Rethinking Politicisation in Politics, Sociology and International Relations (Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology) 303054544X, 9783030545444

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN EUROPEAN POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY

Rethinking Politicisation in Politics, Sociology and International Relations Edited by  Claudia Wiesner

Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology Series Editors Carlo Ruzza School of International Studies University of Trento Trento, Italy Hans-Jörg Trenz Department of Media, Cognition & Communication University of Copenhagen Copenhagen, Denmark

Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology addresses contemporary themes in the field of Political Sociology. Over recent years, attention has turned increasingly to processes of Europeanization and globalization and the social and political spaces that are opened by them. These processes comprise both institutional-constitutional change and new dynamics of social transnationalism. Europeanization and globalization are also about changing power relations as they affect people’s lives, social networks and forms of mobility. The Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology series addresses linkages between regulation, institution building and the full range of societal repercussions at local, regional, national, European and global level, and will sharpen understanding of changing patterns of attitudes and behaviours of individuals and groups, the political use of new rights and opportunities by citizens, new conflict lines and coalitions, societal interactions and networking, and shifting loyalties and solidarity within and across the European space. We welcome proposals from across the spectrum of Political Sociology and Political Science, on dimensions of citizenship; political attitudes and values; political communication and public spheres; states, communities, governance structure and political institutions; forms of political participation; populism and the radical right; and democracy and democratization. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14630

Claudia Wiesner Editor

Rethinking Politicisation in Politics, Sociology and International Relations

Editor Claudia Wiesner Department of Social and Cultural Sciences Fulda University of Applied Sciences Fulda, Germany

Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology ISBN 978-3-030-54544-4    ISBN 978-3-030-54545-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54545-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: chipstudio / Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To all my colleagues and friends that continue to inspire me.

Preface

This book is, on the one hand, a work-in-progress result of my academic reflection on conceptualising democracy and democratisation in the European Union (EU). One basis is hence my previous research—in my PhD on Citizenship and Democracy in the EU (Wiesner 2007), my Habilitation thesis (Wiesner 2014) on the relation of EU discourses and EU democratisation and my Marie Curie fellowship research project “Conceptualizing representative Democracy in the EU polity by re-­ thinking classical key conceptual clusters for the EU multi-Level polity” (Wiesner 2019a) that I carried out at the University of Jyväskylä. In these research periods and projects, I have been working on the fields of democratisation and politicisation in and of the EU and its member states conceptually and empirically. On the other hand, the book is a product of a number of research cooperations, events and inspiring discussions I carried out during the last years. I started to reflect on the concept of politicisation in the context of the Finnish Distinguished Professorship Project “Transformations of Concepts and Institutions in the European Polity” (TRACE; 2015–2019) led by Niilo Kauppi that I was a member of. The perspective on politics as action that has shaped my approach to politicisation has developed during this collaboration, especially in a joint monograph I wrote with Kari Palonen and Taru Haapala (Wiesner et  al. 2017). Together with both Niilo Kauppi and Kari Palonen, I did several collaborative publications on the topic of politicisation (Kauppi et  al. 2016a, b; Kauppi and Wiesner 2018). vii

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In February 2018, during my acting professorship at the University of Hamburg, I organised an international workshop on “Rethinking the Concept of Politicisation” that was co-funded by the Centre for Sustainable Society Research (CSS) at Hamburg University and the TRACE Project— many thanks! The workshop brought together researchers from the subdisciplines of political theory, comparative politics, political sociology, EU studies and international relations. During this workshop, most of the chapters in this book were presented and discussed in early versions. A first publication related to the workshop discussions appeared as a “Critical Exchanges” in the journal Contemporary Political Theory in 2019 (Wiesner 2019b). This book was finalised after I took on a position as Full Professor of Political Science at Fulda University of Applied Sciences in late 2018. My conceptual work has benefitted greatly from the discussions during my period as a visiting fellow at the Minda de Gunzburg Centre for European Studies (CES) at Harvard University in spring 2019, as well as of the fruitful discussions in a further workshop on politicisation at Humboldt-­ University Berlin in April 2018 (see Schäfer and Meiering 2020), and the cooperation and conferences in the OpenEUDebate Jean Monnet Network led by Elena Garcia Guitan and Luis Bouza (Autonomous University Madrid). A follow-up discussion to the first Hamburg workshop took place at the European Consortium of Political Research (ECPR) general conference 2019 in Wroclaw. This book and my own thinking on politicisation has benefitted greatly from these exchanges. Special thanks for inspiration and comments go to my co-fellows at Harvard CES. These experiences convinced me of the fruitfulness of cross-and inter(sub)disciplinary academic exchanges on the topic of politicisation. It was therefore an explicit goal to bring together different subdisciplines and areas in a joint publication, and I think this book proves this to be a successful endeavour. I would like to thank all authors for their valuable contributions and the interesting intellectual input regarding the discussion of concepts in general and politicisation in particular. Special thanks go to these contributors who, at various moments in the process, have additionally been discussing crucial steps of rethinking politicisation with me. Moreover, I would like to thank Fritz-Thyssen Foundation and German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). My visiting fellowship at the Minda de Gunzburg Centre, Harvard University, in spring 2019 was

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funded by a Grant from Fritz-Thyssen foundation: “EU multilevel democracy in crisis mode.” During the final phase of the publication, I have been a DAAD-­funded visiting fellow at Deutsches Haus at New York University—a fellowship that I had to end prematurely because of the corona outbreak in march 2020. Accordingly, this book was finalised in times of the corona virus crisis in spring 2020, and hence under difficult circumstances. In preparing and finalising the manuscript, I received support from my editors and the team at Palgrave—Ambra Finotello, Anne-Kathrin Birchley-Brun and Ruby Panigrahi. Meike Schmidt-Gleim has given precious last comments on the draft manuscript and helped with the final steps. Muriel Pluschke, as always, has been invaluable in overseeing the manuscript finalisation. Thanks again to all the people mentioned for inspiring discussions, help and comments! Fulda and Frankfurt, Germany April 2020

Claudia Wiesner

References Kauppi, Niilo, Kari Palonen, and Claudia Wiesner. 2016a. “Controversy in the Garden of Concepts: Rethinking “Politicisation” of the EU.” Accessed March 27, 2020. https://international.politics.uni-­mainz.de/files/2012/10/ MPIEP-­11_CEDI-­WP-­3-­neu.pdf. Kauppi, Niilo, Kari Palonen, and Claudia Wiesner. 2016b. “The Politification and Politicisation of the EU.” Redescriptions (1): 72–90. Kauppi, Niilo, and Claudia Wiesner. 2018. “Exit Politics, Enter Politicization.” Journal of European Integration 40 (2): 1–7. https://doi.org/10.108 0/07036337.2018.1425244. Schäfer, Andreas, and David Meiering, eds. 2020. (Ent-)Politisierung? Die Demokratische Gesellschaft Im 21. Jahrhundert: Leviathan-­ Sonderband Nr. 35/2020. Baden-Baden: Nomos. Wiesner, Claudia. 2007. Bürgerschaft Und Demokratie in Der EU. Region, Nation, Europa Bd. 46. Berlin: Lit. Wiesner, Claudia. 2014. Demokratisierung Der EU Durch Nationale Europadiskurse? Strukturen Und Prozesse Europäischer Identitätsbildung Im Deutsch-Französischen Vergleich. Baden-Baden: Nomos. Wiesner, Claudia. 2019a. Inventing the EU as a Democratic Polity: Concepts, Actors and Controversies. Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology. Cham, Switzerland: Springer Science and Business Media; Palgrave Macmillan.

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Wiesner, Claudia. 2019b. “Rethinking Politicisation as a Multi-Stage and MultiLevel Concept.” In “Rethinking Politicization. Critical Exchanges.” edited by Claudia Wiesner. Critical Exchanges,  in: Contemporary Political Theory 18. (2): 255–59. Wiesner, Claudia, Taru Haapala, and Kari Palonen. 2017. Debates, Rhetoric and Political Action: Practices of Textual Interpretation and Analysis. Rhetoric, politics and society. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Acknowledgements

This book has benefitted from the generous support of four research grants: (1) the Finnish Distinguished Professorship Project “Transformations of Concepts and Institutions in the European Polity” (TRACE; 2015–2019) led by Prof. Dr Niilo Kauppi, based at the University of Jyväskylä and funded by the Academy of Finland: I had a research period in this project from September 2015 to March 2017; (2) a grant for an international workshop on “Rethinking the Concept of Politicisation,” co-funded by the Centre for Sustainable Society Research (CSS) and the TRACE project and held at Hamburg University in February 2018 during my acting professorship at the University of Hamburg; (3) a grant from Fritz-Thyssen foundation: “EU multilevel democracy in crisis mode” that co-funded my research stay at the Minda de Gunzburg Centre for European Studies at Harvard University (February 2019–April 2019); (4) a grant from Fulda University Research Centre on Intercultural and European Studies (CINTEUS) that also co-­ funded this stay.

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Contents

1 Introduction: Rethinking Politicisation in Politics, Sociology and International Relations  1 Claudia Wiesner Section I  Conceptualising Politicisation  17 2 Politicisation, Politics and Democracy 19 Claudia Wiesner 3 Three Concepts of Politicisation: Republican, Deliberative, and Agonistic 43 Veith Selk 4 Parliamentarisation as Politicisation 63 Kari Palonen Section II  Politicisation, Populism and (Post-)Democracy  87 5 Democracy, Post-democracy and What Came After 89 Meike Schmidt-Gleim

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CONTENTS

6 Populism and Anti-Populism in the 2017 Dutch, French, and German Elections: A Re-politicisation of Post-politics?107 Seongcheol Kim 7 Voting and Non-voting in Post-democratic Times129 Dirk Jörke Section III  (De-)Politicising Europe 151 8 (De)politicisation: Shifting Dynamics in an Emerging European Political Field and Public Sphere153 Niilo Kauppi and Hans-Jörg Trenz 9 Dissensus, Deadlock, and Disintegration? Examining the Effects of EU Politicisation175 Lisa H. Anders 10 Depoliticisation at the European Level: Delegitimisation and Circumvention of Representative Democracy in Europe’s Governance201 Cécile Robert Section IV  Politicisation from Global to Local 223 11 Political Authority, Expected Consequences, and the Politicisation of International Institutions225 Andreas von Staden 12 In-Between Juridification and Politicisation: Zooming in on the Everyday Politics of Law245 Philip Liste

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13 Conclusion: Rethinking Politicisation: What Have We Learned?267 Claudia Wiesner Index

277

Contributors

Lisa  H.  Anders Institute for Political Science, Leipzig University, Leipzig, Germany Dirk  Jörke  Institute Darmstadt, Germany

for

Political

Science,

TU

Darmstadt,

Niilo Kauppi  CNRS, Strasbourg, France University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland Seongcheol  Kim University of Kassel / WZB Berlin Social Science Center, Kassel, Germany Philip Liste  Fulda University of Applied Sciences, Fulda, Germany Kari Palonen  Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland Cécile Robert  Sciences Po Lyon, Lyon, France Meike  Schmidt-Gleim  Fulda Bruxelles, Belgium Veith  Selk  Institute Darmstadt, Germany

for

University

Political

of

Science,

Applied TU

Sciences, Darmstadt,

Hans-Jörg Trenz  University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark ARENA, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

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CONTRIBUTORS

Andreas von Staden  Universität Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany Claudia  Wiesner Department of Social and Cultural Sciences, Fulda University of Applied Sciences, Fulda, Germany

List of Tables

Table 3.1 Table 8.1

Concepts of politicisation Dimensions of (de)politicisation

56 155

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Rethinking Politicisation in Politics, Sociology and International Relations Claudia Wiesner

1.1   What Is Politicisation? Opening the Debate The point of departure for this volume is an apparent contradiction in the current academic debate: on the one hand, there is a hugely increased interest in politicisation as a topic in the Political and Social Sciences, and, on the other hand, the state of the art of this debate is marked by disparateness and several open questions. More concretely, politicisation as a concept is often used in an unspecific and under-theorised way, going the second step of empirical research before the first step, which should consist in theoretical and conceptual clarification. The newly emerging field of politicisation research  is in lack of thorough theoretical and conceptual reflection in order to build a solid foundation to the further debate and empirical research. This is why this volume aims, first and generally, at a

C. Wiesner (*) Department of Social and Cultural Sciences, Fulda University of Applied Sciences, Fulda, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 C. Wiesner (ed.), Rethinking Politicisation in Politics, Sociology and International Relations, Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54545-1_1

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theoretical and conceptual clarification of the concept of politicisation and its operationalisation. Moreover, the state of the art of the politicisation debate shows a separation into different subfields and subdisciplines—and this means: into separate and often disconnected epistemic communities. Politicisation of the European Union (EU) and in International Relations (IR) are discussed, on the one hand, but politicisation and depoliticisation are also thematised in fields such as (International) Political Theory, Comparative Politics, Political Sociology or Legal Theory. So far, these debates are barely connected, even if each subfield has important contributions to make to the general question of how to theorise, conceptualise and operationalise politicisation. But as the epistemic communities are largely disconnected, this theoretical and conceptual richness has remained nearly unexplored. What is more, the different epistemic communities largely have been adhering to their specific paradigms and following their own particular paths of conceptualising and operationalising politicisation, and, as will be discussed in a number of chapters in this volume (see especially Kauppi and Trenz, Liste, Robert, von Staden and Wiesner), as well as in this introduction and the conclusion, this leads to different forms of shortcomings and gaps in the respective approaches. Each particular theoretical, methodological and ultimately empirical lens limits the researcher’s focus: you only can find what you search for. Accordingly, each analytical lens only allows to see part of the reality and hence only part of the phenomena at stake. In order to overcome these limitations, it is necessary to open different perspectives and use different tools (as is the mission of mixed methods research). This also means that a debate across subdisciplines and, even more importantly, across epistemic communities and beyond their standard truths and established instruments is necessary. This is why this volume aims at a thorough rethinking of politicisation as a general Social Sciences concept. It offers the first systematic attempt to theorise and conceptualise politicisation across the epistemic communities of different subdisciplines. The cross-subdisciplinary approach opens up new avenues for theorising, conceptualising and operationalising politicisation. With this approach, the book opens not only decisive new perspectives in the current debate on politicisation, it also allows for important synergies and knowledge generation by making the different subdisciplines mutually fruitful. This is also what distinguishes this volume from most other contributions on politicisation that usually stem from one of the subdisciplines and hence from one epistemic community only.

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In particular, the volume provides a thorough discussion of different concepts of politicisation and their ontological and theoretical backgrounds, conceptualisation and analytical value. It also explores the theoretical, conceptual and analytical linkages of politicisation and its relation to neighbouring or countervailing concepts such as politics, the political, democracy, depoliticisation, juridification, populism and Euroscepticism. The chapters discuss how the concept of politicisation can be operationalised and applied to different empirical examples and cases, and how the methodological toolbox of politicisation research can be broadened. In particular, the chapters go beyond a sole focus on the classical political system, its actors and institutions, and a methodological orientation on quantifications. The discussion in this book hence opens broad, comprehensive and new perspectives on politicisation that not only unite approaches and conceptualisations from different subdisciplines but also go well beyond the state of the art. The volume decisively advances the academic debate on politicisation.

1.2   Aims and Questions As the editor, I wanted to value and validate the strengths of the different backgrounds, perspectives, approaches and (sub)disciplines the authors represent. Therefore, when we worked on the chapters, I did not prescribe a notion or definition of politicisation to be used by the authors. On the contrary, they were invited to discuss and develop their respective and specific approaches. This leads to a book consisting of chapters that rely on different theoretical backgrounds, follow different approaches and discuss different dimensions of conceptualising politicisation. However, the general aims of the book sketched above were taken up by all authors. In the discussion in the chapters, they condensate into four fields of dimensions that are crucial for conceptualising politicisation: 1. The theories, understandings and/or definitions of politics and the political that conceptualisations of politicisation relate to; 2. The who, where and what of politicisation: dimensions, actors, issues, objects, addressees, areas, arenas and spaces of politicisation; 3. The relation of politicisation to concepts such as democracy, depoliticisation, juridification, legalisation, populism or Euroscepticism; 4. The methodological toolbox and the approaches and dimensions of empirical study of politicisation.

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These four fields relate to the fact that politicisation is a concept that refers to several levels of meaning, namely a theoretical and normative level of general or principled normative, ethical, political or social questions; a level that refers to the more concrete dimensions such as the institutions, actors, issues, processes, arenas and spaces of politicisation; and, finally, a level that refers to the specific analytical understanding and operationalisation of these research dimensions, that is, the research strategies, research methods and research items. These levels of meaning can be considered as macro-, meso- and micro levels of a concept (see Chap. 2 in this book). The four fields mentioned above will now be discussed in detail. 1.2.1  Conceptualising Politicisation and Its Relation to Politics Conceptualising politicisation accordingly begins at the theoretical or macro level of meaning. This concerns first the normative, theoretical and conceptual relation of politicisation to politics, or the political, as the understanding of what is considered politicisation crucially depends on the understanding of what is politics/political. This means, in return, that the concept of politics or the political that is, respectively, at the theoretical basis is decisive for the further conceptualisation of politicisation. It can be noted for a start that there are different definitions of politics that can be used in conceptualising politicisation. While in the academic debate on politicisation, a systems or a field perspective on politics is dominant, the chapters in the book underline that politics itself can be interpreted in different ways. As is discussed especially by Palonen and Wiesner, politics can be understood, respectively, as action, as conflict, as sphere, as field, as arena and as system. Depending on whether the emphasis is put on (a) an activity-oriented approach to politics, seeing it as action or conflict or (b) on seeing politics as a sphere, system or field, different approaches to politicisation develop. In one understanding, politicisation is defined as action based; in the other, it has a spatial connotation. However, as discussed throughout the book in several of the chapters, these approaches are to be understood as ideal-types, not in a simple either-or opposition (see the Chaps. 2, 8, 9, 11 and 12). The authors in the volume draw their innovative definitions and operationalisations of politicisation from various traditions of thought in Political and Social Theory, be it agonistic Political Theory (Chap. 3), the concept of post-democracy (Chaps. 5 and 7), a rethinking of Parliamentarism (Chap. 4), Bourdieusian and Habermasian sociology (Chap. 8) or Critical Legal Theory (Chap. 12).

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1.2.2   The Who, What and Where of Politicisation: Beyond a Systems Approach to Politics These different understandings of politics, and especially the question whether it is understood as activity-based or as spatial, raise two further questions that are highly relevant for conceptualising politicisation both theoretically and analytically: first, what are the boundaries of politics, and should politics at all be conceptualised with boundaries? And second, what is a decisive degree of relevance of political conflicts or actions, and from which point onwards should they be made an object of analysis? These questions are directly related to actorship, issues and locations of politicisation, or the who, where and what of politicisation: who can politicise? What is an object of politicisation? What are the spaces, spheres and arenas in which politicisation takes place? All these points refer, on one hand, to the macro level of meaning of the concept, and, on the other hand, to its different dimensions, that is, to the meso level of meaning of the concept of politicisation. In the current academic debate on politicisation, most  empirical approaches rely on a systems model of politics and the relevant actors and issues. More particularly, they focus on the classical political system (parties and institutions) or the international system (international institutions), and the mass media. Politicisation is, then and consequently, often regarded in a top-down logic (parties and institutions that address voters) and in dichotomies that ask for agents and their audience (see the discussion in the Chaps. 2, 8, 9 and 11). The chapters in this book go beyond such a systems approach regarding the who, what and where of politicisation and its analysis because they follow innovative theoretical and conceptual paths: when building upon traditions and perspectives in Political and Social Theory such as agonistic political theory or a politics-as-action perspective, other and more open models of politics and hence broader conceptualisations of politicisation follow. It is then understood as the act of marking something as political, as the opening of a Spielzeitraum, as the moment that brings the political to the fore or as the active use of contingency, as is discussed later and in a number of chapters of the book (see especially Chaps. 2, 3, 4, 5 and 12). All these understandings have in common that politicisation is not fixed to specific contexts or circumstances, but to action, and the who, where and what of politicisation hence can be searched and found potentially everywhere.

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This raises the question whether and to what extent politicisation is conceptualised with boundaries. Purely action-oriented approaches in principle consider politics and politicisation as being unlimited and without boundaries, which brings about obvious analytical difficulties: if politics has no boundaries, where does research start (see also the discussion in Chap. 13)? If, on the other hand, politics is considered a sphere or field, it can well be understood to include actors and issues outside the classical political system, but politicisation then, nevertheless, refers to moving actors or issues into, or out of, this sphere. As said earlier, these differentiations do not describe exclusive dichotomies, but conceptual ideal-types. Accordingly, politics as action can be conceptualised in a sphere or field concept of politics, and also in the classical political system, and vice-versa. All these considerations  have to be well-grounded and well-reflected in order to build a solid research design for politicisation. 1.2.3     The Garden of Concepts Around Politicisation Both the tasks of theoretically clarifying politicisation and of defining its research dimensions include exploring what can be termed the garden of concepts around politicisation, that is, the concepts that relate to politicisation. This means, once more, to clarify the macro- and the meso level of meaning of politicisation. One other concept that is decisive for theorising and conceptualising politicisation is democracy. In the current academic politicisation debate, the relation between politicisation and democracy is often, and again, thematised in dichotomies: while populist or openly anti-democratic politicisation is frequently discussed as a danger or at least a challenge for democracy, other voices underline that politicisation can have democratising effects. The chapters in this book go beyond this dichotomy. They underline that there is no simple answer to the question whether politicisation is beneficial or harmful for democracy. Politicisation is discussed as strengthening democracy if it is democratic politicisation, and as potentially harmful if it is anti-democratic politicisation (Chap. 2) or a politicisation that does not bring the political to the fore (Chap. 5). Furthermore, some chapters in this book discuss the relation of politicisation and democracy in terms of the theoretical conceptions of democracy that are behind concepts of politicisation (Chap. 3) and in relation to institutions (Chaps. 4 and 11), parties and voting (Chaps. 6 and 7).

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This open perspective on the relation of politicisation and democracy is also enlightening for the relation of the concept of politicisation to two other concepts: politicisation in the academic debate is often critically linked to populism and Euroscepticism. It is seen as provoking contestation and system criticism, hindering EU integration and triggering populism. Accordingly, a number of chapters explore these links conceptually and regarding empirical findings (see Chaps. 6, 7, 8 and 9). They underline that it is not politicisation per se that causes populism and Euroscepticism but that both these are an outcome of specific type of politicisation processes, namely populist and/or Eurosceptic, or even anti-­ democratic politicisations (see Chaps. 2 and 5 in this book). The discussion in the book, furthermore, indicates that a predominantly negative judgement of politicisation is related to biases in epistemic communities. First, as Robert convincingly shows, some integration scholars and EU representatives depict representative democracy as dangerous, inadequate to solve problems and even irrational. She explains how this judgement has led both EU representatives and EU scholars to support mechanisms circumventing representative democracy. Second, specific theoretical, conceptual and methodological choices influence the assessment of EU politicisation and the prediction of its effects. What is termed ‘pessimist model’ of EU politicisation by Wiesner is an outcome of a systems model of politics and an analysis of a limited amount of actors and dynamics, out of whom a great number are populist and/or anti-EU and/ or anti-democratic. If such normative, theoretical and methodological choices are opened up, a broader set of actors and issues can be included in the analysis, and the general positive effects of politicisation can get into sight—which unfolds the possibility of an ‘optimist model’ (see Chap. 2 in this book). The conceptual relations between politicisation and depoliticisation, juridification and legalisation are explored in a number of chapters in this book. This means to close another gap in the current academic debate, as especially the discussion on depoliticisation is rarely connected to the one on politicisation. Contrary to this, several  authors in this book discuss depoliticisation as linked to politicisation, be it as a countervailing force (Chap. 8), as a connected phenomenon (Chap. 10) or as an opposite tendency (Chap. 2). Depoliticisation is often linked to processes of bureaucratisation and expertise (Chap. 10), as well as legalisation and juridification (Chaps. 2 and 12). Juridification describes what is meant by the German term Verrechtlichung: the fact that issues, decisions and policy areas are

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defined as legal issues and not as political ones, which makes them seem not to be objects of political action. Juridification in this sense has a depoliticising effect (see Chap. 12 in this book). These discussions underline that the conceptual linkages of politicisation to its neighbouring concepts should be more systematically explored. The chapters in the book make an important contribution here and hence build the groundwork for a solid and broad theoretical and conceptual approach to the garden of concepts around politicisation. 1.2.4   Broadening the Methodological Toolbox in Politicisation Studies Finally, this volume aims at opening up the academic debate on new analytical developments in politicisation research and at broadening the methodological toolbox. This refers to the micro or third level of meaning of the concept, that is, the concrete research strategies and items. When it comes to the approaches and dimensions of empirical study, the chapters underline that empirical accounts on politicisation need to be better linked to the theoretical questions raised earlier—the concept of politics that is behind politicisation, the linkages to the neighbouring concepts and phenomena, and the questions regarding the boundaries, issues and actors of politics—in order to fully grasp the research subject. Concise reflection of these aspects leads the way to clearly set research dimensions. So far, this reflection has been rare, and this, in return, limits the range and focus of empirical research on politicisation. This relates, once more, to the fact that the epistemic communities are too disconnected. While it is a standard in Democratic Theory to discuss the history of ideas of different concepts of politics and democracy, it is not in empirical research on democracy. To take an example: Political Theory, EU studies and Comparative Politics all study populism and democratic deconsolidation. But while Political Theory includes the whole range of concepts of politics possible in the discipline, EU studies and Comparative Politics most often rely on a set of indicators that focus mainly on the classical political system and the mass media. The lens of analysis is thus limited to the phenomena and dynamics that can be found in the system and the mass media. These are without doubt important arenas for populism and democratic deconsolidation, but not the only ones. It is thus a decisive goal of the volume to name and explore new analytical avenues for politicisation research beyond the framework of the classical political system (parties and institutions), the international system

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(international institutions) and the mass media. Methodically and regarding research dimensions, this means to go beyond strategies and research items that concentrate on quantifiable indicators and measure the salience of an issue, the degree of controversiality or actor involvement, or the politicisation within EU institutions (see Chaps. 2, 8, 9 and 10 in this book). The approaches presented, as the chapters in this book demonstrate, open up a large variety of new foci and dimensions of analysis, and in particular micropolitical, speech-act and action-oriented perspectives. Having thus opened the debate, the leading thread for the volume is to see what we can learn throughout the chapters and the various perspectives they develop on the leading questions sketched earlier.

1.3   The Chapters The chapters conceptualise politicisation in different respects. The first three chapters begin by raising and answering general questions regarding the theory and conception of politicisation (Chaps. 2, 3 and 4). The next three chapters discuss politicisation regarding representative democracy, post-democracy and populism (Chaps. 5, 6 and 7). The following chapters discuss politicisation and depoliticisation in and of the EU (Chaps. 8, 9 and 10). Last but not least, a focus is set on international politics (Chap. 11) and transnational law (Chap. 12), and their effects for politicisation. Claudia Wiesner (Chap. 2) begins the book by conceptualising politicisation and its relation to two other key concepts in Political Science: politics and democracy. The chapter discusses crucial theoretical and conceptual questions related to the understanding and usage of politicisation in general and EU politicisation in particular, setting a special focus on the theoretical and conceptual linkages between politicisation, politics and democracy. The argument is based on the presumption that politicisation needs to be understood as a multilevel concept that covers the theoretical and normative macro level, a conceptual meso level and an operational or empirical micro level. The chapter is split into three parts: in the first section, key questions and theoretical steps related to conceptualising politicisation and its linkages to the concept of politics are lined out. After this, two ideal-typical conceptions of politics are presented, that is, (a) an understanding of politics as a system, field or sphere, and (b) an understanding of politics as action. In the remainder of the chapter, the reflections are based on an action-oriented understanding of politics and politicisation, arguing that both potentially can take place anywhere and

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anytime. In the second section, the normative-theoretical question if, and to what extent, a concept of politicisation as action is compatible with representative democracy, is raised and answered: if politicisation is action, then it can be both democratic and anti-democratic action, and the ensuing question is how democracies react to this challenge. In the third section, existing and possible interrelations between politicisation and democracy in the EU are thematised. The chapter concludes with a typology of four types of interrelations between politicisation and democracy and a research outlook. Kari Palonen (Chap. 4) continues the conceptual discussion of politicisation and representative democracy by discussing parliamentarisation as politicisation and clarifying different strands of thinking on politics and the role of parliament. He argues that in the twentieth-century conceptual history of politics, two main currents of conceptualising the political can be distinguished: a spatial and a temporal one. The former regards politics as a separate sphere, field or sector, the latter as an aspect of human activities, as ‘dealing with contingent event’, as John Pocock put it. Palonen himself understands politics as a contingent and controversial activity par excellence. He further argues that the difference between spatial and temporal perspectives on politics and politicisation is clearly manifested in their views on parliament. In the spatial perspective, it is common to regard parliament as a part of ‘the political system’, as one arena among others in which government and opposition, parties and voters face each other. In the second traditions and a Weberian perspective, indebted to Westminster, parliament is a counter-power to the everyday rule of administration, the paradigmatic occasion for politicising questions by intensifying the contingent, controversial and temporal quality of politics. Parliamentary politicisation is then visible in the dissensual procedure, in the rhetoric of debating pro et contra, in parliamentary control of administration as well as in an ingenious multi-stage and multi-layer play with time as subtext of politics. Veith Selk (Chap. 3) develops three concepts of politicisation—a republican, a deliberative and an agonistic one. He argues that politicisation has been an object of deeper interest in Political Science for quite some time. Despite this fact, there has been little research in Political Theory on the topic. Selk seeks to fill this gap in three steps. First, he argues that theoretical concepts of politicisation need to take two manifestations of politicisation into account: governmental and social. Second, in engaging with the theoretical strands of Republicanism, Deliberation Theory and Agonism,

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Selk reconstructs three concepts of politicisation implicit in these paradigms. Third, he assesses whether these concepts are suitable for understanding both instances of politicisation. Selk concludes by arguing that all three concepts capture the governmental form of politicisation; yet, due to their teleological notion of politics, republican and deliberative approaches are unable to conceptualise social politicisation. Thus, in order to understand politicisation properly, non-teleological notions of politicisation are needed. Agonism, this is Selk’s conclusion, is most suitable in this regard. Meike Schmidt-Gleim (Chap. 5) begins the subsection on the relation of politicisation and populism. She takes up the debate on Post-democracy that was once begun by Rancière and argues that currently we see politicisation processes happening (e.g. anti-elite protests, popular vote and social media mobilisations) that rather dissolve than generate the political and subsequently compromise representative liberal democracy. This runs counter to what civil rights movements since 1968 have done—they often questioned representative liberal democracy for its shortcomings and claimed an extension of rights, but these practices never put democracy at risk. On the contrary, through criticising and challenging the present state of democracy, these movements fuelled democracy, by constantly renewing its institutions and adjusting them to historically changing representative demands. Schmidt-Gleim then asks why this is not the case for many, notably the so-called populist forms, of the current protests. Her answer is that while civil rights movements brought the political to the fore, the latter is suppressed by current protest practices. Bringing the political to the fore for Schmidt-Gleim means to allow the coexistence of more than one representation of one and the same object, it highlights the incommensurability between the people as sovereign and the actual people. It thus prevents the possibility of a full-fledged representation and allows further contesting in the future. Populist mobilisations, instead, go back to referring to a self-identical subject, to a ‘we are the people’. Thus, they eliminate the ambivalence of the political subject and transfer political conflict to the borderline between a clearly defined real people against the so called enemies of the people (minorities, immigrants, the elite, the judiciary institutions, etc.). Populist activities, she concludes, politicise issues without democratising society. Dirk Jörke (Chap. 7) continues this debate by discussing voting and non-voting in post-democratic times. He makes out two emerging patterns of political behaviour in Western democracies, namely non-voting and voting for right-wing populist parties. Both are considered as a

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reaction to the post-democratic turn in general, and the changing meaning of political participation in particular. Against the widespread notion that both non-voting and voting for right-wing populists should be considered as irrational, Jörke argues that at least for some parts of the citizenry, both make sense. He develops this argument in four steps. First, he argues that Western societies have become post-democratic and that especially the practices of political participation are structurally biased towards the well-­educated middle class at the expense of the losers of modernisation. He especially asserts that post-representative politics means less, not more democracy. In the second step, Jörke argues that the practice of voting as well as other forms of political participation have become a way to articulate a general appraisal of democratic values rather than to determine the outcome of political decision-making. In criticising theories of simulative democracy, he indicates that for the losers of modernisation, it is highly irrational to participate in these seemingly democratic practices, as their main function is to legitimise a social and economic order through which they are disadvantaged. Yet, the post-democratic constellation has recently changed with the rise of right-wing populist parties, as is demonstrated in the third step. Jörke concludes that at least for those parts of the citizenry which can be described as ‘left-authoritarian’, voting for rightwing populist parties seems to be even more rational than refusing to vote. Seongcheol Kim (Chap. 6) continues the discussion on populism with an empirically based comparison, asking after populism and anti-populism in the 2017 Dutch, French and German Elections. Drawing on Ernesto Laclau’s theory of the political, Chantal Mouffe’s critique of ‘post-­politics’, and Yannis Stavrakakis’s recent work on anti-populism, Kim examines to what extent and in what forms populism and anti-populism are present in political parties’ campaign discourses in the 2017 Dutch, French (presidential) and German election campaigns and to what extent populist discourses took the form of counter-hegemonic challenges to neoliberal crisis management politics, while anti-populist discourses took the form of a defence of the latter. In his post-foundational discourse analysis, Kim (Chap. 6) identifies strongly left-wing populist discourses in the campaigns of the Socialist Party (SP) in the Netherlands, La France Insoumise (LFI) in France and Die Linke in Germany, while the main far-right discourses in the Netherlands and France were primarily nationalist rather than populist and the Alternative for Germany (AfD) combined high degrees of both populism and ethno-cultural reductionism. Moreover, he finds a widespread ‘thin’ anti-populism in the Netherlands that localised the

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‘populist’ threat specifically onto Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom (PVV), minimal anti-populism in a French campaign characterised by competing uses of populism across the candidate spectrum and a fairly thick anti-­ populism in the discourse of the German Christian Democratic Union (CDU) that was, nonetheless, largely decoupled from economic arguments. Lisa H.  Anders (Chap. 9) opens up the subsection on the European Union. She discusses the effects of EU politicisation, asking if it leads to dissensus, deadlock and disintegration—or not. Anders argues that even if scholars agree that the EU and its policies have become politicised and there is extensive research on the causes and patterns of politicisation, its effects on European integration and supranational decision-making, in contrast, have received relatively little systematic attention. Against this backdrop, she systemises and discusses theoretical approaches as well as recent empirical studies on the consequences of EU politicisation. She shows that recent empirical studies provide support for the thesis that politicisation enhances EU decision-makers’ responsiveness. At the same time, intra- and inter-institutional bargaining processes seem to remain more or less unaffected. Also, regarding European integration, politicisation does not seem to be a hindrance. This, Anders concludes, can be attributed to the various strategies decision-makers can employ to shield decisions at the European level from the increasingly attentive and critical public. Niilo Kauppi and Hans-Jörg Trenz (Chap. 8) continue the discussion on the European Union, conceptualising the shifting dynamics in an emerging European political field and public sphere. Their aim is to broaden the discussion of politicisation beyond the narrow focus on voters’ preferences and political parties’ strategies and discuss politicisation as a constitutive element of the public sphere. In Political Theory, research has conceptualised politicisation as action involving temporal structures and politics as forming the spatial matrix for this activity. Kauppi and Trenz seek to conceptually broaden and deepen this discussion by tracing forms of contestation that develop over time, including politicisation and depoliticisation and the structuring of a European political space. Cécile Robert (Chap. 10) concludes the subsection on the EU by focusing on depoliticisation at the European Level, and, more particularly, delegitimisation and circumvention of representative democracy in the European Union. She argues that depoliticisation practices in the European Union are marked by a distrust of representative democracy. Hence, she

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regards depoliticisation not as a recent response to a critical juncture in EU integration and, in particular, to the growing objections to which the EU is subjected, but as an ongoing pattern of EU governance. Robert starts her argument by highlighting the omnipresence of the logics of depoliticisation in making European policies and listing its main methods—expertise, informal negotiation and permanent consultation of interest groups. Trying then to identify what feeds these depoliticisation initiatives, she underlines a relationship of distrust regarding the mechanisms of representative democracy, which, far from being the exclusive prerogative of ‘euro-officials’, is widely shared among Europe’s professionals and closely linked to the genesis and institutionalisation of the European source of power. Andreas von Staden (Chap. 11) discusses the role of political authority, expected consequences and the politicisation of international institutions. He challenges a prominent argument in the IR politicisation literature that suggests that the level of politicisation of an international institution is a function, in particular, of the extent to which political authority has been transferred to it. Von Staden criticises the authority-politicisation thesis as theoretically myopic and falling short of adequately explaining many empirically observable instances of politicisation. Instead, he argues that politicisation is better, and more comprehensively, understood as being driven by the (expected) consequences of particular governance arrangements, and that the perceived significance and magnitude of such consequences need not correlate with formally delegated or recognised authority. He illustrates his argument with a discussion of three types of institutions—the United Nations (UN) General Assembly, the Group of Seven/Eight/Twenty (G7/8/20) summits and coalitions of the willing— each of which can be factually consequential and has triggered substantial politicisation without possessing, as an institution, much recognised political authority in its own right. Philip Liste (Chap. 12), as the last contributor in this book, underlines an important but yet largely unexplored transdisciplinary connection in politicisation research by focusing on the role of law. He states that while international studies have addressed the interplay between international authority and politicisation, the debate has been surprisingly disconnected from an elaboration of a seemingly ‘depoliticising’ juridification. Moreover, a critique of juridification as it has traditionally been articulated in critical theory is widely absent in international studies. Therefore, Liste seeks to

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outline a critical international theory of politicisation and juridification by taking into account the dialectical relation between the two moments. By drawing on the tradition of ‘legal realism’, he stresses the indeterminacy of law as an entry point for the political and argues that, in fact, juridification and politicisation work simultaneously in the everyday practice of international law and bureaucracies.

SECTION I

Conceptualising Politicisation

CHAPTER 2

Politicisation, Politics and Democracy Claudia Wiesner

In this chapter, I aim at conceptualising politicisation and its relation to two other key concepts in Political Science: politics and democracy. I shall discuss a number of crucial theoretical and conceptual questions related to the understanding and usage of politicisation in general, and EU politicisation in particular, setting a special focus on the theoretical and conceptual linkages between politicisation, politics and democracy. My argument is based on the presumption that politicisation needs to be understood as a multilevel concept that covers the theoretical and normative macro level, a conceptual meso level and an operational or empirical micro level (for earlier versions of part of the following, see Wiesner 2019b, 2020). The chapter is split into the following parts: in the next section, I outline key questions and theoretical steps that are related to conceptualising politicisation and its linkages to the concept of politics. I discuss two ideal-­ typical conceptions of politics, that is, (1) an understanding of politics as a system, field or sphere and (2) an understanding of politics as action. In the remainder of the chapter, I base my reflections on an action-oriented understanding of politics and politicisation, arguing that politics and C. Wiesner (*) Department of Social and Cultural Sciences, Fulda University of Applied Sciences, Fulda, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 C. Wiesner (ed.), Rethinking Politicisation in Politics, Sociology and International Relations, Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54545-1_2

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politicisation potentially can take place anywhere and anytime. In the second section, I discuss the normative-theoretical question if, and to what extent, a concept of politicisation as action is compatible with representative democracy: if politicisation is action, then politicisation can be both democratic and anti-democratic action, and the ensuing question is how democracies react to this challenge. In the third section, I discuss existing and possible interrelations between politicisation and democracy in the EU.  I conclude with a typology of four types of interrelations between politicisation and democracy and a research outlook.

2.1   Conceptualising Politicisation in Theory In order to conceptualise politicisation, it is useful to underline, first, that it is a multilevel concept. As succinctly put by Matthew Wood: A ‘multilevel concept’ is one that can be applied in multiple contexts, and can have both a deep critical theoretical and even philosophical meaning, but also refers quite legitimately to concrete acts that can be usefully measured in empirical research. (Wood 2015, 527)

This means that politicisation can be conceptualised 1. at a theoretical macro level, regarding (1) its conceptualisation and (2) its normative implications, 2. at a meso level, that is, a first level of operationalisation, and 3. at a micro level of concrete empirical study. Accordingly,  researchers should clarify what analytical level they are referring to respectively: macro/meso/micro. Thus, philosophical and/or normative claims need to be distinguished from reflecting how the concept should be operationalised, and further from concrete empirical study and its research dimensions, cases or items (see also Wood 2015, 528). On the macro- or theory level, two decisive conceptual and normative questions need to be answered, in order to conceptualise politicisation: (1) which theoretical understanding of politics is at the basis, and (2) how to conceptualise the link between politicisation, politics and democracy? In the remainder of this chapter, I concentrate on these two questions. I, however, conclude by an outlook on the meso and micro levels of operationalisation and empirical study of politicisation.

