A (10:55)
Okay, thanks. And thank you, sort of. Bill Common, welcome. A curious feature of debates about the EU is that the most contentious position of all is probably a defense of the status quo. Unsurprisingly, Eurosceptics find the very existence of the EU a matter of complaint. But surprisingly, many Europhiles criticize its current structures and processes in almost as strong terms. Moreover, each focuses their criticism so much the same feature of the eu, though they offer different, indeed contradictory, interpretations, namely, the relationship of the EU to its member states. For Eurosceptics, the chief complaint of the EU is that it subverts the authority and integrity of its constituent parts. For an increasingly number increasing number of Europhiles, particularly among political theorists, I should say a key objection has been that it fails to do just that by remaining largely intergovernmental in structure and failing to displace national with A European Post national identity and the issue of European citizenship captures these curiously convergent yet opposed criticisms of the EU particularly well. For Eurosceptics, the very status of citizenship of the EU conjures up the specter of a European superstate and the absorption and supplanting of the member states. For Europhiles, the status represents all that's disappointing about the current eu. Tied firmly to citizenship of a member state, EU citizenship serves in most respects to complement rather than to replace or subvert national citizenship. Instead of signaling the provision of a distinct set of goods by the eu, the rights confirmed by EU citizenship are almost all contingent on residents in another member state, with the associated benefits being provided by that state. Formally, at least, the relevant treaty articles and residence directives don't confer an unlimited right to reside in the host state that are linked to the EU citizen having either independent resources or participating in its economic life, thereby avoiding becoming a burden on its services. Far from being tied to and promoted of any sense of Europeanness or of signaling the transcendence of the whole language of national identity, formal union citizenship simply serves to facilitate cooperation between citizens of the different member states and their access to membership of another member state. In itself, it does very little to create a distinctive attachment to the EU per se. Now, true, the lawyers among you will object that the recent can no doubt Damian will do object that the recent case law of the European Court of Justice has produced an incremental extension of the entitlements of EU citizens that could be said to have partially undermined this picture. But my aim in this lecture is the unfashionable one of defending the formal position. From this perspective, I think the criticisms of Eurosceptics and Europhiles are equally misplaced and misconceived. Eurosceptics overlook the degree to which EU citizenship, like the EU in general, serves to buttress and sustain national citizenship, while many Europhiles appear oblivious to the value and virtues of this very achievement, because in so doing, this EU upholds not so much the supposedly outmoded and possibly discriminatory and unjust modalities of a nation state. In fact, it does a lot to erode those. What it does do, though, is uphold the very possibility for democratic citizenship and the goods it generates, such as rights to be maintained in contemporary conditions. For reasons I'm going to outline, neither the member states or the EU are likely to be able to sustain such practices alone, but the right combination between them can indeed prove complementary and mutually supportive. So my plan in the rest of this lecture is, I hope, reasonably straightforward. What I'm going to start by doing is exploring the nature and purpose of citizenship, noting in particular the links between what I'll call its liberal and its democratic components. I'll then turn to two challenges to democratic citizenship. As we'll see, the chief danger with both of these rests on the way they pull the democratic and liberal elements apart. Then finally, I'll turn to the EU and explore to the extent to which it exacerbates or alleviates these challenges. Okay, so let me start by proposing a definition of citizenship, and then seek both to justify and unpack its component parts. So citizenship, as I see it, is a condition of civic equality. Its aim is to secure fair terms of political association whereby the laws, both in their conception and implementation, treat all those subject to them with equal concern and respect as autonomous individuals. And an intrinsic part of this aim, and the instrumental mechanism for achieving it, is that citizens enjoy political equality in influencing how those laws are conceived and implemented. This definition of citizenship is both liberal and democratic. It's liberal in the philosophical sense of prioritizing the equality of individuals in their capacity for self directed action, an ideal open to different interpretations, reflecting the main ideological cleavages in Europe, be they left, right, feminist, green, and so on. It's being democratic is perhaps more controversial, at least among political and legal theorists, for it's often asserted that the liberal argument is self sufficient at best. Those who take this line argue it may be that democracy helps the preservation of civil liberties better than any other regime. But they claim there's no necessary connection between individual liberty and democracy. Indeed, they're apt to argue that democracy may offer a potential threat to liberal values should majorities become tyrannous or simply myopic and careless. But I want to dispute this argument on both normative and empirical grounds. It's noticeable, for example, that contemporary liberal philosophers have increasingly turned to the ideal, if not always the practice of democratic citizenship as a way of identifying and justifying key liberal values. So in Political liberalism, John Rawls reconceives the idea of the social contract as an agreement between autonomous citizens under conditions of political equality as to the character and content of the rules and principles governing their collective life. And