Social Europe

politics, economy and employment & labour

  • Themes
    • Strategic autonomy
    • War in Ukraine
    • European digital sphere
    • Recovery and resilience
  • Publications
    • Books
    • Dossiers
    • Occasional Papers
    • Research Essays
    • Brexit Paper Series
  • Podcast
  • Videos
  • Newsletter

Giving Europe political substance

Mary Kaldor 25th July 2019

In our ‘Europe2025’ series, Mary Kaldor argues that developing substantive democracy in Europe to tame neoliberal globalisation must be the Leitmotif for the coming European term.

substantive democracy
Mary Kaldor

Many of us who live in Britain feel embarrassed and ashamed by the contortions of our politics and the meanness of our government, towards the poor, the foreign and, particularly, the European—which is only going to get worse with Boris Johnson as prime minister.

Yet, paradoxically, the continuing struggle over ‘Brexit’ is an expression of democracy: the fact that the UK has not yet left the European Union is due to debates and positions which have been taken in Parliament, based on a mix of tactical advantage, public pressure and moral conscience. ‘Britain is thinking,’ I remember the great English-European historian Edward Thompson saying during the 1980s—‘and it only thinks every 50 years or so.’

Yes, the rise of right-wing populism has unleashed the dangerous demons of racism, homophobia, misogyny and general human cruelty. But it has also galvanised a new engagement with progressive politics, which could help to make possible the reforms needed if the EU is to survive until 2025.

Cry of frustration

The new political tendencies on both right and left are an expression of a pervasive distrust of formal politics and political institutions, evidenced in a series of Eurobarometer polls. Brexit was a cry of frustration about not being heard, at Westminster or in Brussels: a project on its impact at local level undertaken in my research unit at the London School of Economics showed that the most significant demand in majority-leave areas was for political empowerment. That is why the slogan ‘take back control’ had such resonance in 2016.


Our job is keeping you informed!


Subscribe to our free newsletter and stay up to date with the latest Social Europe content. We will never send you spam and you can unsubscribe anytime.

Sign up here

In explaining this frustration, it’s useful to distinguish between procedural and substantive democracy—as Alexis de Tocqueville did when he studied 19th-century America. Procedural democracy has to do with the formal rules and processes necessary for democracy, including free and fair elections, an independent judiciary, the rule of law, freedom of media and association and civilian control of security services. Substantive democracy is about political equality, a democratic culture, being able to influence the decisions that affect one’s life—the ‘habits of the heart’, as de Tocqueville put it.

The problem today is the weakness of substantive democracy: we have ‘a vote but not a voice’, said the Spanish indignados. And this is the consequence of three decades of neoliberalism.

The Maastricht treaty of 1991 was a compromise between the new wave of Europeanism, constructed from below by the peace and human-rights movements which opposed the cold-war divide during the 1980s, and the then newly-fashionable (if retro) market fundamentalism pioneered in Britain by Margaret Thatcher. Maastricht enshrined in law the requirement to reduce budget deficits and the imposition on debtor countries of the burden of deflationary adjustment of fiscal imbalances. Meanwhile, the freeing up of capital movements and the liberalisation of markets associated with the establishment of the single market speeded up the process of globalisation, facilitated by the emergent information and communication technologies.

In a world where democratic procedures remain focused on the national level but where the decisions that affect one’s life are taken in the headquarters of multinational companies, on the laptops of financial speculators or otherwise in Brussels, Washington or New York, substantive democracy is evidently weakened.

But neoliberalism has also weakened substantive democracy as a consequence of what is happening at national levels, especially since the 2008 financial crisis. On the one hand, it has spurred the erosion of the welfare state and a dramatic increase in social and economic inequality. On the other, the growth of finance relative to manufacturing, as in the US and UK especially, or the dependence of governments on external finance, as in central and eastern Europe and many third-world countries, has meant that states are increasingly dependent on rentier forms of revenue, with all the worrying tendencies associated with rent extraction.

In addition, the contracting-out culture introduced into government, as part of the ‘new public management’ associated with neoliberalism, has given rise to crony capitalism. We see a new breed of politician for whom gaining a political position is a means of access to contracts and other rents with which to reward supporters. 

Bad behaviour

These phenomena help to explain the rise of the new right. They are different from classic fascists. They tend to be crony capitalists—some, such as Viktor Orbán or the oligarchs in other eastern-European countries, have become very rich. Their stances are less ideological and more to do with a celebration of bad behaviour—some analysts call it ‘transgressive’. They lie, steal and say horrible things to blacks, Muslims, women or gay people, and they get away with it. It is a licence to all those who would like to be bad, especially those who resent the ‘politically correct’, socially liberal, educated ‘elite’.

They promise to give back control by ‘making America great again’ or by otherwise restoring sovereignty. It is a very dangerous phenomenon because they cannot actually give back control and the licence to bad behaviour weakens the values underpinning the rule of law and increases the risk of violence. Yet they make political capital out of the damaging consequences of neoliberalism—the inequality, the poverty, the resentment—and they make material capital out of their access to state rents.