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2.1.1  Politics as Action What is it that takes place when politicisation takes place—as conceptualised, first, on the theoretical level? It is obvious that the concept of politicisation is closely linked to the concept of politics, as politicisation in any case (i.e. irrespective of the concrete definition used) refers to political processes, actions or conflicts. I therefore begin by discussing the respective understandings of politics that lie behind different concepts of politicisation. It is not possible in this chapter to discuss the whole history of the concept of politics (see Palonen 2006, 2007 for an encompassing discussion). Instead, I focus on two ideal-typical accounts of theorising politics and the concept of politicisation—politics as a system or sphere, and politics as action. My suggestion is to conceptualise politics as action, as I argue in the following. The path of theorising politicisation which I suggest here (see also Kauppi et al. 2016; Wiesner et al. 2017) departs from the idea that politics is an activity and from Kari Palonen’s distinction of four sub-dimensions of politics—Politics, polity, politicisation and politicking (Palonen 2003, 171). In this conceptual classification, politics is the activity, polity is the institutionalised arena or form politics relates to (this can be the political system but also another institutional form), policy refers to the regulating aspect of politics, politicking means the doing of politics, and politicisation is understood as the act of marking, or naming, something as political. Building on Palonen´s typology, but in my own definition I understand politics as action as such: Political action is each action that refers to one or several of the four dimensions of Politics, polity, politicisation and politicking. Concretely, this means any action that marks an issue as political, drives political processes, builds a polity (e.g. a political system and its institutions), changes a polity or policy, or shapes policies. If politics is thus understood as action, and politicisation as a basic, or founding, act of politics-as-action, it is evident that both are closely related. Politicisation and politics-as-action in this sense can take place virtually at any time, any place and in any situation, and anything can be marked as political. Understanding politics as an activity therefore means that politics has no boundaries. Everything and everyone can be part of politics at all times. Politics relates to what actors do and not to the system or sphere in which they act. Politics then also is contingent—it is always possible to act otherwise, even if the results of the alternatives may be the same. Within this horizon, we can define ‘politicisation’ as an active use of contingency,

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of rendering something contested or controversial. This, importantly, is not an extension of the margins of the activity of politics itself, but rather constitutive of politics. In this sense, politicisation constitutes politics, not vice versa, and all politics is a result of politicising moves (see, in detail, Palonen 2003; Kauppi et al. 2016). Politicisation, then, means to mark an issue as an object or a topic of political action. A core example of such an understanding of politicisation is the famous claim issued by the modern women’s movement that ‘the personal is political’. This act of marking something as political in reality aimed at a major questioning of social institutions and structures such as marriage and family that were not to be questioned beforehand because they had been considered as ‘private’, and hence as non-debatable, by a dominant societal discourse. The aim of the claim was a potential shift in power relations. It is a further theoretical suggestion I would like to make that politicisation should be conceptualised in relation to what can be termed its counter-­ concept in a Koselleckian sense (Koselleck 2006)—depoliticisation. Politicisation means to mark an issue as political, and depoliticisation in this context is the opposite move or strategy. If politicisation refers to creating controversialness, involving actors, or marking issues as political, depoliticisation means taking away or hiding the controversialness, excluding possible actors and denouncing the fact that something is political. Interestingly, depoliticisation has been mostly discussed in the context of a criticism of market liberalism and neoliberalism so far (Wood 2015). Market-liberal welfare state reforms need not necessarily lead to depoliticisation, but they were in many cases communicated to the public by depoliticising strategies, such as the famous TINA-principle (‘there is no alternative’), which was coined by Margaret Thatcher in her early years in government. The depoliticising moment in the TINA-­ principle starts out from marking something, in that case, a policy, as ‘without alternative’ and hence by declaring there is no room for even thinking about alternatives. Kristina Schröder, a former German Minister of Family Affairs and a member of the conservative strand in the Christian Democrat party, used such as strategy on the ‘personal versus political’ question discussed earlier. Her contribution highlights how depoliticisation takes place as an act of marking something as non-political or wrongly politicised. In a newspaper comment Schröder argued that the German family policy reforms since 2007, which led to a considerable increase in childcare facilities, were a mistake, and it was now necessary to allow families to ‘think for themselves instead of re-educating them by statist measures’ (‘Kristina Schröder:

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“Wenn Uns Die Integration Nicht Gelingt, Dann Knallt Es”  – WELT’ 2017). She underlined it was not a duty of the state, and hence not a matter of politics, to organise the private. What has been said also means that politics does not only take place in the political system in a classical understanding of institutions and parties. Politics also takes place outside of it. This is why Palonen underlines that an understanding of politics as an activity belongs to a tradition of thought that is opposed to another tradition that regards politics as a system, or a sphere (see in detail Palonen 2003). A number of crucial theoretical and methodological consequences follow from this distinction. 2.1.2  The Boundaries of Politics An understanding of politics as system or sphere regards politics as a nearly geographically fixed area with more or less stable boundaries, into which actors or issues can enter or leave. Politicisation then means either the extension of the boundaries of this area or sphere, for example, in the relationship to other spheres, such as culture, law, economy or religion, or politicisation means that actors or issues can be moved into this sphere or taken out of it. Definitions of the system or sphere of politics can differ, ranging from merely the classical political system with parties and institutions to broader understandings that include e.g. the media. But in any case, a system or sphere of understanding of politics entails a decisive conceptual difference to an understanding of politics as action, as the realm of politics in this view remains limited. It is conceptualised with boundaries. This may also entail analytical limitations. These are most pertinent in approaches that concentrate on the classical political system: as long as issues and actors are not moved into the system, they are not regarded as political—such a view tends to systematically leave issues and actors outside the political system out of sight. But also approaches that explicitly aim at broadening the focus on politicisation on actors and processes outside the classical political system conception have relied on a definition of politics as a sphere (Zürn 2015). All in all, the decisive conceptual difference is that in the activity concept, everything can become politics. In the sphere concept, only actors and issues in the political sphere are part of politics. As discussed in a number of chapters in this book, the distinctions that were just sketched to a certain extent are ideal-typical. The different

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approaches to politicisation and politics have different benefits and may be possibly related (see Chaps. 3, 4, 8, 9, 11 and 12, and also the discussion in Wiesner 2019c). Nevertheless, the question of the boundaries of politics remains a decisive conceptual stepping stone. This point can be further illustrated by discussing the understanding of politics as conflict as it has been coined by Elmer Schattschneider (1957). He argues that politics is based on millions of conflicts, and that strategy is the heart of politics (Schattschneider 1957, 935, 933). On this basis, he introduces four dimensions that characterise political conflicts, namely intensity, visibility, direction and scope. These are also the dimensions and criteria that are used in a number of empirical accounts on politicisation and its relation to European integration that focus on the salience of EU issues, an increase of actor involvement and an increase in party-political polarisation (e.g. Hoeglinger 2016; Pieter de Wilde et al. 2015; Statham and Trenz 2013; Hutter et al. 2016). Tellingly, the understanding of politics as action I propose in this chapter is not too dissimilar from Schattschneider’s approach who sees politics as conflict. The decisive conceptual difference regards the relevance of a political conflict: from which point onwards should we regard a political conflict as relevant for research? The Schattschneiderian approach at this point returns to a systems concept of politics. Schattschneider, even though he starts by arguing that there can be political conflict before some issue enters a system, makes up a hierarchy of conflicts: […] there are great numbers of potential conflicts in the community which cannot be developed because they are subordinated to stronger systems of antagonism (Schattschneider 1957, 940). Schattschneider thus does not argue that conflict only occurs within a political system, but that out of the great number of existing or potential conflicts in a society, only a very small number has an influence within the system. Relevant conflicts take place in the political system, and only there. Accordingly, the Schattschneiderian tradition only takes a conflict into account if it is visible in the political system and when it creates an effect there, which is, in return, linked to the fact that relevant actors believe the conflict is a strategic issue.  This, however, leads to a limitation of the analytical lens to actors and issues that are already placed in the political system.  It is because of these conceptual and analytical limitations of the sphere approach to politics that I argue for applying an activity-concept of politics and politicisation in empirical politicisation research. In the activity concept politics can take place anywhere. And hence, any issue can become

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political, at whatever level and group of society. The question that is then most decisive in operationalising the concept of politicisation on the meso and the micro levels is from which stage onwards should we conceptualise and analyse conflicts as indicators of politicisation, and which actors are considered to be relevant in our analyses. The resulting question is then: if anything can be politics and political before it enters the political system, how can politicisation be analysed in its early stages? This point is taken up again in the research outlook at the end of this chapter.

2.2   Politicisation, Politics and Representative Democracy I shall now discuss how the relation of politicisation, politics and representative democracy should be conceptualised both normatively and theoretically if based on an understanding of politics as action. If we regard politicisation as the act of marking something as political, as ‘playable’, it is to be regarded as a basic practice of representative democracy. Politicisation is the political practice ‘per se’. This also counts for representative democracies. It is important to underline that I regard representative democracy as decisively shaped by political practice, that is, political action. The institutions that frame representative democracy are the form, or the polity in the Palonenian typology, that frames political action. This means that it is not enough for representative democracy to just offer the institutions and rights, as narrow definitions of democracy (e.g. Schumpeterian models) claim, but that these institutions need to be filled by political practice. On the basis of what has been said earlier on the linkages between politicisation and politics, this also means that democracy is based on politicisations that start political action and, hence, on the contingency that comes along. In this conceptualisation, politicisation is even fundamental for democracy, as, without politicisation, there is no political action. This means that without politicisation and political activity, democracy only consists in an empty institutional framework. But, and this is the tension I shall elaborate on in the following, representative democracy, politics and politicisation are not naturally related, and neither politics nor politicisation are necessarily democratic. On the contrary, politics and politicisation can perfectly be non-, or even anti-democratic.

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2.2.1  Institutions, Politics and Democracy Since neither politicisation nor politics are democratic per se, but can be perfectly non- or anti-democratic, a decisive question is how politics and politicisation can become, relate or transform into democratic politics and politicisations. This question links to the role of democratic institutions and accordingly brings us back to the functions of the political system. Representative democracy consists both in democratic practice and in the institutions that frame it because it is unthinkable without rules and, hence, without a minimum of democratic institutions. But institutions not only fix rules and frameworks—in doing so, they also structure the spaces for political action. They can create but also limit or close arenas for politics and politicisation. Accordingly, they structure, and hence enable, limit or hinder, politicisation, politics and democratic practice. The limiting aspect also refers to the fact that institutionalised arenas for political action give preference to some political actors over others (e.g. large political parties over individual activists) and have a tendency to give some opinions an overweight over others (e.g. the upkeeping of a compromise on digging coal over radical climate protection). All in all, this means that democratic institutions in Western liberal democracies tend to limit the chances and the channels for politicising actions to enter into the core of the political system and thus to become relevant in terms of the Schattschneiderian definition. Despite these limits, it is possible for politicising actors and actions that originate outside the system to enter it, as the history of social movements underlines. Given these tensions between actors and opinions and their different degrees of effect in the institutionalised arenas, it is an essential compromise in representative democracies to guarantee spaces and arenas for opinions deviating from the mainstream dominant in the institutionalised arenas (such as parliaments), and to give them channels for entering these institutionalised arenas. Representative democracies therefore fix democratic freedoms, minority rights and mechanisms such as petition and demonstration rights. These protection mechanisms nowadays are acquired democratic standards. This is why broad empirical models of democracy (see, e.g. Merkel 2004) regard minority rights and protection mechanisms for actors outside the mainstream represented in the institutionalised arenas as a normative condition or precondition for making democracy work. All depends on how the actors then use these protection rights and their rooms for action—or how they fight to gain new arenas.

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This discussion directly refers to the example of the women’s movement discussed earlier: its goal was to undertake a thorough politicisation and to become decisive even in a Schattschneiderian sense, for example, to make the women’s movement’s issues and actors enter the political system and its institutions. As we know, there was considerable success. When represented in the bigger political parties and the system’s institutionalised arenas, the women’s movement’s claims by and by became relatively well represented, and many of them were enacted in concrete policies, even if the more radical goals of the women’s activists were watered down. 2.2.2  Anti-Democratic Politicisation So far, I have argued that politicisation is per se an element and a basis of democracy-as-practice, but it is not necessarily democratic politicisation. Furthermore, both politics and politicisation, and hence democratic practice, are set in tension to democratic rules and institutions, as these tend to set limits to political actions and politicising moves. In most Western representative democracies, institutions are shaped in such a way that they both create and limit arenas for democratic action and for politicisation. In order to give citizens and also persons with opinions that diverge from the government’s position and minorities protection and possibilities of making their voices heard, i.e., to allow for debate, dissent and protest, representative democracies guarantee political freedoms and protection rights. But anti-democratic politicisation may question both the democratic institutions and arenas and the freedoms and protection rights offered by modern liberal representative democracies. Currently we see a number of political actors and movements that are defying minority rights, political institutions and representative-democratic rules, and hence core standards of representative democracies. This is notably the case for many right-wing populist movements and parties (see Chaps. 5 and 6). The ensuing conflicts can be regarded as conflicts about the rules and institutionalised arenas of representative democracies. Such conflicts are at least challenging for representative democracies, if not really dangerous when and where they aim at destroying core principles and standards of democracy. In these cases, to quote a famous dictum attributed to Saint Just, the enemies of freedom use their freedom - opponents of representative democracy use the very freedoms granted by representative democracies to fight against them.

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How should representative democracies deal with these attempts? The answer is twofold. First, as famously put by Rosa Luxemburg, democratic freedom has to be freedom of those people with diverging opinions (Luxemburg 1922, 109)1. Freedom needs to be an absolute principle valid for everyone. If it is just conditional for persons that behave well in the eyes of a government or a majority, it is not freedom anymore. This leaves us with an awkward but necessary tension: representative democracies must guarantee freedoms and protection rights also for deviating opinions. Second, and more complicated, the crucial question is what to do if these deviating opinions are directed against the principles, and the rules of the game, of representative democracy itself? The crucial question then is how democracies—in terms of both their political practices and their institutions—react to these challenges. And this, on the one hand, is a matter of politics and political struggle. To put it bluntly: defenders of democratic freedoms must act politically against enemies of democratic freedoms (in a battle of opinions, in demonstrations and the public spaces). On the other hand, from a certain point onwards, there is an institutional solution by defining limits to anti-­ democratic politicisation. The German practice of interdicting political parties is an example for such an institutionalised reaction: if a political party has the aim to overthrow the German representative democratic system, it can ultimately be forbidden by the constitutional court. The logic behind this is to claim that only actors playing by the rules of the representative democratic system and accepting to support it are entitled to use the benefits of the system. If an actor, or a party, or a movement, aims at destroying it, he/she or they are taken out of the democratic game. Cases that differ from this scenario are the ones we currently find in Hungary or Poland, where right-wing populist parties acceded into government and now use their political majorities to change the rules of representative democracy in their favour. They create new institutional mechanisms that limit both minority protection and the institutional arenas for politicisation and democratic activity. In these cases, both modes of democratic defence have been outplayed. What is left is civil disobedience, 1  Freiheit nur für die Anhänger der Regierung, nur für Mitglieder einer Partei – mögen sie noch so zahlreich sein  – ist keine Freiheit. Freiheit ist immer Freiheit des anders Denkenden. Nicht wegen des Fanatismus der »Gerechtigkeit«, sondern weil all das Belehrende, Heilsame und Reinigende der politischen Freiheit an diesem Wesen hängt und seine Wirkung versagt, wenn die »Freiheit« zum Privilegium wird.

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as it is practised in Hungary and Poland, a fight for new majorities and the question how the European Union’s defence mechanisms will work—the article 7 procedures and the infringement procedures at the Court of Justice. In sum, what has been said underlines that anti-democratic politicisation can be dangerous for representative democracy, especially if anti-­ democrats accede into government. But, importantly, it is not politicisation per se that endangers democracy—it is one specific form of politicisation, namely anti-democratic politicisation. Moreover, the democratic freedoms, protection rights and institutionalised arenas do not create anti-­ democratic politicisation, they just enable it to have an effect in the institutions. As has been said earlier, democratic freedoms by definition need to be valid also for enemies of these freedoms, and therefore anti-democratic politicisation needs to be taken into account if democratic politicisation shall be enabled—up to a certain extent. To cut down democratic freedoms and institutionalised arenas for political actions preventively in order to limit anti-democratic politicisation is a contradiction in itself. This brings us to the decisive function of political action again: it is crucial in this respect how representative democracies react to anti-democratic politicisation both by their practices and by their institutionalised boundaries. This discussion is of direct relevance with regard to the context of the European Union.

2.3   Politicisation, Politics, and European Union Democratisation In this context, the EU differs from national representative democracies in two decisive respects. First, when the EU was created, EU integration was largely kept out of the national arenas for political debate, except for the parliaments, as the French parliamentary debate on the European Political Community in the 1950s underlines. But this does not mean there was no politics in the EU.  It just means that the politics of EU integration were largely non-public. Politicisation in the sense of marking EU integration as an object for political controversy and action was limited to government and parliamentary actors and EU elites. Their politicising actions were largely kept apart from the national publics (see Chaps. 8 and 10 in this book).

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Second, and related, in the EU, institutionalised arenas for democratic and political activity are more restricted than in most member states. In short, these problems relate to an accumulation of different problem fields, namely (1) an over-bureaucratisation, (2) expert dominance, (3) an over-constitutionalisation and (4) differentiated integration (see, in detail, Wiesner 2019a, 281–301). 1. Over-bureaucratisation: Consensus-building and bureaucracy dominate in decision-making processes in the EU system (see, in detail, Tömmel 2014, 171) at the expense of democratic deliberation and publicity. Consensus-building processes such as trilogues and comitology that largely take place behind closed doors and in expert circles depoliticise the EU, in that they withdraw decision-making from the realm of public and/or parliamentary deliberation. Trilogues are informal negotiations between EP, Commission and Council representatives on legislative projects that, in most cases, lead to so-called early agreements on legislation. Committees or the plenary then send a draft law to the trilogue body, where it is negotiated between the representatives of the three institutions. The legislation in question is then usually prepared so that it is approved in the first EP reading, as an agreement had been reached between Commission, Council and EP in the trilogue meetings (European Parliament 2018). In the legislature 2009–2014, 85% of the legislative files were thus accepted on first reading, that is, after successful trilogue negotiations (European Parliament 2018). This quota has been going further up to 89% in the legislature 2014–2019. As the European Parliament itself underlines, this was also the first legislative term under which there were no conciliations, and there were only four full second-reading procedures (European Parliament 2019). Parliamentary deliberation and transparency, those principles that are embodied in the procedure of having several parliamentary readings of a law in plenum, are decisively reduced by early agreements and trilogues. Decision-making preparation is thus taken away from the public nature of parliamentary debates and pushed, once more, into the realm of non-public bodies without direct legitimation. All this reduces parliament’s deliberative as well as its control and responsibility functions.

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2. Expert bodies: There are a number of expert bodies taking on executive competencies that have been created over the years in the EU, and they are also largely withdrawn and decoupled from the realm of public representative decision-making. Strengthening experts in their role in decision-making and further withdrawing issues from the arenas of public debate not only increases intransparency but reduces the chances of politicising the issues by declaring them as non-political, that is, subject only to expert judgements. The EU’s agencies, as well as private consultancy firms that work for the Commission are examples here. These tendencies are part of the depoliticising strategies linked to EU integration. In recent EU governance, we saw a number of cases of withdrawing decisions from the arenas of public debate by moving them into the realm of expert decisions and informal bodies (see  Chap. 10  in this book). Governance of the financial crisis is a core example here (Statham and Trenz 2014; Hutter et al. 2016; Wiesner 2017), especially in relation to the Troika activities (see Wiesner 2019a, 261–80). As the financial crisis underlines, these dynamics are often inherently linked to the dynamics that politicise the EU: protests, demonstrations and party-foundings such as the Alternative for Germany were among the civic reactions to austerity and its effects. Accordingly, the relation and the dynamics between these depoliticising and politicising tendencies merit further theoretical and conceptual thought (see also Chaps. 8, 9 and 10 in this book). I shall take up these types of politicisation further later. 3. Over-constitutionalisation: This problem is further emphasised by the treaties in themselves limiting the possible realm for democratic deliberation and decision-making, as they limit the policy areas that are subject to it well beyond the extent that is usual in national representative democracies (on the following, see in detail Grimm 2017). The EU treaties as EU primary law regulate policy fields that normally should be subject to secondary law. National constitutions usually emphasise questions of polity and politics, whereas the EU treaties emphasise economic policy.2 This means that the EU treaties define most fields in the areas of economic and fiscal policy with a 2  A related argument occurred in the French 2005 discourse on the Constitutional Treaty, when Treaty critics argued that the words ‘free market’ appeared over a hundred times in the draft Constitutional Treaty, whereas the word ‘democracy’ was rare (Wiesner 2014).

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quasi-constitutional character. The consequence is that they are excluded from the usual institutional arenas and processes of representative democratic decision-making. The treaties, just like a constitution, are not normally subject to political debate, but only to legal interpretation by the Court of Justice of the European Union or national Constitutional Courts. 4. Differentiated integration: In addition, the diverse governance modes in the EU (ranging from the ‘ordinary legislative procedure’ of European Parliament and Council in the policy area of the EU inner market over unanimity in Common Foreign and Security Policy to the procedures in the Euro Group or the Schengen system; for overviews, see Tömmel 2014, 171) lead to non-transparency and non-accountability. If it is unclear who actually has taken a decision and who is included, and how the decision-making process went, even to experts, then democratic accountability and transparency are clearly hampered. All in all, this problem cluster of bureaucracy, expert dominance, over-­ constitutionalisation and differentiated integration altogether limits the institutionalised arenas for democratic activity in the EU, that is, the realm for public deliberation and politicised decision-making. It also limits accountability in both horizontal and vertical directions, and it limits transparency (see also Chap. 10 in this book). Conceptualising all this in terms of the understanding of politicisation that was developed earlier in this chapter invites to think about a differentiation of actors and arenas of politicisation. There was no lack of elite-­ driven politicisation in the EU, that is, political action and the marking of EU integration as political issue among government and EU elites. This is a dynamic that Kari Palonen, Niilo Kauppi and myself have referred to as ‘politification’, in order to describe a kind of ‘politicisation through depoliticisation’, meaning that political procedures replace the former diplomatic procedures reigning in international politics (Kauppi et al. 2016). What is lacking in the EU, on the other hand, is both the institutionalised arenas and the actors that fill it, that is, institutionalised, public and civic politicisation.

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2.3.1   Politicisation and Democratisation of the EU As has been discussed earlier, politicisation is a basic activity of both politics and democracy. Institutionalised arenas in the political system as a condition for them to occur and be present in the system. This means that in the EU, in comparison to national democracies, more, broader and more inclusive institutionalised arenas for politicisation and democratic activity are needed. As has been discussed earlier and is further discussed in the following section, this will also mean these institutionalised arenas can be used by proponents of anti-democratic politicisation as well. But as has also been argued, this risk is inherent to democratic freedoms and hence inevitable if one wants a more democratic EU. The battle needs to be won first by words, arguments and policies, not by preventively limiting the arenas for politicisation altogether. Parliamentarisation is essential as a form of creating institutionalised arenas for democratic activity, even if this might mean we see also anti-democrats in parliament. Second, as has been said, representative democracies are entitled to develop institutional means and limits to defend themselves against anti-democratic activities that harm the principles of representative democracy itself. Third, we need to distinguish  a criticism of EU policies, e.g.  economic or fiscal policies, and a principled criticism of the EU as a polity, or even criticism of representative democracy in general. How is the relation of EU politicisation and EU democratisation discussed in the literature? There is now quite a broad set of contributions on the politicisation of European integration that has been written in recent years. It is worthwile noting that they differ as to what politicisation actually does concern in the EU context (Kauppi and Wiesner 2018)—is it EU Politics? European politics? Europe (Statham and Trenz 2013; Hutter et al. 2016)? European integration (Pieter de Wilde 2011; Pieter de Wilde and Zürn 2012; Hoeglinger 2016)? Or European governance (Pieter de Wilde et  al. 2015), or maybe European issues and so on? Even if these questions deserve closer reflection in the academic debate, I will not further elaborate on them here. In the following, I shall concentrate on politicisation of the European Union and the political arenas it opens or closes, and, building on what was said in the first two sections of this chapter, especially the relation of EU politicisation and EU democratisation.

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2.3.2  The Classics and Their Critics Which conception of politics and politicisation and which relation to EU integration is developed in classical functionalist and neo-functionalist accounts on EU politicisation? Three source texts by Schmitter (1969), Haas (1968) and Lindberg and Scheingold (1970) raise the crucial concepts discussed in this respect, namely spillover, integration, politicisation and permissive consensus. Following the accounts by both Lindberg/ Scheingold and Haas, we encounter the idea of European integration as a process carried out by political elites, citizens agreeing to it in what has been famously termed the ‘permissive consensus’. The citizen’s silent acceptance of European integration, following the permissive consensus model, is largely nourished by their ignorance. As long as this permissive consensus carries on—and this is the understanding we find also in a number of texts of the current politicisation literature—EU integration is not politicised and elites can carry out integration unhindered. With the end of the permissive consensus, elites will, or may, face opposition. But this is not to say, and this is important to underline, that problems for integration will be the result,  as Lindberg and Scheingold explicitly state: Consequently, significant opposition and persistent social cleavage does not mean that integrative steps cannot be taken, but rather that the opportunities for blocking them are greater (Lindberg and Scheingold 1970, 41). Or, this invites to add, EU integration needs to be reshaped as according to the citizen’s preferences—what Lindberg/Scheingold tell us as well is that solidarity is important as a policy issue and a policy outcome of integration, which reminds us of a crucial and largely forgotten dimension in today’s debate. Ernst Haas makes up an account of what he calls political integration, in which he underlines that there may be limits to a purely economic integration, as it will not necessarily lead to the building of a political community. When he discusses possible consequences, he indicates a model that sees rising economic dissatisfaction as a possible source of more demands for political integration—there might be political opposition where none existed before, but also demands for more federal political action (Haas 1968, 13). In the same vein as Lindberg and Scheingold, Haas therefore sees several possible pathways and positive linkages between EU politicisation and the continuation of integration. Another classical account on EU politicisation, the one by Philippe Schmitter (1969), depicts a dynamic model of politicisation. In brief,

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following Schmitter, if EU integration becomes more controversial, this leads to a widening of the audience and more debate, and a manifest redefinition of mutual objectives. As a consequence, we experience a shift in actor expectancies and loyalty towards the new regional organisation, that is, the EU. For Schmitter, an increase in actor-defined controversiality is an indicator of beginning politicisation. This political process reminds of what happens in the nation states and their representative democracies as well: if citizens do not like a policy, they can debate and try to change it, and if more people participate in the political process, they also identify more with the polity. Hence, rather than a politicisation, this Schmitterian account could also be termed a normalisation of EU politics towards the standards of representative democracy. Several of the current EU politicisation texts, on the other hand, paint a more pessimist picture of the effects of EU politicisation. The oft-cited account on EU politicisation by Hooghe and Marks (2009) in this context depicts a truly pessimist model of EU politicisation. They term it ‘postfunctionalist’, in order to highlight the difference to the functionalist account mentioned earlier. Their model can be summed up as such: a withdrawal of support and/ or legitimation from the EU (end of permissive consensus) leads to politicisation of the integration process. Politicisation is fuelled by party-­political entrepreneurs that establish anti-European parties which earn electoral successes. This, in the end, hinders elites to continue European integration, and, ultimately, may entail the end of integration or even disintegration. This thesis has led Hooghe and Marks to adopt their rather critical perspective on the politicisation of EU integration. Two pillars of their model deserve  questioning. First, in conceptual terms, the model  Hooghe and Marks develop is a top-down-model of analysing politicisation, in which politicisation is driven by party-political entrepreneurs, and the citizen’s role is limited to giving or withdrawing support. Different from the Schmitterian model, citizens themselves do not appear as politicising actors, despite the crucial role that their changing opinions have. Second, as the end of the permissive consensus is situated in the 1990s and related to the debates and referendums on the Maastricht Treaty, this decade is seen as a turning point (see, in detail, Kauppi et al. 2016). It is notable that recent empirical results have underlined this thesis on the decisive role of the 1990s as turning point to be not true (Hutter et al. 2016).

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2.3.3  Four Models of EU Politicisation The two approaches to EU politicisation that were just sketched can be summed up into two models of EU politicisation. The dynamics sketched by Hooghe and Marks depict what I suggest to term a pessimist top-down model of politicisation: EU politicisation is fuelled and taken up by political entrepreneurs (i.e. in a top-down way) and leads to increased criticism of the EU and dangers for the EU itself. This model depicts one of the possible linkages sketched in Sect. 2.2: politicisation may be critical and even anti-democratic or system-critical politicisation. It presumes a top-­ down dynamic, as it assumes that citizens grant elites support and legitimation for integrating Europe in the permissive consensus. Should they take legitimation and support away, elites face problems and opposition in carrying out integration, that is, integration will be facing obstacles. But what can be termed bottom-up politicisation (individual activism, protests, movements) is left out in such top-down, systems-oriented accounts on politicisation—contrary to the debates in Political Theory, International relations or the ones on depoliticisation (see Chaps. 3, 5, 7, 10 and 12 in this book). This is an important shortcoming also in analytical terms. Accordingly, several recent studies in politicisation research have indicated that we either need to study different pathways and/or a set of actors that goes beyond political parties, political elites and the media (see explicitly Statham and Trenz 2013, 2014; Zürn 2015). Moreover, it is not a necessary consequence that elites will (causal) face opposition when integration becomes politicised, that is, an issue of political debate and conflict. Neither is it clear what will follow from the withdrawal of support and legitimacy, as, again, there are several possibilities: 1. Elites continue without support or with reduced support and do things they are not legitimised for—in that case, citizen support will shrink more. This is very much what we saw happening in the peak of the financial crisis. 2. Elites stop integration, which is a problem for integration, indeed. 3. There is increasing political debate on integration, and this leads to increased legitimacy and increased citizen support—just as depicted by Schmitter. The model sketched by the functionalist classics, and especially by Schmitter, takes up a number of the actors, arenas and pathways that were

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just mentioned—another possible interrelation which I suggest to term an optimist dynamic model. In this model of politicisation, more conflict and more debate about integration lead to an increase in audience, which ultimately leads to a redefinition of integration of objectives and more identification of the citizens, hence an increase in support. This is no sophisticated account of deliberative or grassroots democracy. Nevertheless, it leads to a more open model of understanding and analysing politicisation and its possible outcomes. Instead of citizens being limited to granting or withdrawing support, they can become audience and redefine mutual objectives. (I admit that I am not sure if Schmitter himself meant that the citizens can do this—but at least his model opens up the possibility.) In such an optimist dynamic model, the interrelation between citizens and elites can potentially develop in both bottom-up and top-down ways. Politicisation in this model, moreover, works in a democratising way, as it increases democratic activity and furthermore support of the EU. Besides these two approaches, two other paths of EU politicisation and democratisation are possible: an optimist top-down model and a pessimist dynamic model. What can be termed an optimist top-down model is mainly based on party-political activity of pro-EU parties. In this model, we therefore notice less interaction between elites, citizens and activists than in the dynamic model. But still, political parties and media that communicate the EU positively may raise EU support and EU politicisation. The dynamics is contrary to the one in the pessimist top-down model. In a pessimist dynamic model, the processes are similar to the optimist dynamic model. Citizens and activists politicise the EU, but they engage with the EU in a system-critical way. We notice bottom-up activities and politicisation, but these activities do not create EU support, and they may be anti-democratic.

2.4   Conclusion and Research Outlook In conclusion, politicisation should be understood as a multilevel concept, linking a macro or theoretical and normative level to a meso level of conceptualisation and operationalisation and a micro level of empirical analysis or measurement. It has been shown that to theorise politicisation as the act of marking something as political opens up broader paths for analysis. This brings me to suggesting a stage-model of politicisation that also mirrors the bottom-up dynamics I have been discussing.

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On the theoretical or macro level, I have suggested to consider politics as an activity and politicisation as the activity that marks something as political. On the meso- and micro levels, this brings about a number of different stages that need to be included in the analyses. A first stage then is the fact that an issue is marked as political, whenever, and whoever does so. A second stage is a first degree of public resonance. The issue enters public or semi-public arenas, by media, social media, protests or campaigns. Social media in this context need to be considered an intermediate form or a semi-public arena because they reach a preselected public. Third, and linked by different channels to those public or semi-public arenas, there is the political system, and the ways issues enter into it from the different arenas— because the issues are taken up by party or other actors, because new parties form and enter the system, because the issues become a matter of institutionalised political conflict, and because finally decisions are taken on them. As according to this stage model, when we can concretely measure salience, polarisation and so on, we already see a successful politicisation in the arenas and institutions of the classical political system, that is, an advanced stage of a politicisation process and its effects in the system. I have argued that politicisation, understood as the act of marking something as political, indeed, begins at the bottom level, for example, in private conversations. These private conversations can be a decisive base for politicising an issue up into the public spaces and even the electoral arenas of the classical political system. It is another question how these bottom-up dynamics of politicisation can be empirically grasped. In the case of private conversations, it may be relatively easy, as we have opinion polls: the French referendum debate in 2005, for instance, led to a massive increase in people’s interest into the EU. It became the most important topic in private conversations in three months (Rozès 2005)—and what was debated had a lasting effect on the vote as well, as the winning arguments in the referendum discourse came from the critics of the Constitutional treaty and were directly mirrored by the most decisive reasons for voting ‘No’ (see, in detail, Wiesner 2014, 2015). Media, then, have a gate-keeping function: media only report when they chose to do so. This means that if an issue is debated in the media, it has already passed a ‘mainstream threshold’. But in analysing media, detailed analyses and careful material selection allows for depicting the details of politicisation dynamics. In my analysis of the French referendum discourse in 2005, I studied media articles in four newspapers that ranged in their political orientation from the left to centre right (L’Humanité,

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Libératio, Le Monde and Le Figaro). What I found was that the winning arguments in the discourse—those that criticised the EU as being too neoliberal—not only were directly reflected in the reasons behind the votes as was said earlier. They were also coined and put forward by actors and organisations on the margins of the political spectrum and outsiders to the party system, that is, by left-wing parties, Trade Unions, non-­ governmental organisations (NGOs) and also a group of actors that I have not seen mentioned in many accounts on EU politicisation so far: individual activists. Therefore, the winning arguments, at first, appeared only, or mainly, in left-leaning media (L’Humanité and, to a lesser extent, Libération) for the first two months of the discourse. Only when there had been a number of big demonstrations and protests and the public opinion began to change against the Treaty, as the polls underlined—and that means: in the moment when the protests, movements and the activism had a clear effect in the classical system of arenas—the two journals in the Centre (Le Monde and Le Figaro) took up the arguments. The critical, and ultimately, discourse- and vote-winning arguments had passed the mainstream threshold (Wiesner 2014, 2015). This finding speaks against using just one newspaper per country, in order to analyse mediated discourse. All this means that the research material for studying politicisation should be selected in order to allow for studying top-down as well as bottom-up and sideways dynamics, and it should be selected in order to reflect what we know about the different publics—for example, better-­ educated people usually have a better opinion of EU and read quality press, whereas less educated people tend to read tabloids and have a more critical opinion of the EU. Accordingly, it will give a more positive image of the EU to analyse only the quality press rather than tabloids. It is also worthwhile to conceptualise and research upon politicising actions, such as speech acts, and the related micro-political strategies and processes of politicising an issue (Wiesner 2018). Other possible methods of analysis are focus group discussions, monitoring social media, participant observation with NGOs, the study of local media and the analysis of opinion polls. All in all, therefore, the analysis of politicisation is a field that invites, or even requires, mixed methods research that combines qualitative and quantitative data and methods. Furthermore, it is to be recommended to separate normative and analytical judgements on politicisation. It is hence useful to distinguish politicisation as a process, the (intermediate) outcomes of politicisation processes and a normative judgement of their effects.

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CHAPTER 3

Three Concepts of Politicisation: Republican, Deliberative, and Agonistic Veith Selk

3.1   Introduction Politicisation is a subject that has increasingly been under discussion in political science for quite some time. The growing literature on this topic puts forward proposals for its definition and offers analytical heuristics, conceptual histories, empirically oriented middle-range theories, and macro-level approaches.1 Political theory, however, is awkwardly silent when issues of politicisation arise.2 It has hitherto been unclear what political theory could contribute to the discussion and what the significance of 1  Palonen (2003, 1986); Hay (2007); Zürn (2013, 2016); Wiesner et al. (2019, with further references). For an integrative approach of linking national, European, and global levels of politicisation, see Zürn (2019). 2  Even political theorists who elaborate extensively on the phenomenon do not spend much ink on the concept itself. Niklas Luhmann, for instance, argued that the evolution of the modern welfare state in combination with the structure of democracy as an institutionalised interplay of government and opposition leads to an ongoing dynamic of politicisation in which nearly all societal matters can be construed as political problems governments need

V. Selk (*) Institute for Political Science, TU Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 C. Wiesner (ed.), Rethinking Politicisation in Politics, Sociology and International Relations, Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54545-1_3

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the phenomenon of politicisation for different political theory perspectives is. Against this backdrop, this chapter asks whether the republican, deliberative, and agonist strands in political theory are useful points of departure in this regard. The first section introduces a criterion by which to judge whether a concept of politicisation is helpful for understanding the subject matter. I demonstrate that any realistic notion of politicisation must take two empirical manifestations of its subject into account: social and governmental politicisation (I). The second section presents three concepts of politicisation. They are ideal type constructions based on my reading of republican, deliberative, and agonist political thought and uncover the concepts of politicisation implicit in these three paradigms.3 The closing section explores whether these concepts are able to meet the criterion described in the first section. I conclude by arguing that all three capture governmental politicisation, yet, due to their teleological notion of politics, republican and deliberative concepts are unable to grasp the phenomenon of social politicisation. Thus, in order to understand politicisation properly, non-teleological notions of politics and politicisation are needed. An agonist concept seems to be most suitable in this regard (III).

3.2   Two Empirical Manifestations of Politicisation A well-established conceptual framework in the literature identifies two notions of politicisation, linking them to two different ways of understanding politics. According to this view, politics is either understood as a distinct sphere (or field), or it is seen as a distinct type of action. Hence, politicisation can be conceptualised as either shifting an issue into the sphere of politics or making something a subject matter of political action; alternatively, it can be conceived as a combination of both.4 In the following, I build upon these distinctions by arguing that politicisation takes place empirically within two interconnected spheres: the governmental to take care of (Luhmann 2002, 215; 1990). Notwithstanding this apt observation, he hardly reflected on the concept of politicisation (cf. Luhmann 1972). 3  Of course, as ideal types in the Weberian sense (Weber 1988b, 202), these concepts neither spell out what existing political theories actually do say about politicisation nor do they represent the “true essence” of the respective paradigms. 4  See, with further references, Wiesner’s “Rethinking politicisation as a multi-stage and multilevel concept” in Wiesner et al. (2019).

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sphere and the social sphere. In both spheres, politicisation occurs if a subject matter is treated as a collective problem that requires binding decisions as to the allocation of material values and the validity of immaterial values. With the term governmental politicisation, I refer to the standard notion of politicisation (see Chaps. 2 and 9 in this book). In regard to the former, professional politicians are considered the main actors, and public deliberation, state power (particularly the legitimate use of force), and offices with public authority are a collective focus point. Governmental politicisation takes place if an issue enters the political system. In contrast, social politicisation occurs if private spheres become an arena for political action, wherein the conflicts and issues concerned are not shifted into the political system, leading to a situation where the legitimate use of force does not come into play, and politicians do not become main actors. The domain of social politicisation is the spheres of action below or beyond public governments. 3.2.1  Governmental Politicisation Since citizens are increasingly able to alter more and more subject matters, politicisation has been occurring more often. For example, the practical possibilities to deliberately modify characteristics of biological sex and symbols of cultural gender have led to the politicisation of issues such as the participation of transsexual athletes in sports competitions or the access rules for sex-segregated spaces in prisons and hospitals. These are examples of an overall trend which John Dewey had already recognised nearly 100 years ago, namely that in the “great society”, Dewey’s term for the type of highly interdependent society that succeeded the agrarian, more loosely interconnected type before it, social actions increasingly affect “third” parties that have no direct involvement in the matter at hand. This, in turn, leads to an increasing demand for governmental control of social action (Dewey 1927, 1935/1987). In the “great society”, Dewey argued, social action and its consequences consistently affect persons, groups, and organisations that do not directly participate in the action. These “third parties” consider social action thus as an issue of public significance that should be subject to collectively binding decisions that are either backed or implemented by the state, as a power apparatus, or by functionally equivalent organisations with public authority. This is what I refer to as governmental politicisation.

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Current debates about compulsory vaccination, the (mis)use of antibiotics in veterinary medicine, bans or restrictions for certain types of diesel-­ powered cars, or compulsory quota for female representatives in parliament or executive boards come to mind as recent examples of such attempts to politicise a subject matter as an issue of regulation by public authorities. Many of these attempts have, as of yet, been unsuccessful, and many public controversies are not noticed by the vast majority of citizens (see Chap. 2 in this book), whether it be that the issues in question appear to them as unchangeable or that they go entirely unnoticed. Despite the growing consciousness of contingency within our society, it seems that even in democratic regimes, political rule rests on a certain amount of Weber’s “traditional legitimacy”: the belief that the state of affairs is justified by its time-honoured character. This being said, in democratic regimes, we still can observe a growing amount of collectively binding regulations and decisions on the distribution of values as well as the validity of norms. Indicators for this long-term trend are the increase in public spending over the twentieth century (Tanzi and Schuknecht 2000), which has since been slowed down and partially restricted in the “neoliberal era” if not fundamentally reversed, and the growing number of legal norms and regulations accompanied by a growing expectancy of responsiveness in evermore differentiated policy areas (Adam et al. 2019). 3.2.2  Social Politicisation In the “private” sphere, a pervasive politicisation is taking place at the same time. As a result of the “participatory revolution” (Kaase 1984) during the 1960s, whose emblematic slogan is the feminist assertion that “the private is political”,5 political action now permeates the boundaries of the “political system” and diffuses into society (see Chap. 2 in this book). The result is the emergence of a “political society” (Greven 2009) in which politicisation takes place in formerly non-political spheres and leads to the emergence of what Ulrich Beck has called “subpolitics” (Beck 1996).6 Consequently, more and more institutionalised or organised spheres of action, such as courts (see Chap. 12 in this book), media actors (see Chap.  Or, more commonly used in the US, “the personal is political”.  As this happens “below” the governmental sphere and without initial initiative by the political class, Beck posed the question of whether this process could lead to the emergence of “subpolitics”, “subpolicies”, and “subpolities” (Beck 1996, 94–109). 5 6

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8 as well as 9 in this book), business enterprises, universities, schools, museums, and art exhibitions, as well as other economic, cultural, or educational institutions, become spheres of political action, sometimes with the participation of the state or in its shadow, yet oftentimes without. They become political because in these settings, political discourses take place, choices on collective issues and the regulation of organisational and institutional conduct are made, values are (re)distributed, and binding decisions on the validity of norms are taken. In the course of these processes, actors seek to gain, defend, use, and legitimise their share of power, all without direct leadership or involvement of politicians, public authorities, or direct appeals to the state and its capacity to implement decisions by force. This is a process I refer to as social politicisation. We can observe the reflection of this proliferating politicisation of social spheres in contemporary political science discourse. Two concepts are of particular interest here as conceptual indicators of the growing awareness for social politicisation. The first is the concept of (global) governance: it aims at an analysis of the manifold processes of the making and enforcing of rules in private or public-private institutional, organisational, and network-­like settings (Bevir 2012; Benz 2004; see also Chap. 11 in this book). The second, coined by Michel Foucault, is the concept of governmentality (Foucault 2008). “Governmentality” focuses not so much on collective action but rather on the internalisation of power discourses and their effects on various forms of modern “self-government” and social “self-regulation”. These two concepts represent heterogeneous intellectual traditions, normative foci, and thinking styles, but they do have something in common: they reflect the ongoing diffusion of politics into nearly all realms of human conduct and action beyond and below the political system. Examples of social politicisation are so-called non-political strikes and wage disputes, as well as the contestation of workplace rules and corporate governance in white-collar firms with a skilled and academically trained workforce. Additionally, it encompasses the increase of bargained “deals” in courtrooms, “private” structures in global trade law, the human resources policy and disputes about programme policy among public service broadcasters and “private” media outlets, consumer boycotts against firms, and public criticism of advertisements and products, as well as what some would call the “politically correct” critiques of curricula and teaching, including objections to the codification of “proper language” rules, at kindergartens, schools, and universities. Instances of social politicisation

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are also the campaigns by conservative groups against Queer Studies and related approaches to teaching and conduct in pedagogy, education, and social science research but also the “plural economics” campaigns against the neoclassical paradigm in economic science. For academic scholars, probably one of the most apparent examples of social politicisation is Wissenschaftspolitik found in the academy (cf. Weingart 2001). It is at play if the appointment of chairs, the allocation of funds, the distribution of slots for publication and speaking, and the choice of theories, concepts, methods, data, and research issues are not decided on the basis of scientific criteria alone but with respect to non-scientific—normative or self-serving—concerns. As every practitioner knows, many decisions in academic and research institutions are the result of political parameters: they often follow the logic of coalition building, or maximising influence and gains, and thus stem from strategic considerations and the bargaining power of gatekeepers in organisational steering bodies, influence networks, and cartels in academic communities. As a result, many decisions in scientific and academic contexts are in fact political. They aim at achieving diverse nonscientific goals, such as making panels more inclusive and diverse, changing the balance of power or the representation of different scientific schools and approaches in departments, or rendering universities more business-oriented—or simply serve the attempt to achieve or challenge hegemony. As a result of the politicisation of social spheres, politics can take place in nearly all fields of action. It crosses the borders of, as Systems Theory would have it, “functionally differentiated autopoietic social systems” (Luhmann 1995). This does not mean that everything called political is actually of a political nature, but it means that everything can be political if it is successfully framed as a collective action problem that requires binding decisions on the distribution of material values or the validity of immaterial values—and is actually treated as such (see Chap. 2 in this book). The subsequent decision can be enforced by the state but does not need to be. In fact, the crucial aspect of social politicisation is that social politicisation can but does not have to “spill over” into the governmental sphere and thus trigger governmental politicisation. The monopoly of the legitimate use of force is still an essential part of democratic regimes, but in the sphere of “subpolitics” (Beck 1996), political decisions can be made without the direct threat of the legitimate use of force—even though the

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negative sanctions—whichever may be at hand (shaming, labelling, moralising, losing one’s job, loss of customers, etc.), do play an important role here as well.

