This week we ask: how should the European Union handle the political, social, and economic diversity amongst its member states – and what can it do about democratic backsliding?
For around a decade, the EU – which was founded by the principles of freedom, democracy and the rule of law – has been struggling to contain anti-democratic developments in some member states.
More broadly, the European Union faces a challenge of how to create unity, and yet accommodate the significant political, social, and economic diversity of its member states. Can it accommodate this diversity? And can it do so without risking being unfair or undermining its own legitimacy?
Addressing these big questions is Professor Richard Bellamy, Professor of Political Science here at in the Department of Political Science and a Senior Fellow at the Hertie School in Berlin. He has recently co-authored a book on the subject, called Flexible Europe: Differentiated Integration, Fairness, and Democracy.
Mentioned in this episode:
Richard Bellamy
[00:00:00] Emily McTernan: Hello. This is UCL Uncovering Politics. And this week we ask: how should the European Union handle the political, social and economic diversity of its member states and what can it do about democratic backsliding?
Hello. My name is Emily McTernan. And welcome to UCL Uncovering Politics – the podcast of the School of Public Policy and Department of Political Science at University College London.
For around a decade, the EU – which was founded on the principles of freedom, democracy and the rule of law – has been struggling to contain anti-democratic developments in some member states. Most well documented, electoral victories in Hungary and Poland brought in governments willing to challenge the rule of law.
Various countermeasures, such as the trigger of Article 7 against Poland and then Hungary, have been used to address this democratic backsliding, but with questionable effectiveness.
And more broadly, the European Union faces a challenge: how can it create unity amongst its members, and yet accommodate the significant diversity of those members? Can it accommodate their cultural and political as well as social and economic diversity? And in particular, can it do so without risking being unfair, or even undermining its own legitimacy?
Addressing these challenges of unity in the EU, and what to do in particular about democratic backsliding, is Professor Richard Bellamy.
Richard is a Professor of Political Science here in the Department of Political Science and School of Public Policy, and a Senior Fellow at the Hertie School in Berlin. And he has recently coauthored a book on the subject called Flexible Europe: Differentiated Integration, Fairness, and Democracy.
And I'm delighted that Richard joins me now to discuss its themes. Welcome back, Richard, to UCL Uncovering Politics. It's great to have you on the show again.
[00:01:42] Richard Bellamy: Thanks for inviting me.
[00:01:43] Emily McTernan: Let's start by discussing the big question of the book, of how we can get this unity in the EU without running roughshod over the social, economic and political differences between member states.
So what are these differences and why are they creating issues within the EU?
[00:01:57] Richard Bellamy: So, as you said in your introduction, you've got in the EU states that are widely different in their social and economic capacities and degree of wealth. And you've got states which have differing constitutional systems, democratic systems and cultures, including different languages.
And these differences are much greater than you'll find in most states, including large federal states. So the difference between a poor state, such as Bulgaria, and a rich state, such as Denmark, is greater than the difference between Mississippi and Delaware in the United States, for example. And the differences on cultural values between Poland and Sweden are quite a bit more than you'll find between southern and northern states or country states and urban areas in the United States.
If you want to value that diversity in part, and to have a system of fair cooperation amongst them, then the issue within the EU – as it is within many other international organisations such as the WTO: how do you make it so that the system isn't run according to the rules set by the richest players, and whereby they impose what will be advantageous to them on weaker states so they can carry on gaining advantages – economic advantages – from that cooperation, which are unfair? And how can you also give value to the fact that there are different systems, and one might learn from that diversity?
So, so that's what I set out to do in the book.
[00:04:07] Emily McTernan: And has this problem become more pressing as the EU has expanded and included more states?
[00:04:12] Richard Bellamy: Absolutely, yes. I mean, because the expansion has been to Central and Eastern Europe, which tend to be poorer states.
They are sometimes very large states though, so, you know. Poland has one of the largest populations of a state in the EU. So that gives them a certain weight in decision making.
And yes. The states which have only recently recovered or become democratic constitutional systems only recently developed capitalist and market systems. So all of those things mean that integration is going to be, to some degree, difficult for them, in ways in which, again, you find when you're talking about the difference between developing states and developed states in bodies like the WTO and so forth, but not as great as you find there. And without so much of a history of colonialism.
[00:05:14] Emily McTernan: And as the book's title suggests, you think perhaps the EU can deal with these things. It can somehow be flexible and manage these different countries in the integration process. Could you talk us through a little bit about those ideas?
[00:05:26] Richard Bellamy: Yes, so, already the EU is quite flexible because it allows what is called ‘differentiated integration’. And what that means is that states can either opt out or be excluded from certain policies and they can do so on two different grounds.