We need your support


Social Europe is an independent publisher and we believe in freely available content. For this model to be sustainable, however, we depend on the solidarity of our readers. Become a Social Europe member for less than 5 Euro per month and help us produce more articles, podcasts and videos. Thank you very much for your support!

Become a Social Europe Member

To oppose the new right we need to be able to ‘take back control’ in reality, to construct or reconstruct substantive democracy. At the local level, citizens need to be able to feel that there is some hope for the future and they have a chance to shape that future. But because of globalisation, this can only be achieved via substantive democracy at the European level. So what would this involve? 

First of all, it is necessary to shield the local level from the harmful effects of globalisation. We need to develop mechanisms in financial terms so that creditor and debtor countries share the burden of adjusting imbalances—so that a Greek-type crisis, with its devastating effects on the ground, cannot be repeated. We need to restrain financial speculation, so that national and local policies are not vulnerable to the vagaries of capital markets. We need to develop automatic stabilisers, such as a Europe-wide unemployment-insurance scheme. Multinational companies need to be regulated and taxed. Conflicts need to be addressed and migration needs to be managed.

This list could be extended endlessly. The point is that we need far-reaching measures to tame globalisation, so as to create space for action at local and national levels.

Secondly, the measures which need to be taken to create more space for genuine participation in decision-making require substantive democracy at the European level—debate and deliberation, and activism, across Europe. There are widespread complaints about the bureaucratic character of the EU but this has to do with the absence of politics: the European bureaucracy is not actually that large but it appears overwhelming because it represents a substitute for political engagement.

Some argue, as for example DiEM25, that the problem is procedural and that we need a constitutional convention. As a matter of fact, EU procedures, while they could be improved, do involve serious mechanisms to ensure the accountability of the institutions to citizens. The parliament has far-reaching powers to amend legislation, as well as to approve appointments and the budget. The Europe Citizens’ Initiative, introduced in the Lisbon treaty, offers another mechanism. The neoliberal Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership trade deal was stopped as a result of a citizens’ initiative, as was the abolition of roaming charges on mobile phones, hugely improving communication across Europe while reducing the excess profits of the supplier companies.

The problem is that these powers are not utilised sufficiently because of a lack of serious political engagement. What is lacking, as the Italian federalist Altiero Spinelli said decades ago, is the ‘substance of politics’.

Political mobilisation

But this may be changing in response to the rise of the far right. Ever since the early 2000s, there has been a social mobilisation against neoliberalism, first in the World Social Forum and the European Social Forum, then in the occupations of the squares in 2011 and 2012. But at that time, this activism tended to be ‘anti-political’ and, even where it led to the formation of political parties as in the case of Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece, it tended to be focused on local and national levels. The further rise of the far right in Europe has however provided an impetus for an activism that is more political and more pan-European.

The European elections of 2019 represented the beginning of a debate about different visions of Europe. There were real differences among the parties. Since the Brexit referendum, the far-right parties seem to have shifted from wanting to leave the EU to the idea of creating a European alliance of nationalists. The Party of European Socialists (PES), the greens and the far left put forward radical manifestoes for ending austerity, tackling climate change and addressing inequality. The turnout was higher than for decades. And, with the exceptions of Britain and Italy, the elections were about the future of Europe rather than being proxies for national issues.

Europe is beginning to think.

The risks are huge. There could easily be another financial crisis, because the appropriate measures were not taken after 2008. The Pandora’s box of bad behaviour opened by the far right is very difficult to close. How things will look in 2025 will thus depend on our individual analyses and collective actions—on whether pan-European public pressure can reconstitute the ‘substance of politics’.

Mary Kaldor
Mary Kaldor

Mary Kaldor is professor emerita of global governance at the London School of Economics and Political Science and a member of the national committee of Another Europe is Possible.

You are here: Home / Politics / Giving Europe political substance

Most Popular Posts

European civil war,iron curtain,NATO,Ukraine,Gorbachev The new European civil warGuido Montani
Visentini,ITUC,Qatar,Fight Impunity,50,000 Visentini, ‘Fight Impunity’, the ITUC and QatarFrank Hoffer
Russian soldiers' mothers,war,Ukraine The Ukraine war and Russian soldiers’ mothersJennifer Mathers and Natasha Danilova
IGU,documents,International Gas Union,lobby,lobbying,sustainable finance taxonomy,green gas,EU,COP ‘Gaslighting’ Europe on fossil fuelsFaye Holder
Schengen,Fortress Europe,Romania,Bulgaria Romania and Bulgaria stuck in EU’s second tierMagdalena Ulceluse

Most Recent Posts

EU social agenda,social investment,social protection EU social agenda beyond 2024—no time to wasteFrank Vandenbroucke
pension reform,Germany,Lindner Pension reform in Germany—a market solution?Fabian Mushövel and Nicholas Barr
European civil war,iron curtain,NATO,Ukraine,Gorbachev The new European civil warGuido Montani
artists,cultural workers Europe’s stars must shine for artists and creativesIsabelle Van de Gejuchte
transition,deindustrialisation,degradation,environment Europe’s industry and the ecological transitionCharlotte Bez and Lorenzo Feltrin

Other Social Europe Publications

front cover scaled Towards a social-democratic century?
Cover e1655225066994 National recovery and resilience plans
Untitled design The transatlantic relationship
Women Corona e1631700896969 500 Women and the coronavirus crisis
sere12 1 RE No. 12: Why No Economic Democracy in Sweden?