3.3   Three Concepts of Politicisation As indicated earlier, in political theory, the concept of politicisation has received relatively little attention, especially in comparison with concepts such as “the political”, “power”, and “democracy”. However, notwithstanding that political theorists have not put forth thorough elaboration on the term, the theoretical strands of republicanism, deliberation theory, and agonism do in fact contain implicit concepts of politicisation, which, on this account, need to be reconstructed. Accordingly, the following section elaborates these implicit notions of politicisation in republicanism, deliberation theory, and agonism. Thereafter, the closing section shall sum up the findings and ask whether they are suitable for gaining a fuller understanding both empirical manifestations of politicisation I introduced in the preceding section. 3.3.1  The Concept of Politicisation in Republican Thought Republicanism has a teleological understanding of politics as serving collective autonomy and fostering the common good. The primary objective and the essential meaning of politics, republicans hold, is freedom as self-­ government (cf. Skinner 2002). And it is only through politics, they argue, that citizens can exercise their ability to act collectively, shape their common future, and prevent despotism and servitude. In republican thought, citizens are understood as actors who, under specific conditions, are oriented towards the common good, ideally guided by robust bonds of solidarity and virtue. This notion of citizenship is holistic in the sense that citizenship is not understood as a mere legal status but rather as a life form. It is embodied in a concrete community whose bonds are strengthened by shared ethnicity, traditions, mutual affection, and collective memory of a founding moment or by common heritage. This understanding of civic community is derived from the structure of the city states of antiquity and the Renaissance (Skinner 1978). It is a “thick” conception and undergirds the republican critique of the consequences of modern social differentiation and private organisation for civic participation and

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deprecates the depoliticising, equalising, or sedating effects of modern mass society and capitalist culture (Arendt 1958; Wolin 2008). For republicans, politics is no harmonious endeavour. That is why, at the same time, republican political thought depicts the community as being fraught with tensions due to the differentiation between “lower” and “higher” classes and their conflicting aspirations. In the civic community, aristocratically minded elites clash with rather self-contained common people (McCormick 2006). This confrontation becomes political if it entails a debate on the substance of the bonum commune and the res publica, because, for republicans, the crucial question of politics is: what is owed to the public? Against this backdrop, the notion of politicisation which is implicit in republican thought is about the definition of the common good and the demarcation between the public and the private, “private” being a symbol of the unpolitical sphere, and “public” being a symbol of the political sphere (see Chap. 2 in this book). On the one hand, republicans take the public sphere to be shaped by the rhetorical actions of outstanding political orators. They understand politics as a form of action that addresses the community as an audience that judges collectively what the common good shall be. Oratorical skills are thus necessary for politicising a subject matter by way of a convincing appeal that captures the imagination of the citizenry as a whole. On the other hand, republicans stress that political institutions give form to the public sphere. Founded in the course of a revolution or incrementally evolved over the course of conflicts between the higher and lower classes, political institutions are instrumental for freedom, and they are to be judged as tools for achieving pre-political aims, the collective autonomy of the community, and the common good. Thus, from a republican standpoint, politicisation is an attempt to shift an issue from the private sphere into the public realm by way of political action, in order to convince the community as a whole to reformulate the binding idea of the common good. Since the republican conception of political action is community centred, and in the republican line of thinking, the public sphere is the domain of an exclusive body of citizens, for republicans, politicisation takes place in the borders of a given citizen-polity. However, in a revolutionary situation, the scope of politicisation widens. In that moment, politicisation concerns the identity of the community itself and aims at its reconfiguration in order to form a new polity. Thus, the republican notion of political

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life understands politicisation as appearing in two ways, either aiming at redrawing the boundary between public and private or at founding a new polity. But how does politicisation come about, according to republicanism? In republican thought, the conflict between higher and lower classes accounts for the dynamic and vibrancy of political life. For republicans, in politics, there can be no stationary state because politics consists of an everlasting clash of the ambizione of the grandi with the defensive stance of the popolo against their encroachments. Therefore, for republicans, politicisation stems from the discord between citizens that is a disagreement between the popolo and the grandi on the definition of what is owed by whom to the res publica. However, at the same time, republicans assume, in the end, the telos of politics is the common good. And the more a community allows for acting in concert for the common good, republicans hold, the more acts of politicisation become possible that lead to a renewed public spirit instead of to breaking the polity apart. The proper realm of politicisation, according to republican imagination, is the political community as a whole. Its everlasting source is the confrontation between piazza and palazzo, but its purpose is pacifying the disputes between popolo and grandi by way of refiguring the public, a process in which the discord between the higher ranks and the lower strata is temporarily settled, the idea of a common good renewed, and collective self-government of the citizen community becomes possible again. 3.3.2  Politicisation in Deliberation Theory The primary focus of the deliberative concept of politics lies in rational problem-solving. Politics is pictured as a practice that aims at resolving collective problems through rational discourse and by reaching mutual understanding on reasonable grounds (Habermas 1996). Therefore, citizens are understood to be capable of mutual understanding and be willing partners in it, coordinating their interactions by means of rational communication in the context of their lifeworld, as well as through the political system. Thus, the deliberative approach to politics is mainly occupied with structures and procedures of communication. It thus entails an intersubjective, so to speak “liquefied”, concept of political action that dissipates political action into discourse (Habermas 1994). From the standpoint of deliberation theory, the political community should not be understood as an exclusive community of citizens sharing a

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common heritage or sentiment. Structures of community, deliberation theorists argue, are important on a symbolic level, but in political life, apart from symbolic representation and integration, procedures are what primarily matter. According to deliberation theory, the constitution of community is rooted in the reciprocal recognition of political procedures and universalistic principles (which, however, need to be culturally grounded when it comes to political life). In other words, the political community is a community of rule followers, sharing a common political culture of deliberation. In contrast to the “thick” understanding of political community in republicanism, deliberation theory entails a sociological notion of society that combines the concept of functional differentiation with modernisation theory, which is why the “political system” plays an important role in this line of thinking (Habermas 1987). According to this view, modern society is, on the one hand, characterised by the logic of functional differentiation. It leads to an evolution of functionally differentiated subsystems, in particular and above all, to a differentiation between the economic and political systems. On the other hand, deliberative theory assumes a prevalence of communicative rationality that diffuses through the structures of the lifeworld in the course of social evolution. Seen from this perspective, political action has its place at the interplay between social subsystems and the lifeworld. It is mediated through the public sphere and is enkindled by social movements as problem-­identifying intermediaries. However, it is executed by political institutions and, by way of the political system’s formal decision-making procedures and arenas, as a systemic integration mechanism that gains its legitimacy from the communicative rationality it can employ. Against this backdrop, deliberation theory understands politics as a coping and problem-solving mechanism that deals with integration problems arising from systemic differentiation. Its rationality is grounded in its ability to harness communicative rationality and transmit it into the political system (Habermas 1996, 385–87). The political system is “responsible for problems that concern society as a whole” and it “refers to society-wide problems: it carries on the tasks of social integration at a reflexive level when other action systems are no longer up to the job” (ibid., 385). Thus, in this way of thinking, politicisation appears as being caused by integration problems at the interplay of social and systemic integration. Deliberation theory assumes that if integration in systemic or lifeworld contexts fails, the resulting disintegration causes politicisation and, eventually, politics steps in. This happens because either the systemic media

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guiding communication in the subsystems or normative self-organisation in the lifeworld do not allow for coping autonomously with coordination problems, as it is the case in, for instance, an economic crisis or a conflict of culturally evolved norms. Due to its dual nature, being equipped with the political system’s coercive power as well as communicative rationality at the same time, politics has the ability to solve systemic as well as social integration problems. This deliberative notion considers politicisation not to be tied to a fixed political community and its particular identity but rather to procedures of deliberation. Moreover, deliberation theorists consider a furthering of systemic political integration beyond existing communities as necessary, due to the expansion of the economic system beyond the nation state. However, the necessity of deliberative procedures being culturally rooted, as even Habermas indicates (Habermas 2005), implies that this furthering does indeed have cultural limits. Deliberative theory entails a functional explanation for politicisation. Seen from its viewpoint, processes of politicisation are most likely to happen when unpolitical modes of coordination by means of “lifeworldly” understandings or by non-political communication media of other social subsystems—first of all, money—fail and thereby cause disintegration. The economic system in particular is most likely to produce such politicising integration problems, which are due to its ‘colonising’ tendency of imposing its commodifying logic onto other subsystems and the lifeworld (Habermas 2001). Nevertheless, other subsystems may also trigger politicisation if their medium does not fulfil its integrating function. For instance, from the perspective of deliberation theory, the current politicisation of “loneliness” (Yeginsu 2018), as strange as it may look at a first glance, must be interpreted as the result of a lack of integration by the subsystem of intimacy and family. The love symbol, its communication medium, has ceased to fulfil its function of social integration. However, deliberation theory suggests that the same can be said of the political system. If it overuses its steering capacity by employing its medium—administrative power—the result is the politicisation of state regulations, as an attempt to push back “intrusive legalism” and “bureaucratisation” as forms of encroaching governmental activity (Habermas 1992, 436). Seen from this theoretical viewpoint, politicisation has a specific function. Its objective is to guide the political system either towards integration problems that cannot be solved by other subsystems or through practices of self-organisation in the lifeworld—or to push the administrative apparatus and its intrusive legalism back behind its proper boundaries.

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Politicisation thereby serves the purpose of pointing to the need of recalibrating the equilibrium between systemic integration and social integration. Deliberation theory entails a clear normative standard for judging politicisation. It links the capacity of the political system to solve integration problems and to gain legitimacy for its use of administrative power to the degree of deliberation in formal and informal arenas of political discourse. Hence, from the perspective of deliberation theory, politicisation needs to be judged in the light of “good arguments” as well as by the deliberative procedures, which are or are not employed to politicise a subject matter. 3.3.3  An Agonist Concept of Politicisation Agonism considers politics to be associated with contingency, conflict, and power. The emergence of a secularised society, the erosion of metaphysical foundations of identities, norms, and ideas, and the formation of governing organisations replace non-political sources of normative coordination of action (Greven 2009). As a result, traditional authority erodes. Correspondingly, the awareness of contingency among the population grows, separating past experience from future expectation (Koselleck 1985) and setting the stage for an irreducible kind of pluralism (Mouffe 2005). As a result, more and more subject matters become a possible object of deliberate choice. Simultaneously, the need for the settlement of conflicts over the distribution of material goods and the validity of immaterial values arises. Thus, the ever-increasing “space of the possible” goes hand in hand with the necessity to decide on collective affairs. As a result, politics is, agonists argue, of an encompassing nature, since it is the only source of binding normative integration. However, due to its “decisionist” nature, politics is also a form of performative action. By reordering through decisions, it keeps an awareness of the contingent nature of any order awake. Seen from the point of view of the agonistic approach, politics is interpreted in the context of the formation of manifold governmental agencies, powerful organisations, and a secularised pluralistic society on the one hand, and the emergence of a widespread consciousness of contingency, on the other. The spheres of political action are broadened, agonists argue, because subject matters are not only deemed problematic but are also believed to be contingent, that is, changeable by way of deliberate collective action. In agonistic thought, political actors are regarded as complex actors driven by heterogeneous motives. These range from self-interested

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bargaining orientation to various passionate political aspirations rooted in an adversarial sense of belonging. The community is thus understood as being, in itself, politically differentiated according to groups composed of different identities, interests, normative ideals, and power resources. The bond between political actors and the procedures, institutions, and offices, which help them regulate their political conduct, is the outcome of past political decision-making, and it can become an object of political choice in the future. Hence, this approach depicts political community and citizenship as products of political decision-making. They are not grounded in pre-political sources of community, fixed group identities, or procedures of rational communication. Moreover, for agonists, political action is adversarial. It has, explicitly or implicitly, the structure of “us versus them”, notwithstanding that the identities of opponents are politically constructed and contingent. Seen from this viewpoint, the political dynamic is driven by the struggle for power (Weber 1988a). And because agonists consider politics to essentially be about decisions related to the distribution of scarce goods and to the handling of conflicts between incompatible values or conflicting interests, political action is deemed to be inherently agonistic (see Chap. 2 on political action as well as Chap. 4 on Weber and politicisation). Even though it can be tamed by a sense of belonging and by formal structures— in bureaucracy, routines, institutions, and structures of domination— political action is also laden with dynamism. Moreover, it permanently leads to unexpected events and unforeseeable change because political action always has vast unintended consequences. Agonists hold that due to the erosion of metaphysical foundations for political action, there are no longer any unpolitical sources of rationality or an unpolitical standpoint from which political action can be impartially judged. In agonist thought, judgement is both a part of political action and external to it. Hence, in politics, there is no “court of justice” that could fulfil the function of an impartial arbitrator. For agonists, principles and values are not exempt from power struggles; their validity is the consequence and not the precondition of political action. As a result, the political process as a whole appears irrational and adversarial. Political action is therefore not understood as having an overarching meaning, a rational systemic function, or an inherent telos. Seen from this perspective, politicisation has no insurmountable limits and its boundaries are never fixed, whereas its normative justifications are contingent. Politicisation is a performative process in the course of which

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anything can be performatively constructed as being political. The agonistic approach therefore suggests that politicisation can affect not only issues but also questions of political order, membership, identities, ideas, institutions, and procedures. It can relate to fundamental principles of the polity, to the distribution of rights and obligations within or beyond a given community of citizens or a group of subjects, to given sets of procedures and institutions and, of course, to specific subject matters and issues. However, politicisation not only presupposes the existence of political organisations that take, enforce, and implement political decision-making, it also presupposes the awareness of choice and agency. It therefore seems to be more likely when subject matters are deemed both problematic, becoming a cause for conflict, and contingent, that is, changeable by deliberate political action. Hence, in agonist thought, the emergence of a widespread awareness of political contingency, the possibility of choice, and the need for decision-making are the driving forces of politicisation. Agonism has a dynamic and performative understanding of politicisation. For agonists, nothing is necessarily or essentially unpolitical. In turn, politicisation is depicted as a performative process in the course of which anything can be constructed or treated as being political, and this happens not only in the wider public sphere and the political system but also in other spheres of action where choice and power interplay.

3.4   Conclusion: Politicisation Reconsidered The following table sums up the reconstruction of the implicit concepts of politicisation in republicanism, deliberation theory, and agonism (Table 3.1). Table 3.1  Concepts of politicisation Cause of Politicisation

Purpose, Function, or Meaning of Politicisation

Normative Criterion in Judging Politicisation

Republican

Discord between citizens

Demarcation between private and public

Deliberative

Integration problem Decidability

Recalibration of subsystems and lifeworld Performing contingency

Collective selfgovernment and the common good Communicative rationality –

Agonistic Source: Author

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Republican thought explains politicisation as a result of discord within the civic community. The quarrel between aristocrats and ordinary citizens over the definition of the common good can be temporarily settled, it assumes, if the meaning of the res publica is affirmed and the definition of the common good is renewed. Hence, in republicanism, the purpose of politicisation is to ascertain the identity of the civic community, rekindle the public spirit, and to define on these terms what is owed to the res publica. In contrast, the deliberative understanding of politicisation has a functionalist interpretation of the phenomenon. The cause of politicisation, deliberation theory suggests, is integration problems at the interplay of subsystems and the lifeworld. Politicisation, mediated and rationalised by public deliberation, serves for their rational and thus legitimate recalibration—this, deliberative theorists assume, is its telos. It should therefore be judged according to the extent of communicative rationality it encompasses. Contrary to this perspective, the agonist notion of politicisation suggests that politicisation neither fulfils a pre-political aim nor has a meaning that could be uncovered without partaking in political action. This understanding of politicisation stresses the growing awareness of contingency, that is, the insight that all subject matters of action have become decidable. Politicisation is thus considered to be performative: it is seen as the updating of contingency in political action. As such, it cannot be subjected to or judged in the light of non-political principles without partaking in political discourse. What do we make of this outcome? In the first section, I argued that the criterion for a proper conceptualisation of politicisation is whether the concept is able to grasp two empirical manifestations of the phenomenon I referred to as social and governmental politicisation. What I have called governmental politicisation appears unproblematic from the republican viewpoint as long as it does not lose its roots within the community of citizens, their political institutions, and the public spirit of fostering the common good. However, for republicans, social politicisation must appear highly problematic, since in most cases it is of an informal and parochial nature. Seen from the perspective of republicanism, it does not even count as political and must be considered “idiotic”, inasmuch as it does not relate to the political community as a whole; moreover, it would be interpreted as a sign of the corruption of community by dissolving civic unity, bypassing the public as the stage for determining what affects all and pertains to all, and undermining political institutions

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that should be instrumental for fostering the common good and collective self-government of the citizen collective. Deliberation theory depicts rational public problem-solving as the immanent aim of political action and politicisation. Against this background, the function of politicisation is believed to be the translation of problems that arise from the disruption of interaction in the lifeworld or functionally differentiated subsystems into the political system, in order to recalibrate the relation between systemic and social integration. This is a plausible viewpoint with regard to governmental politicisation, since such a transmitting function is an apparent aspect in this context; especially, the political class frequently justifies its actions by the argument that it “serves” the citizens by “solving” collective problems. This rationalist idea of political action is also present in deliberation theory, which, despite its emphasis on procedures and post-metaphysical methods, is based on a teleological notion of politics. However, this does not take into account the transformation of the latter due to social politicisation, which is a process of situating politics in spheres of action beyond and below the political system.7 Thus, neither deliberation theory nor republican thought acknowledge that political action actually takes place in “non-political subsystems” and the “lifeworld” or in “the private sphere” (cf. Anderson 2017)—oftentimes without being transmitted to the general public and the political system. Both fail to capture the empirical phenomenon I have termed social politicisation. In comparison, the agonistic way of thinking is better suited to account for social politicisation. It does not restrict political action to the public sphere and the political system. However, it does not offer a non-political normative criterion by which to judge processes of politicisation. Normative, allegedly non-political criteria for evaluating politics, agonists suggest, are in themselves political. This sceptical stance towards subjecting politics to non-political criteria actually draws its conclusions from the insight that politics permeates all aspects of life, with political theory and concepts of political science being no exception. Hence, one important corollary of agonism is the insight that our most cherished ideas of political life, be it “democracy”, “human rights”, or “freedom and justice”, owe their practical relevance to contingent political action and are subject to

7  Ironically, Habermas devoted large parts of his early treatise “On the Concept of Political Participation” to the phenomenon I refer to as social politicisation (Habermas 1961).

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adversarial interpretations that need to be enforced by power if they are supposed to gain validity (see Chap. 12 in this book). Agonism’s emphasis on contingency in political life provides at least a crypto-normative criterion for normatively assessing acts of politicisation. Formulating a necessary though not sufficient normative condition, it demands forms of politicising that prevent policies that could lead to fundamental non-decidability and depoliticisation, such as moralising political communication (see Chaps. 2 and 7 in this book), overarching constitutionalisation (deciding that vast areas of policy shall be undecidable in the future), and the closure of political space by TINA rhetoric (“there is no alternative”) In contrast, the republican and deliberative approaches to politicisation offer more firmly grounded normative standards to help judge acts of politicising. But this comes at a price. Both rely on teleological notions of politics, which are rendered increasingly implausible, due to the emergence of social politicisation. In fact, social politicisation is neither inevitably oriented towards the political system nor does it address the citizenry as a whole. It is particularistic and parochial, affects audiences of smaller scale, and it does not necessarily trigger governmental activity. Politics, as a result, becomes more informal, more complex, and more fragmented.8 The rise of social politicisation alters the nature of politics, which increasingly does not follow the rationalist pattern that is oftentimes assumed to empirically exist or be normatively prescribed in the standard policy sequence model of problem identification, will formation, decisionmaking, and policy implementation. This also holds true with regard to the common notion of politicisation, in which the quasi-­ teleological assumption holds that the “final process of politicisation might be seen to promote issues from the public (but non-governmental) sphere into the 8  Especially the increasing complexity of politics, which is of course not solely the result of social politicisation, has momentous consequences. The number of involved political actors grows, and the arenas of problem emergence, will formation, and decision-making, and their respective fields of implementation and impact, increasingly become incongruent and operate on different levels (cf. Zürn 1998; Benz 2010). As a result, an issue can still become politicised on a level that is not capable of solving it, or attempts to politicise a specific subject matter can take place on one level and go unnoticed on the other. More crucially, the informalisation of politics undermines the artificial construction of political equality in formal democratic procedures. Hence, if the “politicisation of everyday life” (Chandler 2014) takes place in an informal manner, it does not “bring democracy down to the societal level of plural and individuated everyday life” (ibid., 43) but increases political inequality.

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arena of direct governmental deliberation” (Hay 2007, 82; emphasis added). Social politicisation does not correspond to models of politics that explicitly or implicitly presuppose an ascending rationality according to which the final telos of politics is to enkindle public deliberation, solve public problems, or realise self-government of the citizen collective and foster the common good of the whole community. In order to understand this new state of affairs in political life, non-teleological notions of politicisation are needed.

References Adam, Christian, Steffen Hurka, Christoph Knill, and Yves Steinebach. 2019. Policy Accumulation and the Democratic Responsiveness Trap. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Anderson, Elizabeth. 2017. Private Government. How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk about It). Princeton: Princeton University Press. Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Beck, Ulrich. 1996. Reinvention of Politics: Rethinking Modernity in the Global Social Order. Cambridge: Polity. Benz, Arthur. 2010. “Blockiert durch Komplexität? Demokratie in Mehrebenensystemen föderaler und transnationaler Politik.” Vorgänge 190:64–72. Benz, Arthur (ed.). 2004. Governance: Regieren in komplexen Regelsystemen. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. Bevir, Mark. 2012. Governance: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chandler, David. 2014. “Democracy Unbound? Non-linear Politics and the Politicization of Everyday Life.” European Journal of Social Theory 17: 42–59 Dewey, John. 1935/1987. “Liberalism and Social Action.” In The Later Works, Vol. 11, edited by Jo Ann Boydston, 1–65. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Dewey, John. 1927. The Public and its Problems. New York: Holt. Foucault, Michel. 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978-79. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Greven, Michael Th. 2009. Die politische Gesellschaft: Kontingenz und Dezision als Probleme des Regierens und der Demokratie. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. Habermas, Jürgen. 2005. “Vorpolitische Grundlagen des demokratischen Rechtsstaates?” In Dialektik der Säkularisierung: Über Vernunft und Religion, edited by Jürgen Habermas, and Joseph Ratzinger, 15–37. Freiburg: Herder.

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Habermas, Jürgen. 2001. The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays. Cambridge: MIT Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1996. Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy. Cambridge: MIT Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1994. “Three Normative Models of Democracy.” Constellations 1:1–10. Habermas, Jürgen. 1992. “Further reflections on the public sphere”. In Habermas and the Public Sphere, edited by Craig Calhoun, 421–461. Cambridge: MIT Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1987. The Theory of Communicative Action: Vol. 2: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason. Boston: Beacon Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1961. “Über den Begriff der politischen Beteiligung.” In Student und Politik: Eine soziologische Untersuchung zum politischen Bewusstsein Frankfurter Studenten, edited by Jürgen Habermas, Ludwig von Friedeburg and Christoph Oehler, 11–55. Neuwied: Luchterhand. Hay, Colin. 2007. Why We Hate Politics. Cambridge: Polity Press. Kaase, Max. 1984. “The Challenge of the ‘Participatory Revolution’ in Pluralist Democracies” International Political Science Review 5:299–318. Koselleck, Reinhart. 1985. “‘Spaces of Experience’ and ‘Horizon of Expectation’: Two Historical Categories.” In: Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, edited by Reinhart Koselleck, 267–288. Cambridge: MIT Press. Luhmann, Niklas. 2002. Die Politik der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Luhmann, Niklas. 1995. Social Systems. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Luhmann, Niklas. 1990. Political Theory in the Welfare State. Berlin: de Gruyter. Luhmann, Niklas. 1972. “Politikbegriffe und die ‘Politisierung’ der Verwaltung.” In Demokratie und Verwaltung: 25 Jahre Hochschule für Verwaltungswissenschaft Speyer, edited by Franz Knöpfle, 211–228. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. McCormick, John P. 2006. “Contain the Wealthy and Patrol the Magistrates: Restoring Elite Accountability to Popular Government.” American Political Science Review 100:147–163. Mouffe, Chantal. 2005. On the Political. London: Routledge. Palonen, Kari. 2003. “Four Times of Politics: Policy, Polity, Politicking, and Politicisation.” Alternatives 28:171–186. Palonen, Kari. 1986. “Korrekturen zur Geschichte von ‘Politisierung’.” Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte 30:224–234. Skinner, Quentin. 2002. “The Idea of Negative Liberty: Machiavellian and Modern Perspectives.” In Visions of Politics: Vol. 2: Renaissance Virtues, edited by Quentin Skinner, 186–212. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (Revised version of: Skinner, Quentin. 1984. “The Idea of Negative Liberty: Philosophical and Historical Perspectives.” In Philosophy in History: Essays in the Historiography of Philosophy, edited by Richard Rorty, Jerome B. Schneewind, and Quentin Skinner, 193–221. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

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Skinner, Quentin. 1978. The Foundations of Modern Political Thought: Vol. 1: The Renaissance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tanzi, Vito, and Ludger Schuknecht. 2000. Public Spending in the 20th Century. A Global Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weber, Max. 1988a. “Politik als Beruf.” In Gesammelte Politische Schriften, edited by Johannes Winckelmann, 505–560. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr. Weber, Max. 1988b. “Die ‘Objektivität’ sozialwissenschaftlicher und sozialpolitischer Erkenntnis.” In Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, edited by Johannes Winckelmann, 146–214. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr. Weingart, Peter. 2001. Die Stunde der Wahrheit? Vom Verhältnis der Wissenschaft zur Politik, Wirtschaft und Medien in der Wissensgesellschaft. Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft. Wiesner, Claudia et al. 2019. “Rethinking Politicisation.” Contemporary Political Theory 19:248–281. Wolin, Sheldon S. 2008. Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Yeginsu, Ceylan. “U.K.  Appoints a Minister for Loneliness.” New York Times, January 17. Accessed January 17, 2018. https://www.nytimes. com/2018/01/17/world/europe/uk-­britain-­loneliness.html. Zürn, Michael. 2019. “Politicisation compared: at national, European, and global levels.” Journal of European Public Policy 26:977–995. Zürn, Michael. 2016. “Opening up Europe: Next Steps in Politicisation Research.” West European Politics 39:164–182. Zürn, Michael. 2013. “Politisierung als Konzept der Internationalen Beziehungen.” In Die Politisierung der Weltpolitik: Umkämpfte internationale Institutionen, edited by Michael Zürn and Matthias Ecker-Ehrhardt, 7–35. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Zürn, Michael. 1998. Regieren jenseits des Nationalstaates: Globalisierung und Denationalisierung als Chance. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp.

CHAPTER 4

Parliamentarisation as Politicisation Kari Palonen

4.1   Politics and Parliament as Activities In this chapter, I understand by politics any contingent and controversial human activity (see also Chaps. 2 and 3 in this book). Not only such issues as naming streets but also the individual lifestyle choices, such as never wanting to learn car driving or boycotting flights, can be understood as thoroughly political. They are political in the elementary sense of being contingent, that they could have been otherwise, and the political quality is increased when they are regarded as controversial. The ‘personal is political’ thesis is held to a higher standard for such acts as objecting to car driving than to the contrary in a context in which car driving is a norm. In Hirschmanian’s (1970) terms, the conformist acts can be seen as signs of ‘loyalty’, in rhetorical terms as acclamations to the conventions, whereas the refusal marks in this case both a voice and an exit. From this perspective, all contingent actions have a political aspect,

K. Palonen (*) Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 C. Wiesner (ed.), Rethinking Politicisation in Politics, Sociology and International Relations, Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54545-1_4

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and when the actors themselves recognise, this marks their political literacy, whereas disputing the political aspect rather refers to the lack of such literacy. From this perspective, politics merely exist because of the acts of politicisation. I have sketched a four-fold politics-typology, in which politicisation is one aspect of politics, which marks a phenomenon or a question as political, making it visible that an action is contingent and controversial. According to my old scheme (see Palonen 2003), those moves of politicisation that get legitimised within an audience constitute a polity. The polity already contains chances for doing politics, for politicking, which must, however, be used by the actors to one way or another. Politicisation of the existing polity opens up new chances for politicking. The fourth English noun, policy, refers to a type of politicking that contains a definite direction or line in coordinating different actions. This perspective, inspired by Max Weber (1919), is purely formal, independently of the polity levels, which should be taken into consideration, and at the same time are entirely historical, in distinguishing between successive waves of politicisation and corresponding chances to act in the other aspects of politics. What has once been politicised cannot be simply taken back, but the chances of a politicising move might be exhausted, superseded by other moves or reactivated in a new context. This explication of the typology enables us to discuss how parliamentarisation has to be understood as a distinct version of politicisation that differs from others in its procedural and institutional character. The key move in parliamentarising a question is to put it to the agenda of the items to be debated in a parliament. The question can be one that has previously not been deliberated in that parliament: it has either been decided by the government and administration, or it has not been regarded as a possible subject to debate at all. In many lifestyle questions, parliamentarisation might also mark a deregulation of an existing norm, other issues, such as climate politics, may require stricter regulations. Still others, such as, for example, those related to the Internet may be such a novelty that it requires time as for the parliament to comprehend that it is a debatable question (see, e.g., Hofstädter 2016). Of course, it is also frequently controversial, what issues can and should enter to a parliament’s agenda, sometimes also the procedures how to get an item on the agenda. In this sense, politicisation through parliamentarisation can in itself have several levels of debate. With parliament, I refer, in this chapter (as in Palonen 2014b, 2018), to an ideal type for a certain procedural and institutional way of acting

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politically. The parliamentary way of politicising, acting and thinking forms a Gedankenbild, as Weber writes (1904, 190), as a mental image, as Hans Henrik Bruun translates it (Weber 2012, 124–25). It is an ideal type that one-sidedly accentuates and intensifies the political way of thinking. The parliamentary way of proceeding politically transcends the given polity: ‘parliament’ is not primarily a parliament ‘of’ a unit, such as the nation state, but concerns any polity level, from city councils to the worldwide institutions. The parliamentary style of politicisation can be given at least five conceptually interrelated but historically different rhetorical topoi, regularly thematised ways of doing that. I shall give a short exposition of each of them (discussed in detail in my Parliamentary Thinking, 2018). . parliamentary government acting in the presence of adversaries; 1 2. dissensus procedure as a guarantee for the opposing points of view; 3. debate pro et contra as the criterion of parliamentary speaking; 4. freedom of members of parliament from dependence arbitrary powers; and 5. parliamentary time as a subtext of politics. The agenda-setting criterion that connects politicisation with parliamentarisation must be set in relation to the major criteria of the parliamentary ideal type. In other words, the political weight of the agenda-setting in an assembly varies according to the degree of parliamentarisation on the constitutive criteria for doing politics in a parliamentary way. Perhaps we could speak of ‘parliamenting’ to summarise this type of activities. 4.1.1  Politicisation Through Parliamentary Government The five aspects of parliamentarisation represent different facets of the contingent and controversial. The parliamentary power in agenda-setting is a historical achievement. The first assemblies called parliaments in the thirteenth century were merely advisory or consultative meetings at the service of the monarchs (or republics in independent Italian cities). The parliamentarisation of government or the rise of parliamentarism as a type of political regime has been a long struggle, including issues such as the regularity of the institution, the length of parliamentary sitting time and the ‘power of the purse’ (to make the finances of the court dependent on the parliament). A historically decisive move has been to make the

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government responsible to the parliament, the obligation of the government to resign if it has lost the support of the parliamentary majority (on the origins of this in Samuel Sandys’ motion in 1741 see Turkka 2007), a principle that was finally accepted in Westminster 1835 and has been followed elsewhere as the minimal criterion of a parliamentary government. Max Weber insists that parliaments form a counterforce to the everyday rule of bureaucracy: they are ‘Vertretungen der durch die Mittel der Bürokratie Beherrschten’, as he formulates in his pamphlet Parlament und Regierung im neugeordneten Deutschland (Weber 1918, 226). For him, parliaments offer a major counterweight to the overwhelming tendency of the time towards bureaucratisation (see ibid., 222–223). This control aspect of parliamentarism is as relevant today than in Weber’s time. With Weber, it is important to insist that parliaments—especially through their committees—can control not only the ministry but also the bureaucratic apparatus of the government (ibid., 235–248). Weber’s view on parliaments as a counterforce means that they are not a part of the state apparatus but on the side of those subjected to the everyday rule of bureaucracy (ibid., 212). His point is that in the daily control of government and bureaucracy, parliamentarians are more competent and professional than citizens’ activities and movements. This perspective is in strong contrast to the ‘governance’ thinkers, who use citizens’ activities to make bureaucracies more flexible and thus weaken the parliaments. Bagehot’s (1867, 122–38) and Weber’s (1918, 227) point on not only electing ministers among the MPs but also letting them to stay on as members of parliament when ministers strengthens both the control of the bureaucracy and the parliamentary government (for the eighteenth-­ century origins of this practice, see Selinger 2019). The parliamentary opposition forms the classical medium of parliamentary control of government, recognised de facto in Westminster during the Walpole era in the 1730s (see Kluxen 1956; Skinner 1974) and recognised as the official opposition in 1824. When no opposition is recognised, the assembly in question does not deserve the title of parliament, at most it can be a pseudo or façade parliament. The institutionalisation of the opposition, reservation time for its parliamentary initiatives, creating parliamentary resources to its control of government as well as holding free and fair elections through which the opposition can replace the incumbent government are the most obvious resources. However, the government versus opposition divide and the one between party factions are not the only forms of adversity in parliament.

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In accordance with the Westminster tradition, there exists a further divide, namely the one between frontbenchers and backbenchers across parties, for whom there are specific occasions to initiate debates (see Griffith and Ryle 2003). Recent studies emphasise how the Westminster parliament has since the 1970s regained control over the government, including institutionalising the powers of backbenchers (see Evans 2017; Wright 2012; Flynn 2012). In the post-war political science, the powers of parliaments have been closely connected to the parliamentary government (see, e.g., Marschall 2005). With this aspect, the judgements have been frequently pessimistic, and, for example, Bruce Lenman (1992) has written a book entitled The Eclipse of the Parliament (1992), and especially in France, the de-­ parliamentarising tendencies gained a new dimension in the Fifth Republic (see Roussellier 2015). Still, parliaments have not been powerless, and moves of politicisation through parliamentarisation can be made visible, when other than the governmental aspect of parliamentary politics will be thematised. 4.1.2  Proceduralisation as Politicisation When I connected politicisation with agenda-setting, this refers to the parliamentary proceduralism as a distinct version of politicisation of the questions. The question of parliamentary procedure hardly appears in the public debates and it has been frequently denounced, especially by populists of different persuasion, as a form of formalism. It also requires a learning process to understand that the procedure is the main aspect distinguishing the parliamentary way of acting and thinking politically from others. The procedural style of parliamentary politics is historically linked to the rhetorical principle of in utramque partem disputare (see e.g. Skinner 1996; Peltonen 2013). A distinct parliamentary procedure has been documented in the English parliament in special commentaries written by parliament’s members or officials (clerks) from the second half of the sixteenth century onwards. They were written in connection with actual debates and decisions forming precedents when it comes to exercising parliamentary control over the government. In the nineteenth century, the new aspect of self-restriction of the parliament emerged; this was done in order to give leeway to the government and not to paralyse the parliament itself,

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which was also added to the commentaries (as for the details, please consult the discussions in Palonen 2014b). The parliamentary form of procedure not only regulates debates but also invites members to initiate new ones by considering the items on the agenda from a perspective that obliges the members to reconsider their strengths and weaknesses. No government can consider all the political consequences of the proposed motion, and every motion depends, like every alleged ‘fact’, on underlying perspectives. The parliamentary procedure invites a politicisation of questions on the agenda by encouraging parliamentarians to undertake thought experiments. The members shall invent and construct perspectives, from which the claimed strengths of a motion could be devaluated and the alleged weaknesses of the alternative views are confronted with amendments that offer new perspectives to the motion. The Canadian Rhetoric Professor James De Mille formulated the principle of parliamentary way of proceeding as follows: ‘The aim of parliamentary debate is to investigate the subject from many points of view which are presented from two contrary sides. In no other way can a subject be so exhaustively considered’ (De Mille 1878, 473). In other words, the actual presence of a debate is made intelligible by the procedural principle of parliamentary dissensus: no question can be properly understood without considering it from opposite points of view. In this sense, politicisation through procedure consists in extending the range of alternatives to a question on the agenda; this is particularly important when confronted with government proposals that seek to correspond common sense or are otherwise hardly disputable. I have called such a vision parliamentary theory of knowledge. Max Weber’s revision of the concept of ‘objectivity’ into a procedure of debating the knowledge claims relies on such an assumption (1904, see Palonen 2010, 2017). Quentin Skinner’s recommendation to read Hobbes’s Leviathan or any other classical study as if it were a speech in parliament, as a contribution to debate, in which a judgement of other present or possible views are as important, equally presupposes this parliamentary view of rhetorical knowledge (see Skinner 2008). As a model for knowledge, the parliamentary way of acting and thinking can also serve as a critique of the conventional trust on the ex cathedra authority in academia. It is equally important to control the views of experts and of specialists in bureaucracies and other institutions relevant for the everyday life instead of subscribing to them by acclamation (see Weber 1918, 235–248). Here

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is also a link between parliament and democracy, if the latter is based on the formal equality in debate and not as a rule of opinions not subjected to debate. 4.1.3  Parliamentary Rhetoric as Politicisation A debate is a parliamentary practice that is expected to take place on every politically important question that is on the agenda. Parliament operates with the deliberative genre rhetoric, that is, its basic mode of operation is the debate pro et contra, weighing the strengths and weaknesses of a motion on the agenda. This principle can be found in early tracts on Westminster procedure, and Markku Peltonen (2013, 139) has found that it was established as a principle of the House of Commons in 1593. Parliamentary politics is opposed to the epideictic genre of acclamation; the forensic genre of jurisdiction about past events and even the diplomatic genre of negotiation between parties are procedurally subordinated to it (see Weber 1917). The rhetorical novelty of parliamentary politics, as compared with classical oratory, lies in shifting the unit of deliberation from single speeches to debate. Parliamentary speeches à la Westminster are not the prepared set pieces but interventions to debate. They are always referring to the item on the agenda and to the moves regarding what to do with an item. The motions also include the resolution on what the parliament should decide upon. The speeches respond or refer to previous speeches in one way or another or provoke a new turn in the debate, for example, by moving an amendment or an adjournment (see Palonen 2016). Thus, the criteria of parliamentary speeches are thus not aesthetic but political, and a major politicisation move would consist of revising either the rules of procedure or the rhetorical practices to a way that excludes reading from paper or declaration avoiding to make reference to the matter on the agenda. Debate is, accordingly, the main parliamentary modus of acting politically. However, the parliamentary debate is no single event but consists of multiple rounds in plenary and committee sittings. Gilbert Campion, later a Clerk of the House of Commons, put it as follows: ‘Motion, Question and Decision are all parts of a process that may be called the elementary form of debate’ (Campion 1958, 143). Debate in the parliamentary sense contains all the phases that an item is dealt with on the parliamentary agenda, including the final vote. A debate pro et contra, includes the

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possibility of amendments, the main medium to present political alternatives in Westminster-style parliaments. An item on the agenda is ‘present’ in parliament so far as it remains under debate and is not finally resolved. The weight of debate illustrates the degree of politicisation of an issue. When the motions include a resolution to be voted on, a parliamentary-­ style debate is never ‘empty talk’, and an obstructive use of the freedom of speech can be regarded as ‘unparliamentary’. The weight of debate cannot, however, be measured by the number of members who change their vote during the debate rounds, as the Habermasians tend to claim (see Steiner et al. 2005). The value of debate can be judged by such criteria as making members to reconsider questions without necessarily changing their vote, opening up new topics to the agenda as well as advancing members’ careers as competent parliamentary debaters. The link between procedure and rhetoric can be illustrated with a scheme of ancient and renaissance rhetoric, called paradiastole, which Quentin Skinner has rehabilitated. It refers to a set of rhetorical moves, by which motions on the parliamentary agenda can be devaluated, revaluated or neutralised (see Skinner 1996). As already William Georg Hamilton saw in his maxims from the eighteenth century (see Hamilton 1927), paradiastolic re- and devaluations as well as neutralisations of concepts not only serve as a common strategy for parliamentary oppositions and backbenchers. They equally illustrate how the parliamentary procedure offers a historical model for a thorough understanding of question by means of confronting opposed points of view. 4.1.4  Parliamentary Freedom as Politicisation Another topos of parliamentary style of politics lies in members’ freedom from dependence, in the sense of the ‘neo-Roman’ concept of liberty, reactivated by Skinner (1998, 2006). The parliamentarians’ freedom has four classical aspects: free speech, free mandate, freedom from arrest (or parliamentary immunity) as well as free and fair elections. Common to all of them is the recognition that an MP (member of parliament) is a free person, not in potestate domini, as slaves and serfs in the Roman law or their analogies in the modern world. Parliamentary elections can, as Weber (1917) well understood, hardly be organised otherwise than on the basis of parties. A membership in parliamentary fraction is a condition for certain parliamentary chances, such as committee membership, and a certain party and coalition discipline is a

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legitimate practical device. Nonetheless, the parliament relies on the principle that members think, act and vote as individuals and encourages their initiatives, instead of merely acclaiming to party or government motions. Parliamentary politics thus assumes that individual members are free in their initiatives and motions, speeches and votes, and this freedom can be regarded as a condition of the respect for the parliament itself and other members. Edmund Burke (1774) with his claim that parliament is ‘a deliberative assembly’ and ‘not a congress of ambassadors’ contested the dependence of members on their constituency. For Karl Kautsky (1911), on the contrary, a Social Democratic MP is ‘not a free man’ but ‘a delegate [Beauftragter] of his party’, a party-based quasi-mandate. Close to it comes Gerhard Leibholz’s (1951) doctrine on the party state (Parteienstaat). Such claims for dependence deny the individual member as constituent unit in parliamentary politics and downplay the value of debating between members, in favour of prefabricated speeches, subordinated to party or coalition discipline in the votes. The parliamentary form of politicisation affirms the priority of the freedom of members over parties, voters, lobbyists and so on. The individual MP’s right to parliamentary initiative is a major sign of reliance on the political creativity of members as independent politicians and not as voting machines of the party apparatus. The cross-party initiatives of backbenchers rely on this creativity (see Flynn 2012, in particular his Ten Commandments for Backbenchers). Free speech and free mandate are today the most important guarantees of the freedom of the parliamentarians. Still also the parliamentary immunity of members, both in the legal sense that its removal requires the consent of the parliament and a measure of protection towards their own parties, has retained its value. The principle of free and fair elections has even gained new importance, for example, regarding the financial fair play between the candidates, the presuppositions that parliamentarians are full-­ time politicians, including the requirement of members to declare their revenues from outside the parliament. 4.1.5  Parliamentary Politicisation of Time A major topos of parliamentary politicisation concerns the politics of time. Parliamentary politics not only happens in time but also operates with time as a key medium of doing politics itself. From early on, it has been understood not only that parliamentary politics both requires sufficient

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time, and time is always scarce in parliament, but also that parliamentary moves themselves operate with time, including aspects of past, present and future. Forms of politicisation can be found in the accentuation of temporal aspects in politics through debating. As opposed to the ideals of speed and efficiency in legislation, the parliamentary style of politics is ready to accept a certain slowness as the price of thoroughness, in which every step contains a different perspective on the debate, each which in principle contains new type of chances to revise the judgements on strengths and weakness of the motion on the agenda. The different stages (three readings), the interplay between plenary and committee debates, the formulation of political issues to separate, successive and irreversible items on the agenda, the different legitimate (amendments, adjournments, opening questions of order, replies) and tolerated (interjections from the floor, recorded in minutes) interruptions require a political judgement to deal with time. The scarcity of time was radicalised with parliamentarisation of government and democratisation of the parliament’s membership in the nineteenth century. The politics of time shall prevent the paralysis of parliament due to misuse of time through obstruction, but still provide sufficient occasions for debates both in the plenum and in committees. The fair distribution of parliamentary time among the items on the agenda and between members remains a major problem in today’s parliaments. Amendments are the key procedural instrument by which parliament practises the politics of time by raising alternatives and debating on their acceptability. In line with the Westminster tradition, politics does concern not so much accepting or rejecting a motion as moving an amendment to it, which claims to alter its content more or less radically. Moving an amendment interrupts the ongoing debate (present), offers a chance to reappraise the motion on the agenda (past) and opens up a new debate on the strengths and weaknesses of the amendment as compared to the original motion (future). Analogous is the situation with the adjournments, which are not necessarily postponements of the debate, but provide occasions for the member to avoid taking immediate stand to the motion. The highly complex parliamentary practice of playing with time combines initiative and reply, debate and vote, progression with the possibility of abrupt termination of debate, moving through several stages with different rules and regular possibilities for interruption as well as a balanced judgement between spending and saving time. The sensitivity as to time is an aspect of politicisation that renders contingency visible and elevates

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time into a medium of controversy. This politicisation is closely linked to the recommendation to the members to expand their parliamentary literacy.

4.2   Parliamentarisation of Existing Assemblies The name of parlamentum or parliamentum was derived from the Italian parlare or the French parler. These ‘parliaments’ were consultative or advisory assemblies of selected notables, convoked by the monarch at different places and irregular intervals. The shift from an occasional event to a regular institution (as the case was with the Provisions of Oxford, 1265) in England, the tighter intervals between the meetings (the first Triennial Act of 1641) prevented the monarch from not ruling without parliament for longer than three years. After the Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689 the English parliament has met annually, increasing its meeting frequency with the growing agenda and assuming that a parliament exists also when it has been dissolved refer to the temporal aspects of politicisation. A spatial aspect lies in the specific parliament buildings, created for that purpose, which is also a sign of politicisation. Obviously, the broadening of the membership from the nobility to the ‘commons’, later to the universalisation of the suffrage has been decisive for the politicising of parliament and parliamentarising politics. Nonetheless, the link of parliamentarisation and politicisation should not be understood as a necessary mechanism. Some changes, such as the radical prolonging of the parliament’s agenda and the increasing talkativeness of the members, related to the growth of the local press reporting on the parliament, justified the self-restriction of the parliament with measures to limit the length of the speeches and the occasions to debate. Particularly, the obstruction campaign of a few Irish members in Westminster in the 1870s and 1880s tended to paralyse the parliament and raised doubts about the parliamentary way of doing politics (see Redlich 1905, on Gladstone’s procedural reform debates in 1882 see also Palonen 2014b). The Westminster model and its formalisation into a parliamentary ideal type for doing politics has offered resources for politicisation of assemblies originally without real political powers. This, for instance, led to changes of the Oxford and Cambridge Unions—student ‘debating societies’—to follow the parliamentary rules in both their public meetings and their internal organisation (see Haapala 2016).

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Another case is the Finnish estate diet, reconvened by the Czar Alexander II in 1863, in which several, mainly Liberal members as well as their press closely followed parliamentarisation of politics in Western Europe and experienced with various means of applying it to the Finnish Diet. They did that without formally challenging either the anachronistic estate system or the dependence on the Russian empire by experimenting with practices circumventing them, such as the joint meeting of the four estates (see Pekonen 2014). The Polish Sejm under the Soviet rule had retained some of the parliamentary procedures and practices from the republic founded after the World War I.  When the occasion arose, it could be used as if the Sejm would have been a parliament proper (see Ornatowski 2010; Ilie and Ornatowski 2016). The last, freely elected Volkskammer in East Germany also tried to learn to act as a proper parliament, but the members were political amateurs and the limits to act parliamentarily became obvious (see Tüffers 2016). These examples refer to the experience that politicisation through parliamentarisation might have at least some chances when departing from existing assemblies and members who have some practical competence as well as knowledge of the broader parliamentary principles and their uses in other contexts. Frequent but less successful have been attempts to exercise parliamentarisation from above, that is, the creation of parliament as a key part of the regime, although they previously have either not existed or merely been ‘rubber stamps’, as the formula goes. In this respect, we can mention the marginalisation of the parliament in the Baltic countries in the thirties or the difficult experiences of parliamentary powers in the Third World (for Indonesia see Adiputri 2015).