One, that they lack the capacity to participate on equal terms with other states. So, as a result, that's led to some states initially being excluded from participation in the Euro. They're regarded as having economies which render participation in most of the EU market policies fair, but not the Euro.
And so, there are stringent, but perhaps if one thinks about what's happened with Greece, insufficiently stringent criteria until you can join. But by the same token, there's also differentiated integration, which allows opt outs on sovereignty grounds. That is, that there are policies which are regarded as being core to the identity or the way that a country works that means that it won't – doesn't want to – participate in that policy.
And again, the Euro is one where you have that, in that Sweden has opted out of that.
And also, so how these things can crop up in surprising areas: Sweden, the biggest – at the time that Sweden joined – the biggest hurdle to that was that in Sweden, there's a form of snuff called snus, which I don't know, somebody told me that it involves bits of ground glass in it, so it doesn't sound a particularly healthy thing, but it is very popular. And this didn't meet the extant health and safety rules of the EU's policies on tobacco. Crucial to the negotiations on joining the EU was an opt out on snus for these particular regulations.
And so that's just a, you know, what might seem a trivial example, though not to the Swedes obviously; the Euro, a rather less trivial one for everyone in terms of a policy that states might feel that they'd be better off not belonging to.
[00:08:09] Emily McTernan: And do these differentiated integration offers, with their different opt outs and exclusions, seem unfair to some? I think some member states seem to be having kind of special treatment compared to others. Or are they well justified in some sense?
[00:08:25] Richard Bellamy: I think one of the worries that the poorer states have is that they become sort of second class, a second-tier form of integration, and that it's only really allowed for the large states or the rich states to opt out.
I mean, in the abstract, that's clearly a legitimate concern to have.
But the EU also has a number of sort of complex voting rules which govern how policies can be – particularly policies which are going to exclude or only apply to certain members. So you have what's called ‘enhanced cooperation’, which is another form of differentiated integration whereby some states can choose to go further than the rest. But this always requires a degree of consensus for agreement or super majorities, which in the way that the voting rules are devised, are done to try and ensure that you need to have a coalition of large and small, and probably rich and poor, states in order to get a policy across.
So, that's, again, one of the other ways in which the EU manages its diversity and seeks to promote forms of social cooperation which are going to be in the interests of all of the states.
[00:10:06] Emily McTernan: So is the claim that Europe is already flexible? Or that it should become more flexible?
[00:10:11] Richard Bellamy: Well, it's both. It's that it's more flexible than many people portray it and that it's capable of being even more so to some degree, as it grows in the number of members, but also as it potentially extends into more policy areas.
So, critics of the EU often like to portray it as a kind of top down, uniform system.
And I think, unfortunately, some pro EU supporters likewise sort of say: well, it ought to be more like that. They dislike these forms of differentiated integration. They accept, at best, that they may be needed as temporary measures whilst the poorer states reach a certain level. But they tend not to see them as how the architecture of the EU should be. It's sometimes called variable geometry or a Europe a la carte. And these are two ‘no-noes’ for certain people in the commission and pro-European politicians.
Whereas, I think that, you know, if you look at many states… You know, take the UK. We have a huge amount of differentiated integration. Here we have asymmetrical devolution of powers to the different minority nation states. So, Scotland has more power than Wales on certain areas.
You also have certain parts of the UK which are now having certain devolution of power to them: Greater London, for example, which, you know, with eight million people and probably what's generated in the area, a gross national product which is greater than that of many EU member states. It's greater certainly than that of the minority nations that people tend to talk about when they talk about devolution.
And so if you get that within the UK, and you have it likewise in member states like Belgium, right at the heart of the EU, where you also have added to that a linguistic difference and religious differences, then within the EU you should expect to have much, much the same.
And, for me, as someone who is a kind of pluralist about these things, I don't regard that as a bad thing. I think it's good to have that diversity. But you want the coexistence – the cooperation – to be done in ways that are fair to all the parties.
And so that's what I've tried to do, and see the EU as being an interesting laboratory for investigating.
[00:13:23] Emily McTernan: That's a fantastic defence of the a la carte strategy for differentiated integration and for all of us paying more attention as political philosophers, in particular, to something like the complex organisation of the EU, which we'll come back to later in our discussion.
But, first of all, do you think that if we'd realised how flexible Europe could be or should be or could one day be, Brexit might not have been the solution?
[00:13:46] Richard Bellamy: I do think so.