Hans Böckler Stiftung Advertisement

The macroeconomic effects of re-applying the EU fiscal rules

Against the background of the European Commission's reform plans for the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP), this policy brief uses the macroeconometric multi-country model NiGEM to simulate the macroeconomic implications of the most relevant reform options from 2024 onwards. Next to a return to the existing and unreformed rules, the most prominent options include an expenditure rule linked to a debt anchor.

Our results for the euro area and its four biggest economies—France, Italy, Germany and Spain—indicate that returning to the rules of the SGP would lead to severe cuts in public spending, particularly if the SGP rules were interpreted as in the past. A more flexible interpretation would only somewhat ease the fiscal-adjustment burden. An expenditure rule along the lines of the European Fiscal Board would, however, not necessarily alleviate that burden in and of itself.

Our simulations show great care must be taken to specify the expenditure rule, such that fiscal consolidation is achieved in a growth-friendly way. Raising the debt ceiling to 90 per cent of gross domestic product and applying less demanding fiscal adjustments, as proposed by the IMK, would go a long way.


DOWNLOAD HERE

ILO advertisement

Global Wage Report 2022-23: The impact of inflation and COVID-19 on wages and purchasing power

The International Labour Organization's Global Wage Report is a key reference on wages and wage inequality for the academic community and policy-makers around the world.

This eighth edition of the report, The Impact of inflation and COVID-19 on wages and purchasing power, examines the evolution of real wages, giving a unique picture of wage trends globally and by region. The report includes evidence on how wages have evolved through the COVID-19 crisis as well as how the current inflationary context is biting into real wage growth in most regions of the world. The report shows that for the first time in the 21st century real wage growth has fallen to negative values while, at the same time, the gap between real productivity growth and real wage growth continues to widen.

The report analysis the evolution of the real total wage bill from 2019 to 2022 to show how its different components—employment, nominal wages and inflation—have changed during the COVID-19 crisis and, more recently, during the cost-of-living crisis. The decomposition of the total wage bill, and its evolution, is shown for all wage employees and distinguishes between women and men. The report also looks at changes in wage inequality and the gender pay gap to reveal how COVID-19 may have contributed to increasing income inequality in different regions of the world. Together, the empirical evidence in the report becomes the backbone of a policy discussion that could play a key role in a human-centred recovery from the different ongoing crises.


DOWNLOAD HERE

ETUI advertisement

Social policy in the European Union: state of play 2022

Since 2000, the annual Bilan social volume has been analysing the state of play of social policy in the European Union during the preceding year, the better to forecast developments in the new one. Co-produced by the European Social Observatory (OSE) and the European Trade Union Institute (ETUI), the new edition is no exception. In the context of multiple crises, the authors find that social policies gained in ambition in 2022. At the same time, the new EU economic framework, expected for 2023, should be made compatible with achieving the EU’s social and ‘green’ objectives. Finally, they raise the question whether the EU Social Imbalances Procedure and Open Strategic Autonomy paradigm could provide windows of opportunity to sustain the EU’s social ambition in the long run.


DOWNLOAD HERE

Eurofound advertisement

Eurofound webinar: Making telework work for everyone

Since 2020 more European workers and managers have enjoyed greater flexibility and autonomy in work and are reporting their preference for hybrid working. Also driven by technological developments and structural changes in employment, organisations are now integrating telework more permanently into their workplace.

To reflect on these shifts, on 6 December Eurofound researchers Oscar Vargas and John Hurley explored the challenges and opportunities of the surge in telework, as well as the overall growth of telework and teleworkable jobs in the EU and what this means for workers, managers, companies and policymakers.


WATCH THE WEBINAR HERE

Foundation for European Progressive Studies Advertisement

Discover the new FEPS Progressive Yearbook and what 2023 has in store for us!

The Progressive Yearbook focuses on transversal European issues that have left a mark on 2022, delivering insightful future-oriented analysis for the new year. It counts on renowned authors' contributions, including academics, politicians and analysts. This fourth edition is published in a time of war and, therefore, it mostly looks at the conflict itself, the actors involved and the implications for Europe.


DOWNLOAD HERE

About Social Europe

Our Mission

Article Submission

Membership

Advertisements

Legal Disclosure

Privacy Policy

Copyright

Social Europe ISSN 2628-7641

Social Europe Archives

Search Social Europe

Themes Archive

Politics Archive

Economy Archive

Society Archive

Ecology Archive

Follow us

RSS Feed

Follow us on Facebook

Follow us on Twitter

Follow us on LinkedIn

Follow us on YouTube