in the variation on this theme, Jurgen Habermas takes as his starting point the preconditions of political equality itself, so that citizens could debate the terms of their political association as equal, autonomous agents. And this derivation of liberal principles from democratic citizenship underlies their normative inseparability. Because we value political equality because as autonomous agents, we want to be able to shape any collective rules and equal basis to everyone else, so they reflect and respect our capacity to have views of our own and make choices about our lives. As I said, though this mutual entainment of liberalism and democracy may be appreciated at the philosophical level, it's less so at the practical level. For while it's rightly assumed by normative theorists that empirically there have been no working democracies, that is, democracies where parties can freely compete and are likely to alternate in power that do not recognize liberal values, they've been less inclined to acknowledge that the reverse is largely true, or almost that university true, too. Liberalism has never been established much beyond the degree of democratization of a given society. That is, beyond the extent to which those with power have been obliged to obtain the voluntary cooperation of others and so treat them as political equals. To some extent. Now, some people may be perplexed that up to this point I've not met rights. For there's a tendency in many recent accounts of citizenship to define it in terms of an ever expanding list of rights. But despite talk of basic rights, rights per se aren't basic. The basis for justification lies in the appeal to a distinct set of independent arguments. And as I noted, many contemporary philosophers couch their appeal to liberal principles which either give rise to or best conceived as rights, in terms of democratic citizenship. And that's because, though rights attach to individuals, they only make sense within social relations that give rise to what Hume and later Rawls called the circumstances of justice, namely, social conditions of material scarcity and limited human altruism and knowledge. It's in these circumstances that we need common rules that treat all with equal concern and respect as autonomous agents. And these rules create fair terms of social cooperation, protecting us from intended or unintended mutual harms, facilitating our ability to plan and interact with each other, and offering an equitable division of the benefits of our cooperating rights derive from the existence of such rules and the arguments that lie behind them. Now, there are four features of this account that need highlighting in their context and are important for what follows. First, the rules from which rights follow operate as and serve to secure public goods, that is, goods that all could be expected to want and from which none can or should be excluded. The aspiration of a system of civil liberties, for example, is to provide the good of personal security in a number of different forms, on an equal basis for all, and, to the extent it exists, is a system from which all benefit and none can be excluded except by the action or inaction of others in failing to respect that system. Second, a public system of rights can only be provided through collective effort and arrangements. Equal rights entail equal duties to sustain them and to ensure collective arrangements exist to uphold them law, courts, police force, hospitals, and so on, even if these public services are supplied by the private sector. Third, some accounts of rights and democracy take as their starting point individual autonomy on its own. But that will only be satisfactory if one can assume a situation that is somehow beyond the circumstances of justice, where the autonomy of each will somehow be the condition of the autonomy of all, a view sometimes attributed to Marx, for example. However, in the absence of any plausible account of how such harmony might be achieved, we must assume that autonomous choices can and do conflict. So we need rules and processes designed to resolve such conflicts under conditions of of equality. Fourth, and finally, and relatedly, reasonable disagreement exists of both a normative and empirical kind as to the best ways of securing collective goods and to some degree over which goods ought to be matters of public concern. In part, such debates turn on the degree to which individuals are or should be deemed responsible for their own choices and the ways in which they should be viewed as equal or as legitimately unequal and therefore meriting differential treatment. Democracy as a system of political equality provides a mechanism for the fair resolution of such disagreements. So democratic citizenship forms, in Arendt's famous phrase, the right to have rights. Accounts such as this that attach rights to citizenship are sometimes criticized on the grounds that they neglect the human rights of those who are excluded from democratic states. However, Arendt coined that phrase in the context of a discussion of the rights of a particular group of stateless persons disaspera Jews. I think this objection could be met by seeing the right to democratic citizenship as the human right. In essence, this is the de facto position in human rights law, which is the creature of democratic citizens states and in practice only adhered to by them. The logic of human rights law is for all states to be democratized and for democratic states to recognize the rights of asylum seekers and of denizens, to naturalize a process that, however imperfectly, is gradually happening, and for the rights of the different democratic states to fashion their laws in their own way. I think what this definition of rights focus attention on is that there are two key components of democratic systemship. First, a political association committed to the provision of certain collective goods and second, a system of political equality in which fair terms for their provision and distribution have been debated and agreed, and those charged with their implications held to account in order to ensure they are organized in a manner consistent with viewing all as equals. In sum, putting together the liberal and the democratic components of citizenship highlights the