4.3   Europeanisation as Politicisation A current example of parliamentary politicisation is the European Parliament. The creation of international organisations from the Red Cross and World Postal Union to Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) was a major political change in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The post-war formations of the League of Nations and United Nations were, of course, the most universal and thematically general among them. Within the IPU, early plans both for a world parliament and parliamentary assemblies for the League and other international organisations were constantly on the agenda (see Kissling 2006).

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In Western Europe, after World War II (WWII), three major institutions were created: the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) with France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxemburg, the West European Union (Britain in addition to the six) and the Council of Europe (including most of the West European states). All of them marked a politicisation in the sense of adding a new polity level to the existing ones and requiring, consequently, to reconsider the national and subnational polities from the perspective of Europeanisation. All these institutions were connected to a parliamentary assembly. In the Council of Europe, fierce battles were conducted regarding their internal forms between the so-called unionists retaining their diplomatic and intergovernmental character and federalists, who insisted on the extension of parliamentary powers. Although parliamentarians from the member states participated in the Consultative Assembly, the powers as well as the intensity of the Assembly remained limited (see Haapala and Häkkinen 2017). In rhetorical terms, the opposition lies between the diplomatic negotiation between given partners on the terms of agreement and the parliamentary deliberation over political alternatives. The ECSC was the only one of these institutions that included supranational aspects transcending the level of international organisations. Still, unlike the struggle within the Council of Europe, the debate was not directly between parliamentary and diplomatic ways of proceeding, but consisted in the creation of a High Authority, which combined the aspects of a quasi-government as well as an office of experts and specialists.

4.4   The Report of Pierre Wigny The discussion of plans for parliamentarisation of the European Communities from 1957 to 1960 deals with both proposals for the strengthening of parliament and its relationships to European integration. After signing the Treaty of Rome in 1957, in which the European Community of Coal and Steel (ECSC) was integrated with the European Economic Community (EEC) and the Euratom to form the European Communities, the Belgian Christian Democrat lawyer and member of the Common Assembly, Pierre Wigny wrote a report, L’Assemblée parlementaire dans l’Europe des Six (1958). The Common Assembly of the ECSC accepted the report in February 1958. Its focus lies in the discussion of the transition from the Common Assembly to the European Parliamentary

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Assembly, scheduled in the Rome Treaty. Many of the key dimensions of the European integration in terms of ‘politicisation through parliamentarisation’, which have been debated later (see e.g. Tiilikainen and Wiesner 2016), were already indicated in this report. Wigny’s report resembles classical commentaries on parliamentary procedure, which includes the works of such authors as John Hatsell (1779–1996), Jeremy Bentham (1791/1843), Thomas Erskine May (editions from 1844 to 1883) or Gilbert Campion (editions from 1929 to 1958) or Eugène Pierre (editions from 1893 to 1924) in France. (see Palonen 2014b) His small commentary of the 1950 and 1957 treaties plays a major role in the documentary European Parliament 50 years ago (2008). Following the model of the classical procedural commentaries, Wigny positions the European treaties politically into the tradition of parliamentary laws and practices, to droit parlementaire, as the French term goes. Wigny’s central thesis is a strong political continuity from the Common Assembly to the European Parliamentary Assembly. With regard to their political realities: ‘Une Assemblée se définit en droit par les textes qui la fondent mais se caractérise en fait par sa composition et ses pouvoirs. A ce point de vue, rien n’est changé ou plutôt tout est confirmé et renforcé’. (Wigny 1958, 11) In the Common Assembly, the national delegations have been less important than ideological groups (ibid., 12). Despite the minimalist formulation of the Paris Treaty, the Common Assembly has formed a permanent parliamentary control of the politics of the ECSC (ibid., 13). The Assembly has, for example, developed a control a priori, without waiting for the initiative of the High Authority and ‘implied powers’ of institutions in financial matters (ibid., 14). The third and most important aspect of unwritten practices concerns the parliamentary rules: ‘cet ensemble de règles qui constitue le droit commun des Assemblées parlementaires dans les six pays membres et généralement de toute Assemblée parlementaire’ (ibid., 14–15). The members of the Common Assembly, elected among the parliamentarians of member countries, have treated the Common Assembly like another parliament that should follow well-known parliamentary rules in its mode of proceeding. The Assembly has in particular established its permanent committees, while the Treaty remains silent on them (ibid., 15). In other words, Wigny well understood that an assembly of experienced parliamentarians interested in advancing the European integration only accepts ordinary parliamentary ways of proceeding. Its members have

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not seen themselves as ‘delegates of their parties’, although party groups were formed, but as independent parliamentarians. Even if the Treaties guarantee only the parliamentary immunity of the members (part III, articles 7 to 9 of the Treaty of Paris), they took free speech and free mandate for granted, together with the procedural independence of electing their chairs and deciding upon their rules of procedure. The Common Assembly has been novateur in European politics in extending the parliamentary style of doing politics at a supranational level; ‘Il crée une autorité européenne dont les pouvoirs sont limités mais réels; il y fait démocratiquement participer les représentants des peuples des États members’ (Wigny 1958, 19). The assembly has participated in the key decisions of the ECSC: ‘elle participe effectivement à une pouvoir qui a pour objet les grandes décisions et non les modalités d’exécution’ (ibid.). The significance of juridical constructions depends ultimately on what the politicians give to them (ibid., 31). Ordinary parliaments have the powers over legislation, finances and control of the government. When, according to the Treaty, first of them is lacking form the ECSC and the second very limited, the Common Assembly has concentrated all its powers to the control of the annual report of the High Authority, granted by the Treaty. Wigny emphasises how the Assembly has de facto gained a permanent control of most important political matters: En fait, l’Assemblée a rendu le contrôle continu par la multiplication des sessions, par la création de commissions permanentes, par l’utilisation à tout moment de la procédure de questions écrites. Le dialogue entre elle et la Haute Autorité n’est jamais interrompu. (ibid., 32)

The parliamentary principle has in general gained strength in practice, in the struggle with the court, the administration and government, before being confirmed in the constitutions. In line with this parliamentary tradition, Wigny sees that the Common Assembly has judged that it can do everything that it has not been explicitly forbidden. All policy areas up to the international relations have been dealt in the committees of the Assembly. It has also required extensive reports of all activities of the High Authority, including the budget. Resembling Weber’s view on parliamentary control of officials, Wigny writes:

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Elle vote des motions, des résolutions, elle recueille l’avis de spécialistes et envoie des enquêteurs sur place’, relying on its ‘moral authority’ (ibid., 32–33). The nomination of the President of the High Authority was judicially a matter of the member states, but the Assembly must be heard: ‘comment, politiquement, ne tiendraient-ils pas compte des indications de l’Assemblée supranationale devant laquelle l’Exécutif va rendre des comptes. (ibid., 34)

According to the Treaty of 1951, the Assembly did not have any powers over the Council of Ministers of the ECSC. Nonetheless, the Council members have come to listen the Assembly debates in Rome and have judged to needing cooperate with it (ibid., 35–36). Even if the Treaty limited the powers of the Assembly to the report of the High Authority, Wigny quotes Jean Monnet, the first president of the High Authority, appreciating the Assembly’s opinions on the future policy before (ibid., 37). The ECSC also goes beyond the practice of international law in exercising constituent power in the revision of the Treaty itself, with other institutions of the Union but without the intervention of the member states (ibid., 41–43). Writing ahead of the sittings of the new European Parliamentary Assembly (EPA), Wigny analyses its expected activities in relation to both the new treaty and the experiences of the Common Assembly. He emphasises that the EPA should not sacrifice the de facto achievement of the Common Assembly (1958, 49). In the Paris Treaty, the German wording for the possibility to issue a vote of no confidence to the High Authority was only auf Grund des Berichtes; the Rome Treaty uses the formula wegen der Tätigkeit der Kommission (Article 144), that is, the entire policy of the European Commission can be used as the basis of no confidence. This is in line with the parliamentary tradition of affirmation of powers from below. When the Europeanisation concerns the ‘marché commun ou de grandes industries de base’ (Wigny 1958, 51), it requires a parliamentary-­ style politicisation of the institutions, as opposed to their administrative or diplomatic character. The connection between parliamentarisation and Europeanisation concerns also the Council of Ministers. In international organisations, the state delegates act with an imperative mandate and a veto power over the decisions. The European Communities are, in contrast, independent of the nominating member states: ‘ils n’ont pas d’instructions à recevoir ni

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de comptes à rendre’, and even in the Council of Ministers, the decisions are made with a majority vote, (ibid., 52), including the ‘weighted majority’ (ibid., 53). Le Conseil n’est pas la réunion permanente de délégués gouvernementaux qui confrontent les politiques nationales et cherchent à les concilier. Il est un organe communautaire. Ce n’est pas le ‘Conseil des Ministres’ mais un ‘Conseil de Ministres’. (ibid.)

The Council is no intergovernmental ‘congress of ambassadors’ à la Edmund Burke’s parody of dangers for a parliament (1774). The difference between ‘de’ and ‘des’ in French marks that it is a place for the ministerial deliberations on the policy of the EEC: ‘le devoir de toutes les institutions est de réaliser les objectifs communautaires dans le cadre de leurs attributions respectives et dans l’intérêt commun’ (Wigny 1958, 53). The decisions of the Council are not subject to ratification by national parliaments but presuppose cooperation with the Commission which is under the control of the Parliamentary Assembly (ibid., 54). According to the Rome Treaty, the Commission exercises the monopoly of initiative, but the Council makes the decisions, after a transition period by the majority vote (ibid., 59, 63–64). Wigny sees also a major point: the commissioners are full-time politicians on behalf of the EEC, and the ministers remain in the cabinet of their own countries, which makes it difficult for them to overthrow the Commission’s proposals (ibid., 64). This double executive appears to weaken the Parliamentary Assembly, which in turn can only control the Commission. The extension of the powers to control the commission concern also the finances, including the elaboration of the budget, and politically, the control also reaches the Council: Un budget est l’expression comptable d’une politique. Si les amendements de l’Assemblée qui en fait constituent une proposition d’orientation politique ne sont pas maintenus, le Conseil de Ministres se sentira inévitablement tenu de s’en expliquer avec les parlementaires et, par-dessus leurs têtes, devant l’opinion publique. (ibid., 66)

According to Article 138, the powers of the Parliamentary Assembly concern ‘deliberation and control’, and Article 18 makes the consultation of the Assembly obligatory. Wigny sees here the recognition of a

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participation in the legislative power: ‘La collaboration nécessaire de l’Assemblée est imposée dans des hypothèses qui presque toutes concernent l’élaboration de cette législation européenne’ (ibid., 67). Additionally, the Parliamentary Assembly plays a part in the constitutive power of treaty revision (ibid., 68, see also 81–84). After the enactment of the Treaty of Rome, the member state parliaments lost parts of their powers. Wigny sees here a danger of the new communities (ibid., 73). The Treaty does not yet require from member state parliaments any committees of European affairs, to prepare and to ratify the Community-level decision, and for this reason, the strengthening of the EPA is the major tool of ‘democratic control’. In this respect, Wigny emphasises the reliance on parliamentary procedures and practices, following the policy of the Common Assembly (ibid., 74–75). The institutionalisation of political groups, financed by the Assembly, further strengthens the powers of the Commission and the Council, as do the committees as well as the parliamentary staff of the EPA (ibid., 76–77). The very presence of a parliamentary assembly was an important part of the ECSC, and continuity was assumed to exist to the European Communities after the Rome Treaty. Pierre Wigny regards this from a wider perspective of parliamentary culture, including procedure and debate as well as the extension of parliamentary time through the committees. The possibility of the vote of no confidence was the juridical basis for his political analyses of the relationship between the governmental and administrative powers of the parliament, and he views that already in the ECSC has extended the parliamentary-style politics to a supranational level. All this presupposes that the politicians participating in the ‘governmental’ institutions adopt a parliamentary perspective to their own activities, in the line of the Bagehotian cabinet government (1867, 11–12). Wigny remained confident about the parliament’s changes in this constellation: ‘L’Assemblée aurait tort de se laisser travailler par un complexe d’infériorité ou de faire preuve d’intransigeance. Comme dans tout régime parlementaire, on attend d’elle qu’elle collabore’ (Wigny 1958, 84–85). Of this, no guarantee existed, and the Gaullist reaction consisted in devaluating the entire parliamentary style of doing politics through the manner of deliberating pro et contra and relied instead on the rhetoric of acclamation in the dual sense of presidentialism and expert powers (see e.g. Tulli 2017).

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4.5   Conclusion More than 60 years after Wigny’s report has not lost its actuality with regard to the chances for politicisation of European Union (EU) politics. In general terms, it underscores the weight of parliamentary legitimacy as well as the strengths of the parliamentary modes of proceeding for any politics. Conversely, the main reason to oppose parliamentary powers in the context of European integration has been just the ‘politicisation’ that it involves, making the political alternatives visible and submitting them to time-consuming controversies. All that should, on the contrary, be understood as the main strength of the parliamentary style of politics, which should be given a full strength in the politics of the European Union. The report of Pierre Wigny offers us an excellent illustration of an ‘innovative ideologist’s’ rhetoric to extend the range of application of parliamentary principles (see Skinner 1974, 1979). He appeals to principles which are already accepted in certain contexts and might look clearly relevant for the item currently debated. This concerns how the regulating treaties can be interpreted regarding the possibility of the vote of confidence. In a wider sense, he insists that the Common Assembly of the ECSC, composed of experienced parliamentarians, as well as the EPA do not have a raison d’être without following the rules and practices of proper parliaments, for example, in setting up committees or exercising the control of the other ‘European’ institutions. He goes a step further when moving politics to the European level and regards that the powers of bureaucrats or that of ministers beyond the parliamentary control would be a fatal mistake. The politicisation by opening a supranational playground, although limited in scope, could only be fully legitimate—with a political leadership of the Commission—subject to efficient parliamentary control. For the conceptual history of politicisation, parliamentary history offers rich resources, in both successful and unsuccessful examples. The early history of the post-war European integration contains a number of interesting proposals and thought experiments for politicisation with parliamentary means. Pierre Wigny’s report can be regarded as one of the many cases of the ‘buried intellectual treasure’ that the parliamentary and politicisation scholars could bring ‘back to the surface’ (Skinner 1998, 112).

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SECTION II

Politicisation, Populism and (Post-)Democracy

CHAPTER 5

Democracy, Post-democracy and What Came After Meike Schmidt-Gleim

5.1   Introduction This chapter discusses the effects of politicisation on democracy and a specific kind of politicisation, the one via social movements. The crisis of Western liberal representative democracy has been widely expressed in the last years. At the same time, however, citizen participatory political dispositives (such as referenda or popular vote) and political activities from citizens have multiplied protests (anti-elite, anti-Islam/-immigrant), popular vote practices (referenda), petitions, social media mobilisations, and so on. All of these inherently democratic practices of public mobilisation have seen an increased popularity. So how can it be explained that democracy seems to show signs of crisis at the same time? In the past, protests and social movements have been fruitful for democracy. Hence, the diversification of forms of citizen participation and the increase of protest could be interpreted as a sign of health for democracy. Yet, the new challenges

M. Schmidt-Gleim (*) Fulda University of Applied Sciences, Bruxelles, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 C. Wiesner (ed.), Rethinking Politicisation in Politics, Sociology and International Relations, Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54545-1_5

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reveal a more complex relationship between protest, citizen participation and democracy and some tend to have rather deteriorating than reviving effects on democracy. The chapter argues that the observed transformation of the relation between political mobilisation, protest and other citizen activities and democracy from a fruitful to a deteriorating one can be clarified in a confrontation between two concepts: Politicisation and the political, that is, that only political forms of protest in which politicisation and the emergence of the political coincide have democratising effects. Citizen protest and mobilisation can be defined as politicisation even though in a mainstream understanding they are situated on the margins or, or even outside, the political system in an Eastonian understanding. The concept of politicisation is contested (see the discussion in this book, especially in Chaps. 2, 8, 9 and 11). A mainstream definition oriented towards quantitative measurement defines politicisation in terms of increasing salience, actor involvement and polarisation (see Chap. 9 in this book; De Wilde et al. 2016; Rauh 2019; Hutter et al. 2019). This means politicisation is a category that can be measured in its intensity and via the quantity of appearance. I would now propose to translate these categories with regard to a public and a polemic aspect of politics. I suggest to regard politicisation as bringing an issue into the public sphere, assembling citizens and bringing antagonisms to the fore. This turns the focus from visibility and involvement to the act itself. Politicisation then can be defined as an action. This also means that politicising actions can take place before a new topic reaches a point of salience that can be quantitatively measured and that they can take place outside the political system such as through citizen protest. I further suggest to take in account the effects that politicisation has on democracy (see also Wiesner 2020; Chap. 2 in this book). Regarding the latter, I claim that politicisation per se is neither good nor bad for democracy. The outcome of politicisation is unpredictable as it can as much conclude in democratisation processes as it can lead to new autocratic institutions. The democratic or undemocratic character of specific forms of politicisation remains thus obscured by an approach that simply measures politicisation in its above-mentioned definition. Thus, in order to analyse the democratic quality of specific forms of politicisation, one needs a second category that determines the kind of politicisation that is at stake. The category of the political can serve as this second category. The condition for a progressive or democratising outcome of politicisation depends on its capacity to bring the political to the

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fore, that is, a specific form of politicisation that will be defined in the following, whereas the absence of the political causes compromising effects on democracy. The following analysis therefore explores the development of citizen protests/activities and participatory tools in the horizon of the difference between politicisation and the political; it shows that not every form of politicisation triggers the political and explains why the absence of the political has a compromising impact on democracy. The chapter builds on an argument made by Jacques Rancière in the 1990s (see Democracy and Postdemocracy, Rancière 1997). The text conveys an elucidating understanding of the political. Furthermore, rereading the text 20 years after gives reason to think about how much the political landscape has changed since the text has been written. As a consequence, the essay by Rancière may serve as backdrop for the depiction of the development of politicisation in a historically comparative perspective. In the first part, this chapter begins with a resume of Rancière’s text before it discusses how representative democracy developed since his text has been published. In the second part, the chapter examines the specific form of politicisation that is democratic according to Rancière, that is, the meaning of the appearance of the political. In the third part, the chapter confronts the actual trends in different arenas of political action with the fundamental democratic form of politicisation, the appearance of the political. Finally, the chapter concludes comparing the different types of people who are  generated by  democratising and non-democratising politicisation.

5.2   A Brief Recital of Democratic Development or When Politicisation Was Still a Valid Indicator of Democratisation and De-democratisation In his text Democracy and Postdemocracy, Rancière distinguishes between formal and real democracy and claims that in the 1970s and 1980s, formal democracy was accompanied by sharp criticism, accusing liberal democratic institutions and procedures of democratic deficits. This criticism came along with a claim for ‘real’ democracy in order to challenge formal democracy and was embedded in the politicisation of civil society—the latter being interpreted as enactment of the public and the polemic aspect of politics. Civil rights movements since 1968 politicised issues by making them subjects of popular discussion, attracting media attention, assembling

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big crowds of people and spliting the society into partisan ­groups.The objectives of these civil rights movements had been further democratisation. The goal of questioning the present state of representative liberal democracy for its deficits was accompanied by a claim of an extension of rights. The politicisation of the civil society aimed at extending political representation to new individuals, new groups and new issues, such as the women’s rights movement, anti-discrimination, for instance, gay and lesbian movements, the environmental movement and so on (Rancière 1997; Chap. 2 in this book). Taking into account that these social movements have been citizen-­ driven and related to forms of participatory democracy and fundamental bottom-up processes outside political institutions presupposes a fundamental incompatibility with the formal institutions of liberal representative democracy (Rancière 1997), as they regularly contrasted the legal framework of political institutions. Yet, even in cases when these movements stood for a radical disapproval of the democratic institutions like in some of the squatting scenes or in cases of outspoken civil disobedience, their activities did not endanger democracy, but rather fuelled democratic aspects of the present system (Sichtermann and Sichtermann 2017). Despite an encounter that can be characterised rather as disruptive than as collaborative, these social movements had an inclusive effect on democratic representation. They were extending the scope and meaning of citizen rights (Merkel 2014), for instance, women’s rights, and led to an expansion of forms of political participation (Chap. 7 in this book). Thus, these practices of criticism did not put democracy at risk; on the contrary, they had their share in the democratic debate. Through challenging the present state of democracy, the democratic institutions had been fuelled, constantly renewing and adjusting its institutions and rights to historically changing representative demands (Rancière 1997). In conclusion, civil rights movements actively conducted politicising acts. And given their democratising effects, it seems at this state reasonable to deduct from the experience of the 1970s and 1980s that politicisation is fruitful for democracy. The same holds true for the subsequent depoliticising era. Rancière continues his argument with the observation that these critiques came to an end, when—with the fall of the Berlin Wall—representative democracy seemed to carry on an overwhelming victory over the totalitarian systems of Eastern Europe. Emphasised by the choir of the end of history, the unique status of the Western democratic systems seemed unquestionable,

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infallible and only to be copied by Eastern European countries (Zizek 1994, 133). The legitimation of this system did not have to be proven any longer, it had been proven by the failure of the opposing regimes. However, instead of triggering a higher identification of the people with their democratic institutions, a hitherto unknown indifference towards democracy and its institutions spread. In Germany, the terms ‘Politikverdrossenheit’ and ‘Politikmüdigkeit’ emerged in the media and the latter was selected the word of the year by the Duden in 1992. Rancière writes that criticism fell silent and democracy was henceforth left to its daily institutional practice. According to him, this development resulted in a new perception and configuration of democracy: From the moment that democracy remained unchallenged, democracy was equated with its institutional practice: the constitutional state and the rule of law (Rancière 1997, 96). Suspicious of this victory, he attributes the name Post-democracy to the institutionally smoothly working systems of liberal democratic states in the 1990s, which reduce democracy to free elections based on universal adult suffrage and the rule of law. Colin Crouch picked up this notion and published the book Post-­ democracy in 2004 in order to fill the notion with more detailed meaning emphasising on the intransparent deals between business and political elites. Like Rancière, he emphasises that the substantial institutions of parliamentary democracy are still in place and as such post-democratic regimes are fundamentally different from non-democratic regimes. However, the promise of democratic control embodied in these institutions is hardly guaranteed. Democratic decision-making has been replaced by non-­ transparent negotiations between the government and economic elites (Chap. 7 in this book). Crouch describes post-democracy as follows: ‘Under this model, while elections certainly exist and can change governments, public electoral debate is a tightly controlled spectacle, managed by rival teams of professionals … The mass of citizens plays a passive, quiescent, even apathetic part, responding only to the signals given them. Behind this spectacle of the electoral game politics is shaped in private by interaction between elected governments and elites, which overwhelmingly represent business interests (Crouch 2004, 4)’. The description of contemporary power constellations in politics can be read as a de-­ politicisation of politics, citizens are described as passive and governments as business players. The depoliticising effect is also pointed out by Urbinati; in her account, politics is replaced by an epistemic regime that searches for truth instead of staging conflict (Urbinati 2014, 2019).

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Since Rancière has published his text, political development has taken another twist: Whereas the narrow scope of political manoeuvres and the interwoven character of government and business relations continue to frame the political landscape, citizen apathy ceased. Since the end of the 1990s, we cannot say anymore that the system of representative liberal democracy remains uncriticised or unchallenged by its citizens (Chap. 7 in this book). Representative democracy is currently faced with diverse challenges on many different levels and sites of political action and dispositives; this concerns as much institutional practice as technical devices of representation and citizen-driven bottom-up action. The challenges range from street protest over social media mobilisations to the employment of means of direct democracy such as popular vote or referenda and reach up to challenges of liberal democratic institutions and entities from within governments and party organisation. Many of these new civic protests fit in line with past civil rights movements (the Occupy Wallstreet Movement and its claim of the 99%, the Indignados or 15  M movement in Spain, Women’s marches in America etc.) and the democratising effects of politicisation (Solnit 2016) as they struggle for an expansion of citizen rights. Even if according to empirical research rather than rights, the critique of the current shape of democracy is central to these movements (Volk 2013). Yet, many other recent mobilisations, practices and interventions do not blend in with former civil rights movements despite their politicising efforts: They bring issues to the public, appeal for citizen involvement and challenge dominant positions. These concern, for instance, populist protests, but also the practice of popular vote or referenda and the commercial mediatisation of the electoral process that organises politics more and more around charismatic and video- or telegenic figures as well as the commercialised social media. Differences put aside, these practices have in common that they distinguish themselves from the specific kind of politicisation triggered by the civil rights movements of the 1970s and 1980s. Moreover, as this chapter argues, they share a particular characteristic: They politicise agendas without triggering the political. Instead, they introduce a split between politicisation, on the one hand, and the political, on the other. And as we will see in the following, the suppression of the political goes along with a tendency to undermine the democratic dimension of the political system.

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5.3   The Emergence of the Political as an Indicator of Democratising Politicisation In order to answer the question whether politicisation is beneficial for democracy or not, it is helpful to have a close look at the specific kind of politicisation a democracy is based on. I consult Rancière again and look at his definition of democracy. He does not define democracy by the existence of certain institutions such as free and general elections, the control or division of powers or the freedom of speech. Instead, he isolates three characteristics of democracy that are independent from specific institutions of democratic systems and can thus be applied as a normative setting on democracy in general: First—a sphere where the people can appear. Having followed Rancière’s position up to this point suggests that elections and parliamentary representation of the people are not sufficient to guarantee this sphere. Rather it necessitates the creation of a public space, which is less defined by a specific place such as the street or social media, but by the quality or identity of the people it allows for. In order to explain the meaning of this specific democratic quality or identity of the people, we need to look at the second and third criteria of democracy: The second criterion—mentioned by Rancière—is the existence of transgressive agents. Rancière speaks primarily of the proletarian. However, the proletarian is—as we will see— with reference to Laclau and Mouffe a placeholder that can be occupied by all sorts of political subjects. The third criterion is the appearance of the people as a non-identical subject (Rancière 1997, 99–101). The first and second criteria of democracy seem to be part of the politicisation processes discussed earlier, as populist protests and mobilisations reach out into public space and transgress the status quo of the political representation contesting it. Yet, what about the third aspect of democracy? What does the non-identical subject mean? In order to describe the precedent state of post-democracy, Rancière recurs to the ‘people’ as a non-identical subject. It is non-identical with itself or never fully identifiable because it has at least two different identifications. In other words, the ‘people’ is opposed to the dominant interpretation in nationalist terms, that is, opposed to a homogenising conception, to a quasi-natural entity (Ruzha Smilova 2018), and it is conceived as double or double guised. This means the people has at the same time two identifications which do not overlap. They are two incommensurable subjects describing the same. These subjects are, on the one hand,

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the Rousseauian identification of the people with the sovereign, the people’s sovereignty—the normative, idealised ‘people’ as the sovereign of which all build an inextricable part. On the other hand, they are identified by the Marxian empirical social figure of the worker—the concrete individual or group—and the proletarian as a figure of transgression, thus people as lived reality and political actors. Thus, the normative and the real and political figure of the people does not coincide and build thus a complex if not paradox unity. The reference to the proletarian though is—as especially Laclau and Mouffe have shown (Laclau and Mouffe 1985)—an over-determined example of such a transgressive figure. It emerged, for instance, in the women’s and in the Black Movement and also in the contemporary LGBTQ+ movements. It relates to diverse marginalised groups of people and minorities claiming for inclusion and also emerges in political agents that are not bound together by a shared identity but by common objectives or issues such as the environmental movement. Criticising the essentialist conception of class interests, Laclau and Mouffe claim that there is no necessity for political demands to be articulated in a specific way (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 120). Thus, one can determine the double guise of the people in many different categories and guises: The convention of the people on the one side and the community of the people on the other, the people as presence or crowd on the one side and the sociologically determined society on the other side and the majority and the parliament or the poor and the polis (Rancière 1997, 100). Or as Laclau puts it, in plebs and populous (Laclau 2005, 81). Why is the double guise of the people a democratic figure? The double guise of the people means that the subject of democracy, the people, appears as a contested, disputable subject. The people do not speak with one voice, and the whole of the people cannot be rendered, measured or determined by sociological methods. The whole of the people always exceeds the total of any measurement and as such turns society into what Claude Lefort called a truly historical society, a society that can never be determined or represented in its totality (Lefort and Gauchet 1991). The people differ at any time from the people, but neither one nor the other of its embodiments ever takes over, and fully represents the people. The representation of the whole cannot be solved by a more equal distribution but remains always caught up in a partial representation which excludes parts of the whole. The democratic moment of the political brings the ambivalence of the body of the people to the fore. Yet, this ambivalence is not

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only dual or diverse, but it is also about the paradox that the representation of one object on different levels can be contradictory without falsifying one of them. The normative and symbolic representation can be unifying, while the actual inequality polarises the people. This ambivalence—which goes along with a very unstable situation, because none of the two meanings of the people suffices to describe the people—is the condition of the possibility of the emergence of the political as it endows the marginalised to struggle for the recognition of certain particular interests as universal. On the basis of the democratic sovereign, people can protest against their exclusion from the sovereign in everyday politics. And this marks the moment of the political. Rancière (1995, 31) and with him various other scholars, such as Slavoj Zizek, have defined the emergence of the political as the moment when the excluded, those who don’t have a place in society, claim to be representative for the whole of society, when they claim to incarnate true universality: ‘…They, the excluded, those with no fixed place within the social edifice, thus paradoxically presented themselves as the representative, the stand-in for the whole of society, for the true universality’ (Zizek 1999, 27). Rancière only slightly elaborated this definition with respect to democracy; yet, the difference in the outcome is fundamental for the vision of democracy: To him, the political is not only the moment when a part of the community, the ‘part of the no part’, claims to be universal, but when this claim is confronted with the order of the people as equal and brings the incommensurability of the two people to the fore: The inequality finally is only possible because of equality (Rancière 1995, 37). As such he democratised the definition of the political—even if he did so maybe against his own intention as he conceives the political as something disruptive and not reformative as, for example, Lefort (Lefort and Gauchet 1991). The political is inscribed in the paradox that people can be included as part of the people’s sovereign and excluded as women or workers at the same time. It becomes inherently democratic because the claim of the excluded happens on a legitimate basis as part of the people’s sovereign. In the horizon of a democratic constitution, these struggles are legitimate because those who fight for their claim are themselves members of the sovereign. The text of Rancière though remains unclear with regard to the identity of the democratic sovereign’s ‘We’. Does the demos include only citizens or everyone who claims citizenship? We should turn to writings of Laclau and Mouffe in order to explore the identity of the sovereign further. They

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emphasise on the impossibility of a closure, that is, the impossibility of society, because of its fundamental antagonist relations (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 122, 125): The sovereign remains thus an open horizon, not a predefined (by nationality or citizenship) subject, in order to account for the fundamentally antagonistic character of society. These antagonisms cannot be eliminated by a pluralist society, claiming the total inclusion of everyone because it would ignore the conflict-ridden ground of society (Mouffe 2000, 16). Chantal Mouffe conceives the political thus as a struggle for the inclusion within the ‘we, the people’—not just for recognising certain interests within an already defined ‘sovereign’. The crucial political question is who is ‘we’ —how is ‘the sovereign’ constructed (Smilova 2014)? Yet, in a democratic setting as Rancière conceives it, this should be set in a horizon where everyone is entitled to be part of the sovereign, where the ‘we’ includes potentially all of humanity. Civil rights movements have been for a long time a motor of the political in this democratic sense in that they brought the incommensurability between the representation of the people as people’s sovereign and the actual people to the fore. They consciously played out the cards of being included and excluded at the same time. Furthermore, they were never claiming that a fully fledged representation could be possible. The political thus appeared as a complex field of many overlapping societal groups and an ambivalent political subject that prevented any durable delimitation of the field, yet, integrated the promise of future inclusion. The 1990s interrupted this fruitful political conflict, the double guise of the people as well as real democracy were according to Rancière rejected as myths (Rancière 1997) and replaced by a population defined by sociological means (see Zizek 1999). This rejection of the symbolic representations of the people as myths—as Rancière analyses it—came along with an alienation of the people from its representation, which seems at first sight to be a paradox: In times where the democratic institutions had been exposed to sharp criticism and had been confronted with an ambivalent political subject, people engaged in democracy, whereas in times where the democratic institutions gained seemingly complete legitimacy, people became indifferent towards the system (Rancière 1997, 96). Post-­ democracy means thus the end of the distance between the political and the sociological body of the people, between subjectivation and identity (Rancière 1997, 118). Post-democracy triggered the illusion that the body of the people can be determined in every detail by sociological means and that politics only needs to adopt measures that fully account of each

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specificity. In the 1990s, Slavoy Zizek opposed ‘true politics’ to ‘identifying the specific problems of each group and subgroup…,  the African American single unemployed lesbian mothers’, in order to exemplify this sociological approach to politics. Post-democracy assumed that politics may draft policies like a medicine can prescribe the right therapy based on a precise diagnosis (Zizek 1998, 1001, 1008).

5.4   The Disappearance of the Political in Current Practices of Politicisation Democratic institutions have been eagerly challenged again since the millennium. Placing the protester as the person of the year on the front page of the Time magazine in 2011 might be taken as a symbolic indicator of this development. Yet, the end of the period of an apathetic electorate was also marked by the success of populist leaders who were blaming the political establishment for ignoring the needs of the people. In Europe, the first big breakthrough of right-wing populism occurred when in 1999, the FPÖ won 26.9% of the votes in Austria, followed in 2002, by the results of the French presidential elections: Jean-Marie Le Pen of the Front National won 16.86% in the first round, only 3% less than President Jacques Chirac (19.88% of the votes). Ever since the rise of populist parties in all European countries seems unstoppable (See Chaps. 6 and 7 in this book), crested maybe by Mr. Trump’s victory of the US presidential elections and accompanied by numerous populist civil protests (anti-elite protests and anti-immigration movements). These populist movements and politicians use referenda (e.g. the EU-constitution referenda and Brexit), media coverage and social media. Social media foster populism (Flew and Iosifidis 2019; Jungherr et al. 2019; Schroeder 2019), yet the increase of the use of referenda, the commercialisation of media and the developments of social media are independent phenomena. As I argued earlier, populist politics, populist mobilisations and practices of popular vote and so on dispose of many aspects of politicisations; they bring up issues into the public sphere (the public aspect of politics/ the appearance of the people) and challenge dominant positions (the polemic aspect of politics). They politicise issues, however, without bringing the political to the fore, without allowing for any non-self-identical subjects that are always more than one unity. Instead, they claim to refer to a self-identical subject, to a ‘we are the people’ that incorporates the

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‘real’ voice of the people and constructs an identity between the proclaimed political subject and the people. This is not due to a coherent ideology incorporated by these practices. Populism and social media do not dispose of the same ideology; the latter does not dispose of an ideology at all. However, it is due to the implementation, interpretation and use of these practices. Let us inspect the logic of several of these practices one by one. 1. Populist protests and movements attack the current system in the name of change and claim the integration of their positions like civil rights movements and other political protest did (Laclau 2005; Urbinati 2019). Thus, a part of the people claims a universal position. Yet, they reduce the political field to a single conflict-line between the real people against the so-called enemies of the people (minorities, immigrants, the elite, the judiciary institutions, etc.) (Müller 2016), not accidentally this expression traditionally used by totalitarian regimes suddenly became part of the vocabulary of the leader of a democratic state. The double guise of the people is annihilated. Thus, in cases where these political currents gain majority, for example, in elections or in referenda, the political risks to be completely absorbed by the proclaimed self-identical subject of the real people (Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018; Urbinati 2019). Instead of extending the scope of people and issues represented, it reduces the people to a part of the people (Müller 2016; Urbinati 2019). And this part claims to speak in the name of the whole people (Müller 2016). Those who claim to be the real people become representative for the whole by eliminating the ambivalent subject of the people. 2. Party politics increasingly bases its programmes on opinion polls casting around for votes in the pool of the general electorate, while neglecting traditional interest representation. According the Colin Crouch, the party of the twenty-first century would be one which comprises a self-reproducing inner elite, remote from its mass movement base (Crouch 2004, 27), but nested squarely within a number of corporations, which will in turn fund the subcontracting of opinion polling and policy advice. It is post-democratic in so far as it is concerned with the opinion research and expert policy work characteristic of this period. It is pre-democratic in the way that it provides privileged political access for individual firms and commercial

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­interests (Crouch 2004, 29). This produces a new self-referential elite ellipse (Crouch 2004, 30). 3. The instrument of popular vote or referenda which became very much in fashion as a means of direct democracy, has similar effects. Complex issues get reduced to singular pro and contra questions. And even narrow majorities at the outcome of referenda get widely interpreted as if the voice of the people has spoken, as if the French in general didn’t want a European Constitution and the English wanted Brexit. What these results meant were subject to interpretations by governments and media. The opposing party seems to be inexistent from the moment of its defeat, its position almost erased. So, again the people get reduced to a part of the people by the interpretation of the results of referenda. The incommensurability of two referential bodies is erased, and democracy equated with what the majority presumably said. Moreover, plebiscitarianism ‘…treat the sphere of public and political opinion as a terrain of conquest under the guidance of skilful leaders and…the support of a crowd of spectators (Urbinati 2014, 7)’. This means the people is a mere construction by political leaders and the media. 4. The commercialised social media has the effect of dissolving more and more the mediating level between the people and the government (Urbinati 2019), parties, and the representation of interests lose their importance. The absence of this mediating level allows, on the one hand, for a more direct involvement of the people. This potential fostered many protest movements and supplied agency to civil society. However, the promising offer of pure subjectivation, of a place where the real voice of the people can speak up, replaces the ambivalence of representation in a new way, as it presupposes true authenticity of the people could be possible. Here, it is not the sociologically determined subject of post-democracy, but the pretended mere presence that annihilates the double guise of the people. I cannot go into detail here, in how far this presence is never mere authentic presence but shaped by the media’s apparatus. However, democratically spoken, the ‘I’ is not an ‘I’; as soon as self-­ representation becomes a question of a true I and annihilates the ambivalence of any representation, the productive tension between inclusion and exclusion is dissolved and the result is a pure ideological subject.

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5. The commercial mediatisation as well as the commercialised social media also changed the profile of successful politicians (Jungherr et al., 2019). It all started when after the first televised presidential debate between Kennedy and Nixon in 1960, Kennedy won because—as the legend goes—Nixon refused to put on make-up. The visual character of media communication and information facilitates audience voyeurism encouraging spectatorial enjoyment rather than control or inspection (Urbinati 2014, 6). Thus, commercial media feature preferably catchy news that seem close to the people, enthroning and elevating those who know how to speak with, to and for the people. Thus, politicians who claim a kind of hot wire to the people meet the expectations of media. The effect of pretending to reflect the real people’s needs and issues, once again erases the double guise of the people. In all of these cases, the double guise of the people gets annihilated and replaced by a pretended more real or more authentic representation. The ‘we’ of the people or the ‘I’ of the subject represent just a part of the people, the populist movement, the nativist people, the majority, the opinion poll outcome, those who engage actively in social media platforms and the object in the head or the belly of a populist politician. Why do I not simply claim that plurality and diversity are lost (which is also the case) instead of the double guise of the people? The specificity of the double guise is that one and the same subject has more than one face and that these faces are not only plural, but paradox and contradictory as this is the motor of democratic change. Plurality might be served by an empiricist politics that corresponds to everyone’s needs; the double guise of the people will always keep its contradictory feature and challenge the status quo. Thus, the new figure of the people and the political subjects described above are more than a mere loss of diversity as they create one-­dimensional subjectivities. The majority in this thinking equals the people, and furthermore the nativist people equals the people. There is no nativist community that is at the same time a fragmented group, divided by class and other social divisions divided group. All of these significations construct the subject as homogeneous, significant, meaningful, univocal, authentic and evident. A new myth of the people emerges. However, this new mythical figure of a people is not to be mixed up with the totalitarian predecessor of a self-identical and omnipresent people. It is a new

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formation: Instead of adjusting the people to a higher and transcendent formation of the people, it pretends to come as close as possible to the people whether this is through referenda, opinion polls, the authenticity of social media feeds or the populist politicians who pretend to widely open their ears to ‘the man on the street’.

5.5   Formal Versus Real Democracy. The Real People Versus the False People Returning to the introductory description of the challenges to democracy in the 1970s and 1980s, we need to clarify that contrary to what one might understand hearing the names of the concepts formal and real democracy, the confrontation between the two bodies was not an opposition between something real (the real people) and something unreal, formal (the represented people), between things and names (Rancière 1997, 13), it was rather a confrontation between two names or two bodies that coexist; it was the possibility of a synchronous symbolic appearance of two perspectives, a polemic space in which the ‘part of the no part’ stands for both, for the poor and the whole, for the mass and the sovereign (Rancière 1997). Thus, it was the incorporation of a double guise of the people. Equal in terms of entitlement, this political community could claim inclusion even as an empirically excluded part of society. The above-mentioned practices of recent politicisations, especially the populist mobilisations, generate an opposite case. Even though they often vehemently attack democratic institutions like civil rights movements in the past, they establish the reference to a more real people, contrasting it with the false people, ‘the elite’, ‘the parasites’ or just ‘the minority’. This real people can be defined by a national or nativist community (populist movements), by the majority (referenda), by the ‘authentic’ voices of individuals or those politicians who genuinely incorporate the real people (populist politicians). Yet, the authentic or the proximity to the people should not be confused with a claim to more truth. The new ‘real’ is not a repetition of the relation to truth such as the one totalitarian regimes established accepting only one truth, the truth of the party, instead it acknowledges the irrational, emotional relation to truth of everyone, and fosters the noise of everyone who is not questioning preconceived identities and boundaries.

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The paradox setting of the democratic moment of the political that inclusion and exclusion function synchronously is put into question. Instead, the Schmittian political scheme of the ‘we’ and the ‘them’ peeks around the angle, as these political practices have in common that they do not claim equality on the basis of equality, but on the basis of inequality presupposing that inclusion can only be insured and achieved by inequality. One ‘more real’, more authentic, more streetwise, more mediocre body of the people erases all others, inclusion seems to be possible only at the cost of the exclusion of others, just like in the classical scheme of ‘we’ and ‘them’. The populist belief erases the double guise of the people by believing that their community can afford to be equal because they are fundamentally unequal compared to all the others. Politicisation and democratisation diverge. Thus, politicisation and the appearance of the political do not mutually condition or trigger each other. The appearance of the political requires the representation of multi-faceted, complex and even contradictory identities; politicisation on the contrary does not only not rely on this condition, but can actively contribute to the concealment of any complexity and contradictory aspects of the identity of the sovereign and reduce it to a self-identical and closed community. In post-democracy, the people disappeared in the sociological body of the people, in the people of the surveys. The relation between the people and the institution was thus disrupted. The new development is therefore—apart of the development of commercial media—also an aftermath of certain post-democratic practices of liberal representative democracy that generates, on the one hand, a democracy that spins around its institutions and, on the other hand, a people that spins around itself. The relation between the two is interrupted. However, reviving the relation between the institutions and the people would be crucial in order to reinvigorate democracy, in order to allow for an appearance of the people as double and non-identical.

References Colin Crouch. 2004. Post-democracy. Oxford: Polity Press. De Wilde, Pieter, Anna Leopold, and Henning Schmidtke. 2016. “Introduction: the differentiated politicization of European governance.” West European Politics 39 (1):3–22. doi https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2015.1081505. Flew, Terry, and Petros Iosifidis. 2019. “Populism, globalisation and social media.” International Communication Gazette, vol. 82 íssue 1, February 2020. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/1748048519880721.