I mean, this is the second book I've written on the EU and I've worked on it on and off ever since Maastricht, so for the past 25 years. And my constant concern was that those who favoured the EU did a very poor job of defending it. And I think one of the reasons they did a poor job of defending it was that they tended to buy in to the view that the critics put of it, that it was about handing over sovereign power to a supranational entity, having greater uniformity amongst the member states. And I mean, they argued that this was something which indeed was going to make us all better off and more justly governed.
But, I always believed that was both pragmatically or practically a very difficult aim to have. And that it missed what I regard as being the great advantage of the EU, which was that it enabled cooperation amongst various member states, whilst allowing them to retain a great deal of sovereignty in the way in which they did that.
They had conferred certain competencies upon the EU, but as Brexit showed, they could also take them back – they were under their control. And obviously the very powerful slogan of the Brexiters was taking back control, something which I don't think, of course, has happened as we've just become a very weak power; we're under the control of the rules that are made by far more bigger units, including the European Union.
But I think that what was missed was that we had a great deal of control over how we operated within the EU, and through cooperation with the EU partners, had a much bigger voice in affairs globally. That was the vision which I found was never really put forward by people. And I think it was perhaps because they, maybe some of them, didn't realise how flexible Europe was.
[00:16:18] Emily McTernan: Which seems so strange, given Britain never joined the Euro. So it was obviously demonstrating very clear flexibility in terms of the unity required.
Let's turn to one of the challenges in the EU, and one to which it's not quite so clear that the EU should respond with sort of acceptance of the diversity of the nation states in this particular respect. And that's democratic backsliding.
So, just to set the scene, could you talk us through the state of democracy in the EU member states at the moment, and where have we seen this backsliding, and should we be worried?
[00:16:49] Richard Bellamy: Yes, well, I mean, by backsliding I mean that's when a government that perhaps has come to power through reasonably fair democratic rules then seeks to entrench its position in government by changing the rules in ways that systematically favour it and its policies.
And whilst that's often put forward as a kind of ideological choice, if you're preventing proper opposition and criticism of those in power, it also clearly opens up avenues for corruption and self-aggrandizement, as well as – if their ideological views are rather illiberal, as they tend to be in these cases – as well as oppressing particular minorities. And so in regimes like Orban's in Hungary, you see both the corruption in the regime and it's oppressing particular minorities and refusing to do its bit in burden sharing with regard to immigration, for example.
[00:18:14] Emily McTernan: And is it that refusal to do its bit that's motivating the concern of the EU? Or is it the slipping away from core democratic principles?
[00:18:22] Richard Bellamy: I think both. I mean, so I think the EU It has an, you know, it has an interest in governments not being corrupt. Because it, particularly if it's a state like Hungary, which receives a lot of EU funds, then you want to ensure that those funds are spent wisely and equitably rather than simply going into the private pockets of your friends in the administration, which is what happens a lot at present.
It also means that, you know, the courts are full of people there just to favour the administration and its cronies. And one of the things that you want to claim is that you've opened up markets to other countries and render them free. Then for those courts to be deciding a lot of commercial matters is likewise going to be something to be deeply worried about.
So, you know, as again with the WTO, there's a kind of thin view of the rule of law, which is favoured even by neoliberal market supporters because they want to ensure that their companies can compete on rules that have been agreed.
I think though that, you know, there's also both an interested and – what you might call – a disinterested reason for being worried about the persecution of those who of the gay community, for example – something one of our colleagues has written about.
And I think again, it does impact certain key EU policies, particularly the freedom of movement of citizens. So EU rules have tended to sort of say that same sex partners should be treated the same way as heterosexual partners. And that's something which is impeded sometimes by the rules of these countries.
But alongside that, strictly speaking, market interest, there's also simply a liberal ideological view that such discrimination is against the principles of treating people equally, which is at the heart of the EU project too.
[00:20:55] Emily McTernan: And so what can the EU do? What should it do, in your view? And what has it been doing?
[00:20:59] Richard Bellamy: One of the reasons why I felt I had to talk about it in the book is because this has been seen as sort of a potential weakness of my view.
So one aspect of my view, and what I called earlier ‘sovereignty differentiated integration’, is what has been called constitutional pluralism. This term or idea was developed within the EU by a legal theorist who had a great influence upon me, Neil MacCormick, because my first job was in Edinburgh, and he was the Regis Professor of the Law of Nature and Nations.
[00:21:43] Emily McTernan: What a fantastic title to have.
[00:21:46] Richard Bellamy: Exactly. I've always coveted that title.
And Neil was very pro EU. He actually was an MEP. But he was also a Scottish nationalist. And for a lot of people, there might seem to be tensions here. But one of his ideas was that he thought a great advantage of the EU – and I believe he thought of the UK or could be of the UK – was the fact that different systems, different states or regions or whatever, had different constitutional systems. Different ways of perhaps putting forward, broadly speaking, social democratic, liberal values. But they weren't identical in the ways they did that.