degree to which principles of justice are, in Rawlsian terms, reciprocal norms of social cooperation between members of a given political community. Now, for all their shortcomings, the established democracies of the member states of the EU have been remarkably successful in establishing such political associations and offering unprecedented protection of civil and social rights as a result of their having institutionalized political equality within working systems of democracy. In the rest of this talk, I want to to look at the challenges to these settlements and the ways that the EU may help or hinder their being successfully met. So what are the two challenges confronting this union of liberal and democratic components of citizenship that characterize the member states? The first challenge concerns the capacity of existing states to deliver certain collective goods within their territory, in part because of its inability to keep both the positive and negative externalities of cooperative behavior within its borders. That you can't reap the benefits of some of your good non polluting behavior, for example, and you suffer the disbenefits of others bad polluting behavior behavior. And this is a problem with the incomplete character of the political association. The second challenge concerns a partial attenuation of the willingness of citizens to conceive of themselves as co participants in the delivery of certain of these goods on a collective basis. This is a problem of a weakening commitment to political equality. In many respects, the two challenges are linked, and indeed each can feed the other. One way of forestalling a failure to cooperate, always tempting with public goods where free riding is possible, is to compel obedience. But for such compulsion to be legitimate, a political association must exist where citizens acknowledge its de facto capacity to deliver that good and its de jure entitlement to do so. The legitimacy of any political authority will certainly be weakened if it's seen as ineffective. But it will also lack effectiveness if it's not seen as legitimate. Not all can be compelled, and an essential aspect of that legitimacy will be that all citizens are socialized into playing their part as political equals in cooperative behavior, so that they possess bonds of trust and solidarity. Democratic participation can reinforce that socialization, not least holding rulers to account and giving people a sense of possession through having their say. But it also trades on it within the member states. This socialization was largely provided by state policies of nation building that accompanied the mass mobilization of required by industrialization and war, both of which ultimately fed into and drove the development of mass democracy. Yet nothing Akin to this socialization process has or is likely to occur at the EU level, Even if the social and political factors existed for it to do so, which they don't, its success would still be inhibited by the fact that such processes have already happened at the member state level. Now, the temptation in meeting these two challenges has been to try and divorce the liberal from the democratic component of citizenship and simply deliver a global rights based form of citizenship upheld by international courts. Many normative theorists have conceived EU citizenship in analogous terms. But if the legitimacy and commitment to rights depends on their instantiation within democratic practices that uphold the citizen's right to have rights, then these solutions won't work. Somehow we need to confront these challenges in ways that preserve the capacity of the liberal and democratic components of citizenship to mutually reinforce each other. So let me now turn to the EU and explore its role in meeting these two challenges and to anticipate. I think it can help meet the first challenge and can certainly avoid exacerbating the second. However, to remain part of the solution, rather than being the cause of the problem, it must continue to complement citizenship at the member state level. So let's start by looking at the first challenge, the incompleteness of political community. The two key areas where it's long been difficult for collective goods to be obtained at a purely national level are economic and security policy. To these have been added a growing appreciation of the importance of the collective good of the environment and the dangers of the public bad of pollution, and the realization that this too requires cross national collaboration. Now, for some time, these three areas have been those where the EU has enjoyed most legitimacy. I don't think this can be explained simply by the fact that these have also been the areas where the EU operates, because security policy has been comparatively weak and has only grown at the EU level as the deficiencies of alternative international arrangements have become apparent. It has always enjoyed high level of support from EU citizens. It's basically executives who don't want to move security policy there. However, those areas where the second challenge, the disengagement from collective participation operates, are even weaker at the EU than they are at the national level. Social rights and political participation are two key areas where there's been some disengagement by citizens. In both cases, support for welfare and for democracy as collective goods remains high. What's expressed is dissatisfaction with the existing mechanisms and personnel. So people say, yes, more social rights, more democracy, it's a great thing. But they still carry on not wanting to disengaging from them. This has produced A certain disengagement from these systems by those able to do so into more individual and private arrangements that don't have the same egalitarian quality, enforcing a fair engagement with the concerns of others. So collective health arrangements get supplemented by private insurance that essentially allow queue jumping within those same services. Litigation and targeted campaigns by pressure groups increasingly supplement and occasionally supplant political parties which have to appeal across the whole range of policies issues with each citizen having an equally weighted vote. So once again, here we have areas where, if you like, there's been