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Hutter, Swen, Edgar Grande, and Hanspeter Kriesi. 2019. “Politicizing Europe in times of crisis.” Journal of European Public Policy 26 (7):996–1017. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/13501763.2019.1619801. Jungherr, Andreas, Ralph Schroeder, and Sebastian Stier. 2019. “Digital Media and the Surge of Political Outsiders: Explaining the Success of Political Challengers in the United States, Germany, and China.” Social Media + Society 5 (3):1–12. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119875439. Lefort, Claude, and Marcel Gauchet. 1991. “Über die Demokratie.” In Autonome Gesellschaft und libertäre Demokratie, edited by Ulrich Rödel. Frankfurt/ M: Suhrkamp. Laclau, Ernesto. 2005. On populist Reason. London/New York: Verso. Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. 1985. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. London/New York: Verso. Levitsky, Steven, and Daniel Ziblatt. 2018. How democracies die. New York: Crown. Merkel, Wolfgang. 2014. “Is there a crisis of democracy?” Democratic Theory I (2):11–25. Mouffe, Chantal. 2000. The democratic paradox. London/New York: Verso. Müller, Jan-Werner. 2016. What Is Populism? Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press Inc. Rancière, Jacques. 1997. “Demokratie und Postdemokratie.” In Politik der Wahrheit, edited by Rado Riha. Wien: Turia und Kant. Rancière, Jacques. 1995. La Mésentente. Paris: Editions Galilée. Rauh, Christian 2019. “EU politicization and policy initiatives of the European Commission: the case of consumer policy.” Journal of European Public Policy 26 (3):344–365.doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/13501763.2018.1453528. Sichtermann, Barbara, and Kai Sichtermann. 2017. Das ist unser Haus. Eine Geschichte der Hausbesetzung. Berlin: Aufbau Verlag. Schroeder, Ralph. 2019. “Digital Media and the Entrenchment of Right-Wing Populist Agendas.” Social Media + Society 5 (4):1–11. doi: https://doi. org/10.1177/2056305119885328. Smilova, Ruzha. 2014. “The General Will Constitution: Rousseau as a Constitutionalist.” In Constitutions and the Classics: Patterns of Constitutional Thought from Fortescue to Bentham, edited by Denis Galligan, 265–289. Kirjastus: Oxford University Press. Smilova, Ruzha. 2018. “(Re)conceptualizing ‘the people’ as the sovereign”, Presentation at RECAST Workshop, Coimbra University, November 2018. Solnit, Rebecca. 2016. Hope in the dark. Untold Histories Wild Possibilities, Chicago: Haymarket Books. Urbinati, Nadia. 2014. Democracy disfigured: Opinion, Truth, and the People. Cambridge, Massachusett/ London: Harvard University Press. Urbinati, Nadia. 2019. Me the People: How Populism Transforms Democracy. Cambridge, Massachusetts/London: Harvard University Press.

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Volk, Christian. 2013. „Zwischen Entpolitisierung und Radikalisierung  – Zur Theorie von Demokratie und Politik in Zeiten des Widerstands.“ Politische Vierteljahresschrift 54 (1):75–110. Wiesner, Claudia. 2020. “Politisierung, Politik Und Demokratie. Zu Theorie Und Konzeption Eines Komplexen Politikwissenschaftlichen Begriffsgefüges.” In (Ent-)Politisierung? Die Demokratische Gesellschaft im 21. Jahrhundert: Leviathan-Sonderband Nr. 35, edited by Andreas Schäfer and David Meiering. Zizek, Slavoj. 1994. “Genieße deine Nation wie dich selbst!” In Gemeinschaften, edited by Joseph Vogl, 133–164. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp. Zizek, Slavoj. 1999. “Carl Schmitt in the Age of Post-Politics.” In The Challenge of Carl Schmitt, edited by Chantal Mouffe, 18–37. London/New York: Verso. Zizek, Slavoj. 1998. “A leftist Plea for Eurocentrism.” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 24, n°4.

CHAPTER 6

Populism and Anti-Populism in the 2017 Dutch, French, and German Elections: A Re-politicisation of Post-politics? Seongcheol Kim

6.1   Introduction The election year 2017 in Europe was widely predicted to be a showdown between “populists” and their opponents, especially after “Brexit and Trump.” The Dutch, French, and German elections, in particular, pitted apparently populist challenges from both left and right against embattled ruling blocs—outgoing Grand Coalitions in the Netherlands and Germany as well as a French administration struggling with record-low approval ratings—that had been at the centre of crisis-management politics in the Eurozone (see Chap. 7 in this book). The stage seemed set for a “return

An earlier version of this chapter appeared as the following: “Populism and Anti-Populism in the 2017 Dutch, French, and German Elections: A Discourse and Hegemony Analytic Approach,” POPULISMUS Working Papers 7, http:// www.populismus.gr/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Kim-WP-7-upload.pdf. S. Kim (*) University of Kassel / WZB Berlin Social Science Center, Kassel, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 C. Wiesner (ed.), Rethinking Politicisation in Politics, Sociology and International Relations, Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54545-1_6

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of the political” of sorts, or what Stavrakakis (2014) had observed in the Greek context as a clash of populism and anti-populism: competing constructions of “the people” being met by an anti-populist neo-liberalism positioning itself as the only alternative to the “populist” threat. From the perspective of a post-foundational theory of discourse and hegemony that understands the political qua antagonism as the instituting moment of every social order (Laclau and Mouffe 2001[1985]; Laclau 2005; Marchart 2007), a populism/anti-populism divide would suggest a perfect storm of politicisation insofar as populist and anti-populist discourses alike make visible the antagonistically instituted nature of collective identities (whether it is “the people” vs. “the elite” or “the democrats” vs. “the populists”; see also Chap. 5 in this book). Yet from this theoretical perspective, the question is also to what extent populist discourses challenge established hegemonic constellations—not least the neo-liberal crisis-­ management regime of “TINA” or Alternativlosigkeit looming large since the beginning of the decade—and to what extent anti-populist discourses are about defending the latter, as Stavrakakis argues in the Greek context. This chapter takes up this line of inquiry and examines two related sets of questions: (1a) to what extent populism, understood in discourse-­ theoretical terms as an equivalential construction of a popular subject against a power bloc (Laclau 2005), was indeed present in electoral campaign discourses in these countries and (1b) to what extent they posed counter-hegemonic challenges to dominant crisis-management discourses; (2a) to what extent anti-populism, likewise understood in discourse-­ theoretical terms as an equivalential construction of a hostile “populist” threat to an existing order (Stavrakakis 2014), could be observed in the electoral campaigns; and (2b) to what extent this anti-populism took the form of a defence of neo-liberal economic rationality and thus points to what Marchart (2017), following Mouffe (2005a, b), refers to as a re-­ politicisation of neo-liberal post-politics. In doing so, the chapter draws on both the theoretical underpinnings and the analytical instruments of Essex School or post-foundational discourse analysis, based on the discourse and hegemony theory of Laclau (1990, 2005, 2007[1996]) and Laclau and Mouffe (2001[1985]). The discourse analysis that follows identifies a widespread “thin” anti-populism in the Netherlands that localised the “populist” threat specifically onto Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom (PVV), minimal anti-populism in a French presidential campaign characterised by competing uses of populism across the candidate spectrum, and a wide-ranging but more diffuse anti-populism in the discourse of the

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Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in Germany. Additionally, all three elections featured left-wing populist discourses that articulated direct counter-hegemonic challenges to neo-liberal crisis-management practices, while Emmanuel Macron’s neo-liberal populism notably linked an affirmation of the latter with a populist opposition to “the system.” The main far-right discourses, in contrast, were primarily nationalist rather than populist in the Netherlands and France and combined high degrees of both populism and ethno-reductionism in Germany—calling into question the inflationary use of the “populist” label both as an analytical category and as an anti-populist designation for the far right.

6.2   From the “Political Difference” to Post-­politics and Anti-populism This chapter works with an analytical concept of populism and anti-­ populism grounded in a “post-foundational” (Marchart 2007) discourse-­ theoretical ontology (Laclau 1990, 2005, 2007[1996]; Laclau and Mouffe 2001[1985]) that posits the discursively constituted and politically instituted nature of the social. From this perspective, social identities are constituted through the contingent interplay of differences; yet any field of differences presupposes an original moment of political institution whereby these differential elements take on a collective identity through an equivalential logic that generates an antagonistic frontier against a constitutive outside (e.g. “democracy” as a nodal point equivalentially linking “liberty,” “equality,” and “fraternity” against “absolute monarchy” in an original moment of antagonistic break). The political as antagonism is thus understood as an instituting moment of every social order and an ontological precondition for politics, insofar as politics as a struggle for hegemony presupposes the possibility of redefining social order around new oppositions (e.g. “democracy” as a struggle of “the working class” against “capital,” “the nation” against “foreign powers,” etc.). Politicisation, from this perspective, would occur whenever an antagonistic division of the social space re-emerges to make visible the politically instituted nature of sedimented social constellations (see also Laclau 1990). The “Keynesian welfare state” as a hegemonic formation (Wullweber 2017), for example, was first instituted politically via antagonistic divisions of the social space by New Deal-era discourses of “soaking the rich,” then reproduced around an ensemble of largely de-contested

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sedimented practices such as macroeconomic demand management, progressive taxation, and universal old-age insurance, and later dislocated by the (re-politicising) discourses of Reagonomics and Thatcherism that directly challenged it by articulating notions of “liberty” and “entrepreneurship” around an antagonistic frontier against “big government” or “the nanny state.” More generally, the contingent nature of discursively mediated social identities means that any hegemonic partial fixation is constantly subject to such re-politicising moments of dislocation that interrupt the structured reproduction of differences (e.g. the claim that instituting principles of democratic order such as “liberty” and “equality” are being disregarded in actual practice). From this theoretical perspective, Laclau (2005) later argues that populism takes on a metaphorical character for the political insofar as populism entails the equivalential construction of a popular underdog around an antagonistic frontier against a power bloc,1 thus making visible and politically articulating the people/power gap that, with Lefort (1988), constitutes the founding logic of democracy itself. Populism, in other words, is always about the (re-)politicisation of democratic order founded on the promise of popular sovereignty (see also Canovan 2002); the question is in what manner and in what contexts of hegemonic structuration. Mouffe (2005a, b) takes up this line of inquiry with her critique of “post-politics,” pointing to a “neo-liberal hegemony” in Western Europe built on the promise of a rational consensus on the right economic policy that blurs left/right divisions beyond recognition. Post-politics, following Mouffe, is this illusion that politics can exist outside the political, that is, without the need for division of the social space: even a hegemonic order built on the promise of conflict-free rational consensus cannot reproduce itself without ultimately resorting to the drawing of antagonistic frontiers, such as by dismissing challenges to the “right” economic consensus as wrong 1  As emphasised in subsequent applications (De Cleen and Stavrakakis 2017; Kim 2017; Stavrakakis et al. 2017), populism thus becomes conceptually distinguishable from (1) what Laclau calls institutionalism, which entails a predominantly differential articulation of demands and thus the construction of a non-antagonistic relation between the addressers and addressees of demands; (2) other types of predominantly equivalential discourse such as nationalism, which pits a national subject against foreign Others, or indeed—as will be seen—anti-populism, which constructs a hostile “populist” threat to an existing order; and (3) different forms of class, ethnic, nativist, and/or religious reductionism, which circumscribe the equivalential construction of a collective subject by reducing the latter onto an a priori privileged differential essence (e.g. Björn Höcke’s “64 million native-born Germans”).

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and irrational and thus shifting political conflict onto a “moral register” (Mouffe 2005a, 56). In this context, Mouffe (2005a, 51, 57) interprets the rise of “right-wing populism” as a “consequence of the post-political consensus” that challenges (and re-politicises) the post-political order by appealing to the sovereignty of a “people” against “the elite,” thereby also forcing the neo-liberal mainstream to constitute itself equivalentially as a hegemonic bloc—albeit in the moralising terms of “the good democrats” against “the evil extreme-right.” The result is a re-politicisation of sorts, albeit one leading to an “impasse of moralism” whereby the populist right invokes an ethnicised  “good hard-working” people and the neo-liberal mainstream responds with moral condemnation. Stavrakakis’ (2014; Stavrakakis et al. 2018) diagnosis of anti-populism takes up Mouffe’s theoretical line of argument while laying the groundwork for an analytical concept of anti-populist discourse. Stavrakakis argues that while neo-liberal crisis-management discourses in the EU point to a “post-democratic” hegemony grounded in the “alternative-­ less” (alternativlos) adherence to market imperatives over popular sovereignty (similar to the diagnoses of Crouch, Rancière, and Streeck—see Chaps. 5 and 7 in this book), the rise of populist challenges to this order provokes an anti-populist reaction whereby the neo-liberal hegemonic bloc positions itself as the only alternative to “populism” as the main threat to the existing order. The “populist” threat is thus constructed as “omnipresent” and spanning the left, right, and centre, thus turning into an anti-populist nodal point equivalentially linking all kinds of discourses that do not link themselves equivalentially (e.g. Syriza and Golden Dawn, Mélenchon and Le Pen). Moreover, as Rancière (2016) also points out, anti-populism itself constructs a “people”—one that is irresponsible, irrational, and therefore susceptible to populism (Stavrakakis 2014, 509–10; see also Chap. 7 in this book). As with post-politics, the anti-populist antagonistic frontier thus showcases, in symptomatic fashion, both the hegemonic bloc’s commitment to a technocratic rationality of “TINA” and the limits of its claim to organise the social along purely differential technocratic lines. The political as antagonism thus returns as a limit of objectivity (Laclau and Mouffe 2001[1985], 122) that forces the existing order to define its frontiers and make its hegemonic (re-)institution explicit, suggesting a “re-politicisation” of post-politics (Marchart 2017). This, in turn, raises the question to what extent anti-populist discourses in other national contexts specifically take on this form of a politicised defence

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of neo-liberal hegemony—and to what extent populist discourses articulate counter-hegemonic challenges to the latter in the first place. The rest of this chapter takes up the context of the 2017 election campaigns in the Netherlands, France, and Germany to examine the extent of (1) populism and (2) anti-populism from the conceptual perspective outlined as well as the extent to which (1) populist discourses articulate counter-­hegemonic challenges to dominant crisis-management discourses and (2) anti-populist discourses take on the form of a defence of the latter. The analysis takes up the “methodological holism” (Marttila 2015) of Essex School or post-foundational discourse analysis (Howarth and Stavrakakis 2000; Nonhoff 2006; Marttila 2015), which draws on the above-discussed discourse-theoretical categories as analytical concepts for the study of discourses as structured ensembles of differential and equivalential articulations and their structuration around nodal points. As discourse is understood within this theoretical framework to encompass all signifying practices (linguistic and non-linguistic), the discourse analysis seeks to triangulate between numerous different forms of discursive practice from the 2017 campaigns, from party programmes and slogans to leaders’ speeches and published interviews. Each case analysis first introduces the prior context and different types of populist discourse in the party system, followed by a more detailed analysis that identifies populist and anti-populist discourses in the 2017 election campaign and works its way through their competing antagonistic frontier constructions, keying in especially on how the popular subject (in populism) and the “populist” threat (in anti-populism) are equivalentially constructed. The prior occurrence of populisms of both left and right in all three countries also allows for a diachronic perspective on shifting forms and degrees of populism in 2017 compared to previous elections. 6.2.1  Analyses 6.2.1.1 The Netherlands Background. Populism has been a recurring feature of the Dutch party system in combination with nationalism (right) and socialism (left). The discourse of Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom (PVV) has built on the liberal nationalism (Akkerman 2005) and civilisationism (Brubaker 2017) of the earlier List Pim Fortuyn (LFP) by combining liberal positions on abortion, euthanasia, and LGBT rights with a rejection of “intolerant and

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backward Islam” as a threat to this way of life and to “Judeo-Christian culture” (Vossen 2011; Brubaker 2017, 1197). This discourse took on a populist inflection in the PVV’s 2010 election programme, which formulated the underlying problem thus: “elites are knocked loose from reality and are doing things on their own that ordinary people are not getting better off from” (Partij voor de Vrijheid 2010)—and tied this to an equivalential chain of demands not only “for Islam suppression and against mass immigration,” but also “for security,” “for a social Netherlands,” “for a better environment,” and even “for animals, farmers and fishers” (pointing to an equivalential incorporation of demands prominently represented by other parties). After the 2010 elections, the PVV reached an agreement to tolerate a minority government of the liberal right (VVD) and the Christian Democrats (CDA); the agreement, titled “Freedom and responsibility,” was centred on wide-ranging spending cuts to counteract the Dutch “competitive fall” as well as measures “to limit the migration of low-opportunity migrants,” tackle the “important problem” of “illegal immigration,” and “intensif[y]” a “return policy” of deporting immigrants without legal status—while also emphasising the two coalition parties’ recognition of “Islam – unlike the PVV – as a religion” (VVD and CDA 2010). This strategy of differential incorporation of PVV demands lasted until April 2012, when Wilders walked out of budget negotiations citing disagreements over further spending cuts affecting pensioners, declaring a “definitive” break and stating that “we do not accept that the elderly pay for the nonsense Brussels demands” on budgetary policy (NU. nl, April 23, 2012). Numerous studies have classified the Socialist Party (SP) as left-wing populist (Mudde 2004; March 2011), with March (2011) arguing that the party’s clear anti-establishment profile in the 1990s gave way to a “post-populist” democratic socialism in the 2000s. Indeed, when the party peaked electorally with 16.6% in the 2006 elections, its programme was centred on the more traditionally socialist nodal point “more solidarity” as an answer to the “major concerns over care, social security, and safety” but also the “fear of more criminality and ethnic tensions”—yet without the construction of an opposing power bloc, apart from the more localised opposition to the threat of a “European superstate” and “even more Brussels paternalism” (Socialistische Partij 2006). Populism was a stronger element in the SP’s (2010, 2012) 2010 and 2012 campaigns— with the 2010 programme blaming “politicians from the right to the left” for falling for the “neoliberal thought” that had led to “the crisis of casino

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capitalism” and the 2012 programme designating an entire spectrum of parties from GreenLeft to PVV as complicit in “the government of VVD and CDA” that “cuts billions from the citizens”; in both cases, the SP positioned itself as the alternative for a “social government,” pointing to a combination of populist and socialist discursive structurations. The 2017 campaign. On May 7, 2016, Wilders announced the PVV’s election priorities with the tweet: “Core PVV election program: more boss over own country; de-Islamise; borders shut, riff-raff out; billions to the Dutch ordinary man/woman.” The PVV subsequently released its 2017 election programme on a single A4 sheet titled “Netherlands ours again,” centred on the demand to “de-Islamise the Netherlands,” including a moratorium on all refugees as well as immigrants “from Islamic countries,” a ban of the Koran, and the closure of all mosques, in addition to making “the Netherlands independent again” by leaving the European Union (EU) (Partij voor de Vrijheid 2017). The strongly nationalist construction of “the Netherlands” against “Islam” and “EU” dominated the PVV campaign discourse, culminating in the Wilders-Rutte TV debate two days before the elections in which Wilders declared: “I want the Netherlands to become the Netherlands again, and Islam does not belong to it” and “If you want the Netherlands to become ours again, chase that man away and put me on that tower” (De Standaard, March 13, 2017). The PVV’s discourse thus featured little populism in the sense of a people/power opposition; while the signifier “ordinary people” had been used previously and again in the Wilders tweet—and the one-page programme included the demand “citizens get power” through binding referendums—it did not play the function of a nodal point linking multiple demands. The lack of a populist interpellation of a wide-ranging power bloc is particularly notable given the outgoing Grand Coalition of VVD and Labour (PvdA) (as in the 2002 elections with LFP’s success). The  Socialist Party’s campaign discourse, centred on the slogan #PakDeMacht (“take the power”), was a more strongly populist one centred on the nodal point “a social Netherlands” against “the politics of the elite,” calling for a “politics not only for the elite, but for everyone” (Socialistische Partij 2017). The party thus interpellated an “elite that is richer after the crisis than before it” thanks to government policies: “The gap between the high earners at the top and the rest of the population has increased deliberately through the government. Premier Rutte has taken good care of the directors and managers, of the banks and multinationals” (Socialistische Partij 2017). This central opposition was tied to an

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equivalential chain of demands such as a single-payer national health system, minimum wage and pension rises, investment in social housing as well as a continued rejection of “Brussels coercion,” criticism of the EU as a “project that undermines democracy and gives all space to multinationals,” and a call for “a referendum on a new European Union”; also included was a pledge to “prevent migration flows” by improving development aid and ending “unfair trade,” while also “respect[ing] and implement[ing] the Refugees Treaty” (Socialistische Partij 2017). The SP, while far from incorporating the PVV’s flagship policies in these areas, thus likewise articulated oppositions to the EU and “migration,” albeit in terms of the “social” values that structured its chain of demands. While the SP’s social-populist discourse thus articulated a more directly counter-hegemonic challenge (i.e. across a wider range of demands) to a ruling power bloc than the PVV’s nationalist one, both were conspicuously circumscribed in this respect. The first Rutte cabinet had taken office with the technocratic promise to curb the Dutch “competitive fall,” especially with spending cuts and immigration restrictions—an agenda that Wilders supported until he drew a line at “the elderly” as the target for such cuts. The second Rutte cabinet continued this course with the central pledge to lead “the Netherlands stronger out of the crisis” with detailed tables of spending cuts designed to increase “purchasing power” and encourage “entrepreneurship” (VVD and PvdA 2012), with Rutte also promising ahead of the 2012 election “no cent more to Greece.” When Rutte declared in the March 2017 debate with Wilders that “The most important promise I made to the voters in 2012 was to bring the Netherlands out of the crisis. That has now happened,” Wilders responded that “You were not going to send more money to Greece, but that has happened” (De Standaard, March 13, 2017). Wilders thus displaced the Rutte cabinets’ technocratic crisis-management discourse in a nationalist direction by maintaining that the only way its promises can be fulfilled is by leaving the EU altogether, while not questioning their rectitude; this could also be seen with refugee policy, with the PVV demand for “borders shut” extending Rutte’s appeal to would-be refugees in 2016 “to stay home.” The SP likewise situated itself within this hegemonic framework in constructing migration as a threat—especially labour migration, with an SP MP even declaring in February 2017: “Own workers first! That is not Trump, that is not PVV, that is SP” (NOS, February 20, 2017)—albeit with an alternative construction of this threat, namely via the nodal point “social Netherlands.”

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The election campaign was characterised by anti-populist articulations by spokespersons of the VVD, PvdA, D66, and GreenLeft, yet of a largely “thin” variety singling out the PVV as representing the “populist” threat. In the case of Rutte, who constructed the threat of “wrong populism” in technocratic terms as a source of “chaos” with the Brexit and Trump victories, this threat was equated with the PVV and pitted against the VVD as the only force capable of stopping it. While telling Wilders in the TV debate that “I will never work with you” (De Standaard, March 13, 2017), however, Rutte continued to pursue a strategy of differential incorporation of PVV demands, as with his widely publicised appeal to immigrants: “If you do not like it here, leave the country, leave!” (Trouw, January 23, 2017) The most wide-ranging anti-populism came from PvdA leader (and Rutte’s vice-premier) Lodewijk Asscher, who criticised Rutte for this remark and called him “a thin strain of a populist,” thus linking his outgoing coalition partner to “the evil” of populism (De Telegraaf, January 23, 2017). This flexible application of the “populist” threat as a highly equivalential category was a rarity, however, with D66 leader Alexander Pechtold (2016) articulating a liberal anti-populism that equated “populism” with the figure of Wilders (as well as Trump and others) as a specifically “conservative, nationalist mishmash without ideals of community.” The reduction of “populism” onto the right even found a left-wing inflection in GreenLeft leader Jesse Klaver (NRC.nl, December 16, 2016), who declared that “I want to be an alternative to right-wing populism with progressive parties – PvdA, D66 and SP”; Klaver thus articulated a left-­ wing (and anti-PVV) anti-populism in terms of a left/right frontier and even named the SP as his most preferred coalition partner in a newspaper poll. Speaking after the results came out on election night, Klaver asked the GreenLeft supporters, “Has populism broken through?”—inducing chants of “No!”—while Pechtold declared that “Here in Netherlands the populist noise has stopped” and Rutte claimed that the country had said “stop” to “wrong populism” (NU.nl, March 16, 2017). 6.2.1.2 France Background. The Front National (FN) in France presents a notable case of changing inflections of populism and ethno-reductionism. An early attempt at “normalisation” took place leading up to Jean-Marie Le Pen’s first-round success in the 2002 presidential elections, with the party dropping several ethno-reductionist demands from its programme such as mass repatriation of non-European immigrants (Shields 2014). Marine Le Pen,

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who took over the leadership in 2011,  has pursued a strategy of “de-­ demonisation,” including purging the party’s discourse of explicitly anti-­ Semitic and homophobic elements and even pursuing equivalential incorporation by displacing the antagonistic frontier onto a common one against Islam—exemplified in her assertion that it is unsafe in some places “to be a woman, a homosexual, a Jew, or even French or white” under the “Muslim occupation” of the country (Le Parisien, March 17, 2016). Le Pen’s (2012) 2012 campaign was characterised by heightened emphasis on populist opposition to the main parties of the left and right, designated by the signifier “UMPS”; her programme promised a “total break with the politics of the UMPS” in terms of “the utmost priority” of restoring full employment as well as “the choice of the UMPS” of “reducing wages and dismantling the system of social protection” in order to retain the euro, which she rejected with reference to both social security and national sovereignty. The party’s long-standing demand for “national preference” for French-born nationals in jobs and social services was reformulated as a “national priority […] applied to all French, whatever their origin,” indicating the loosening of ethno-reductionist closure (Le Pen 2012). The 2012 elections were also notable for the candidacy of Jean-Luc Mélenchon for the Left Front (FG), an alliance of the Communist Party (PCF) and the Left Party (PG, a left-wing split from the Socialist Party). Mélenchon presented a left-wing populist discourse tied to a strategy of mass open-air rallies—under the slogan “Place [or square, place] to the people!”—and of interpellating “the people” equivalentially with “the left,” as exemplified in the slogan “The Left Front is the front of the people.” The joint FG programme, “The Human First,” declared that “The Left Front is rightly born out of the need to reinvent the left by leaning on the popular implication” and called for a “citizens’ revolution” against the “financial oligarchy,” with a participatory constituent assembly leading to a “parliamentary Sixth Republic” (Front de Gauche 2012). Mélenchon’s discourse also combined populism with a left/right camp logic, adhering to the latter in appealing to “our political family, the world of labour and its demands” to support François Hollande in the second round “without demanding anything in exchange for beating Sarkozy” (France TV Info, April 23, 2012). In August 2014, Mélenchon announced his intention “to federate the people” in a new movement for a Sixth Republic, signalling a break from the FG framework; in February 2016, he announced the formation of La France Insoumise (LFI; “Unsubmissive France”).

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The 2017 campaign. In her 2017 election programme, Le Pen (2017) declared that “The object of this project is first to give France its liberty and voice to the people” and that the presidential elections will be “a choice of civilisation” between two visions: “The ‘globalist’ choice on one hand, represented by all my opponents, which seeks to destroy our great economic and social equilibria, which wants the abolition of all frontiers, economic and physical” and “the patriotic choice […] that puts the defence of the nation and the people at the heart of all public decision and that, above all, wants the protection of our national identity, our independence, the unity of the French, social justice, and the prosperity of all.” Le Pen’s discourse was now primarily nationalist rather than populist, articulating a patriotism/globalism frontier in “civilisation[al]” terms, with “the people”—featured prominently in Le Pen’s campaign slogan “In the name of the people”—being used interchangeably with “nation” and pitted against an opposing bloc constructed specifically in terms of national/ foreign (“globalist”) rather than underdog/power (“UMPS”). While the EU was marked as an external locus of power in opposition to the demand of “restoring to the French people its sovereignty (monetary, legislative, territorial, economic),” this took the form of a more localised opposition rather than a nodal point structuring the discourse—the latter function being played rather by the “patriotism” signifier that linked demands ranging from “a new patriotic model in favour of employment” to an “economic patriotism” favouring “French agricultural products” and even renewable energy investments. Mélenchon, using the campaign slogan “The force of the people,” again campaigned on a left-wing populist discourse, yet with the key difference that he positioned himself outside the framework of the political parties, including the PCF-associated left. In announcing his presidential candidacy for LFI at the annual PCF festival in September 2016, Mélenchon (2016) declared that “I am a candidate outside the parties but I am not a candidate against the parties,” while introducing the new programme, “The Future in Common,” as a populist reiteration of “The Human First”: “If it’s the human first, then the human is in every man, every woman, whatever [his/her] social condition, whatever [his/her] education, whatever [his/her] religion […] which is the mass of the French people.” The programme opened with a renewed call for a Sixth Republic through which “the sovereign people must redefine our democratic rules and define anew social, ecological, and emancipatory rights” as well as abolish “the presidential monarchy” that serves “the oligarchy and

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the caste in power” (La France Insoumise 2017). The nodal point “people” took on a structuring function in linking demands for a justice system “in the name of the people,” a “popular cultural policy” as opposed to “culture for a minority of the privileged”—but also alongside the more traditional left-wing signifier “solidarity” referring to a “solidaristic protectionism” (as opposed to the FN’s “patriotic” articulation of this demand), a “solidarity tax” on wealth, and “a guaranteed and solidaristic retirement.” Mélenchon’s strategy was thus centred on turning the FN’s people-as-­ nation into a floating signifier and re-articulating it around a counter-­ hegemonic populist challenge to the political and economic order. Notable in this regard was Mélenchon’s (2017) speech at a mass rally “for the Sixth Republic” on March 18, in which he repeatedly interpellated “the people” gathered before him as the subject of a “citizens’ revolution”—citing Victor Hugo to proclaim that “The name of France is revolution”— against “the presidential monarchy,” “the privileges of finance,” but also the dual menace of “an ethnic coup d’état or a finance coup d’état,” rejecting “the extreme right that would like the ethnic nation.” In denouncing a “European Union that confiscates the sovereignty of the people and submits it to the sovereignty of money,” Mélenchon blamed it for “encourag[ing] the most blind nationalisms and the most absurd xenophobias,” thus maintaining his opposition to the FN’s nationalism even on the terrain of critique of the EU. Mélenchon’s balancing act of opposing “the people” to both “nationalism” and “financial oligarchy” can be seen in the re-articulations of demands superficially similar to the FN’s—from “solidaristic protectionism” to “control[ling] the causes of migration that are wars, climate warming, and free trade” while “reaffirm[ing] the right to asylum” and “respect[ing] the human dignity of migrants” (La France Insoumise 2017). In this context, the ultimately successful strategy of Emmanuel Macron was not an anti-populism that lumped Mélenchon and Le Pen together, but an anti-nationalist neo-liberal populism that re-articulated Le Pen’s “patriotism” (against “nationalism”) and Mélenchon’s populist opposition to “the system” while tying this to a neo-liberal reform agenda. Macron claimed to stand for an “open patriotism” that represented “the French spirit” in demarcation from “narrow nationalism and the reduction onto a chimeric identity, and on the other hand a blissful multiculturalism” (20 minutes, March 17, 2017), denouncing Le Pen’s call for leaving the Eurozone as “economic war” and declaring that “nationalism is war”

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(BFMTV, April 4, 2017). Macron, in interpellating “nationalism” as his opponent rather than “populism,” displaced Le Pen’s patriotism/globalism frontier by turning “patriotism” into a floating signifier while insisting that “I am not a rootless multiculturalist globalist” (Le JDD, March 18, 2017). At the same time, Macron articulated a populist opposition to “the system” in positioning his candidacy outside the framework of established parties and as one that “comes to upset the established order because it worries the system,” as he declared at his first rally in July 2016 (Huffington Post, October 5, 2016). Yet Macron’s populism was a specifically neo-­ liberal one insofar as it opposed “the system” for failing to deliver business-­ friendly labour-market reforms, with Macron promising to go farther than the contentious El Khomri Law and centring his election programme on the promise of a “society of work” that would “free labour and the spirit of enterprise” by, for example, further “reduc[ing] the cost of labour” for employers (En Marche! 2017). Macron, the former Economy Minister under Manuel Valls (2014–16), thus extended the technocratic reform discourse of the Valls cabinets by linking his opposition to “the system” to the long-standing neo-liberal demand (and supposed economic imperative) for labour-market flexibilisation that “the system” had allegedly failed to deliver. Macron (2017) accentuated the anti-nationalist and populist elements of his discourse ahead of the second round, declaring in his first-round election-night speech that he wanted to be “the president of the entire people of France, the president of patriots in the face of the menace of nationalists” (anti-nationalism) who also “breaks to the very end with the system that has been incapable of responding to the problems of our country for over 30 years” (populism). In one tweet, he reinforced this anti-nationalist populism by articulating the equivalential link between the FN and “the system” not only in terms of a common negative frontier, but a direct causal link: “It’s the system of old political parties that has nourished the National Front for so many years.” Le Pen’s campaign discourse, which had been less populist and less directed against neo-liberal crisis-­ management politics than in 2012, shifted gears after the first round by equivalentially incorporating part of Mélenchon’s populist discourse and turning it against Macron: “It is the project of Macron that is built entirely for the benefit of the oligarchy, the great financial powers and to the detriment of labour” (Paris Normandie, April 28, 2017). Mélenchon, for his part, retained his left-wing populist opposition to the “two candidates who approve and want to extend, both of them, the current institutions”

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in the interest of “mediacrats and oligarchs,” refusing to make a recommendation for the second round apart from not voting for the FN (Europe1, April 23, 2017). Ironically, the most anti-populist articulations came from the François Fillon campaign—which itself made use of populism in appealing to “the people” while opposing (and taking up Le Pen’s signifier) “government of judges”—in branding Macron as a case of “worldly populism” (Le Parisien, April 1, 2017) and hailing the Dutch election results as a victory “against populism and extremism” that provided hope for the battle against “the extreme right” in France (Le Point, March 16, 2017). While Fillon’s anti-­ populism was thus directed against both Macron and Le Pen, Fillon himself declared support for Macron after the first round, thus reproducing the hegemonic practice of upholding the “republican consensus” against the FN in run-offs. The French case, then, resembles something like a populist conjuncture in which competing discourses deployed populism (not least against each other) and none—except Fillon—played the anti-­ populist card. 6.2.1.3 Germany Background. Germany has seen a more recent emergence of contrasting populisms in combination with ethno-cultural reductionism (right) and socialism (left). The Alternative for Germany (AfD) was founded in 2013 and, after a 2015 leadership change, shifted from a “competition populist” (Bebnowski 2015) discourse, centred on the nodal points “the people” and German “competition” interests against “the Altparteien” and the euro and banking bailouts, towards an ethno-culturally reductionist construction of “the people” as the “only 64 million native-born Germans” built on “the classical family” as “the nucleus of society and state” (Kim 2017). This völkisch discourse, in reducing “the people” onto a biological essence under existential threat from “human flooding” (or Umvolkung), displays the highest degree of reductionism of the far-right discourses examined here, but is also consistently tied to a populist opposition to “the Altparteien” as the power bloc allegedly responsible for immigration as well as Angela Merkel’s heavily technocratic discourse of “Alternativlosigkeit” in relation to the euro and banking bailouts. The discourse of Die Linke (“The Left”) can be understood as a joint articulation of the socialist nodal point “social justice” with a left-wing humanist populism pitting “the people” (or “the human beings”; die Menschen) against the “profit” interests represented by the “neo-liberal

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consensus.” Since its founding in 2007, the party has recurrently deployed the slogan “People before profits”—often in conjunction with specific demands such as “Against Hartz IV” and “Against the care emergency”— while opposing the banking bailouts with the slogan “A safety net for the people” and defending a progressive refugee policy in terms of “human dignity.” In the face of the AfD’s reductionist turn and electoral rise, Die Linke co-chairs Bernd Riexinger (2016) and Katja Kipping pursued a strategy of displacing the frontier onto a “conflict between top and bottom and not between inside and outside” and calling for a “social offensive […] that benefits all people” (Junge Welt, April 2, 2016), while parliamentary group co-chair Sahra Wagenknecht generated controversy by attempting to partly incorporate the AfD’s constitutive outside by criticising Merkel’s decision to suspend the Dublin Regulation—which she also blamed for “mak[ing] the AfD strong” in the first place (Focus, January 13, 2017)—thus highlighting tactical differences within a broadly left-wing populist orientation. The 2017 campaign. The election year 2017 began with an anti-­populist offensive from Christian Democratic Union (CDU) General Secretary Peter Tauber, who compared Free Democratic Party (FDP) Chairman Christian Lindner with “Mr. Gauland from the AfD” and referred to Die Linke as a “red AfD,” declaring that “Sahra Wagenknecht and [AfD co-­ chair] Frauke Petry are the twin sisters of populism in Germany”; he ruled out any form of cooperation with Die Linke and the AfD and added that “I expect such a clear demarcation from the SPD and Greens as well” (Die Welt, January 8, 2017). This textbook case of anti-populism entailed the construction of “populism” as a highly equivalential category straddling the left/right spectrum and defining the outside of legitimate democratic politics; Wagenknecht herself criticised this strategy as an attempt to “make the AfD the reference point of politics” (Focus, January 13, 2017). The CDU’s anti-populism continued after the selection of Martin Schulz as SPD chancellor candidate in January, with Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble (CDU) branding Schulz as “almost literally Trump” for using the slogan “Make Europe great again” and criticising Schulz’s style “at a time when the temptation of populism has increased worldwide” (Spiegel Online, February 10, 2017). The CDU’s anti-populism crystallised in the hegemonic claim to be the sole party capable of upholding the existing order against “populist” challenges from both left and right. Tauber declared in an April interview that “the question is, as always, whether a Christian Democrat or a Social

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Democrat will sit in the chancellor’s office”—adding that “The CDU says very clearly that there will be no alliance with the populists of the right and the left, that is the AfD and the Left Party. Here, the SPD is blind in one eye” (Rheinische Post, April 10, 2017). Angela Merkel (2017) declared in a similar vein at her annual press conference: “Indeed the CDU says, the Union of CDU/CSU says: We will not work with the AfD and we will not work with Die Linke. Social Democracy, unfortunately, has not made such a clear statement in both directions.” The CDU’s anti-populism thus entailed an equivalential expansion of the party’s anti-communist “Red Socks” campaigns in the 1990s of questioning the SPD’s democratic commitment by alleging the likelihood of an SPD coalition with the then-­ Party of Democratic Socialism, but the threat now had a new name—populism—that could travel from the left to the far right. Yet the equivalentially wide-ranging construction of this threat also meant that it took on a more diffuse catch-all character (rather than being directed specifically against left-wing economics or right-wing nationalism). Populism did emerge on both the left and right in the election campaign, but in diametrically opposed ways at odds with the CDU’s equivalential construction of a two-headed threat to the existing order. The AfD (2017) presented a joint articulation of populism and ethno-cultural reductionism that pitted the nodal point Volk against “a small, powerful political oligarchy” that had to be reined in through limitations on the power and funding of political parties, term limits, and referendums through which “The people must once again become sovereign”—while also reducing this Volk to an ethnicised essence under threat from a “peoples’ migration,” highlighting the need for “self-preservation, not self-­ destruction of our state and people.” The people/oligarchy opposition meant that the AfD discourse exhibited a stronger populist structuration than their Dutch and French far-right counterparts, but also with a more strongly reductionist closure from other “peoples” deemed fundamentally incompatible with an ethnically defined essence of “our people.” This reduction was radicalised  — that is, the constitutive exclusion extended from the threat of external migration onto domestic targets on ethnic grounds  — when the AfD’s Alexander Gauland responded to federal Integration Commissioner Aydan Özoguz (SPD), who denied the very existence of such an a priori essence in arguing that “A specifically German culture is, beyond the language, simply not identifiable,” by stating that “we […] can dispose of her in Anatolia” (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, August 28, 2017), and when party co-chair Jörg Meuthen asserted in the

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election night leaders’ debate that “A successive dissolution of our nation” can be seen in the fact that “Germans” are “only sporadically” visible in inner cities (Augsburger Allgemeine, September 24, 2017). Die Linke (2017), with the campaign slogan “Social. Just. Peace. For All,” structured its campaign discourse around the dual nodal points “social justice” and “all [people],” thus radicalising (i.e. extending onto a more far-reaching chain of demands) the SPD’s nodal point “justice” while displacing the AfD’s populist-reductionist frontier onto an opposition between “mak[ing] the future for the people [die Menschen] more just and better” on the one hand and “the rich and powerful” on the other, including “the upper ten thousand,” “corporations, super-rich, and their political allies,” and “economic power translat[ing] itself into political power.” The party directly attacked Merkel’s technocratic discourse of a “market-conforming democracy,” blaming it for a “crisis of democracy” and “the rise of right-wing populists” (Die Linke 2017), thus reaffirming the equivalential link between neo-liberalism and “right-wing populism” via direct causal link. Petra Pau, who headed the party list in Berlin, accentuated the party’s left-wing humanist populism in declaring at multiple rallies around the city that the election will be about “whether Article 1 of the Basic Law still holds: ‘The dignity of the human being is inviolable.’ I emphasise: Of all people, not only of the wealthy and beautiful, not only of the whites and Germans”—thus explicitly displacing the reductionist closure in the AfD discourse. The German case thus points to a clear clash of populisms of left and right, which interpellated very different popular subjects—“all people” understood as human subjects against powerful economic interests and an ethno-culturally reductionist “Volk” against a “political oligarchy” and other “peoples”—while the CDU deployed a wide-ranging anti-populism tied to a continuation of the differential technocratic promise of “solving problems” as “the best answer to every form of populism” (Christlich-­ Demokratische Union, July 13, 2016). The AfD and Die Linke presented very different counter-hegemonic challenges, with the AfD notably displacing Merkel’s long-standing promise of “no transfer union” in opposing the euro as a de facto transfer union and pursuing radical opposition to “mass migration,” while Die Linke consistently structured its opposition to the crisis-management politics of the Merkel cabinets around the “social justice” interests of “all people” against powerful profit interests.

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6.3   Conclusion The 2017 Dutch, French, and German elections point to a nuanced picture of different forms and degrees of populism and anti-populism. Based on a discourse-theoretical conceptualisation of populism, the most clearly populist discourses are found on the left, with SP, LFI, and Die Linke each interpellating a popular subject against a power bloc defined in economic and political terms alongside socialist nodal points such as “social justice” or “solidarity.” The main far-right discourses in the Netherlands and France were primarily nationalist rather than populist, while being interpellated by opposing discourses as “nationalist” in the French case and as “populist” in the Dutch one. This, in turn, points to differing neo-liberal strategies—from the VVD’s “defensive-hegemonic” positioning as the guardian of the existing order against “populism” to Macron’s “offensive-­ hegemonic” strategy (Nonhoff 2006) of taking on a populist challenger position against “the system” in advocating neo-liberal reforms while also opposing “nationalism.” The hegemonic effects of this anti-populism and anti-nationalism, respectively, can be seen in the extent to which it cross-­ cuts competing party discourses (e.g. D66, GreenLeft, LFI) that share a referential basis for the “populist” or “nationalist” threat (i.e. PVV, FN). In Germany, the diametrically opposed populisms of the AfD and Die Linke articulated contrasting counter-hegemonic challenges to the CDU’s economic and refugee policies, respectively, and were both interpellated by the CDU in a sweeping equivalential manner as “populist.” In the three countries, different forms of “re-politicisation” of “post-political” crisis-management discourses can thus be observed: from the VVD’s “defensive-hegemonic” neo-liberal anti-populism and Macron’s “offensive-­hegemonic” neo-liberal populism to the CDU’s more wide-­ ranging but diffuse anti-populism.

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Riexinger, Bernd. 2016. „DIE LINKE kämpft für eine Revolution der Gerechtigkeit.“ Accessed May 28, 2019. https://archiv2017.die-linke.de/ partei/organe/parteitage/magdeburger-parteitag-2016/reden-und-grussworte/bernd-riexinger/. Shields, James. 2014. “The Front National: From systematic opposition to systemicintegration?” Modern & Contemporary France 22:491–511. Socialistische Partij. 2006. “Een beter Nederland, voor hetzelfde geld.“ Accessed March 15, 2019. https://www.parlement.com/9291000/d/vtk2006_ vp_sp.pdf. Socialistische Partij. 2010. “Een beter Nederland voor minder geld.“ Accessed March 15, 2019. https://www.parlement.com/9291000/d/2010_sp_ verkiezingsprogramma.pdf. Socialistische Partij. 2012. “Nieuw vertrouwen.” Accessed March 15, 2019. http://pubnpp.eldoc.ub.rug.nl/FILES/root/verkiezingsprogramma/TK/ sp2012/SPTK2012prog.pdf. Socialistische Partij. 2017. “#PakDeMacht.” Accessed March 15, 2019. https:// www.sp.nl/sites/default/files/pak_de_macht.pdf. Stavrakakis, Yannis. 2014. “The return of ‘the people’: Populism and anti-­populism in the shadow of the European crisis.” Constellations 21:505–517. Stavrakakis, Yannis, Giorgos Katsambekis, Nikos Nikisianis, Alexandros Kioupkiolis, and Thomas Siomos 2017. “Extreme right-wing populism in Europe: Revisiting a reified association.” Critical Discourse Studies 14:420–439. Stavrakakis, Yannis, Giorgos Katsambekis, Alexandros Kioupkiolis, Nikos Nikisiani, and Thomas Siomos. 2018. “Populism, anti-populism and crisis.” Contemporary Political Theory 17:4-27. Vossen, Koen. 2011. “Classifying Wilders: The ideological development of Geert Wilders and his Party for Freedom.” Politics 31:179–189. VVD [Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie], and CDA [Christen-Democratisch Appèl]. 2010. “Vrijheid en verantwoordelijkheid. Concept regeerakkoord VVD-CDA.” Accessed March 15, 2019. https://www.parlement. com/9291000/d/pdfs/regeer2010.pdf. VVD [Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie] and PvdA [Partij van de Arbeid]. 2012. “Bruggen slaan. Regeerakkoord VVD  – PvdA.” Accessed March 15, 2019. https://www.parlement.com/9291000/d/regeerakkoord2012.pdf. Wullweber, Joscha. 2017. “Staat, Ökonomie und globale Politik. Laclaus Hegemonietheorie und die Internationale Politische Ökonomie.” In Ordnungen des Politischen. Einsätze und Wirkungen der Hegemonietheorie Ernesto Laclaus, edited by Oliver Marchart, 169–192. Wiesbaden: Springer VS.

