Policy making in the European Union: Is there a social democratic space? (original) (raw)
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Social Democracy Caught in the European Trap
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Political science literature has extensively described social democracy’s ‘two metamorphoses’. First there was the establishment of social democratic parties as major government parties in the ‘Keynesian State’ period and then their ‘de-social-democratisation’ after the 1970s, while the renovation promoted by Tony Blair and Gerhard Schröder was associated with electoral success at the end of the 1990s. The propulsive power of this new social democratic identity was then rapidly exhausted. Until the last days before the 2014 European elections, opinion polls carried out in EU member countries allowed the social democrats to hope that they could pass the 200-seat threshold in the 751-seat European Parliament (EP) and make good the setback they had suffered five years earlier. Indeed, in 2009 only a quarter of the MEPs belonged to the EP’s S&D group, which was at an historically low level. We will first show that social democracy managed to stabilise its weight in the EP only while continuing to decline in percentage of votes. This result should be seen in the context of the historic trajectory of a political family of parties that we extensively studied in The Palgrave Handbook of Social Democracy.2We will next address the present state of this family of parties in the middle of capitalism’s structural crisis and the dilemmas it faces in the very peculiar regime of the European Union. The social democrats, because of their own history, have tied themselves up in a bundle of constraints — which are creating their present difficulties. For this reason, they will probably not be of much help in putting an end to the austerity that is devastating the European continent. This will be the last point covered by this article.
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The following document is the final submitted version of a paper I did for a governance and democratization class during my Masters of International Relations program. The European Union has come under extensive scrutiny for it perceived democratic deficit through its institutional structure, centralisation and accusations of anti-democratic behaviour, which began with the Maastricht Treaty (Christiansen, 2012: 686-687). Given the rise of so called 'populist' politicians in Central European member states of the union, there is a great level of concern about the degradation of democracy. On the other hand, 'Eurosceptic' politicians on the left and right have long expressed concern about how continued integration into the European Union political project is eroding national sovereignty. With the ongoing dramas of Brexit, this issue is in the spotlight. This essay will examine the risk to democracy that comes out as a result of some of the second and third order governance features of the European Union (Kooiman, 1999: 78-83). Additionally, I will use the conceptual tools of norm entrepreneurship and class struggle as foundational assumptions of my argument. I will argue that the dangers to maintaining democratic forms of governance in the European Union is a mix of failures of national parliaments, the decisions of EU leaders and the series of contradictions within its current construction. I will achieve this by first discussing the differing views of what constitutes the ideology of the European Union, the issue of populism and a discussion of the core institutions themselves. The risk to democracy here is defined in the sense of our most common, fundamental expectation of democracy: that elected leaders enact policy that is within the desires and best interests of the demos. A further possible risk to democracy from the European Union is the further entrenchment and reproduction of class warfare and liberal totalitarianism (Gambetti, 2005: 642-645), whose totalitarian nature has previously been disguised by 'market solutions' and the depoliticization of politics (Brown, 2006). It should also be noted that this essay is not an exhaustive account of this specific issue.