And that one of the advantages of the EU was that each state had joined the EU in ways that were consistent with their domestic values. And through the EU, they came to have mutual respect for their different systems.
So he had this quite pluralist view of how the EU should be.
[00:23:09] Emily McTernan: So is this a pluralism of how the court of law works, what the democratic system looks like, how we divvy up the seats in a parliament and so on?
[00:23:16] Richard Bellamy: Exactly. So, you know, so there are different ways of being plausibly a democratic regime. There isn't a kind of canonical way of meeting certain agreed democratic criteria. There may even be differences about those criteria.
[00:23:33] Emily McTernan: So I guess here comes the problem of democratic backsliding. Is it a democratic backsliding or just an instance of constitutional pluralism? Who said a democratic state couldn't elect its own judges after all? Some of them do.
[00:23:45] Richard Bellamy: Exactly. So that became a problem. So, because the European Court of Justice or Court of Justice of the EU – the various bodies that could plausibly be called this are now called – it has always resisted a constitutionally pluralist view.
Instead, it says that it's the body which can decide whether an EU rule is applicable or not, and whether a state should conform to it and how it should conform. So in the language of legal theorists, it's said to have competence, confidence – that is, competence over its own competences.
Whereas various national constitutional states, most notably the German Federal Constitutional Court have disputed that. And they've said: well look, you know, we've joined the EU on grounds which are compatible with the German Constitution, and the body that can decide – has the competence to decide – whether or not what we're doing is compatible with the German constitution, which is the only way in which we could have joined the EU, is us. So, as a result we can challenge certain European court decisions. So long as the judgment put it, so long ago as Germany doesn't change its constitution in some way that we would agree with as the courts as being compatible with the basic law or whatever. So that seems to hand over the issue to the backsliding courts.
So, can I get round this, is the answer.
And how I do it is I sort of say, well, I've never been a fan of the European court claiming competence. And I have just felt that's a view that has been discreetly ignored by the member states.
But I do think all the member states have an interest in cooperating with a state whose institutions are in good order, shall we say, and are compatible with Article 2 of the Treaty of the European Union, which sets out the pluralist constitutional orders. It says that all the different states should have some recognisably democratic and constitutional system. But it doesn't specify it's got to have a particular canonical form.
And as I say, there are good reasons why you wouldn't want to cooperate with a state which didn't have those.
So I think rather than say this is something decided by a supranational institution, I would like to say this is something which could be decided by a body appointed by and representative of the various member states. And I seek to design what I call an ‘article to commission’ that could provide such a body. And there would be a regular, like a systematic, review of all member states, so you're not picking on any particular member state by this body, to see whether this was happening. A rule of law index would be something that you could have.
In this way, I think there's a pluralist way, if you like, of ensuring, you know, mutual respect between the plural constitutions, but nonetheless sort of saying that, yes, they have to operate in a way which is mutually compatible in certain senses, such as those set out in the Article that they've all signed up to.
[00:28:21] Emily McTernan: As you present the article, it sounds like quite a low bar. So is it the case that the democratic backsliding we're seeing is definitely in violation of that quite low sounding bar for what it would be to count as sufficiently democratic?
[00:28:33] Richard Bellamy: I think it is. And in a way it's admitted as such by those states. Because they weren't saying that they met that Article. They were tending to say that it was an Article that they could opt out of.
And I think that there was, in a certain sense, a, self-contradiction in wanting to do that. Because this Article was the very Article which sort of said that if they were a state which met it, then they could cooperate and, you know, therefore were able to opt out of these other issues.
But if they don't meet it, then in a certain sense they've fallen short of the criteria that form part of the accession process in the first place.
[00:29:26] Emily McTernan: And what do we do then?
So you have some proposals for how we can go about handling these people who are failing to meet Article 2 conditions. And you have two forms of value differentiated integration that backsliding action could take.
So you say there could be conditionality requirements on the disbursement of EU funds, and there could be withdrawal of voting rights in the Council. What makes these particularly effective strategies for handling such things?
[00:29:53] Richard Bellamy: I think money is quite a persuasive way of dealing with things.
I think, you know, they're the problem. You know, there are two legitimacy problems that the EU faces in taking action.
One is that, if the Court of Justice makes the decision, or the Commission, then the argument would be: well, why are these unelected bodies arbitrarily deciding how we democratically elected government should act? So you have to try and deal with that.