CHAPTER 7

Voting and Non-voting in Post-democratic Times Dirk Jörke

7.1   Introduction When we look at the development of European democracies since the turn of the twenty-first century, two phenomena are particularly evident: on the one hand, the decrease in voter participation (Offe 2013), and, on the other hand, the increasing electoral success of right-wing populist parties (Kriesi and Pappas 2015b). In scholarly (Birch 2009; Schäfer 2011; Müller 2017; Mounk 2018) as well as public discussions, both types of voting behaviour are described as irrational and as threats to democracy. In this chapter, I would like to contradict these interpretations. First of all, I argue that both the refusal to participate in elections and the decision to vote for a right-wing populist party could be considered as new forms of politicisation. Second, I consider the criticism of non-voting and of the election of right-wing populist parties as part of what Ingolfur Blühdorn (2013) described as ‘simulative democracy’. In other words, the typically

D. Jörke (*) Institute for Political Science, TU Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 C. Wiesner (ed.), Rethinking Politicisation in Politics, Sociology and International Relations, Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54545-1_7

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preachy condemnation of these actions is hypocritical because it ignores the increasingly simulative character of democratic procedures in post-­ democratic societies. As a consequence, this leads to a consolidation of post-democratic conditions (see also Chap. 5 in this book). My argumentation is threefold: First, I want to illustrate the appropriateness of speaking of post-democratic conditions, especially with regard to European societies. In doing so, I focus mainly on the processes of supranationalisation and the informalisation of political decision-making. Concerning these developments, in a second step, I argue that democratic procedures have become more simulative in the past 20 years. In short, the smaller the number of democratic decisions, the more the democratic myth is evoked. But the so-called losers of modernisation (Kriesi et  al. 2012) increasingly stay away from democratic procedures. This can be interpreted as a rational act, as they refuse to join the community of the ‘good democrats’ who participate in mostly simulative practices. Finally, the third section addresses voting for right-wing populist parties. My argument is that this is also a rational decision, made by those voters who can be described as ‘left-authoritarian’ (Lefkofridi et al. 2014).

7.2   The Post-democratic Challenge Not long ago, many scholars saw a glorious future for democracy. Since the late 1970s, more and more autocratic systems have been transformed into democracies. American political scientist Samuel Huntington spoke of a ‘third wave’ of democratisation with regard to Latin America, East Asia and Europe (specifically Spain, Portugal, and Greece). With the implosion of the Soviet Union, this wave once more gained strength in the late 1980s and early 1990s and affected most of the countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. However, in recent years, many scholars have become sceptical about the future of this trend. A great number of new democracies have been increasingly described as defective democracies. Although these newly transformed states established democratic institutions such as voting systems, they are insufficiently developed in terms of the robustness of their constitutional system and civil society (Merkel 2004). Meanwhile, the number of states that are explicitly turning against democracy is growing (Kurlantzick 2013). Worse yet, this critical discourse has not been limited to democratising societies: democratic optimism equally seems to be

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fading away in well-established Western democracies as well. There is much talk about disenchantment with politics, and faith in political elites has dramatically decreased (see Hay 2007; Dalton 2008). Certainly, one sign of citizens’ loss of confidence is the growing appeal of theories of post-­democracy, not only within the discipline of political science but also in the wider public (see also Chap. 5 in this book). In political theory, the concept of ‘post-democracy’ was used for the first time by Jacques Rancière. It primarily described the disappearance of ‘the political’ in modern societies. In post-democratic societies, democratic conflicts are replaced by the ‘rule of opinion polls’ and experienced political operators. Thus, the space of political conflict, which according to Rancière is constitutive for democracy, has disappeared. Politics has been reduced only to the ‘management’ of social interests: Postdemocracy is the government practice and conceptual legitimization of a democracy after the demos, a democracy that has eliminated the appearance, miscount, and dispute of the people and is thereby reducible to the sole interplay of state mechanisms and combinations of social energies and interests. (Rancière 1999, 102 [emphasis in original])

Sheldon Wolin (2001) uses the term ‘post-democracy’ as well. Referring to Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, Wolin criticises an escalating culture of consumerism that deprives the public life in the United States of its democratic substance. In contrast to this argumentation that borrows from cultural criticism, Colin Crouch presents a description that draws more from political science. In his opinion, the post-democratic regime is characterised by the following contradictory structure. The substantial institutions of parliamentary democracy, such as periodic elections, the competition of parties, and separation of powers, are still present. This is why post-democratic regimes are fundamentally different from non-­ democratic regimes. However, the promise of democratic control embodied in these institutions is hardly fullfilled. According to Crouch, decision-making by authorities that have been elected and approved by the demos has been replaced by non-transparent negotiations between the government and economic elites: My central contentions are that, while the forms of democracy remain fully in place – and today in some respects are actually strengthened – politics and government are increasingly slipping back into the control of privileged

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elites in the manner characteristic of pre-democratic time, and that one major consequence of this process is the growing impotence of egalitarian causes. (Crouch 2004, 6)

Crouch developed his diagnosis of post-democracy more than 10 years ago, and it has not been without criticism. In particular, he has been criticised for glorifying the history of European democracies—especially that of the 1950s to the early 1970s. Indeed, in this period, voter participation was higher, but at the same time, alternative opportunities for democratic participation were much more limited: only once every four or 5 years was there a vote that individuals could participate in, and activism in civil society consisted mainly in demonstrations, such as those against the war in Vietnam, or in general strikes. By contrast, today, after the ‘silent revolution’ (Inglehart 1977), there are various opportunities to participate in political decisions, from referenda to mediation processes and even participatory budgeting. Furthermore, since the early 1970s, what has taken place in Western democracies has been not only an expansion of forms of political participation but also a general liberalisation of social norms. Especially the emancipation of women and the legal and cultural recognition of non-traditional lifestyles have constituted crucial democratic achievements. This is a de facto enlargement of citizen rights and the creation of new citizen rights (Merkel 2014). Nevertheless, Crouch’s diagnosis should be taken seriously, mainly for two reasons. Firstly, over the past two decades, one can, indeed, observe in Europe a shift of political decision-making from national parliaments to less-representative institutions such as supranational bodies, constitutional courts, central banks, and expert councils. Secondly, political participation is becoming more and more a playground for very highly educated citizens. Not only is this the case for elections: it is especially true of new forms of civic participation that are supposedly more democratic than conventional forms. To the first point, the formation and strengthening of numerous institutions for the purpose of global governance set the stage for the ‘post-­ national constellation’ (Habermas). European integration is certainly the most impressive and advanced example of this process. Therefore, the establishment of the European Single Market and the common currency can be seen as a way to accommodate the post-national challenge. However, this is connected with a substantial loss of sovereignty both for national parliaments and for organs of regional self-government. The

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imperative of increasing competition—implemented by the European Commission and the European Court of Justice—is creating a politico-­ economic framework that leaves only limited space to national, regional, and locally elected representatives to regulate the distribution of public goods (Scharpf 1999; Schäfer and Streeck 2013; Mair 2013). On the other hand, it has still not been possible to reduce the much-lamented democratic deficit of the European Union (EU) institutions in a significant way. Rather, a technocratic mode of politics is predominant, flanked by laboriously negotiated intergovernmental compromises, such as the recent replacement of European leaders. All in all, as the chapter by Cecile Robert in this book shows, processes of a decidedly neoliberal depoliticisation can be described as the core of the European Union (for further discussions of EU politicisation, see Chaps. 2, 8 and 9 in this book). From a normative-theoretical perspective, this is clearly a negative tendency—one which has acquired an increased dimension with the financial and Eurozone crises. The ‘government of experts’ temporarily installed in Italy was in this regard only the sad peak of a policy that has been geared to the markets more than to the will of the citizens. Moreover, due to the financial aid programmes since 2010, a massive expansion of the authority of the European Commission and other technocratic institutions like the Eurogroup and the European Central Bank took place. In this context, the European Stability Mechanism set up in 2012 dictates that states seeking financial assistance are forced to realise a macroeconomic adjustment programme. Likewise, the European Fiscal Compact is based not only on a so-called debt limit, to which all member states must adhere, but also on the supervision of national budgets by the European Commission. Budget control used to be one of the most valued and exclusive powers of national parliaments. All these measures were critically debated in the European public spheres, and to some extent, there were massive civil society protests and the founding of new parties such as Cinque Stelle in Italy, Podemos in Spain, or the Alternative for Germany. But these protests have not led to a democratisation of European governance. Quite the opposite. Some authors meanwhile speak of an ‘authoritarian turn’ (Kreuder-Sonnen 2018) of the European Union as the outcome of the financial crisis. In short, the euro crisis has led to a politicisation, but not to a democratisation, of the supranational exercise of power (Scicluna 2014). Even a further strengthening of the competences of the European Parliament would not change this post-democratic reality. The academic debate on whether or not there is a European Public Space and EU-related

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parties has been quite intense in the past years, and there is no agreement on whether both are in the making or not enough developed. My position in the debate lies with the second camp: I argue that the European public (space) and the EU-related parties are not sufficiently developed, and that this is due to the heterogeneity of the European polities and demoi (Jörke 2019). Moreover, the process of constitutionalisation that began with the Maastricht Treaty has significantly restricted the scope of action of the European Parliament and any democratically elected authority within European Union member states (Grimm 2015). As a result, although European integration had the noble goal of maximising benefits for all EU citizens, in reality, its institutional setup and policy orientation, especially since the Eurozone crisis, seem to benefit the markets at the expense of majority will and equal participation. The story becomes even bleaker when we consider the internal situation of national democracies. In the past 20–30 years, Western democracies have seen a significant decline in citizen support of both formal political institutions and the representatives of those institutions. This has manifested itself most distinctly in phenomena such as political disengagement, unwillingness to become actively engaged in political parties, and, not least, a declining voter turnout (Putnam and Pharr 2000; Dalton 2008). Non-participation, and this is the second reason why I consider the post-democracy diagnosis to be appropriate, is particularly evident in the case of socially disadvantaged citizens who often refuse to vote and have withdrawn from political parties (Birch 2009; Hill 2006; Schäfer 2011, 2013). This is even more the case with regard to the new channels of participatory democracy. Empirical studies on these forms of citizen participation, such as participatory budgeting and other deliberative processes, reveal a clear social bias. The lower a person’s economic, social, and cultural capital, the less likely it is for him or her to participate in public meetings that call for voluntary participation (Verba et  al. 1995; Geißel and Joas 2013). This tendency is not least due to the complex skills and resources that these new participation procedures demand of active participants; in comparison, the process of voting has fewer prerequisites. Yet, many people have withdrawn even from this simple form of political participation. In the next section, I develop an analysis that interprets the refusal to vote as a form of politicisation. My starting point is the diagnosis of a ‘simulative democracy’ as given by Murray Edelman and more recently by

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Ingolfur Blühdorn. I assume that participating in democratic rituals is for those who belong to the winners of post-industrial capitalism, but not for those we might describe as losers of the modernisation process. Non-­ voting, thus, becomes a protest against simulative democracy and can be considered as a negative form of politicisation.

7.3   Non-voting as a Reaction to the Simulation of Democracy In recent years, much has been written about media democracy, spectator democracy, staged democracy, and democracy as mere ritual but also about the disenchantment with politics and political parties. The respective publications on these topics vary from mass media charges against the ‘political class’ to serious political science treatises. In his widely discussed study on representative governments, Bernhard Manin has emphasised the increasing ‘personalization of voting decisions’ and ‘the rule of media experts’, as the central features of a ‘spectator democracy’, which succeeded party democracy in the 1980s (Manin 1997). Manin argues that candidates no longer get elected because they represent a certain platform; instead, they are often primarily dependent on their respective images. In his study on ‘post-democracy’, Colin Crouch goes even one step further. According to Crouch, the public election campaign is a strictly controlled spectacle, organised by rival teams of professional spin doctors. They determine the political agenda by selecting and staging the agenda, which also becomes more and more personalised. Most of the citizens play only a passive, quiet, sometimes, even apathetic, role, unable to create their own political debate. The real political process takes place in the shadow of this staged ‘election game’, in the form of private interaction between the elected government and elites that predominantly represent the interests of economically strong actors (Crouch 2004). This is accompanied by a readjustment of the political parties and their candidates, which, in turn, leads to the situation where differences between these parties and candidates need to be artificially created (see Hay 2007; Mair 2013). However, the phenomenon of a staged democracy is not new. Already Plato described democracy as a ‘theatrocracy’ in his Nomoi. And since at least the 1920s, it has become a standard repertoire of so-called realist theories of democracy to expose the image of a democratic public as a mere illusion (see Lippmann 1997; Schumpeter 1976). Nevertheless, I

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assume that the symbolic dimension of politics in recent years has reached a new quality. This assumption is based on the process of de-­democratisation as described in the previous section. If the observation holds true that basic decisions are made by expert committees or by supranational committees, and that the need for legitimated political actions increases because of the far-reaching decisions of these committees, then the widely bemoaned intensification of merely symbolic or staged politics is a logical consequence. Elections are described as the High Mass of modern democracies. In representative democracies, elections symbolise the ideal of political equality. Every adult citizen is, in principle, allowed to participate in elections, and this applies to both the passive and active right to vote. The fundamental democratic importance of elections can be seen by the fact that the deprivation of the right to vote is strictly regulated. The opinion polls that regularly ask for party preferences, the intensity of election campaigns, and the detailed reporting on the evenings of elections are further indications of the high importance of elections in modern democracies. As Murray Edelman argued, these and similar practices produce a democratic myth: ‘School teachers, good-government groups like the League of Women Voters, and candidates themselves never tire of repeating that voting gives the people control over their officials and policies, that the citizen who fails to vote should not complain if he ends up with a poor government, and that elections are fundamental to democracy’ (Edelman 1964, 2). However, according to Edelman, this narrative does not correspond to reality—it is a myth. Elections do not determine politics; politicians hardly orient their decisions with regard to election results. Edelman wrote this characterisation of elections in the 1960s, focusing on the United States. His underlying theory of ‘the symbolic uses of politics’ and its differentiation between an instrumental and a merely symbolic side of politics have been controversial and much discussed. Indeed, the conspiracy theory element, according to which the citizens are merely a manipulated mass, has to be questioned. This critique should, however, not neglect the ritual character of elections and election campaigns. Elections have both sides: an instrumental one, namely to aggregate the will of the people or, at least, to change the political elites, and a ritual one. Yet, my thesis is that the symbolic functions of elections have become all the more important. In other words, due to the processes of constitutionalisation and supranationalisation of politics as described in the previous section, elections

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have lost their instrumental meaning. Election turnouts now have little influence in determining politics (Mair 2013; Scharpf 2013). However, it is not sufficient to denounce a pseudo-democratic façade of elections. In fact, democratic rituals still have an important, namely socially integrative, function. Democratic forms of participation in general and elections in particular are always rituals, in which the symbolic integration of society is ensured and reproduced. They serve to ensure a sense of community and to confirm fundamental political ideals. This is also emphasised by Edelman: They give people a chance to express discontents and enthusiasms, to enjoy a sense of involvement. This is participation in a ritual act, however; only in a minor degree is it participation in policy formation. Like all ritual, whether in primitive or modern societies, elections draw attention to common social ties and to the importance and apparent reasonableness of accepting the public policies that are adopted. Without some such device no polity can survive and retain the support or acquiescence of its members. The key point is, however, that elections could not serve this vital social function if the common belief in direct popular control over governmental policy through elections were to be widely questioned. The insistence of the most involved upon general participation in the rite is both understandable and functional in this light. (Edelman 1964, 3)

The last sentence is crucial because through democratic rituals, the legitimacy of the political order is ensured. However, with the following two claims, it is possible to go beyond Edelman’s classical ideology-critical position. First, I want to recall Ingolfur Blühdorn’s (2013) critique of Edelman’s theory about symbolic politics. Yet second, I shall argue that Blühdorn’s theory of a ‘simulative democracy’, which he places in opposition to the traditional ideology-critical discourse, takes only those parts of society into account that actually participate in democratic rituals. Blühdorn’s main argument against Edelman is that those who participate in democratic rituals in modern democracies do not have a false consciousness. Rather, he assumes that politicians and politically engaged citizens have come to ‘a sort of quiet agreement’ (Blühdorn 2013, 183). According to Blühdorn, both sides are interested in strengthening the democratic myth. He argues that the ‘systemic imperatives’ (Blühdorn 2013, 182) in the postmodern world—he speaks of a third modernity— do not allow ‘real democratic’ or bottom-up decision-making. Furthermore, Blühdorn claims—and this is the provocative part of his

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argument—that citizens are no longer interested in ‘so-called authentic politics’, that is, practices of ‘real’ self-government. Not only would such a government crash with the functional necessities of late modern societies, it would also impose too much on its citizens. As a consequence, these citizens would have to give up their consumerist lifestyles. In other words, Blühdorn attributes to the citizens not a false consciousness, but rather to a sort of insincerity (la mauvaise foi), as described so wonderfully by Jean-­ Paul Sartre (1992) in Being and Nothingness. It is not just a staging of those norms that is socially desired but also of democratic norms, which are linked to hopes, so that they become an important part of one’s self-­ image. At the same time, the real impact of democratic rituals has to be limited; otherwise, the rituals would jeopardise personal autonomy— which in the postmodern world is above all anchored in consumption and career. That is the reason why there is a need for the whole society to stage the democratic myth over and over again, yet at the same time to ensure that the democratic games have no ‘real’ effects. According to Blühdorn, this corresponds to the often-described change in forms of participation where engagement in political parties has shifted to rather liquid ways of participation, such as demonstrations, open councils, online petitions, and consumer boycotts. As is also true of elections, these forms of participation are characterised by a staging of the ‘availability of democratic norms’, even if ‘the outcome of these democratic rituals will have no influence on the main questions of a society’s future (e.g. the austerity policy prescribed by transnational actors)’ (Blühdorn 2013, 177–178). No doubt, Blühdorn’s theory of a simulative democracy as the essential feature of the ‘post-democratic constellation’ is provocative. Furthermore, the lack of a solid empirical foundation to his thesis can be criticised. Nevertheless, his theory convincingly shows why in times of supranationalisation and post-parliamentarianism the democratic myth becomes so intensely evoked, for example, through the introduction of new forms of participation or the many calls to participate in the elections, as one could recently observe in the elections to the European Parliament. And this is true not only for the political elites but also for those who, in one way or another, are among the winners of present societies. This includes not only those whose incomes or assets have considerably increased in recent years but also those who benefit from the growing possibilities of mobility and who, despite all their lamentations against the so-called neoliberal

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order, have to fear a fundamental social change (Goodhart 2017). However, Blühdorn misses the target by describing simulative democracy as a ‘whole society concerning project’ (Blühdorn 2013, 183). It is true that Blühdorn correctly emphasises the importance of democratic elections and unconventional forms of political engagement for the purpose of expressing democratic ideals. These become even more important as the actual sites of decision-making are moving from democratic institutions to expert committees and to the supranational level. But Blühdorn’s thesis does not make sense to those citizens who do not profit from the ‘post-democratic constellation’, that is, the neoliberal reconfiguration of social conditions and the permanent staging of the democratic myth, as Blühdorn himself concedes in the later part of his book: ‘Democracy is no longer the instrument of empowerment and equality for the underprivileged, but the instrument of political legitimacy and practical management of increasing inequality’ (Blühdorn 2013, 262–263). A conventional interpretation views those who refuse to participate in democratic procedures (e.g. non-voters) as acting irrationally. They are depriving themselves of the possibility to place their demands on the political agenda. Their refusal to vote allows political elites to ignore their interests. In this way, the already-mentioned vicious circle consisting of non-voting and lack of responsiveness will not stop. Therefore, some argue that compulsory voting would be a necessary policy to generate more political, and consequently also social, equality again (Malkopoulou 2015; Hill 2015). Following Blühdorn, however, a different interpretation can be formulated. This interpretation asserts that due to the consolidation of post-democratic conditions, especially with regard to the financial and monetary structures outlined earlier, and due to the increasing importance of mere ritual forms of democratic participation, the refusal to participate in these democratic rituals should be seen as a form of politicisation, albeit a desperate one. From the perspective of socially disadvantaged citizens, the decision to vote could be seen as legitimising a social order that stands against their interests. In the words of Claus Offe: It can also be the case that the perceived inability and/or unwillingness of any governing coalition to respond to inequalities through the adoption of redistributive measures have become so evident […] that citizens affected by these conditions have given up on raising their voice and demanding such measures. (Offe 2013, 208)

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The symbolic dimension of elections has become more and more important, not only because elections now have only limited influence on the contents of politics but also because a change of policy towards more equality is highly unlikely, given the few budgetary opportunities and the consolidation of the neoliberal supply-side policy. It is for this reason that in the democratic community, which is created by elections and other forms of political participation, the socially deprived do not see themselves as represented. In other words, their vote would only legitimise a social order that, from their perspective, stands against their interests. Why should they participate in a ritual in which they can no longer find hope? Why participate in elections when the personal circumstances of one’s life won’t change anyhow? In a paradoxical sense, the decision not to vote can be seen as a moral appeal to society and its leaders to take the celebration of elections seriously and not only for their symbolic content. It is a form of politicisation insofar as the refusal to participate in democratic rituals calls into question their legitimacy. Above all, non-voting challenges the symbolic order of post-democratic societies. In the past, however, increasing abstention has not contributed to a greater destabilisation of Western democracies. The situation is different with the current wave of right-wing populism, which can be observed in almost all contemporary democracies, especially in many European countries.

7.4   Right-Wing Populism: A New Politicisation of the Integration Process In many parliamentary and presidential elections in the countries of the European Union, turnout has risen again in recent years. This seems to reverse the trend towards increasing abstention, at least in the medium term. This increase in voter turnout, however, is largely due to the fact that right-wing populist parties are on the rise. On the one hand, election analyses show that these parties are particularly popular among former non-voters.1 On the other hand, the mobilisation effects on the part of those parties that explicitly oppose the demands of right-wing populist parties, such as a stronger limitation of migration or the defence of traditional family stereotypes, must not be neglected. All in all, as Lisa Anders 1  For example, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) won the most votes from the non-voter camp in Germany’s federal elections in 2017.

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and Seongcheol Kim in this volume argue, the success of right-populist parties has led to a fundamental politicisation of the economic and symbolic regime of the European Union and its member states, as the right-­ wing populist parties are strongly opposed to many European policies. These include gender equality policies, even if not all right-wing populist Parties share this opposition to gender equality, and migration policy, here, all of those parties are critical against European policies. In addition, most right-wing populist parties’ focus on strengthening the respective nation states, often combined with a social-chauvinist agenda. The politicisation of the European polity was particularly evident in Germany and France during the last European parliamentary elections. Here, Europe-­ friendly and Europe-sceptic parties opposed each other in a manner reminiscent of Carl Schmitt’s distinction between friends and foes. It seems that politicisation, as it can currently be observed, stands in the way of a democratisation of the European Union (see Chaps. 8 as well as 2 in this book). As mentioned in the introduction, many observers see the election of right-wing populist parties as a violation of the values of liberal democracy. It cannot be denied that many of these parties hold positions that are anti-­ pluralist and deny the rights of minorities (see Chaps. 5 and 6 in this book). Yet, as I argue in this section, this is only one part of the story. As the Dutch historian Luuk van Middelaar convincingly shows in his history of the European Union, the unification process has not only produced winners but also ‘losers’: The other side of the coin of increased freedom of movement is greater competition for jobs, which certainly does affect those who remain at home: French plumbers in France, Austrian students in Austria, Luxembourger voters in Luxembourg. There are simply a lot more of them. Which is why the deal entered into by the member states for the benefit of their citizens is good news for cosmopolitan elites or for those with nothing to lose, but is not experienced as beneficial by a majority of the public. (2014, 260)

This analysis by van Middelaar is particularly remarkable because it comes from a fundamental proponent of the European unification process. But he also has to admit that the common market has produced many ‘losers’, and that the frequently heard reference to the economic advantages of the European Union is therefore not convincing for large parts of the European population. It is therefore hardly surprising that the

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European unification process is primarily supported by the economically successful and the academic middle classes. If we look at socio-structural factors, we notice considerable differences in attitudes towards the process of European unification. Those who are highly educated and post-materialistic support European integration more strongly and have a stronger sense of European togetherness than their fellow citizens. The people who are critical of the unification are on average older, have intermediate or lower educational qualifications, are less mobile, and have a more materialistic orientation (see Kuhn et al. 2016, with regard to the Brexit vote see Antonucci et al. 2017). And it is these groups of people who find themselves particularly frequently among the voters for right-­wing populist political parties. Many social scientists (Kriesi 2010; Hooghe and Marks 2017) now speak of a new cleavage between cosmopolitans who are very open to further Europeanisation, on the one hand, and traditionalists (sometimes also referred to as ‘communitarians’) who defend the nation state are sceptical about immigration and reject free trade, on the other. Already in the early 1990s, researchers observed that the success of right-wing populist and extremist parties in Western Europe, such as Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ), Schweizerische Volkspartei (SVP), Front National, Lega Nord or Vlaams Blog, is mainly based on votes by unskilled and manual workers (see Betz 1994; Kitschelt 1995). This was surprising because at that time, these parties promoted neoliberal policies. For example, they called for tax cuts, privatisation, and deregulation. In this way, their agenda was addressed mostly to the petit bourgeoisie, namely small business owners and other self-employed people, such as workmen or shop owners. And these social groups were initially the main voters for right-wing populist parties. Yet in spite of their mainly neoliberal agenda more and more workers became supporters of these parties. Today their voters are mostly people who have a lower level of education and can be described as the ‘losers of modernization’ (Kriesi et al. 2012; Ivaldi 2017).2 In some countries the right-wing populists are even the new workers’ parties (Rivero 2019, 290). Therefore, the rising success of right-wing populist parties should not only be considered as a revolt against the normative order of liberal democracy but also as a politicisation of the economic order of the European Union (see Roberts 2019, 152). 2  However, it is also important to note that the most disadvantaged people are not the main electors of right-wing populist parties, but they are mainly the members of the lower middle classes. People from the lower classes continue to be largely absent from the elections.

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In what follows, I develop the thesis that for the losers of modernisation, it is rational behaviour to vote for right-wing populist parties, since it is these parties that are challenging the neoliberal agenda of the European Union. In short, the rationality of this choice can be seen in the fact that these parties represent working-class interests and values more than left-­ wing parties do. This is due to the fact that right-wing populist parties have changed their agenda. The programmatic development of these parties in Western and Northern Europe is not the same everywhere because national path dependencies such as a country’s political culture, political system, and economic structure play an important role. Nevertheless, at least two trends can be identified. First, some degree of de-radicalisation, at least in their rhetoric, has taken place: right-wing populism in Western and Northern Europe is predominantly no longer openly racist or anti-Semitic, but it now has an intensified anti-Islam and anti-EU rhetoric. Regarding questions of gender identity or traditional family values, the party line of these organisations is much more ambiguous. Positions vary from a progressive affirmation of homosexual lifestyles, as seen in the Netherlands, to a strong orientation towards traditional family values, as present in Hungary and Poland, for example. Second, a shift towards social protectionist positions can be observed. This is certainly the case with the Front National in France, which under the leadership of Jean-Marie Le Pen called for deregulation and massive tax cuts. However, since then, the economic programme of the Front National (since 2018 Rassemblement National) has rapidly changed (Betz 2015). Its current national platform clearly criticizes free trade and calls for tariff walls to protect French industry. Furthermore, governmental support for low-paid workers and pensioners has also been put forward in their political agenda. A very similar development can be observed in the Dansk Folkeparti, which emerged from a tax protest party but now opposes cutbacks to the welfare state and calls for the support of pensioners and for the expansion of the Danish healthcare system (Wirries 2015). The Finns Party is also characterised by ‘a left-populist defence of the welfare state against market-led policies.’ (Ylä-Anttila and Ylä-Anttila 2015, 71).3 Also, in many Eastern European Countries, right-wing 3  Yet, when they entered the government, they still supported the more market-liberal politics of their coalition partner. Support for neoliberal policy content within the framework of coalition governments can be seen as a factor leading to a loss of votes in the following elections.

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populist parties are promising to protect the ordinary people from market forces, which explains much of their electoral success (cf. Kriesi and Pappas 2015b). A clear distance from free trade and a critique of economic integration in Europe have been an integral part for some time now among almost all right-wing populist parties in Europe (Oesch 2008). As Ángel Rivero (2019, 289) states, ‘they even became critics of the neoliberal policies of the traditional parties and vocal defenders of the welfare state that they rejected in the past. This defence of the welfare state (just for the nationals) is accompanied by a critique of globalisation and, above all, a refusal of the European project’. Right-wing populist parties mirror and strengthen the criticism of the neoliberal agenda of the European Union articulated by large segments of European society, a criticism which is rarely addressed by social democratic parties anymore. To the extent that almost all social democratic parties in Western and Northern Europe see themselves as pro-European, they are at least at present very reluctant to articulate any serious criticism of the political economy of the European Union. This makes them unattractive to those people who have come under pressure from the liberalisation of trade and labour migration. On the other side, right-wing populist parties are politicising the economic agenda of the European Union by transferring economic, socio-political, and democratic questions into a fundamental conflict on nationality and national sovereignty. Nevertheless, it must be emphasised that the economic policies of most right-wing populist parties try to both address the small-scale entrepreneurs, by calling for tax reductions and deregulation, and the workers, by defending or even widening the achievements of the welfare state. The underlying aim is to satisfy both the old and more recent segments of its electorate. This is achieved by expressing a critique of social benefits granted to migrants, while also proclaiming a social protectionist agenda. The promise is to finance social policies by implementing tariff walls or by enacting an industrial policy based on domestic production. However, another important strategy to win the votes of both potential constituencies is simply not to focus too heavily on economic demands but to concentrate instead on the control of immigration, criticism of Islam, and general critique of the elites. Importantly, the discussion of cultural norms can mobilise people across different economic interests. In this way, Hanspeter Kriesi and Takis S. Pappas emphasise the strategic use for right-­ wing populist parties to debate cultural norms: ‘[t]he success of the new challengers was mainly due to their appeal to the cultural anxieties of the

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“losers”, which, given the “losers’” heterogeneous economic interests, provided the least common denominator for their mobilization’ (Kriesi and Pappas 2015a, 3). Against this background, it is at least short-sighted to explain the rise of right-wing populism solely on the basis of a specific ‘working-class authoritarianism’ (Lipset 1959) or antiliberal values (Norris and Inglehart 2019). Doing so would, in particular, not help to clarify why we are currently experiencing such a wave of right-wing populism in Europe. To answer this question, the concept of left-authoritarianism (Lefkofridi et al. 2014), however, is very helpful. It states that huge parts of the electorate prefer more authoritarian values regarding cultural issues and perhaps even tend to xenophobia, while they, at the same time, support classically leftist positions on economic subjects. Until the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, there was no party that represented both positions at the same time. Left-authoritarian voters had to choose between social democratic or leftist parties, which represent liberal values and a left-leaning social policy, or right-wing parties, which combine authoritarian values with a decidedly neoliberal economic agenda. Since neither was particularly attractive, many of them stayed away from the elections. Yet, this constellation is obsolete in two ways. On the one hand, with regard to social democratic parties, it is no longer certain whether they advocate a left-leaning economic policy or a strengthening of the welfare state. Their attractiveness for left-authoritarian voters has also been diminished by the fact that, over the past two decades, social democratic parties have adopted important demands on cultural issues made by the postmodern New Left. Much the same is true for radical left parties. And it is therefore no surprise that the electorate of so-called leftwing populist parties like Podemos or Syriza are much more academic than the one of right-wing populist parties (Ivaldi 2017, 159). On the other hand, and as already stated, right-wing populist parties have changed their image. They have been de-radicalised to some extent, and some of them have moved to the left in questions of social and economic policy. This combination of authoritarianism and left-wing economic positions seems to be attractive for more and more voters, especially for the losers of modernisation. The right-wing populist parties continue to be culturally authoritarian, but they are now also arguing for a strong welfare state. They especially advocate an agenda, which could be described as ‘welfare-chauvinism’ (Keskingen et al. 2016). This particularistic social protectionism and social chauvinism mean a sharp contrast to the more universalistic left-wing parties.

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7.5   Conclusion On the basis of the diagnosis of post-democracy, which was developed particularly with a view to the polity of European Union and its consequences for the democratic culture in the member states, two forms of politicisation have been distinguished. First, a silent protest against the symbolic order of post-democratic societies by refusing to vote. Non-­ voting was presented as a legitimate form of politicisation for those people who are among the losers of modernisation. This was for many people a rational option as long as there was no realistic prospect of a change in the political and economic order, and going to the polls merely meant a kind of commitment to the existing social regime. Why should people participate in the practices of a simulative democracy when they feel strongly disadvantaged by the political and economic regime, which is legitimised by these practices? But with the rise of right-wing populism and, in particular, its adoption of former social democratic positions in the area of economic and welfare policy, the constellation has changed significantly and a second form of politicisation has arisen. Right-wing populist parties are challenging the political and economic order of the European Union in a way that is convincing for ever larger parts of the electorate. The combination of left-­ wing economic policy positions and more conservative to authoritarian values, combined with clear criticism of immigration, is proving particularly attractive. The challenged elites react to this predominantly with a strategy of moralisation. This mainly consists of branding right-wing populist positions as nationalist and racist. However, it is doubtful whether this strategy will be successful in the long term. The past European elections and the political developments in Italy, France and many Eastern European countries should be reason enough to give more thought to economic disadvantages and their structural causes in scholarly research, politics and the public.

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SECTION III

(De-)Politicising Europe

CHAPTER 8

(De)politicisation: Shifting Dynamics in an Emerging European Political Field and Public Sphere Niilo Kauppi and Hans-Jörg Trenz

This chapter proposes an understanding of politicisation as the field of contestation about the political. Applied to the contested field of European Union (EU) governance, the argument is that EU politicisation cannot be understood without analysis of its synergy with EU depoliticised governance (see also Chap. 10 in this book). We start with a discussion of some of the dimensions and modalities of (de)politicisation and follow with analysis of EU (de)politicisation in relation to the political field and public

N. Kauppi (*) CNRS, Strasbourg, France University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland e-mail: [email protected] H.-J. Trenz University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark ARENA, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 C. Wiesner (ed.), Rethinking Politicisation in Politics, Sociology and International Relations, Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54545-1_8

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sphere. To understand the ‘politics of politicisation’, we demarcate the field of political struggle and locate the wider public and societal resonances of such a struggle over the political. The research programme for the analysis of the ‘politics of EU-politicisation’ then refers to the wider processes of how political conflicts are selectively amplified to create public visibility, how attention among relevant publics is unequally distributed, how opinions of these publics are formed and, ultimately, as well, how legitimacy (or de-­legitimation) is generated. After delineating possible research directions, we finish with some comments on EU (de)politicisation as a rupture from national politics and the competitive and multi-level merging of political fields and public spheres through the transnational encounter of agents and publics. This chaotic process has unpredictable outcomes for EU-legitimacy, but it nevertheless opens a European field where political contestation meets with societal resonance with possibilities of reflexivity and democratic learning for both institutional agents and publics involved.

8.1   The ‘Politics of Politicisation’ How to make sense of politicisation within the political theory of European integration? The purpose of this chapter is to demarcate the field of research on politicisation and the way it contributes to our understanding of the specifics of the EU as a political order in search of legitimacy through analysis of political action. For this purpose, the distinction between the political and the non-political (implicit but not explicit in the definition of Zürn 2018; Kauppi et al. 2016a) is a good starting point to reflect about politicisation as the field of contestation about the political. To talk about politicisation assumes, first of all, that the meaning or the character of issues to be political can be contested (see Chaps. 2, 3, 4 and 9 in this book). Politicisation as the field of contestation about the political presupposes a conflicting understanding about the character and scope of the political. This means further that politicisation as the force or the dynamic of turning something political can only be understood in relation to the countervailing force or dynamic that something should not be considered political (see Chaps. 2, 10, and 12 in this book). Politics can only be situated in a world in which not everything is political. But in what sense can something be considered political and non-political? Answering this question requires unpacking the relationships between the (non)political and

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(de)politicisation from a historical, agent-­ centred perspective (cf., for instance, Kauppi et al. 2016b). (De)politicisation makes sense in relation to social contexts, cognitive structures, and political strategies (see Chap. 10 in this book). Something is (de)politicised for someone in a specific structural and situational configuration. The visibility of certain issues is directly dependent on the knowledge individuals have of these issues, on the mind’s eye so to speak, and on the interests of the protagonists of (de)politicisation processes. For instance, for a long time, the carbon footprint was not politicised for the public. Scientists talked about it among themselves. It was an issue that raised debate in professional circles and was politicised in those milieus, but not for the public. The scientists’ interventions in the media politicised the issue for the public. The same could be said about EU-integration. It was meant, on purpose, to be an area of ‘low politics’ invisible to the general public. If we do not know anything about an issue, it cannot be politicised for us. And if (de)politicising the issue is in nobody’s interest, then it will not be (de)politicised. Some objects or events are more prone to be politicised than others. Certain groups try to monopolise the politicisation of certain objects, such as the environment or climate change. In other words, different groups specialise in different kinds of politicising actions. While knowledge and interests give us clues on the limits of the (de) politicised, cultural conventions and codes also play a role. Some objects are more protected from politicisation than others. For instance, in Thailand, the King as an institution is a cultural taboo in Russia, the presidency is, for the moment, sheltered from direct politicisation strategies. The various dimensions of (de)politicisation include then transformations of issues from non-politicised to politicised and vice versa (see Chaps. 2, 10, and 12 in this book), as well as the involvement of various groups that seek influence and power (see Chap. 5 in this book). The following simplified table represents the relevant dimensions of (de)politicisation (Table 8.1). Table 8.1  Dimensions of (de)politicisation Dimensions of (De)-politicisation

Politicisation

Public Private

‘Official’ politics, anti-system Consensus, TINA Turf wars, ‘cabinet politics’ Legalese, technocracy

Source: Author

De-politicisation

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Politicisation cannot be discussed in any depth without a deeper thinking of politics. The current literature unduly separates the two. Mair, for instance, distinguishes between regular party politics and system opposition (Mair 2007). The first sustains the political system, while the second is potentially disruptive. Opposition within the system is ideologically driven and decides about the distribution of power and positions in politics. Opposition of the system questions the polity and its constitutive identity in more fundamental terms, for instance, in the form of a separatist movement or the Gilets jaunes movement in France. Politicisation as ‘polity contestation’ would in this sense be dramatically different from ‘politics’ in the sense of triggering a dynamic of ‘identity politics’ or other form of system critique or politicisation that does not seek reconciliation or compromise but fundamental rupture. Such an understanding of politicisation as ‘identity driven’ in contrast to political party contestation as ‘ideology driven’ has become dominant in the literature on EU-politicisation (de Wilde et al. 2013; Hooghe and Marks 2009; Kriesi 2016; Statham and Trenz 2012). It is put in a nutshell by the call for a new grand theory of integration, which is ‘post-functionalist’ but, at the same time, meant to be ‘post-ideological’ putting at focus, instead, the fundamental identitarian conflicts and cleavages that divide the EU in light of current challenges such as economic and financial crisis, Brexit or illiberalism (Hooghe and Marks 2019). To reopen this debate, we propose an understanding of politicisation that is not based on a distinction within the field of political contestation, but it focuses, instead, on the field of contestation about the political. ‘Turning something political’ does not only mean ‘making an issue political’. It also opens the field of struggle about the political. In this sense, politicisation is not issue specific or limited to a particular kind of debate such as ‘crisis’ or ‘Brexit’, but it concerns the whole constellations of agents, institutions, affected parties and audiences that are involved in the political game. By ‘claiming to be political’, politicisation is, at the same time, perceived as an intrusion of the political into the autonomy of other sectors of society, which so far have claimed to be ‘non-political’. This regards broader distinctions like the one between ‘private’ and ‘public’ or ‘politics’ and ‘market’ that become subject to political contestation. Politicisation affects the set-up of broader societal relationships. More often than adaptation, politicisation is also an imposition of political logics. It is a colonising force, which claims that the political should rule over other sectors of society, for instance, that family life should be regulated or

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that the market should be steered (see Chap. 3 in this book). Everything is political (Bourdieu 2001), but in the sense that everything is potentially political, and everything can be politicised in the sense of applying political logics to something that is or was not considered political (see Chap. 2 in this book). As such, politicisation typically faces opposition of those who resist being or becoming political. This tension already points to the constitutive link between politicisation and de-politicisation as countervailing forces—an idea we are going to develop in further detail at the end of this chapter. The transformation of something not political into something political can assume two distinct but interrelated meanings (1) making something publicly salient and (2) making something debatable and open to conflict (see Chaps. 2, 3, and 4 in this book). In the first case, politics operates in a sphere of public visibility, and ‘turning something political’ basically implies any effort of creating visibility (Nassehi 2002). An issue is visible to someone when this person is aware of the issue and understands its meaning. An issue and its meaning are highlighted over other issues, which means that particular technics are applied to increase its visibility, making it salient but also relevant for others. Someone might assert, for instance, that an issue should be considered being of public interest or affecting a wider public. In the second case, politics is essentially about conflicts, and the political move consists in turning something a priori not contested, politically unmarked, devoid of struggle, and disagreement, into something disputable or at least discussable, involving different perspectives and interests (Kauppi et al. 2016a). Neither one of these two different meanings of ‘turning something political’ is sufficient to describe politicisation. Politics as the process of creating visibility is usually described as ‘agenda-setting’ (McCombs 1981). As such, it does not need to be controversial. In case everybody agrees that an issue should be raised on the public agenda, we would not talk of politicisation. Politicisation further needs to build on the visibility of political issues, it cannot set the agenda, but only build on it. Politicisation is triggered when agenda-setting has been successful and when issues that have become salient are debated further in the public realm of politics. This needs to be distinguished from conflicting interests that can be fought in the private realm or from political struggles that do not reach the threshold of publicness. We can enter debate and controversies with our political adversaries but be unsuccessful to raise the public agenda and gain attention for our concerns, or we can fight our conflicts backstage. In

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EU decision-making, the frequent power and interest politics between governments and member states behind closed doors might be a case in point (see Chap. 10 in this book). Such forms of non-public contestation would thus unfold below the threshold of what is commonly defined as politicisation. Politicisation as we shall argue is the special case of ‘turning something political’ that combines the visible and the contested dynamics of the political. Conflicts of interests among governments, EU institutions, stakeholders, and experts behind closed doors in the protected area of Brussels has been one of the main characteristics of European integration (cf. Olivi 1998). Making such conflicts and debates publicly visible would be one modality of politicisation. We thus talk of politicisation if politics unfolds as a competition for the attention of the public. The ‘politics of politicisation’ are distinguished by the strive to contest the distinction between the ‘political’ and the ‘non-political’, to expand such conflicts and to make them publicly salient. To understand these ‘politics of politicisation’, we do not only need to demarcate the field of political struggle: where and by whom such contestation of the political is carried forward? We also need to locate the wider public and societal resonances of such a struggle over the political: how is such contestation selectively amplified to create public visibility, how is attention among relevant public unequally distributed, how are opinions of these publics formed, and, ultimately as well, how is legitimacy (or de-­legitimation) generated? It is here that the ‘empiricism’ of the politics of politicisation is theoretically embedded. What is needed then, is not a ‘theory of politicisation’, but it is simply the bridging of two existing theory traditions: the theory of the political field and the theory of the public sphere.