a separation of liberal elements from the democratic aspect with inegalitarian results. Support for the EU taking on social welfare responsibilities is very low, over 65% of all EU systems, which means much higher in most countries. Countries regard these issues as exclusively national concerns that the EU shouldn't have any part in them at all. And though EU citizens say they want an EU committed to democratic principles, they're even more disengaged from processes and personnel at the EU level than at the national level. Indeed, they become more so with each extension of democracy at the EU level. For these issues, it would appear that at best, the EU suffers from the same problem as the member states. Indeed, it may be part of the problem. For it's noticeable that across all advanced democracies, support for national political communities and cultures has remained strong and even grown, growing, especially at the sub state level. And that is true as well of the member states of the eu. So, like hardline Euroscepticism, any strong political identification with the Europe is a minority taste. What explains this divergence between support for the EU being involved in collective goods which meet the first challenge, like environment, and lack of support for its being involved in collective good goods associated with the second challenge, like welfare and democracy. Well, part of the explanation lies in there being some truth in the argument of Andrew Murabchik and Nina Mayone that the EU largely operates in areas that are of low electoral salience. In essence, the EU legitimacy is highest in areas that secure win win positive sum for radio efficient improvements and lowest in areas involving redistributions that are zero sum and win win simply aren't that contentious in a way, and they often are very, very technical. And although matters are not quite so simple in that many of the EU's regulatory policies have a differential cost impact and some are more electorally salient than others, I think a broad distinction between these two policy areas can be drawn. That doesn't mean, though, that democracy is simply not relevant to, indeed possibly even a hindrance to securing certain sorts of technical good, as Mahoney and Muravchiks just are, suggest that experts are more trustworthy or better informed in setting emissions targets than politicians say there's no evidence for this suggestion. Indeed, the normative and empirical disagreements even between experts on such matters suggest there are good grounds for deciding such policies democratically. What allows such win win international agreements to work is rather that they can be viewed as securing the right to have have rights of the citizens of the states who are parties to them by reaping the benefits of their positive externalities by having good environmental policies and guarding against negative externalities, as is standardly the case with trade, security and environmental pacts. What's essentially being preserved is the mutual capacity of citizens and states to determine their collective policies in circumstances where each is likely to impact on others. In other words, it's that preservation of the sustainability of democratic citizenship within the member states that's going on in these areas, and that the more such agreements are perceived as themselves involving illegitimate interferences with domestic collective politics policy choices, the less acceptable they'll be. And of course, there is some danger that that is happening in the EU precisely because national politicians hide behind expertise and bureaucracy and fail to negotiate in transparent ways that reveal the domestic benefits of cooperation. But none of that really requires EU level democracy, merely stronger national level democratic accountability on EU issues. Indeed, pushing democracy up to the EU level risks undermining it further. As I noted, those areas where the second challenge operates are precisely the ones where support for EU competence is lowest. And the reason is that in areas where the incentives to defect from common arrangements are greater, then it's going to be all the more important that people are socialised into compliance. Here the EU faces the problem of preemption for both democratic politics and social policy. Quite thick national political cultures exist. These reflect particular ways in which citizens operating under conditions of political equality have come to shape the way these collective goods are understood, so that though all member states share a commitment to welfare and democracy, it's structured in very different ways in each of them. And as I said, there seems to be little pressure to relocate these mechanisms. In fact, to do so would risk accelerating the process of disembedding them from the social context that holds them together. Now, some have argued it's one of the big arguments of Jurgen Habermas, for example, that the EU must take on these responsibilities because it's market driven. Negative integrationist policies have in different ways eroded welfare and democracy at the member state level, producing a race to the bottom on welfare and short circuiting executive accountability in crucial areas. In fact, the first hasn't occurred. The race to the bottom in welfare is not a feature of what's happening in the eu, or certainly not a feature any greater than anywhere else. And the second, that of short circuiting executive accountability, is likely to be exacerbated by a shift to the EU level. The proposed solution of building EU social democracy by declaring allegiance to these principles within the charter or constitution misses the point. These generic values, while shared by pretty much all established democracies, including the most populated parts of the usa, do not in and of themselves constitute a pan European political culture, something that sheer size and linguistic diversity and significantly different institutionalized valuations of these values all work against. Indeed, it would undermine the right to have rights, to have recursively solidified these values in ways that have occurred within the member states already. Worse, and here I think I would differ greatly from Professor Roseanne Boulogne. The legal and political structures likely