How to Democratize the European Union...and Why Bother? by Philippe C. Schmitter

Author:Philippe C. Schmitter [Schmitter, Philippe C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Speculating about the Implications

From this sketch based on variations in Rokkan’s original analysis, I come to the following speculative observations:

The cleavage patterns in Europe are even more multiple than was historically the case at the national level; hence, the emerging European party system will be less uniform, and, even when the politicians do manage to adopt the same symbols and programs across all member states, the parties running on this common basis will be much more fragmented into factions and less capable of exerting party discipline, either in parliament or in the nomination process.

The cleavages may be more multiple, but they are a lot less salient and capable of inspiring polarized attraction and repulsion. Hence, Euro-parties will be even more “centripetal” in their competition with each other (and bland in their respective platforms) than their national counterparts, many of whom are still living off a past political capital of strong antagonism.

Class conflict will continue to provide the major cleavage to the emerging Euro-party system, but it will be profoundly crosscut by alliances along sectoral and center-periphery lines. Left and right will persist as general orienting labels, but as we have already seen at the national (and, very lately and embryonically, at the supranational) level, it will be preceded by various modifiers designed to appeal to the vast public in the middle.

New cleavages that were not envisaged by Rokkan may prove more salient in the emerging Euro-polity, even if they will tend to align themselves with the basic underlying left-right continuum. Many of these are rooting in generational conflicts, exacerbated by an aging population that is reserving an increasing proportion of total resources to itself and a young population that is bound to find less attractive job prospects than their elders. To the extent that many environmental issues are also “age graded,” they will reinforce the tendency toward generation-based cleavages.

I suspect that what will emerge in the near future is a “2+2” party system in which two pro-European parties (one on the left and the other on the right) will compete for most of the votes and collude in the management of EU affairs—as they now do in the internal politics of the European Parliament. Anti-European parties will gradually increase in popular appeal (especially if little or nothing is done to democratize EU institutions), but they will be initially divided along left-right lines. What is not yet clear is whether these parties will compete for Euro-votes and Euro-seats in the EP or whether they will increasingly resort to “extraparliamentary” tactics to express their resistance to further integration.

If the “anti-Europeans” do choose to play according to EU rules in order to oppose it from within and if the left-right cleavage continues to decline in salience, then the longer-run prospect will be for the emergence of a two-party system in which two very heterogeneous coalitions (one pro and the other anti) will dominate—an outcome that superficially resembles the U.S. party system even if the central issue will be “state’s rights” rather than social class.

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