8.2   Directions and Modalities of  (De)politicisation Instead of transforming the not political into the political, politicisation can also, in a more concealed way, transform something political into something not political, depoliticising an issue. In this sense, de-politicisation is a form of reversed politicisation. As the prefix indicates, de-politicisation marks something already politicised as not political, something contested as being not contested, defusing its political character (see Chaps. 2 and 10 in this book). In other words, de-politicisation tries to

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erase the political, leaving only the non-political visible. Erasing is also an act of political marking that presents the result as being something nonpolitical, the result of an act of deliverance from constant struggle or disagreement. It is a way of disconnecting it from one modality of existence to another. De-politicisation can occur by temporalisation, that is, by postponing something, even ad infinitum, or by spatialisation, by removing it from the repertoire of potential politicisable objects. A political issue can be synchronised with another issue that is considered as not being political, thus attempting to depoliticise the political issue through proximity or contagion. A political agent can transport an issue, a person, an institution, or other object of contention that is potentially politically explosive into a more controllable milieu such as an expert group or committee that meets behind closed doors. Making something technical or discussing it using technical jargon, that is, transforming a political issue into a technical, legal, or scientific one is a familiar depoliticising move (see Chaps. 2, 10, and 12 in this book). This is in essence the Jean Monnet method of European integration canonised by neofunctionalism and theorists like Ernst Haas and Leon Lindberg. Another de-politicisation strategy is to invoke the state secret or the public interest. This strategy can lead to executive politicians, such as presidents and prime ministers, politics and politicisation as their domaine reservé or monopoly. This process has been canonised by the intergovernmentalist theory of European integration developed by Stanley Hoffmann and his students. According to this perspective, European integration depends in the last instance on the political strategies of these executive politicians and the ‘high politics’ they manage. If successful, the result of de-politicisation is that some issues will not be discussed as political, that is contestable issues. From a broader perspective, politicisation then involves actions that politicise either by making something not political political or, in a more concealed way, something political not political. An important addition has to do with the question of potential political issues. Politicisation requires pre-politicisation (cf. Kauppi et al. 2016b), that is, objects that have the potential of or are amenable to being politicised by some agents and their strategies or interests. The infinity of potential objects has to be somehow restricted. The politicisable or potential political objects might be discussed in the media or in more closed, expert, or technocratic groups. Unmarked objects can include any kinds of objects, from broad social and natural developments, sand or clean water, dormant or ‘inanimate’ social issues that have been left to oblivion, or

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individuals for instance. To be successful, political marking or politicisation requires from the agents creative political action and sometimes risktaking, a sense of the opportune moment that provides the momentum or leverage for politicisation, or de-politicisation. In the literature, scholars take politicisation as being something active, involving action in time (see Chaps. 2, 3, 4 and 9 in this book). However, it could also be thought as necessarily involving passivity. In Finnish, the distinction between passive and active modes is clear: politisoiminen for the active, politisoituminen for the passive. In English, the distinction is not linguistically marked. A way to linguistically mark this political distinction would be to use politisation for the passive modality and politicisation for the active modality (cf. Kauppi et al. 2016b). The object of politicisation can be a variety of ‘things’. Issues such as the right economic policy, persons like Jose Manuel Barroso when he switched from the presidency of the European Commission to Goldman Sachs, institutions such as the European Parliament, aspects of things like the colour of the European flag, events like anniversaries celebrating European treaties, and so on. In theory, anybody can decide to politicise an issue that had previously been politically unmarked, introducing into the political game a new stake. Anybody means anybody, not just a legitimate agent of the political field (see Chap. 2 in this book). In reality, the impact of the act, its performative and political effect depends a great deal on who the instigator is. Politicisation does not take place in a political vacuum. The current literature adopts an objectivist conception of politicisation, the object of (de)politicisation being inanimate and prone to manipulation, which overall leads to a differentiated pattern with regard to the question what is politicised and by whom (de Wilde et  al. 2015; Rauh 2016; Zürn 2018). More nuance has to be introduced. The objects of politicisation can be more or less active, willingly or unwillingly politicised, devising resistance or avoidance strategies. What has to be taken into account are the perceptions and knowledge, or the reflexivity of the agents, subjects, and objects, involved in (de)politicisation processes. Objects are (de)politicised not in the abstract but for certain individuals or groups. Technicisation is not just an act of de-politicisation. It is a move by which certain political agents reflexively de-politicise an issue, removing it from the horizon of consciousness and action of some groups, for instance, the general public, attempting to place it into the horizon of consciousness and action of some other, more restricted groups, making it available for them for reflection and action, provided they have the

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knowledge necessary to decipher the issue. For these latter groups, technicisation is akin to a process of empowerment and potentially of politicisation. The result of technicisation is that for the excluded, the issue might present itself as not political, while, for the included, it might become highly politicised. At the same time, the included might present to the excluded the issue as being depoliticised, in order to keep the issue under their control and power. For instance, in relation to European integration discussions between politicians and civil servants in the corridors of Paris, London, and Washington were certainly, from the beginning, highly politicised discussions. Historical reconstructions of events confirm this (cf., for instance, Olivi 1998). But the majority of the public in France or Germany were either not aware of these, or, then, if they were, the issues were despite them mostly marked as non-political, except at some key historical moments like the empty chair policy or the various referenda. The average citizen remained on European integration a relatively unreflective passive object of de-­politicisation processes. Hooghe and Marks have described these processes using the term ‘permissive consensus’ that was previously coined by Lindberg and Scheingold (see Chap. 2 in this book). But this de-politicisation was a reflexive strategy of certain groups and elite configurations. This example illustrates the seeming contradiction that an issue can be simultaneously politicised for certain groups and depoliticised for other groups. The scope of politicisation of an issue depends on who has the power or capacity at a certain point in time to define the issues that are legitimately considered as being politicised or political or not and of being of public relevance or not.

8.3   Locating Politicisation: The Political Field and the Public Sphere If politicisation demarcates the ‘empiricism’ of a field of the struggle over legitimacy and public attention, it follows from this that we do not need a theory of politicisation, we need a theory that describes the contradicting forces of raising attention and its contingent effects on the shaping of public opinion and political legitimacy in the relationship between political representatives and their constituents. Such theories exist and do not need to be reinvented. As political sociologists, we rely here on insights from two interrelated theory traditions: (1) the Bourdieusian theory of

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the political field, which contextualises how contestation over political issues is related to legitimising practices of collective agents and (2) the Habermasian public sphere theory, which focuses on the mediating infrastructure for the unfolding of political debates and the validation of competing claims for political legitimacy through external publics. A political field emerges as a result of the institutionalised and stratified relationship of collective agents, who have entered a game of power that is not only guided by strategic choices and interests but also by collective representations about the meaning of the political. Political competition unfolds through established routines and practices, which decide about the positioning of competing agents within the field and about their status that empowers or disempowers them to represent or act in the name of others. As a form of status politics, the political field regulates the relationship between dominant and dominated groups, the rules of entry into the field, and the agents’ positional strategies (Bourdieu 1993; Kauppi 2003, 2005; Swartz 2013). The distribution of primary (political) and secondary (economic, epistemic…) resources or capital has an impact on the agents’ potential actions. As we are going to elaborate further on, such a theory of the political field as a socially regulated struggle about the distribution of social status adapts well to the situation of the EU, which does not know a centralised power or a firmly established hierarchy but is an unevenly structured space of political action, more or less open to competitive gain. It sharpens the view on the logics of such a competition game and the way agents involved in such a game undergo processes of what could be called European socialisation (Favell 2006). In modern societies, the public sphere denotes the intermediary realm of communication where opinions are expressed, exchanged, and made publicly salient (Trenz 2015b). ‘To make things public’ implies the discovery of problems that need to be dealt with collectively, the channelling of these problems through the filter of the media and political institutions and the realisation of the collective will of the people in the act of democratic self-­government (Habermas 1996). The public sphere is, however, only insufficiently described in terms of a rational consensus about the issues and problem that deserve to be raised on the public agenda and to be dealt with collectively. Issue-agendas remain contested as much as different solutions are debatable in light of underlying interests and normative choices. The public sphere is in this sense best conceived as a place for the struggle over public attention, which in our media landscapes is considered to be a scarce resource (Wessler 2019). At the same time, the

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salience of political issues remains tied to the expression of public concerns that need to be normatively justified to be of ‘public relevance’. In this process of competing for public attention and claiming for ‘public relevance’, the public sphere increasingly transnationalises, for instance, through the mobilisation of social movements and their promotion of issue agendas that need to be dealt with at a global scale (della Porta and Tarrow 2005). A distinct European public sphere can be conceived along the same lines as a detector of shared problems that are brought to the attention of European publics (Trenz 2015a). In relation to these two grand theory traditions, the ‘politics of politicisation’ fuse together status politics and attention politics. Politicisation as status politics is about the positioning of particular agents as competitors in the political game. It can however also be about the status of particular issues as political or as non-political and their ranking on the public agenda. Politicisation as attention politics goes beyond the interplay of competing agents or issue agendas and calls for the attention of a third party (the public) as a mediator in the dispute between competing agents. As such, politicisation expands the field of politics by opening up another tension between those who call for attention for political issues and those who pay attention to (not necessarily the same) issues. Politicisation as attention politics is only insufficiently described as a strategic game between competing agents as it is intrinsically normative in the way the struggle over public attention is linked to particular norms that justify why an issue deserves to be of public interest. To the extent that politicisation triggers debates about the status of political issues to be of ‘public interest’, these debates also need to adjust to the normative constraints of the public sphere and the demands for justification that distinguish public reasoning from private interest negotiation (Eriksen 2014).

8.4   The Distinctiveness of European Union Politicisation In the attempt to formulate a political sociology for the European Union, scholars have controversially discussed whether Bourdieusian, Habermasian, and Foucaultian grand theories of the political still apply to the case of the EU (Favell and Guiraudon 2011; Zimmermann and Favell 2011). Scholars have applied both the notion of the ‘political field’ and the notion of the ‘public sphere’ mainly within a national framework of

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politics, where legitimacy is derived from a constitutive state-society relationship. Falling into the trap of ‘methodological nationalism’ (Beck 2003), most political scientists have conceptualised national politics and EU politics as constituted by distinct political fields and distinct public spheres that obey different logics and also underlie different constraints of legitimacy. The recent scholarly emphasis on the dynamics of EU politicisation reminds us of an ongoing process of convergence of ‘policies’ and ‘politics’ that goes beyond the increasingly artificial delimitation of ‘political fields’ and ‘public spheres’ in the plural. EU politicisation is precisely an indicator of the competitive process of a multi-level merging of political fields and spheres through the transnational encounter of different agents, institutions, and audiences. EU-politicisation is a rupture from the established modes and logics of national politics, but it is also renewal with a potential to open up democratic legitimacy. As such, it understandably creates uncertainty for the positioning of various agents and institutions as well as the salience of political issues that are to be dealt with collectively. Paradoxically, such an uncertainty can itself become a driver of further politicisation. Scholars often analyse EU politicisation as unfolding outside the institutionalised infrastructure of an established party system for political contestation and of a public sphere for the mediation of political debates. As distinguished from ‘regular politics’ politicisation is seen as ‘exceptional’ and, as such, often driven by agents from the margins of the political spectrum. Scholarly research considers the political field for contestation and the public sphere for the struggle over attention that distinguish the ‘politics of politicisation’ to be confined to the realm of national politics. This is also in line with Hooghe and Marks’s (2009) understanding of EU politicisation for whom politicisation takes place in national political contexts and inevitably leads to the re-nationalisation of EU politics. We claim that the case of EU politics cannot simply be grasped by the dynamics of fragmented politicisation within established national politics. It requires a focus on the constituting dynamics of a transnational political field and public sphere (cf. Kauppi 2013). In focusing our attention on the combination of status and attention politics, EU politicisation offers a useful framework for analysing these constituting dynamics of a political field and a public sphere that emerge over the contestation of political issues and the establishment of new relationships between conflicting political agents and their publics. In this sense, EU-politicisation is a move to

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overcome the fragmented European political landscape. As such, it creates mutual dependencies in negotiating the status of political agents and issue agendas that resonate across borders. EU politicisation becomes increasingly important as a form of status politics of prominent Eurosceptic leaders and their attempts to converge issue agendas in European Parliament election campaigns (Galpin and Trenz 2018). Engagement in status and attention politics can also become a normative requirement. EU agents and institutions are increasingly expected to develop appropriate public communication strategies to launch debates about the EU and making issues on the EU agenda publicly salient. Prominent key figures, such as the Spitzenkandidaten in European Parliament election campaigns, appear in their role as unifiers of political debates, which includes also the possibility of becoming the target of public contestation. Conceptualising EU-politicisation in terms of the constituting dynamics of a European political field and a public sphere does, however, not mean conceiving politicisation as a unifying force. Politicisation does, of course, not exclude differentiation in the way the public agenda is raised and shifts across the EU political landscape (de Wilde et  al. 2016). We expect EU politicisation to differentiate not only across time and across countries but also across different media formats. In practice, differentiation often results from the scarcity of public attention as a resource for political mobilisation. In EU politics (and not only), visibility and public attention are, despite continuous efforts to politicise EU agents and issues, still to be considered as scarce resources. The realm of politics is already overpopulated with agents and issues that compete for public attention. In the EU, politicisation remains exceptional, depoliticised governance the rule. At the same time, we observe that EU politicisation has developed in a usual symbiosis with EU governance. On the one hand, the complex technocratic character of the EU administrative apparatus puts a serious constraint on the possibility of politicisation as the opportunities for engagement in status, and attention politics are seriously restricted (see Chap. 10 in this book). On the other hand, EU technocracy has become increasingly the target of politicisation, claiming to regain political control over bureaucratic decision-making and thus undermining the trust in expertise. This power constellation opens up another line of conflict between those who wish to neutralise and keep issues private or disclosed from public attention and those who wish to uncover their political character. De-politicisation, as driven by bureaucrats and experts, is a protective move to shield the realm of

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governance and the efficiency of decision-­making from the perceived illegitimate interferences by partisan political agents. In contrast, politicisation detracts attention from EU policy output and performance and focuses on the system character of the EU, fundamentally questioning the delegation of political authority to a supranational body (de Wilde and Trenz 2012). This form of system or polity contestation is another distinctive marker of EU politicisation we wish to emphasise. In contrast to institutionalised politics within established political systems, the politicisation of the system cannot be reduced to a simple competition game between political agents and their positions, the moving targets in contentious politics. The whole EU has been historically constructed as a rather inert target of contestation that requires its defendants and opponents to position themselves in an either-or categorical way, for or against the EU. EU-politicisation as a form of system opposition comes then, indeed, close to the kind of identity politics emphasised by Hooghe and Marks (2009) and Kriesi (2016), where competing agents are pushed to align themselves along a pro- and anti-European cleavage line that does not leave much room for manoeuvre in the political game.

8.5   Politicisation and De-politicisation as Countervailing Forces in European Union Politics Some scholars have presented EU-politicisation as a major rupture in European integration. It has been discussed like the peccato originale, the ‘fall of mankind’ that has forever changed the peaceful, consensual, and civilised patterns of EU governance that evolved over the past decades to promote the common good and prosperity of Europe (Hooghe and Marks 2009, see also Fossum and Trenz 2006; Statham and Trenz 2012). This interpretation rests on the assumption that de-politicisation is the norm, while politicisation remains exceptional. We have, instead, argued for an understanding of politicisation and de-­ politicisation as two countervailing forces in the contestation about the contours of the political. As such, neither politicisation nor de-politicisation do just happen by themselves, but they require the application of tactics and tools by political agents that need to adapt to the logics of the political field and the norms of the public sphere. Political processes always involve variably reflexive political agents (Kauppi 2018). While de-politicisation as the tactics of erasing the political has worked quite well in

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European integration (for instance, Flinders 2006), the political dynamics has changed since its appropriation by nationalist and extreme political groups (see also Chaps. 5, 6 and 7 in this book). EU politicisation and de-politicisation remain ultimately tied together in the struggle over the public agenda about what deserves to be at the focus of public attention in the EU. In this struggle over public attention, politicisation and de-politicisation do not stand in a symmetrical relationship to each other. Once an issue is politicised for a broad group of people through the media, once an issue has been experienced as being a political issue, it will not easily be depoliticised. Attempts to erase the already political are not only often unfeasible, they might be also be counterproductive and perceived as illegitimate political moves. In this sense, politicisation does not only leave indelible political traces but also introduces important normative changes and learning by reflexive political agents. Politicisation can then become, indeed, the norm in a highly mediatised public sphere, while de-­ politicisation is suddenly perceived as exceptional or even unwanted. The way politicising agents claim normative superiority in the struggle over democratic legitimacy and its requirement of publicness and inclusion is, in itself, part of the politicising dynamics of European integration. De-politicisation, in turn, remains defensive, but never submissive. It can take its chance from the epistemic requirements of governance and the calls for experts. In more practical terms, new media developments and the diversification of audience attention allow niche publics to proliferate and to practice alternative, often more deliberative ways to debate political issues. In the struggle over the scarce resource of public attention, governments and EU agents will also continue to find their way to escape from the limelight. EU politics will continue to be more backstage than frontstage. EU politicisation will not be reversed (de Wilde and Zürn 2012), but at the same time, it remains difficult and exceptional to focus public attention. Some, sometimes, prefer de-politicised governance over politicisation. Sometimes, it is unwanted, but it cannot be avoided, and most times, it is still the routine of EU governance. EU politicisation cannot be understood without analysis of its synergy with EU depoliticised governance. Without de-politicisation as a countervailing force, EU politicisation would lose its distinctive character. It would not be able to collect enough momentum, not be prolonged by actions from others, fade into the background, or else start forming habituation patterns. EU politicisation continues to drive because there are resistances to it. From the vantage point of a political sociology of the EU,

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we can thus conceive politicisation and de-politicisation as two countervailing forces of EU politics. At the surface, EU politicisation happens as status and attention politics of new political agents that have entered the EU power game. Once we enter the dynamics of the political field and of the public sphere that set the contours for these status and attention politics, we can see, however, that politicisation happens because there is a structural constellation of shifting agendas and issue cycles and an unequal distribution of attention across the EU political space. EU-politicisation is possible because attention remains such a scarce resource within the system of EU governance and because the status not only of political agents but also of issues on the public agenda remains normatively contested. Understanding politicisation and de-politicisation as countervailing forces helps avoid falling into the fallacy of ahistorical conflict studies, which postulate an irreconcilable and mutually exclusive positioning of hegemonic and counter-hegemonic agents in conflict (see also Chaps. 3, 5 and 6 in this book). According to such accounts, conflict would be grounded in a fundamental antagonism that divides society and that cannot be overcome by democratic means (Mouffe 2013). While we certainly agree with the claim that conflict needs to be considered as a necessary feature of any politics, we wish to emphasise that politicisation does not simply describe a polarised or antagonistic constellation between competing agents but also a long-term process of political change. There is, in other words, a procedural dimension of conflict that develops over time and that allows for a changing positioning of agents and their opinions. This relates to an old topos of public sphere theory, which understands conflicts as embedded in public opinion formation processes in relation to long-term processes of institutional and societal learning (Trenz and Eder 2004). We therefore call the notion of politicisation as grounded in an antagonistic conflict constellation (as, for instance, based in the Schmittian friend-enemy distinction) ahistorical, precisely because it forecloses the possibility of learning. In the literature on EU-politicisation, we encounter such a constellation in the notion of a constraining dissensus that simply blocks political actors or captures them in their identitarian cages, but it does not enable them to engage in collective problem-solving. EU-politicisation would thus be conceived as an end of history drama, where irreconcilable and never-ending identity conflicts block each other and are an obstacle to any path of future integration. By considering the dynamics of politicisation and de-politicisation, we lay the analytical focus on possible dynamics and procedures of how to overcome such blockages.

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De-politicisation, for instance, can be useful in a situation of crisis as a management strategy that lays emphasis on expertise. In some situations, de-politicisation can also be explained as a learning outcome of agents and institutions who take more reflexive stances beyond their momentary interests and identities. Such a procedural and historical perspective of the shifting dynamics between EU- politicisation and de-politicisation as a process of institutional and societal learning is further corroborated by the observation that EU institutions, despite continuous efforts of de-politicisation in response to crisis, have not regained control over politicisation (Trenz et al. 2015). To the contrary, their measures of crisis management have further fuelled politicisation. There is, in other words, an increasing gap between depoliticised crisis governance as the dominant mode of institutional learning and public perceptions. This is because, even if institutions opt for a largely ‘silent’ crisis management style, their actions will be publicly scrutinised and contested. This is the effect of the democratic public sphere, within which processes of politicisation and de-politicisation remain embedded. EU-politicisation in times of crisis can be considered as a test case for triggering such learning processes, which can encompass primary perceptions of crisis, its magnitude and negative effects, as well as valuations and assessments of the end of crisis. Politicisation in times of crisis is driven by mediatised public contestation as a crucial element for the attribution of responsibilities, for new political alignments or cleavages (North-South, Nordics vs. the rest of the EU) and the demarcation of new national or transnational spaces of democracy, belonging, and solidarity. Politicisation thus can be perceived as a long-term crisis accountability mechanism, whereby the more short-term crisis management process and its outcomes are evaluated, setting the basis for learning of the agents and institutions involved or undermining it altogether. In terms of such long-term learning processes that include EU institutions and society, the effects of crisis seem contradictory. If we take public opinion as one major indicator for long-term changes of attitudes of the European population, we find that Euro crisis measures are unpopular and perceived as undemocratic, while public discourse surrounding them is highly elite-critical and divisive, often drawing on national stereotypes and prejudices (see Chaps. 6 and 7 in this book). In such circumstances, politicisation can, indeed, become disruptive, in terms of a ‘constraining dissensus’ and blocking the possibilities of both institutional and societal learning. Political agents and institutions who are

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driven by politicisation are often concerned with their short-term survival rather than facilitating the accountability process or safeguarding the core functions of democracy and preserving the democratic legitimacy of the system as a whole. Thus, instead of functioning as an accountability mechanism, politicisation in times of crisis would lead to a polarisation of dominantly Eurosceptic publics along national and identitarian lines. Mobilised publics remain an external constraint to institutions and no mechanisms are foreseen to turn their expression of ‘constraining dissensus’ into democratic empowerment of the EU. An alternative understanding of EU politicisation as ‘empowering dissensus’ (Bouza and Oleart 2018)’ or as ‘catalysing dissensus’ (Auel et al. 2016) refers to the possibility that conflicts, carried out in the public sphere, are an important mechanism of democratic learning (Eriksen 2019; Kauppi et al. 2016b). Democratic learning does not only refer to enhanced public accountability of institutional actors, who respond to societal demands, it also entails the awareness of relevant publics that hindrances can be overcome by collective decision-making by delegation of competences and by changing modes of problem-solving and conflict resolution to ensure that they are legitimate, vis. acceptable for affected parties (Eriksen 2019). Thus, while post-functionalist accounts of a ‘constraining dissensus’ as an effect of politicisation (see Chaps. 2 and 9 in this book) emphasise a ‘downward pressure on the level and scope of integration’ (Hooghe and Marks 2009, 22), politicisation as a mechanism of democratic learning can fuel integration from ‘depoliticised governance’ to ‘democratic government’. Democratic learning sets limits to de-politicisation as a strategy to gain long-term legitimacy effects in the form of EU crisis governance, for instance. There is a need for all actors involved to recouple de-politicised governance and public resonance (Trenz and Eder 2004). EU-institutions and political actors need to follow democratic procedures, which imply the necessity to make themselves and their counter-crisis decisions available to institutional and public scrutiny. At the same time, affected publics would make legitimate use of the opportunities to raise voice and channel their concerns through the EU system. The re-coupling of de-politicisation and re-politicisation would thus take place from a double perspective of both institutional and societal learning. Ideally, EU-institutions and publics would mutually observe and critically scrutinise each other. Institutional learning would take place as a readiness to recognise past mistakes, seek external expertise, adapt to current situations, and pave ways for reform through feedbacks and interactions with

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affected parties and the public. Public learning would take place as a form of politicisation that alerts citizens to pay attention, exchange their opinions, and voice their concerns. Citizens would be enabled to build knowledge, engage in opinion and will formation and collectively mobilise to raise voice vis-à-vis national government and the EU (Michailidou and Trenz 2015). Only under such ideal conditions, politicisation of the EU could be channelled into an ‘empowering dissensus’ that could claim a higher legitimacy than the old, uninformed permissive consensus, and that would avoid the peril of a constraining dissensus through institutional and public blockages A sociopolitical theory of politicisation can only outline the dynamics of conflict that can lead to such an ‘empowering dissensus’ through democratic learning. The normative and empirical challenge remains how to meet these conditions.

8.6   Conclusion The intent of this chapter has been to contribute to a sociopolitical theory of European integration that takes collective action and social groups, not institutional structures (neo- or postfunctionalism and multi-level governance) or nation state’s governments (intergovernmentalism) as its key categories. A political sociology of European integration needs to take its starting point with the constituting force of the political at the European or transnational level in terms of both political field and of public sphere. (De)politicisation is the struggle about what is to be included in-/excluded from European politics. This is not just simply a question of various strategies of actors to get access to EU politics but a structural problem of unequal access, different positional and situational resources, and opportunities for participation in EU politics. We have sought to outline an approach that focuses from a procedural and historical perspective on the shifting dynamics between EU-politicisation and de-politicisation as a process of institutional and societal learning As there is no general answer to the question of legitimate government, a constant struggle follows in which actors, academics included, as the current boom of politicisation research testifies, attempt to delimit and define European politics, its legitimate attributes, processes, and players. A better knowledge of these dynamics will enable the development of ways to overcome the increasingly fragmented European political landscape.

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References Auel, Katrin, Olga Eisele, and Lucy Kinski. 2016. “From constraining to catalysing dissensus? The impact of political contestation on parliamentary communication in EU affairs.” Comparative European Politics 14 (2):154–176. Beck, Ulrich. 2003. “Toward a New Critical Theory with a Cosmopolitan Intent.” Constellations 10(4):453–468. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1993. Language and symbolic power. Cambrdige, MA: Polity Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 2001. Contrefeux 2. Paris: Raisons d’agir. Bouza, Louis, and Alvaro Oleart. 2018. “From the 2005 Constitution’s “Permissive Consensus” To TTIP’s “Empowering Dissensus”: The EU as a Playing Field for Spanish Civil Society.” Journal of Contemporary European Research 4 (2):87–104. de Wilde, Pieter, Anna Leupold, and Henning Schmidtke. 2015. “Introduction: the differentiated politicisation of European governance.” West European Politics 39 (1):3–22. de Wilde, Pieter, Anna Leupold, and Heinning Schmidtke. 2016. “Introduction: the differentiated politicisation of European governance.” West European Politics 39 (1):3–22. de Wilde, Pieter, Asimina Michailidou, and Hans-Jörg Trenz. 2013. Contesting Europe. Exploring Euroscepticism in Online Media Coverage. Colchester: ECPR Press. de Wilde, Pieter, and Hans-Jörg Trenz. 2012. “Denouncing European Integration: Euroscepticism as Polity Contestation.” European Journal of Social Theory 15 (4):537–554. de Wilde, Pieter, and Michael Zürn. 2012. “Can the Politicization of European Integration Be Reversed?” Journal of Common Market Studies 50 (S1):137–153. della Porta, Donatella and Sidney Tarrow. 2005. Transnational Protest and Global Activism. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Eriksen, Erik Oddvar. 2014. The Normativity of the European Union. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Eriksen, Erik Oddvar. 2019. Contesting Political Differentiation: European Division and the Problem of Dominance. Cham: Springer International Publishing. Favell, Adrian. 2006. “The Sociology of EU Politics.” In The Handbook of EU Politics, edited by Knud Erik Joergensen, Mark A. Pollack and Ben Rosamond, 122–128. London: Sage. Favell, Adrian and Virginie Guiraudon. (eds.). 2011. Sociology of the European Union. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Flinders, Matthew. 2006. “Depoliticisation: Principles, Tactics and Tools.” British Politics 1 (3):203–318.

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CHAPTER 9

Dissensus, Deadlock, and Disintegration? Examining the Effects of EU Politicisation Lisa H. Anders

9.1   Introduction For decades, European integration was driven by political elites. Treaties were negotiated behind closed doors, European policy-making was insulated from domestic politics, and most of the time the integration process and European policies remained low-saliency issues. Public opinion stayed more or less indifferent towards European unification, the EU and its policies, and this was seen as part of the EU’s success (Zürn 2019, 982). This has changed. EU issues have become more salient and divisive in public and partisan debates. Scholars agree that the EU has become politicised (see Chaps. 2, 8, and 10 in this book). The “genie is out of the bottle” (Risse 2015, 153)  and politicisation is probably “here to stay” (Braun et al. 2016, 571) as it cannot be “stuffed back in the bag” (Hooghe and Marks 2009, 22), or reversed (De Wilde and Zürn 2012). Against this background, the likely consequences of EU politicisation move into the spotlight (see also Chap. 2 in this book). Will it diminish

L. H. Anders (*) Institute for Political Science, Leipzig University, Leipzig, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 C. Wiesner (ed.), Rethinking Politicisation in Politics, Sociology and International Relations, Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54545-1_9

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governments’ room for manoeuvre at the European level, thus inhibiting supranational decision-making efficiency or even causing deadlock? Will it hinder further competence transfers or even lead to disintegration? To answer these questions, this chapter is structured as follows. The next section addresses conceptual issues. It contrasts different definitions of the term and specifies the actors and arenas of politicisation. The third and fourth sections take stock of theoretical propositions on the consequences of politicisation. The fifth section then presents empirical findings on the repercussions of politicisation on both European policy-making and European integration. The final section summarises the results. Overall, this chapter shows that research on the effects of EU’s politicisation is still in its infancy. However, studies provide initial evidence that politicisation strengthens decision-makers’ responsiveness in European policy-making, while leaving intra- and inter-institutional bargaining processes more or less unaffected. Propositions relating politicisation to decreasing decision-making efficiency thus seem unwarranted. Also, regarding European integration, politicisation does not seem to be an obstacle. Even in highly politicised times, heads of state and government agreed on deepening integration. This is mainly due to the strategies decision-­makers can employ to shield decisions at the European level from the increasingly attentive and critical public. While European elites might not be capable of reversing politicisation, they can creatively work around politicisation-induced constraints—at least in the short run.

9.2   The Politicisation of the EU Within the past decade, politicisation has become an important research frontier of social sciences. This section briefly reviews how EU scholars commonly define and operationalise politicisation as well as the related concept of politics. It additionally introduces the arenas of politicisation and briefly discusses the added value of an action-based understanding of politicisation (see also Chaps. 2 and 4 in this book). As highlighted in the introductory chapter of this book and extensively discussed elsewhere (De Wilde 2011; Zürn 2019; Wiesner 2019a), EU scholars use the term “politicisation” to describe different phenomena in different contexts. Most conceptualisations, though, share a core meaning. Firstly, they link politicisation to conflict, controversy, contentiousness, and contestation. Early on, Schmitter (1969, 166) defined the politicisation of European integration as a process “whereby the

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controversiality of joint decision-making goes up”. Likewise, Hooghe and Marks (2012, 840) conceive it as the “growing contentiousness of decision-­making”. Drawing on Schattschneider (1957, 1975), also Grande and Hutter (2016b, 7) understand politicisation as “an expansion of the scope of conflict within the political system”. Secondly, most EU scholars agree that politicisation implies public visibility of these conflicts (Risse 2015, 146; Statham and Trenz 2013, 3; Schmidt 2019, 1018). Issues are considered as politicised if they are “a matter or an object of public discussion” (Zürn 2014, 66) or if the debates surrounding them find “resonance in mass media or other public forums” (De Wilde 2011, 568). Public forums are, for instance, the electoral arena where parties compete for votes, the national and European parliamentary arena where elected officials publicly debate and take political decisions, and the protest arena where interest groups and social movements publicly voice their concerns. In essence, the underlying idea of these approaches to EU politicisation is that politics is about visible conflict. Actors act politically if they publicly advance their different positions on how to handle the problems at hand, if they visibly struggle over the right course of action. Conversely, issues that are not debated in public arenas are considered as “politicized to a very limited extent – if at all” (Grande and Hutter 2016b, 8). Based on this conflict-oriented understanding of politics, most EU scholars agreed on a three-dimensional conceptualisation of politicisation within a relatively short period of time. The prevailing perspective now is to view politicisation as characterised by three key features: the public salience, the expansion of actors, and the polarisation of opinions (Hutter et al. 2016; De Wilde et al. 2016; Rauh 2019; Hutter and Kriesi 2019). Accordingly, an issue is politicised if it is frequently raised in public debates by a wide range of actors with differing opinions (for a critical discussion of this perspective, see Chaps. 2, 8, and 10 in this book). Studies employing this conceptualisation mainly focus on “public discourse and the supply side of politics” (Hutter and Kriesi 2019, 999): arguing that public visibility of conflicts crucially depends on the media, they analyse politicisation chiefly through content analyses of mainstream print and, more recently, social media (Grande and Hutter 2016d; Statham and Trenz 2013, 2014; Ademmer et al. 2019). In addition, and based on the premise that issues do not get politicised due to their “intrinsic importance”, but when parties pick them up (Hooghe and Marks 2009, 18; Grande and Hutter 2016b, 22), most studies focus on partisan conflicts. A few also examine patterns of EU politicisation in the protest arena and

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the citizens’ arena (Dolezal et al. 2016; Hurrelmann et al. 2015; Ademmer et al. 2019). Some studies even deploy indices combining levels of public opinion politicisation, visibility of EU issues in the media, and protest events (Rauh 2016). However, such combined approaches remain an exception, and hardly any study focuses on the interplay of politicisation dynamics in different arenas. As highlighted in Chap. 2 of this book, the dominant empirical approach to EU politicisation—to focus on mass-mediated statements of party actors—implicitly suggests a top-down perspective on politicisation dynamics (Kauppi and Wiesner 2018, 231). Parties appear as the decisive drivers of politicisation, media as neutral intermediaries, and citizens as the passive audience of politicisation. To revive ontological debates and to bring ordinary citizens as agents back into politicisation research, Palonen, Kauppi and Wiesner suggest an action-based approach, which defines politicisation as “the act of naming something as political” (Palonen 2003, 182; Wiesner 2019b). Conflict-oriented and action-based approaches share their focus on controversies. In fact, the act of naming something as political is seen as marking something as contingent. This, in turn, is defined as the activity of “rendering something contested or controversial” (see Chaps. 2 and 4 in this book, as well as Wiesner 2019b, 257, Kauppi et al. 2016). Hence, both approaches relate politics to conflict. Yet they truly differ regarding the role they assign to the public when defining the threshold of politicisation. While conventional conflict-oriented approaches conceive public visibility of conflicts as a defining feature of politicisation, the action-based conceptualisation stresses that “virtually everything and everyone, in every possible setting  (…)  can be part of politics” (Wiesner 2019b, 256). Accordingly, any issue can be politicised “at whatever level and group of society” (ibid., 258), that is, issues can already be counted as politicised if citizens name them political in private conversations. Besides, the action-­ based approach suggests a bottom-up model of politicisation. In the beginning, ordinary citizens or civil society actors mark an issue as political. Then, the issue reaches semi-public or public arenas such as (social) media or the protest arena. Finally, politicised issues enter the political arena, are taken up by party actors, and become a “matter of institutionalized political conflict” (see Chap. 2 in this book, as well as Wiesner 2019b, 258). The main advantage of this action-based bottom-up perspective is to emphasise that issues can be politicised by various actors at various levels

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inside and outside the political system. It additionally highlights that politicisation processes in these different arenas are interrelated. To fully grasp politicisation in its action-based form, it does not suffice to focus on indicators such as salience or actor expansion in mainstream media. Rather, researchers should focus on politicisation actions, that is, the concrete act of making something subject to political action (ibid.). At the same time, the action-based model does not imply that the three stages of politicisation are equally important with regard to their consequences for European policy-making and European integration: private or semi-public controversies over EU issues are less likely to systematically influence decisions at the supranational level than mass-mediated party conflicts and conflicts that made it into the political system (see Chap. 2 in this book). In this regard, conflict- and action-based politicisation concepts converge. The next sections, therefore, discuss how European decision-making is affected if EU issues become increasingly salient and divisive in public and partisan debates.

9.3   Politicisation and European Policy-making How does politicisation affect supranational policy-making? As shall be shown, there is no simple answer to this question. On the one hand, there are good reasons to expect that politicisation tightens accountability links and increases responsiveness, which, in turn, might reduce decision-­ makers’ flexibility in European negotiations and therefore impede effective decision-making. On the other hand, decision-makers can employ various strategies to counter politicisation-induced constraints, rendering the responsiveness-enhancing effects of politicisation unlikely (see Chap. 10 in this book). In general, politicisation is expected to increase the “decidability of the offer” (Bartolini 2000, 37). If EU issues become salient and contested in public and partisan debates, different party positions become visible, and citizens are provided with meaningful alternatives (De Wilde 2011, 565). The same holds if these issues are publicly marked as something “that is open to alternative forms of action” (Kauppi et al. 2016, 82). This enables citizens to make informed choices, feed their demands into the EU system, and reward or punish incumbents for their performance in Brussels. Consequently, vote-seeking decision-makers can be expected to become more responsive to their constituents. This holds for both electoral channels of the EU: the intergovernmental channel, where citizens can voice

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their opinions in national elections by (indirectly) electing their governments who collectively constitute the Council of Ministers, and the supranational channel, where citizens directly elect the European Parliament, which has become an equal partner with the Council of Ministers in almost all policy areas (Hix and Høyland 2013). In both channels, politicisation potentially strengthens the link between citizens and their representatives by raising the visibility of political alternatives and providing voters with choices on EU-related questions. The argument can also be extended to non-majoritarian institutions such as the European Commission. Knowing that, due to its prominent role in decision-making, discontent concerning EU  policies quickly turns into a general criticism of its powers; the Commission, as an actor with a general interest in self-preservation, will be eager to demonstrate its responsiveness (Bes 2017, 539). Hence, EU’s politicisation can increase “the weight of the wider public in the utility function of a competence-seeking Commission” (Rauh 2019, 348). With regard to the input legitimacy of European decision-making, the politicisation of EU issues thus seems a highly welcome development. It increases the salience of these issues, boosts the visibility of actors’ different positions, and it can enhance decision-makers’ responsiveness. Ultimately, therefore, politicisation can help to overcome the EU’s infamous status as a “polity without politics” (Schmidt 2006). Along these lines, various authors underline the democracy-enhancing potential of the EU’s politicisation (Follesdal and Hix 2006; Risse 2010; Zürn 2014). With regard to the efficiency of European policy-making, the effects of politicisation seem less easily predictable. Some expect policy politicisation to streamline decision-making processes, while others fear that it causes a stalemate. According to Hix (2006), the politicisation of EU policies improves decision-making efficiency. Assuming that EU policy-related questions can be integrated into the classic left/right dimension of political conflict (see also Börzel and Risse 2009), he expects politicisation to structure conflict within EU institutions along the traditional socio-­ economic cleavage, to create similar partisan majorities within the European Parliament, the Council, and the Commission, and, as a result, to “increase the chances of overcoming gridlock” (Hix 2006, 8). Others question this expectation. Highlighting that political conflict on EU policies might as well be structured along national lines, they doubt whether majorities within EU institutions converge with increasing politicisation. Therefore, politicisation-induced partisan alignment in EU institutions might also hinder inter-institutional compromise (Bartolini 2006).

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Similarly, two-level game approaches (Putnam 1988) suggest that the politicisation of EU policies adversely affects Council negotiations. If EU policy issues are salient and inform vote choices in national elections, the shadow of the vote might affect the governments’ willingness to compromise. By reducing governments’ room for manoeuvre and making Council negotiations more strenuous, politicisation, therefore, might inhibit supranational decision-making efficiency (Zeitlin et  al. 2019, 966). Conversely, domestic constraints might also be turned into a bargaining advantage. If a government credibly claims that it is domestically bound to a certain position, then other governments might be more willing to make concessions. Politicisation can be expected to complicate Council negotiations particularly under two conditions. Firstly, if levels of politicisation are equally high in all member states. In this case, no government will be able to make concessions. Secondly, if politicisation results in a re-nationalisation of debates. In this case, EU issues are framed as “pitting one’s own nation state against others or against supranational institutions” (De Wilde and Lord 2015, 151). Compromise in re-nationalised debates is probably harder to achieve than in situations where problems are publicly framed as common European problems. The more conflicts are perceived as zero-­ sum games between member states, the less governments are willing to compromise (Risse 2015; Zeitlin et al. 2019). How political conflicts are framed is an empirical question. While scholars agree that politicisation is influenced by national context factors (De Wilde and Zürn 2012), they still debate if it leads to a re-nationalisation of public debates or the evolution of a European public sphere. Some suggest that politicisation potentially enhances the Europeanisation of political debates (Statham and Trenz 2013, 3). Others stress that the growing salience and divisiveness of EU issues in national public spheres neither necessarily increase transnational communication nor inevitably entail shared problem perceptions (Eppler et al. 2016, 16; Risse 2015, 146). Evidently, many expectations outlined earlier share the premise that citizens can hold their representatives accountable for their decisions in Brussels by rewarding or punishing them at the ballot box. To be able to do so, voters require information. They need to know how their representatives negotiate at the supranational level and how they decide on the policies of interest. In this vein, accountability requires a “politicization of what governing bodies do (and do not do)” (Curtin et al. 2010, 937). To some extent, opposition parties can politicise what governing parties do.

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Ideally, governments should also engage in account-giving to enable citizens to hold them to account (Rauh and De Wilde 2018). Statham and Trenz (2014, 291) expect this to happen. According to them, the expanding public discourse on EU issues makes executive decisions more transparent. Zürn (2014, 60) seems equally sanguine in this regard, positing that politicised international institutions respond “with increased formal transparency”. It is, however, well established that the EU as a consociational polity (Magnette and Papadopoulos 2008) provides ample opportunities to shield decisions from public scrutiny, to diffuse responsibility, and to engage in blame avoidance. Negotiations in the Council of Ministers offer a prime example of such depoliticisation strategies (for a detailed discussion of depoliticisation in European governance, see Chap. 10). Although, according to the treaties, qualified majority voting is the norm and votes should be made public, ministers have developed informal practices to avoid formal voting. Given this informal practice, voters cannot assess “how much effort any government has put in” (Schneider 2019, 59) to realise their constituents’ preferences. Voters, thus, cannot attribute responsibility to decision-makers, and governments cannot “be blamed by their constituencies for having failed to defend national interests” (Novak 2013, 1091; Hillebrandt and Novak 2016). Besides, European decision-makers can pursue arena-shifting strategies. They can delegate decisions to expert groups and committees which remain “rather opaque to a wider public” (Falkner 2011, 5). By the same token, the trilogue procedure insulates decision-making. It relocates political debates from public to secluded settings, where representatives of the Council, the Commission, and the European Parliament negotiate early agreements behind closed doors. Obviously, this procedure lacks transparency (Curtin and Leino 2017). Overall, these practices leave citizens more or less ignorant about what governing bodies do in Brussels. While politicisation can increase voters’ opportunities to feed policy demands into the EU system, it does not necessarily enable them to sanction their representatives for their decisions at the supranational level. It therefore appears questionable whether politicisation really induces responsiveness and affects inter- and intra-institutional negotiations. To sum up, there is still no agreement on the effects of the EU’s politicisation on policy-making. Against this background, it seems useful to cast the net widely when empirically examining how the increased public attention and contestation of EU issues affect Europe’s day-to-day

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policy-making. Do policy alternatives become visible so that voters can translate their policy preferences into vote choice? Are EU institutions increasingly responsive to the wider public? Does this alter intra- and inter-institutional negotiation processes? The previous paragraphs also suggest that the effects of politicisation on policy-making are contingent upon different factors. The content of politicised debates matters. The more politicisation induces a re-nationalisation of debates, the more it can be expected to become a hindrance to smooth decision-making. Besides, EU actors’ responses matter. They can pursue various strategies to mitigate the politicisation effects.