to be adopted by the EU prove inimical to political equality. The complexity of decision making and the weighting of votes make it second to the United States in its capital counter majoritarian checks and balances. But what do all of those do? What does it mean if you don't have majoritarian democracy done on an equal basis and say everybody now has their say and we're only going to go with policies that everybody will accept? Well, you know, it's a version of the person who can stay in the politics pub longest wins the argument. Some say that the Treaty of Nice was done precisely because the Spanish were able to state that they were used to staying in the pub longer than anybody else. It gives veto to minority privileges, essentially, and the common agricultural policy is a prime minister symbol of this situation. More profound, though rarely mentioned in the democratic deficit literature, is also the way that European integration has produced a certain side tracking of the democratic process through the Americanization of European law. Again, disembedding regulation from established social networks of trust among repeat players produces pressures to adopt more rule governed approaches. Against the background of weak and fragmented governmental authority but strong courts, there are incentives to take to law. Indeed, the EU has actively encouraged such moves to make up for the democratic deficit, often under the banner of citizenship rights. When your plane is late being able to claim rights, compensation is one of those elements. But litigation is far less egalitarian and more focused on individual than the public good than democracy. Notwithstanding class actions and legal aid. Though national legal cultures are resisting change, decisive steps towards a more costly Adversarial and individualistic legal style have occurred. In particular, a new venue for disengaging from national democracy has opened up. Making the EU arrival to national citizenship in these areas would exacerbate the second challenge, therefore, not least because it inevitably pulls apart the liberal from the democratic component of citizenship. Not being able to realize that democratic element means you rely on liberal mechanisms in order to do so. Courts, expert bodies, non majoritarian bodies, etc. Now, the beauty of the current citizenship provisions, I think, lies in them guarding against against this occurring. They seek to allow citizens to move and trade freely between member states, but they constrain such rights by the need not to disrupt the rights enjoyed by national citizens, not least with regard to their access to domestic services and involvement in national elections. This constraint is important if the democratic compact between citizens on welfare, education and other public service services is not to be undermined by fears of welfare shopping by citizens of less well provided states. In the relevant treaties, articles and directives, states have been able to ensure citizens of other member states contribute to the production of collective goods and to protect certain privileges of their own citizens. So basically, you have to reside for a certain time and work before you can claim certain kind of welfare rights. And there are certain particular occupations, etc. Which are tied in specifically with the integrity of states which have been reserved to national citizens. You can't vote in national elections, though you can in local elections. So effectively sufficient commitment of the host state to justify effectively naturalization has to be shown before full access to the rights of citizenship are granted. And in this way, the bonds of reciprocity between citizens created by the process of democratic socialization aren't challenged yet. It's this constraint, apparently upheld earlier in judgments such as Uke and Baumbast, that the ECJ has potentially eroded in Martinez, Sala, Vidar, among others, in a misguided attempt to realize what one Advocate General called the destiny of union citizenship to be the fundamental status of nationals of the member states. I see very few EU citizens sharing this belief in their destiny. A recent poll revealed only 18% of Europeans knew their rights as citizens, and only 41% felt they knew what the term citizen of the EU meant. Indeed, the two people who accompanied me down to this lecture fell into the not knowing the 60% and the 80% who didn't know, respectively. For example, few exercising their EU citizenship rights take up their eligibility to vote in local and EU elections outside their state of origin. A mere 6.5 million in the 2004 European Parliamentary elections often as low as 9% of those eligible. It's hard to resist the conclusion that promoting EU citizenship in this way would risk subverting the very practice of citizenship itself with no advantage to the eu. Again, the real benefit of EU citizenship is being missed. This consists of combining an increasing, increasingly global market with the capacity of citizens to shape their collective public goods in a variety of ways to reflect national political cultures. That capacity is surely the essence of citizenship, and one with no likelihood of being adequately achieved at the EU level. Well, the website advertising this lecture contained a rather daunting list of questions that I guess I was supposed to answer, so, such as, can the idea of European citizenship really be applied to the inhabitants of the diverse collection of nation states grouped in the eu? Can the EU really be a democratic institution? Is more democracy good for the EU and is it effective for its citizens? You may be waiting for my answer. And here it is. I think you might be surprised by it because my answer is yes. Yes to all of those questions. Yes, but with a but. And in a way, the whole of this lecture has been one long but only if its role is that of strengthening the democratic citizenship of the member states and helping it meet the challenges it faces. And that's to be achieved less by democratizing the EU per se and increasing its competences, and more by democratizing how we think about the EU within the member states and deepening our understanding of its important complementary role in confronting the two challenges outlined in this lecture. Thank you.