The other thing is that when you take away funds, you can end up hitting many of the people who are ideally supporting you because these funds are usually given to states to help the poorer sections of the community. And so then that could add to the former problem with the sort of saying: they're doing that and the fact that our funds are being taken away, etc., that's also the fault of the naughty…
So, I think it's important that one finds ways whereby, for example, you could carry on giving the funds, but you could disperse it to certain civil society groups in the policy area affected, and somehow take the government out of the picture. So the funds would still be dispersed, but the method of dispersing them might alter. There might still be reasons not to give certain kinds of funds, but to make it as proportionate and as unharmful to ordinary citizens as possible is the aim.
The removal of the voting is that, of course, you know, there are certain policy areas where these states can exert a veto which can imperil the EU. One has seen that recently where Orban has vetoed support to Ukraine. And in that he, you know, he differs.
And so, in that sense, the whole defence of the EU is being undermined by Orban having that veto. And so, again, that seems a reason why it may be necessary to take that vote away from them temporarily.
[00:32:22] Emily McTernan: So we've got a really clear sense now, I think, of how we're going to go about dealing potentially with these backsliding states, but in a way that protects their members and preserves the functions of the EU in the right kind of way.
But let's zoom out to a question about the methods that you're engaging with here. So one of the interesting things about your work is you're a political philosopher, a political theorist. And you're writing about the institution of the EU. And that's not so usual amongst political theorists – we tend to be much more abstract than that.
So what is it that you think we can learn from this sort of very careful and important study of actual institutions as they are?
[00:32:57] Richard Bellamy: So, I mean, there's been a big growth of interest amongst political theorists in questions of global justice and global democracy for obvious reasons, in the sense that we've become more increasingly aware that we are, and indeed always have been, to some degree, part of a global system.
And just as political theorists have been interested in how domestic arrangements can be just, they've increasingly become aware that you can only talk about those in relationship to the wider questions of the world.
And the EU is one of those institutions, the most developed extant institution, which seeks to bring those two things together, at least for its members, because of course, many would say that it continues to act by far lower standards than it ought to when it comes to how it operates in the globe.
But if it was being consistent, you might sort of say that it ought to support the development of similar organisations elsewhere in the world, and at a further stage up, operate well with them.
So then the issue is, well, how should we develop our ideas about what principles are going to work? And as you know, there's a debate amongst political theorists, broadly speaking, between idealists and realists, shall we say, those who say, well, we must start with first principles and to, as far as possible, think about them in abstraction from anything that's going on in the world.
And then there are those who sort of say: well, if we want our ideals to have traction in the here and now, and to some degree if we also want them to respect the views of ordinary people who are asking to do things, then maybe we ought to start from where we are, but critically reflect upon it in ways that help us make those movements from the status quo to a better, admirable, more just world a just and democratic world – but in a way that is going to have allegiance of people and be credible.
So broadly speaking, I tend to think, well, you know, the EU probably has the most favourable circumstances for thinking about global justice and democracy in the sense that you've got states that, even though there are big differences between them, are all democratic states. Or even those that are falling off democracy have been democratic states, and want to pay lip service to being so, and can provide for their citizens to a minimum level well above what the global minimum level is.
So if you're putting forward policies which don't work in the EU, I feel it's highly unlikely they're going to work anywhere else. So it's almost like a laboratory for thinking about these ideas.
And putting some sort of detail upon them so that you actually know what does a principle entail when it's actually fleshed out in practice. And the EU provides you with a way of thinking about those things.
I mean, inevitably when one does this, you know, political theorists think: do I really want to be bogged down in all of this EU detail? So I try to make it as light and as relevant as possible.
And EU specialists think: do I really need all of this philosophy in there, and all of these principles? And I hope that I can convince a few, anyway that, yeah, finding out about the EU is good for political theorists and finding out about political philosophy is good for empirical political scientists of the EU and other areas of the world too.
So that's the aim, which is immodest. But I'm reconciled to modest results.
[00:37:44] Emily McTernan: Thank you, Richard. That was a fantastic discussion of the flexibility of the EU, how it can handle democratic backsliding, and a pitch to all of us empirical theorists to engage a bit more with each other.
Today we've been looking at Richard Bellamy's latest book coauthored with Sandra Kroger and Marta Lorimer. It's called Flexible Europe: Differentiated Integration, Fairness, and Democracy, and was published in 2022 by Bristol University Press. And we've been focusing in particular on Chapter 3: ‘Democratic Backsliding and the Limits to Differentiated Integration’.
As ever, you'll find full details in the show notes for this episode.
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I'm Emily McTernan. This episode was researched by Alice Hart and produced by Eleanor Kingwell-Banham. Our theme music is written and performed by John Mann.
This has been UCL Uncovering Politics. Thank you for listening.