongst the many volumes and articles along these lines, some of the most widely cited are L. Diamond, Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition and American Complacency (London: Penguin, 2019); S. Levitsky and G. Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (London: Penguin, 2018); R. Foa and Y. Mounck, ‘The signs of deconsolidation’, Journal of Democracy, 28/1, 5–16; S. Berman Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); T. Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom (London: Vinta...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Measuring the challenges to European democracy
• 3 Citizen responses: The people mobilize
• 4 Government responses: Democratic consultation on the rise
• 5 Political party responses: Democratic realignment?
• 6 Digital responses: Reclaiming technology for democracy?
• 7 EU responses I: Taking on illiberal democracy?
• 8 EU responses II: Towards a democratic union?
• 9 Pathways to rebuilding European democracy
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright Page