9.4   Politicisation and European Integration How does politicisation affect European integration? To answer this question, the grand integration theories, which dominated scholarly debates for decades, are of little help. While neo-functionalism and liberal intergovernmentalism disagree on who the key actors of integration are, they essentially share the premise that European integration is an elite-driven process, mainly motivated by economic preferences (Hooghe and Marks 2009; De Wilde 2011). Both approaches equally rely on the idea of a permissive consensus. Both approaches, therefore, agree that public opinion and public debates play “little or no role of significance” (De Vries 2018, 212). Strictly speaking, neo-functionalists did not completely ignore politicisation. In his early writing on European integration, Haas expected integration steps to persuade political actors “to shift their loyalties, expectations and political activities toward a new [European] centre” (Haas 2004, 16). However, he focused on supranational actors and interest groups and deemed public opinion and public debates causally irrelevant for European integration (Risse 2005, 297). Later, Schmitter added that the expansion of EU tasks into new policy areas would result in attitudinal spillover, defined as the “collective recognition that the original objectives [of sectoral integration; author’s note] have been attained, surpassed, or made irrelevant and that new ones involving an upward shift in either scope or level of commitment are operative” (Schmitter 1969, 166). So, overall, neo-functionalists expected politicisation to propel integration (see also Chap. 2 in this book). Liberal intergovernmentalism, in contrast, stresses the low salience of EU issues in the minds of European voters. Constitutive issues, or as

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Moravcsik (2002, 615) puts it, institutional choices on how to manage EU issues are regarded to be particularly low in salience and not systematically related to popular behaviour in elections and referendums (Moravcsik 2018, 1652). European integration issues, therefore, are not expected to mobilise large numbers of swing voters. Governments, thus, are not confronted with sustained public constraints. Besides, Moravcsik stresses the functional pressures for and the resulting interest in integration. As in many policy areas, as unilateral action is simply not viable any more, governments are incentivised to continue to widen and deepen integration even if constitutive issues become more salient or divisive. To do so, the “optimal strategy of politicians is collectively to say one thing and do another” (Moravcsik 2018, 1661). In short, in liberal intergovernmental reasoning, politicisation is not expected to have a noticeable effect on integration. Postfunctionalism, explicitly aiming at “hypothesizing the consequences of politicization for the substantive character of European integration” (Hooghe and Marks 2009, 3), is more pessimistic (see the discussion in Chaps. 2, 8, and 10 in this book). Synthesising research on public opinion, identity formation, and literature on the strategic interaction of political parties, Hooghe and Marks argue (a) that European issues entered the arena of mass politics where decision-making is “subject to mass media, political parties, social movements, and government coalitions” (Hooghe and Marks 2019, 5), (b) that in spite of far-reaching competence transfers to the European level, citizens’ identities have remained remarkably stable, and (c) that political entrepreneurs strategically mobilise this growing tension between supranational authority and national identities. Especially right-wing populist parties have electoral incentives to mobilise Eurosceptic citizens (or, to be precise, citizens with exclusive national identities) by framing Europe as a threat to national identity and politicising constitutive issues, which “cannot easily be accommodated in left/right contestation” (Hooghe and Marks 2009, 18). If they do so successfully, the permissive consensus is replaced by a constraining dissensus. Political elites can no longer rely on the benevolent and quiescent public. This narrows the ground for possible agreement in intergovernmental negotiations and creates “downward pressure on the level and scope of integration” (ibid., 22). Postfunctionalism identifies three linkages relating politicisation to (dis)integration. Firstly, reforms can be blocked if Eurosceptic parties form the government in one or two member states. As treaty revisions

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require unanimity, a single Eurosceptic government can put a halt to integration. Secondly, referendums provide citizens with the opportunity to block treaty revisions. Intergovernmental negotiations, therefore, become “mightily constrained by the fear of referendum defeat” (ibid., 21), as heads of state and government have to calculate whether negotiated treaties will be accepted by their constituencies. Last but not least—and in line with the arguments presented earlier—the growing salience and public contestation of EU issues lead politicians to anticipate the electoral consequences of their decisions at the European level. Even if citizens do not have a direct say on revised treaties, they can sanction incumbent governments in national elections. This constrains bargaining on further integration, as heads of state and government will not agree on deepening the level and scope of integration if this seriously reduces their chances of being re-elected. Though sometimes interpreted in this way—some even read it as a “theory of disintegration” (Webber 2019, 9)—postfunctionalism does not predict that politicisation automatically causes stagnation or integration setbacks (see Chap. 2 in this book). Rather, it remains agnostic about the concrete effects of politicisation by highlighting that they depend on the strategies the elites pursue to work around politicisation-induced constraints. As already mentioned, the European multilevel system offers governments ample opportunities to work around domestic constraints. Even if political elites may not be capable of reversing politicisation, they can try to cushion its effects, and, depending on their success, politicisation can result in disintegration, maintaining of the status quo, or punctuated reform (Hooghe and Marks 2019, 5). First and foremost, governments can try to avoid referendums by negotiating agreements outside the treaty framework or by repacking bigger reforms into smaller reform packages. As Hooghe and Marks (2009, 22) underline, such a strategy might come with costs. Disentangling a reform package into several smaller bundles to avoid referendums reduces options for log-rolling and thereby potentially narrows the scope of reforms. Moreover, governments can cushion politicisation effects on integration by providing opt-outs and greater flexibility for those governments which are constrained by their domestic electorates (Schimmelfennig et  al. 2015). Finally, governments can shield integration from politicisation by “shifting decisions to non-majoritarian regulatory agencies” (Hooghe and Marks 2009, 22).

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Similarly, new intergovernmentalism stresses that governments can react to the demise of the permissive consensus by using more informal and secluded modes of decision-making and by delegating decision-­ making competences to so-called de novo bodies (Bickerton et al. 2015). While these shielding strategies enable decision-makers at the supranational level to withstand domestic political pressure in the short term, they might have adverse effects in the long run, as they can widen the gap between popular and elite preferences and amplify public discontent. Thus, according to Hodson and Puetter (2019, 15), the “EU is at risk not only from Eurosceptic challengers but from member state governments’ determination to circumvent them” (also see Chaps. 7 and 10 in this book). To summarise, while neo-functionalists expect politicisation to fuel European integration and liberal intergovernmentalists emphasise the low electoral salience of EU-related questions, postfunctionalism posits that politicisation results in a rising downward pressure on the level and scope of European integration, yet does not automatically lead to disintegration. Rather, the effects of politicisation on European integration are mediated by the strategies of political elites. If they successfully insulate intergovernmental negotiations from politicisation-induced constraints, the effects of politicisation will remain moderate—at least in the short term.

9.5   Empirical Research on the Effects of EU Politicisation Most studies on politicisation have focused on the patterns and causes of this phenomenon. Only very recently have scholars started to examine the impact of politicisation on EU institutions, supranational decision-making processes, and European integration. This section first sketches major findings concerning the patterns and drivers of politicisation and then turns to its effects. Irrespective of their different—conflict-oriented or action-based—conceptualisations, scholars agree that politicisation is not an entirely new phenomenon. Long-term analyses based on the conflict-oriented concept of politicisation reveal that in some member states, most notably Great Britain, European issues were already politicised in the 1970s (Grande and Hutter 2016a, c). Likewise, Kauppi et al. (2016) highlight from an action-­ based perspective that the course of integration—though often negotiated behind closed doors—has always been marked by contingencies, as

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conflicts between federalists and unionists as well as the debates on the European Defence Community exemplify. Studies furthermore demonstrate that politicisation peaked around major integration events such as treaty revisions, accession rounds, referendums and European Parliament elections (Hutter et al. 2016). Besides, politicisation is “differentiated” (De Wilde et al. 2016). There are major differences between the arenas of political discourse. When compared to the electoral arena, politicisation of the EU is very low in the citizens’ arena and in the protest arena (Hurrelmann et  al. 2015, 56; Ademmer et al. 2019; Dolezal et al. 2016). Besides, politicisation varies considerably between member states. This might ease intergovernmental negotiations. If governments are not all equally constrained by an increasingly attentive and critical public, there is room for concessions. In line with postfunctionalist expectations, studies identified radical right-wing parties to be the main drivers of politicisation in the electoral arena (Kriesi 2007). These parties predominantly use nationalist frames when publicly debating EU issues (Helbling et al. 2010, 517). Their “battle cry is defense of national sovereignty” (De Vries and Edwards 2009, 22). Along these lines, parties with more Euro-critical stances tend to address constitutive issues more often than their Euro-friendly counterparts (Braun et al. 2016). The more they do so, the more they challenge the dominance of integrationist executives, which monopolised EU-related discourses for decades (Koopmans 2007). Thus, politicisation is often equated with the surge of Eurosceptic populist parties and generally perceived as a threat. However, the increasing salience and contentiousness of EU issues can also be interpreted as a normalisation of EU-related debates (see Chap. 2 in this book). Only if competing approaches on European integration become discernible, does democratic choice become viable. Besides, radical right-wing parties are not the only politicisation drivers. High levels of politicisation can also result from strong polarisation between mainstream parties (Dolezal and Hellström 2016). As mentioned earlier, the consequences of politicisation are much less studied. While several works investigated how politicisation influences political structuring at the national level, we still do not know much about how it affects European institutions, EU policy-making and European integration. Besides, studies usually do not distinguish between different types of politicisation, namely the politicisation of policy-related and constitutive issues (Bartolini 2005, 310). As regards the consequences of politicisation, it seems crucial to specify what exactly is politicised (Mair

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2013). Yet empirical studies often refer to the politicisation of “the EU” or “Europe” (but see Braun et al. 2016; Anders and Tuntschew 2018). The following studies that are discussed lend credence to the idea that politicisation strengthens decision-makers’ responsiveness. While initial evidence thus confirms the sanguine expectations regarding the input side of politics, the efficiency of supranational decision-making seems less affected by politicisation. Neither has policy-making slowed down nor has integration been noticeably affected by the increased salience and contentiousness of EU issues. As is shown, this can be attributed to the manifold strategies EU decision-makers employ to shield themselves from politicisation (see Chap. 10 in this book). As Sect. 9.3 showed, politicisation is often expected to enhance responsiveness. If policy alternatives become visible, voters can make informed choices, and this compels decision-makers to take voters’ preferences into account when acting at the European level. Research on EU issue voting confirms this expectation by showing that attitudes towards the EU translate into vote choice if EU issues are salient among citizens and if there is partisan conflict over EU issues (De Vries 2007). Now, therefore, voters in most EU countries “mandate their representatives on the basis of their EU preferences” (De Vries 2015, 228). Recent survey experiments corroborate these findings. Voters are more likely to vote for politicians if their policy choices at the European level reflect the voter’s preferences. Conversely, they punish politicians if policy choices at the European level diverge from their preferences (Schneider 2019). In this respect, politicisation strengthens the link between voters and their representatives. The more EU issues are politicised, the more people can and do base their vote choice on their EU preferences. However, long-term studies on plenary debates in four member states also reveal that the rising salience of EU issues does not automatically result in a broader supply of electoral choice. Rather, EU salience is raised by government parties, while opposition parties emphasise EU issues less. Adding to this “opposition deficit”, salience of EU issues declines, the closer national elections are (Rauh and De Wilde 2018). Obviously, politicians start to de-emphasise EU-related questions if national elections are approaching. In doing so, they diminish the decidability of the offer the politicisation is supposed to increase. Apparently, “parliaments have only partially succeeded in enhancing EU accountability” (ibid., 211). Notwithstanding this lack of balanced debates in national parliaments, governments turn out to be responsive to citizens’ preferences when

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negotiating legislation in the Council of Ministers. As a study of more than 3700 Council policy positions demonstrates, governments “attempt to align the very substance of policies to domestic public opinion” (Wratil 2018, 70). In addition, it shows that responsiveness is contingent upon the salience of the issues under question. This causal link is established by showing that governments are generally responsive to those issues that have a rather stable salience in national elections, namely left/right issues (see Chap. 6 in this book). Responsiveness to pro-/anti-integration issues, in contrast, increases only when these issues become salient due to opposition mobilisation or EU-related events (ibid.). This demonstrates that the governments’ responsiveness is systematically linked to the salience and respective electoral importance of the issues under question. Similarly, Schneider (2019) shows that governments adopt those positions in Council negotiations they deem to be of interest to their constituents. They particularly do so in election periods. Altogether, the aforementioned studies demonstrate that politicisation strengthens accountability links and responsiveness. The nexus between politicisation and responsiveness is also confirmed with regard to non-majoritarian institutions. As an analysis of 17 consumer policy initiatives reveals, the Commission is sensitive to the politicisation of European integration and reacts by becoming responsive to the wider public (Rauh 2016, 2019). The EU actors’ increasing responsiveness is also reflected in their public communication. The Commission, the Council, and the European Parliament react to the rising salience of EU issues and the mobilisation of civil society groups by addressing the public interest more often. By publicly referring to important segments of the public such as “the citizens” or “the taxpayers”, they start to signal that citizens’ voices are being heard (De Bruycker 2017). A recent analysis also confirms that EU elites rhetorically respond to politicisation. It, furthermore, reveals that the rhetoric reaction of national leaders and the Commission is contingent upon the specific configurations of public and partisan Euroscepticism in the member states (Rauh et al. 2019). Whether and how politicisation affects bargaining within EU institutions remains under-researched, and evidence is mixed. A study on Council negotiations suggests that politicisation does not affect intergovernmental bargaining. More specifically, it demonstrates that governments confronted with high levels of politicisation in their home countries cannot turn this into bargaining advantages (Pakull 2018). However, another study establishes that governments tend to obtain preferred policy

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outcomes with elections pending in their member state (Schneider 2019). Similarly, the question of whether politicisation facilitates or hampers inter-institutional bargaining has not been addressed systematically to date. Apparently, the increased public controversies on EU issues in recent years did not slow European decision-making down. On the contrary, in more and more co-decision procedures compromise between EU institutions is already reached at an early stage of the procedure (first reading). This is mainly due to the use of trilogues, which have become the standard operating procedure. Even highly politicised legislative proposals are negotiated through this procedure (Bressanelli et  al. 2014, 14), which facilitates inter-institutional compromise by shifting decision-making to informal arenas. What is more, the secluded trilogue procedure enables mainstream parties to marginalise Eurosceptic party groups and to reduce their opportunities to participate in the legislative work of the European Parliament (Ripoll Servent and Panning 2019). In recent years, some studies specifically focused on the relation between politicisation and integration. Most of them suggest that politicisation effects are moderate at best. Even in highly politicised cases, the public contentiousness of EU issues did not act as an obstacle to integration. In their comprehensive study of the EU’s politicisation in six European countries, Hutter et al. (2016) demonstrate that high levels of politicisation do not systematically hinder integration. While some highly politicised attempts to revise European treaties failed (the Constitutional Treaty rejected by the French and the Dutch peoples is such a case in point), other politicised negotiations resulted in the revision of existing treaties, thus deepening the level and scope of integration. Against this background, it seems “erroneous to equate politicization with failure, stalemate and negative decisions” (Grande and Kriesi 2016, 295). Again, these findings suggest that high levels of politicisation alone cannot explain how integration is affected. Obviously, there are additional factors at play, determining whether highly politicised negotiations on European integration succeed or fail. Consistent with this conclusion, it has been demonstrated that in spite of extraordinary politicisation levels, the Euro crisis resulted in new financial commitments and supranational delegation. In terms of competences, the Commission turned out to be the “unexpected winner of the crisis” (Bauer and Becker 2014). This was possible because political elites shielded European reforms from the constraining dissensus. Firstly, they formed “Euro-compatible” government coalitions that kept Eurosceptic parties

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out of negotiations at the European level. Secondly, governments designed treaty revisions and new treaties in a way that minimised “the need to hold referendums” (Schimmelfennig 2014, 334). Thirdly, governments delegated new tasks such as banking supervision to supranational institutions, namely the European Central Bank (ECB). In doing so, they removed decisions to secluded arenas. Thus, the high levels of politicisation during the Euro crisis have “not decisively affected the integration outcomes on this most likely occasion” (ibid., 335). In fact, governments had used these shielding strategies before. After the defeat of the Constitutional Treaty, for instance, heads of state and government shied away from popular votes and employed collusion strategies to get around referendums on the Lisbon Treaty in several countries (Oppermann 2013). Recent studies also demonstrate that even negative referendums do not necessarily put a halt to integration, as governments can “reduce the impact of the negative vote in their integration plans” (Schimmelfennig 2019, 1057). When they engage in renegotiating the treaties that resulted in a “no” in referendums, they can, for instance, keep changes to a minimum. This strategy was deployed after the rejection of the Constitutional Treaty by the French and the Dutch peoples, when heads of state and government mostly agreed on symbolic changes on controversial issues. This strategy turned out to be successful and the Lisbon Treaty preserved approximately 90 per cent of the Constitutional Treaty (Risse 2010, 240). Furthermore, governments confronted with negative referendums can grant opt-outs to recalcitrant member states, thus fostering differentiated integration (Schimmelfennig et al. 2015). Shielding strategies, however, can come with costs in the long run, and recent studies called for a closer look to be taken at the interplay between depoliticisation and politicisation (van der Veer and Haverland 2018). While Statham and Trenz (2014, 296) agree that governments successfully pursued a “defensive strategy of conflict avoidance” during the Euro crisis, they also underline that this depoliticisation attempt could not permanently ban European issues from the agenda. On the contrary, it brought the EU’s democratic deficit back to the fore and induced public discontent, which was amplified by the media. Likewise, Börzel and Risse (2017) conclude that depoliticisation through supranationalisation during the Euro crisis ultimately resulted in more politicisation. As a consequence, governments were no longer able to meet common challenges during the Schengen crisis through further transfers of competences. Yet they also highlight that the different outcomes of the Euro and the Schengen crises

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cannot solely be traced back to differing levels of politicisation. According to them, the framing of the different crises mattered. While the Euro crisis was predominantly framed in economic terms, debates about the Schengen crisis were dominated by cultural frames.

9.6   Conclusion Starting from the observation that the EU’s politicisation is probably here to stay, this chapter addressed how this affects European policy-making and European integration. As has been shown, scholars have different expectations on how the increased salience and divisiveness of EU issues in public and electoral arenas affect supranational decision-making. With regard to EU policy-making, some highlight the democracy-enhancing potential of politicisation and expect an increase in the responsiveness of EU decision-­makers. Others, however, fear that politicisation impedes inter-­institutional compromise and, as a consequence, reduces the EU’s decision-making efficiency. Scholars are equally divided concerning the effects on European integration. While neo-functionalists deem politicisation to fuel integration, liberal intergovernmentalists do not presume noticeable effects at all. Postfunctionalists, in turn, expect it to create a constraining dissensus, which potentially limits governments’ room for manoeuvre when negotiating further integration steps. At the same time, the approach highlights that governments can employ various strategies to circumvent politicisation-­induced constraints. While empirical research on the effects of politicisation on European policy-making is still in its infancy, initial evidence supports the idea that politicisation enhances EU actors’ responsiveness. The more salient EU issues are in public debates, the more governments try to align their positions to their constituents’ policy preferences when negotiating in Brussels. The same holds for the Commission, which becomes responsive to societal interests if initiatives are salient. Yet, and surprisingly, the policy-making efficiency does not seem to be adversely affected. This finding challenges propositions that link politicisation to paralysis. It also challenges the widespread assumption about trade-offs between inclusiveness and responsiveness, on the one hand, and effective governance, on the other. The evidence, however, is still too sparse to draw final conclusions on how European policy-making ultimately changes because of the increasingly attentive and critical public. More research is needed to understand to what extent and by what mechanisms these phenomena are linked.

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With regard to the effects of politicisation on European integration, most studies demonstrate that politicisation is not a hindrance to integration. Even high levels of politicisation do not necessarily constrain heads of state and government when negotiating further integration. As things currently stand, governments use the escape routes they have at their disposal to cushion politicisation-induced constraints and to continue with integration. Whether this enables them to withstand the effects of politicisation in the long run remains to be seen. Along these lines, new studies suggest taking a closer look at the dynamic interplay between depoliticisation and politicisation processes (see Chaps. 2 and 10 in this book). Also concerning the politicisation impact on European integration, it is important to reiterate that it is too early for final conclusions. Further systematic research is needed to detect how the growing public visibility and contentiousness of EU issues impinge on the level and scope of integration. The foregoing has suggested that politicisation effects are contingent upon several scope conditions. The type of politicisation, the content of politicised debates, as well as the strategic response of European elites seem to matter. These scope conditions deserve closer inspection in future politicisation research to refine our understanding of when and how politicisation affects supranational governance.

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Palonen, Kari. 2003. “Four Times of Politics: Policy, Polity, Politicking, and Politicization.” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 28 (2):171–186. Putnam, Robert D. 1988. “Diplomacy and Domestic Politics: The Logic of Two-­ Level Games.” International Organization 42 (3):427–460. Rauh, Christian. 2016. A Responsive Technocracy? EU politicisation and the consumer policies of the European Commission. Colchester: Ecpr Press. Rauh, Christian. 2019. “EU politicization and policy initiatives of the European Commission: the case of consumer policy.” Journal of European Public Policy 26 (3):344–365. https://doi.org/10.1080/13501763.2018.1453528. Rauh, Christian, and Pieter De Wilde. 2018. “The opposition deficit in EU accountability: Evidence from over 20 years of plenary debate in four member states.” European Journal of Political Research 57 (1):194–216. https://doi. org/10.1111/1475-6765.12222. Rauh, Christian, Bart Joachim Bes, and Martijn Schoonvelde. 2019. “Undermining, defusing or defending European integration? Assessing public communication of European executives in times of EU politicisation.” European Journal of Political Research. https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-6765.12350. Ripoll Servent, Ariadna, and Lara Panning. 2019. “Eurosceptics in trilogue settings: interest formation and contestation in the European Parliament.” West European Politics 42 (4):755–775. https://doi.org/10.1080/0140238 2.2019.1575639. Risse, Thomas. 2005. “Neofunctionalism, European identity, and the puzzles of European integration.” Journal of European Public Policy 12 (2):291–309. Risse, Thomas. 2010. A Community of Europeans? Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Risse, Thomas. 2015. “European public spheres, the politicization of EU affairs, and its consequences.” In European public spheres: Politics is back, edited by Thomas Risse, 141–164. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press. Schattschneider, Elmer Eric. 1957. “Intensity, Visibility, Direction and Scope.” The American Political Science Review 51 (4):933–942. Schattschneider, Elmer Eric. 1975. The semisovereign people: A realist’s view of democracy in America. Boston: Wadsworth. Schimmelfennig, Frank. 2014. “European Integration in the Euro Crisis: The Limits of Postfunctionalism.” Journal of European Integration 36 (3):321–337. https://doi.org/10.1080/07036337.2014.886399. Schimmelfennig, Frank. 2019. “Getting around no: how governments react to negative EU referendums.” Journal of European Public Policy 26 (7):1056–1074. https://doi.org/10.1080/13501763.2019.1619191. Schimmelfennig, Frank, Dirk Leuffen, and Berthold Rittberger. 2015. “The European Union as a system of differentiated integration: interdependence, politicization and differentiation.” Journal of European Public Policy 22 (6):764–782. https://doi.org/10.1080/13501763.2015.1020835.

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Schmidt, Vivien A. 2019. “Politicization in the EU: between national politics and EU political dynamics.” Journal of European Public Policy 26 (7):1018–1036. https://doi.org/10.1080/13501763.2019.1619189. Schmidt, Vivien Ann. 2006. Democracy in Europe: The EU and National Polities. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schmitter, Philippe C. 1969. “Three Neo-Functional Hypotheses About International Integration.” International Organization 23 (1):161–166. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020818300025601. Schneider, Christina J. 2019. The Responsive Union: National Elections and European Governance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Statham, Paul, and Hans-Jörg Trenz. 2013. The politicization of Europe: Contesting the constitution in the mass media. London: Routledge. Statham, Paul, and Hans-Jörg Trenz. 2014. “Understanding the mechanisms of EU politicization: Lessons from the Eurozone crisis.” Comparative European Politics (advance online publication 3 March 2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/ cep.2013.30. van der Veer, Reinout Arthur, and Markus Haverland. 2018. “The politics of (de-) politicization and venue choice: A scoping review and research agenda on EU financial regulation and economic governance.” Journal of European Public Policy 40 (5):1–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/13501763.2018.1523220. Webber, Douglas. 2019. “Trends in European political (dis)integration. An analysis of postfunctionalist and other explanations.” Journal of European Public Policy 7:1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/13501763.2019.1576760. Wiesner, Claudia (ed.). 2019a. Critical Exchange: Rethinking Politicisation. Contemporary Political Theory. Wiesner, Claudia. 2019b. “Rethinking politicisation as a multi-stage multilevel concept.” In Critical Exchange: Rethinking Politicisation, edited by Claudia Wiesner, 255–259. Contemporary Political Theory. Wratil, Christopher. 2018. “Modes of government responsiveness in the European Union: Evidence from Council negotiation positions.” European Union Politics 19 (1):52–74. https://doi.org/10.1177/1465116517735599. Zeitlin, Jonathan, Francesco Nicoli, and Brigid Laffan. 2019. “Introduction: The European Union beyond the polycrisis? Integration and politicization in an age of shifting cleavages.” Journal of European Public Policy 26 (7):963–976. https://doi.org/10.1080/13501763.2019.1619803. Zürn, Michael. 2014. “The politicization of world politics and its effects: Eight propositions.” European Political Science Review 6 (01):47–71. https://doi. org/10.1017/S1755773912000276. Zürn, Michael. 2019. “Politicization compared: at national, European, and global levels.” Journal of European Public Policy 26 (7):977–995. https://doi.org/1 0.1080/13501763.2019.1619188.

CHAPTER 10

Depoliticisation at the European Level: Delegitimisation and Circumvention of Representative Democracy in Europe’s Governance Cécile Robert

Over the last decade, debates on the politicisation and depoliticisation of the European Union (EU) have become increasingly important in academic literature. Based on the assessment of EU politicisation, this literature highlights the establishment of the latter, an intersecting issue in partisan national and European spaces and the growing polarisation of public opinion on this matter (Hooghe and Marks 2009; Hutter et  al. 2016; Statham and Trenz 2013; De Wilde et al. 2016; De Wilde and Zürn 2012). As Kauppi et al. (2016) note, this politicisation is often presented as a threat to the EU: it is interpreted as putting an end to “permissive consensus”, that is to say a silent and passive form of support of political and administrative elites by European populations, giving way to more

C. Robert (*) Sciences Po Lyon, Lyon, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 C. Wiesner (ed.), Rethinking Politicisation in Politics, Sociology and International Relations, Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54545-1_10

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critical, even hostile, positions (see also Chaps. 2, 8 and 9 in this book as well as the discussion by Kauppi and Wiesner 2018). In this context and in contrast, depoliticisation has been used to designate the technocratic modes of operation, which would be emblematic of institutional responses to the politicisation. Describing these strategies deployed to continue to govern Europe, despite the increasingly noisy opposition that they elicit, authors emphasise the lessening use of popular consultations, especially referendums, in favour of intergovernmental political agreements evading usual validation procedures, and even the growing power of non-majority agencies and institutions ([first and foremost, the European Central Bank, the Court of Justice and the European Commission] Rittberger 2014; Schimmelfennig 2014). Kriesi evoked, for example, the “vast repertory of the pro-Europeans’ depoliticisation strategies” including “techniques such as de-emphasizing the issue of European integration in national elections (as in the 2013 German elections), sidestepping treaty changes in order to avoid referendums (as in the case of the Fiscal Compact), delegation to so-called ‘non-majoritarian’, technocratic supranational institutions” (2016, 32). Such an approach to depoliticisation raises several conceptual and empirical questions, mainly due to the confusion it maintains between its processes and supposed results, be it the very nature of the depoliticised issue or its perception by citizens and in the public sphere. In other words, depoliticisation as a way of conducting public policy is, more or less explicitly, likened to a substantial transformation of the issues or activities that it affects, leading them to automatically “lose” their political and conflictual dimension. This reading is particularly based on the hypothesis according to which the use of science (Neyer 2006), law, or even weak publicisation (De Wilde and Zürn 2012) significantly reduces conflict and transforms political debates into technical discussions. This interpretation also derives from the predominant meaning given, in these works, to depoliticisation’s antonym: politicisation. The assimilation of the latter, without further detailing its objects,1 into forms of citizen expression rather critical of directions decided upon in Brussels,2 results in depoliticisation being 1  As Kauppi et al. (2016) also underline, the question of the objects and/or subjects of these processes is often overlooked in recent works on the EU: is it a case of (de)politicisation of individuals or issues? And, in the latter case, do these issues relate to the EU, its current system of governance, or some of its policies? 2  Or to cite most commonly used de Wilde’s definition (2011, 520): “an increase in polarisation of opinions, interests or values and the extent to which they are publicly advanced towards the process of policy formulation within the EU”.

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implicitly presented as characterising a subject provoking neither mobilisation nor controversy. This conception of depoliticisation is then empirically questionable. Firstly, its nominalist reasoning seems ill-suited to an institutional space in which a same case/object is frequently subjected to competing labelling, presented by some as technical and by others as political (Robert 2001; Baisnée and Smith 2006). Secondly, this understanding of depoliticisation phenomena relies also on a singular vision of the history of the EU, of which many works, dating politicisation from the 1990s, overinflate the technical and irenic character of the first decades (Hooghe and Marks 2009) and only refer to depoliticisation dynamics from the early 2000s, as a response to, and component of, “crises”, especially of the Eurozone (Majone 2011, see also Chaps. 2, 8 and 9 in this book). It is thus necessary to build on an alternative definition of depoliticisation that allows to distinguish between depoliticisation as a way of making and presenting public policies/EU issues and its possible (and diverse) consequences on their perception by the citizens. We propose here to conceive depoliticisation strategies as ways of (re)describing and (re) assigning (Lagroye 2003, 361) objects of public policy and, in doing so, designate their “owners” and their legitimate management methods. In other words, in the formulation of European public policy, it is not the disappearance of depoliticisation’s political issues that plays out, but rather the obscuring of these issues, for the purpose of circumventing their debate. Such an approach to depoliticisation also requires a definition of the political (see Chaps. 2 and 4 in this book), allowing it to be identified even when it is denied or obscured: activities are political because they involve value choices, arbitration between different interests and thus arbitrariness, whether or not they are due to elected officials, and more generally claimed as such by social actors (Robert 2005a). This definition is close to the one suggested by Wood and Flinders (2014, 135) considering that depoliticisation occurs anytime there is “denial of political contingency and the transfer of functions away from elected politicians”. From this perspective, indeed, it is ultimately depoliticisation itself that should be recognised as political and as a way of doing politics, by addressing the way in which its processes contribute to circumventing and redefining forms of legitimate authority, to “restricting the prerogative of politics to establish common forms” (Linhardt and Muniesa 2011, 15).

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Considered in this way, depoliticisation appears to be a characteristic shared by many ways of formulating and making public policy at the European level. A series of works have shown its long-standing success in Brussels, whether it involves expertise (Robert 2013; Roger 2010; Wiesner 2019), law (Bailleux 2014; Vauchez 2014), technocracy (Georgakakis 1999), or independence (Vauchez 2014). Depoliticisation also highlights what constitutes their common denominator, in other words, the circumvention of forms of deliberation and modes of legitimisation, specific to representative democracy. From this point of view, this chapter explores the hypothesis according to which depoliticisation is not a recent response to a critical context, but the result of the both singular and long-standing relationship of EU institutions and actors with “politics” and representative democracy, leading them to try to bypass its constraints (see Chap. 7 in this book). To this end, based on several surveys conducted over the last fifteen or so years on European decision-making processes,3 this chapter endeavours, in the first part, to highlight the omnipresence of logics of depoliticisation and to list its main methods—expertise, informal negotiation, permanent consultation of interest groups—in making European policies. The second part is devoted to identifying what feeds these depoliticisation initiatives: it illustrates a relationship of distrust regarding the mechanisms of representative democracy, which, far from being the exclusive prerogative of “euro-­officials”, is widely shared by “Europe’s permanent professionals” (Georgakakis and Rowell 2013) and closely linked to the genesis and institutionalisation of the European field of power.

10.1   Making Depoliticised Public Policy at the European Level: From Obscuring to Delegitimising Politics In the last chapter of his final work, dedicated to the hollowing of Western democracies, P. Mair suggests considering the European political system as one of the most successful results of these processes, encouraging researchers to analyse how “European policy making [evades] the control 3  Based on observations and interviews with political and administrative actors, lobbyists, consultants and experts in and around European institutions, these surveys focused on the uses of expertise, governance by committees, questions concerning transparency, and, more recently still, comitology and its reform.

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and constraint of majority democracy and accountability” (Mair 2013, 9). Extending this question, we identify three main methods for developing public policy in which depoliticisation mechanisms are at work and contribute to making the representative task both more complex and less profitable. 10.1.1  Expertise as a Way of Doing Politics and Pretending Not To Widely mobilised at the European level, expertise is a process of public policymaking of primary importance, contributing to discrediting political resources in several ways. If expertise is a vector of depoliticisation, it is first because it organises and legitimises the management, by non-elected actors, of entire sections of the EU’s public policies. In the name of their supposed knowledge, and qualities of objectivity and associated independence, a set of institutions and professionals are entrusted with a central role in formulating and/or implementing public policy. One of the most obvious examples of this is the European Commission: as illustrated in many works from the 1990s (Cini 1997; Cram 1999), it is, more than its mere national counterparts, a “political administration”. Yet, it owes this role to the technical competencies of its officials and to their supposed capacity to distance themselves from national influences: these justify both the Commission’s claim to define the general European interest and its prerogatives regarding initiative and execution (Georgakakis 1999). It is also in terms of expertise that these officials account for their role—often as discreet as central—in making policies (Roger 2010; Robert 2013). Most recently, the strengthening of the Commission’s role in the EU’s economic governance, since the 2008 crisis, has been justified by what is presented as for example financial stability mechanism, monitoring of economic policies, assistance to the coordination of national public policies, or supervision of the financial sector (Bauer and Becker 2014). Providing a substitute form of legitimacy, expertise makes political resources dispensable in a second way. It is accompanied by modes of making public policy that in turn hinder its (re)politicisation: by presenting public policy as entirely guided by constraints and reasons external to the actors that manage them, they actually make it indisputable, while obscuring the creative dimension of the work carried out in the name of expertise. The policy preparing for future enlargements from 2004 to 2007

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offers an illustration of this rhetoric. The policy was legitimised, at each stage of its formulation, by resorting to expert knowledge: lessons of transitology governed the definition of the programme’s annual guidelines; the acquis communautaire4 dictated priority areas for aid; and the definition of institutional solutions recommended to governments and Europeans (on aspects as divisive, between and within member states, as financing retirement systems, reorganising private practice medicine, or judiciary independence) was treated as a service of expertise and entrusted to consultants. Involving the denial of the policy’s political dimension, particularly its influence on defining societal choices in candidate countries, the Commission’s legitimisation of its “technical assistance” resulted in its construction as a solution without any alternative. By placing the policy under the authority of law and science, it made the issues invisible and turned its object, the enlargement to the East, when it was being prepared, into a “subject of no debate” (Robert 2005a, b). “A way of doing politics and pretending not to” (Robert 2001), expertise is thus a form of legitimisation that the European Commission shares with other protagonists, all equally essential to Europe’s governance. Following the perspective defended by A.  Vauchez (2014), the EU’s Court of Justice or the European Central Bank should be mentioned, as their importance in managing economic governance has considerably increased since the 2008 crisis, in the name of the “neutrality of its expertise”. Although their powers are more limited and especially confined to certain specific public policy sectors, a series of agencies (European Medicines Agency, European Food Safety Authority, European Securities and Markets Authority, etc.) fall under similar forms of legitimisation. Lastly, expertise is a self-­sustaining depoliticisation mechanism: referring to expertise leads, even forces, all these institutions, in the name of their competencies, to involve a group of external actors in their daily work. Therefore, the Commission massively resorts to external expertise, via its groups of experts (Robert 2013) and its agencies, and tends to systematically hide behind their advice, should they be contested—like that of the EFSA on GMOs or glyphosate—when no consensual positions can be found among member states (Pisani and Weimer 2016).

4  Itself presented as the simple reflection of the state of European law to be taken up candidate countries, while its definition is conversely subject to strong controversy within the Commission and among member states.

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10.1.2  Informal Governance as Circumvention and Confinement of the Political Debate The multiplication of consultation mechanisms prior to official negotiations is a second way of making public policy while discrediting representative resources and practices. It involves the Council’s 150 or so working groups (bringing together national and European officials to prepare ministerial meetings), 280 comitology committees (composed of representatives of national administrations overseeing the Commission’s exercise of its implementing powers), 700 groups of experts (linking representatives of interest groups and member state officials to prepare, with the European administration, its future initiatives), or even the informal trilogues (composed of representatives from the three institutions, tasked with defining a common position on legislative acts in order to accelerate their adoption by the Council and the Parliament). Although they differ in terms of their composition and prerogatives, these bodies participate very directly in the depoliticisation of the European decision-making process. Indeed, they consist of identifying, in advance and in small committees, compromise positions to facilitate the adoption of decisions: they therefore circumvent, in the name of efficient and productive negotiation, the formal procedure, bodies and organised debates. For instance, Commission officials establish groups of experts, in particular composed of national officials, to understand the positions and power relations between member states and galvanise their support, from the writing stage of the legislative proposal. Their challenge is to submit a text to the Council that is already adapted to internal political balances and power relations, and likely to be rapidly adoptable (Robert 2016). The ability to build consensus is particularly sought after by the European administration insofar as its strategies of legitimisation, based on its political “neutrality”, depend on it.5 Nevertheless, convergent positions operate in different types of committees, like the Council’s working groups (Naurin and Wallace 2008), comitology (Böhling 2014), or trilogues (Reh 2014). This is because their members tend to make reaching compromises and their validation, by the bodies in whose name they are established, a priority goal and an indicator of their success. The available 5  As an administration serving the directions set by its member states, it cannot explicitly oppose the positions of these members ([unless other “superior” principles—EU law, safeguarding EU public interests—give it the authority to do so] Robert 2005a, b).

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statistical elements on their operation seem to confirm the “effectiveness” of these bodies in this regard.6 Moreover, public debate is all the more avoided as secrecy is a characteristic of these informal modes of negotiation and considered to be a condition for their success. Meetings rarely have publicised minutes and even less often forms of media coverage. Regarding groups of experts, discussion minutes anonymise the positions defended by members, which in turn means that they cannot be attributed to—or claimed by—relevant members, on the outside. As for the Council bodies, provisions introduced in favour of publicity are systematically circumvented, leading negotiators to conceal their disagreements and “unanimously” adopt decisions, even when they are opposed to them.7 In this regard, the multiplication of these committees means that citizens only become aware of political projects under discussion at the European level at an advanced stage of their development (Curtin 2014), when oppositions have already been silenced, alternatives excluded and power relations crystallised. These forms of informal governance ultimately put the representative task to the test. As they operate out of sight, the unfolding political exchanges distance themselves in several ways from the public and contradictory model of debate, in which clearly differentiated projects, and representatives legitimised by the support of their constituents, come into conflict. Although they fall under diverse forms of delegation, the practices of deputies participating in trilogues, and of national officials who are members of the Commission’s groups, give rise to similar observations: the control of their positions can only be imperfectly executed. This occurs a posteriori and on the final text, the individual contribution of the relevant “representative” often not being identifiable. Citizens have limited opportunities to demand accountability at this potentially crucial stage of policymaking (European Ombudsman 2016; Robert 2016).

6  According to a European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) report (2017), 84% of legislative texts were subject to an “early agreement”. As for comitology, figures provided by the Commission (2016) report a very high rate of positive responses delivered by the committees (between 93% and 97% depending on the year). 7  Since 1993, the date of adoption of the principle of publicity of votes in the Council, more than 80% of decisions falling under qualified majority voting appear to have been adopted by consensus, without explicit opposition (Novak 2011).

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10.1.3  Consulting “Civil Society”: An Alternative to Political Representation? The institutions’ ongoing dialogue with interest groups, throughout the European decision-making process, can be considered as a third and last mode of public policymaking, pertaining to a delegitimisation of representative resources and practices. The organised consultation of civil society is not a specificity of the European political system, any more than expertise or informal governance. Within it, however, it takes on singular forms. For the European administration, the symbolic, and sometimes financial, support of “organized European civil society” was originally a means to assert itself against its institutional partners-rivals. The multiplication of exchanges with these organisations sought to prove its capacity to define the general European interest and to claim a monopoly over it, faced with the Council, presented as the bastion of national interests. Preferred tools for building a specifically European form of legitimacy (Vauchez 2014), the consultation mechanisms of organised civil society also became, at the turn of the century, one of the means by which the Commission claimed to “dialogue” with European citizens (Finke and Kohler-Koch 2007; Smismans 2006). Moreover, aiming to compensate for the lack of elective legitimacy, these consultation policies are presented as an answer to the deadlocks of representative democracy. Borrowing from social scientists (Aldrin and Hubé 2016), they highlight the incapacity of circuits of representative democracy to meet the challenges of modern governance and promote a “participatory turn”. Over the last decade, they have also translated into the reform of decision-making processes, offering interest groups new opportunities to contribute to it in different ways (pre- and post-legislative impact studies, increasing public consultations, etc.). These interaction frameworks contribute to depoliticisation in several ways: depending on the subjects to be addressed, ad hoc punctual exchanges with actors who are most often chosen by their institutional interlocutors than appointed by their organisation are preferred to institutionalised relations with established structures, and their potential elected officials (Roger 2010). More than just confronting viewpoints and the ability to build a balance of power, stakeholders are expected to have technical knowledge and a control of decision-making processes, allowing them to produce proposals that are directly mobilisable by their interlocutors. Lastly, many actors are invited to contribute as experts: this role, as defined in these bodies and by the institutions’ officials, is constructed in

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opposition to that of the representative, demanding from those assuming it both the spirit of compromise and the capacity to detach themselves from the organisations to which they belong. Significantly, some of these bodies have long complained that the operation of these groups, and more generally their interactions with institutions, are difficult to reconcile with the involvement of their constituents in these exchanges (Robert 2013).

10.2   The Origins of the European Union’s Depoliticisation: Political Illegitimacy and Determinants Whether formulating, negotiating or inviting actors to co-produce public policy, the methods of its development at the European level thus participate in delegitimising political resources and practices. In this regard, we would now like to show that the proximity of these ways of seeing and making the EU reflect a set of prejudices regarding the actors and mechanisms of representative democracy. This “relationship with the political” could thus be seen as a legacy of the context and founding fathers who presided over the birth of the EU. Yet, it is not only a trace of the past. Indeed, it still finds a raison d’être in its convergence with the interests and worldviews of a group of Europe’s professionals and “permanent officials”, who can and/or must promote competing resources. 10.2.1   European Actors and Their “Relationship with the Political”: A Common Distrust of Representative Democracy and Its Mechanisms The mechanisms of depoliticisation previously mentioned, and discourses justifying them, outline a “relationship with the political” revolving around three complementary postulates. According to the first, elected officials are not in a position to make relevant public policy choices. As demonstrated by several surveys conducted with Commission officials in the 1990s and 2000s, these agents are suspected of acting for the sole purpose of ensuring their re-election, under pressure from their constituencies, and of being driven more by passion than by reason (Bellier 1999). Although this is not specific to the European sphere, the representation of political actors as less capable of reason and impartiality nonetheless particularly resonates, as they are also

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perceived as the main vectors of national interests and thereby considered to be a threat to the survival of the European project (Abélès and Bellier 1996). The second type of preconception at the root of the logics of depoliticisation concerns the properties attributed to political debate, viewed as a very imperfect way of determining public policy directions. Publicising debates would first accentuate the elected officials’ natural inclination for decisions likely to serve their self-promotion, to the detriment of less immediately profitable, but more collectively useful, positions. Conversely, informality and secrecy are defended, for the preliminary phases of intergovernmental negotiation, in the name of the fact that they “leave negotiators more freedom to consider the substance of, and debate, different options, to take risks, to change their mind, to rely on experts” (Curtin 2012, 24). Similar arguments have been put forward by the Commission on groups of experts (Robert 2013). Publicity is also associated with conflict: the latter is itself analysed as both a cause and a symptom of the poor quality of exchanges, a way to build antagonisms rather than a means to facilitate the identification of a common solution. Indeed, conflict is considered to be neither productive (in that it could favour the identification of issues, of alternatives) nor even “natural” (in the sense that it could be explained by the pre-existence of different interests). If political debates, reduced to often sterile conflicts, are perceived as dangerous for Europe, it is ultimately due to their supposed effects on citizens. By reporting the potentially divergent interests of parties, and arbitrations conducted to the advantage of some and to the detriment of others, the formulation of public policy in political terms would have deleterious consequences for its legitimacy. It first presupposes recognising prerogatives, highlighting the Union’s power of action, even when no European institution finds itself in a position to claim such authority, because the European political system grants none of them the legitimacy of a government. Such a form of justification would then harm the decision legitimised in this way (especially among the member states that opposed it). More generally, it would feed a reading of Europe in terms of winners and losers, deemed both scarcely compatible with its promotion as a place reconciling interests and dangerous for its putative opponents. Moreover, as A. Smith recalls, “the European order is challenging because the political work conducted to legitimize it directly competes with efforts devoted to safeguarding the illusion that Europe is composed of globally intact nation-states” (Smith 2010, 177). Although national governments

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sometimes attempt to save themselves from the political costs of European decisions by blaming them on “Brussels”, they are equally as reluctant to shed light on the intergovernmental bargaining and the choices that it entails. This is evidenced by the unspoken rule adopted by negotiators, consisting of publicly silencing oppositions in the Council once the decision is adopted (Novak 2011), or by national oppositions to the project to make the votes of member states public regarding comitology procedures (Robert 2018). 10.2.2  Technocratic Roots The illustration of this unique relationship with the political, and more specifically of this form of diffuse distrust of mechanisms of representative democracy, is an invitation to retrace, in the history of Europe’s construction, the root of its depoliticisation. From this perspective, several works have underlined the technocratic aspirations of the “founding fathers” of Europe and their mark on its original institutions. W. Kaiser and J. Schot (2014) have documented the progressive emergence, from the middle of the nineteenth century, of networks of experts, claiming, in the name of their expertise, a central role in constructing international norms and organisations. Their worldview is based on the idea that only a dialogue between experts and technicians, founded on pragmatism and consensus-building, can bring about peace and economic prosperity. These experts are also convinced that conducting public policy, especially due to its growing internationalisation, falls under primarily technical expertise, that political leaders and diplomats are neither completely suited nor legitimate to be responsible for it. In particular owing to their trajectories and allegiances to these networks, Jean Monnet, Robert Schuman and their kind were entirely the heirs and representatives of this “international technocracy”. They had a shared distrust of elected officials and, more broadly, of mechanisms of majority democracy (Cohen 2012). This desire to shield Europe from the passion, folly and fluctuations of political will was strengthened and legitimised by the post-war context: while the European construction was appointed as the guarantor of peace at the continental level, old national democracies were themselves perceived as potential threats. In addition to their inherent instability, they demonstrated, through their inability to contain the rise of nationalism and prevent the Second World War, the natural propensity of

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political discourses—and of those promoting them—to turn European citizens against one another. A complex mix of distrust of politics and ambition to replace it, this technocratic relationship with the political would find reasons within the European political system to more sustainably take root. The persistence of this technocratic spirit was the doing of the European Commission and of the High Authority that preceded it: indeed, the delegitimising of political resources and representatives in favour of expertise and independence is its raison d’être, as well as the main argument for extending its prerogatives. Having become one of the central dimensions of the professional culture of its officials, this relationship with the political is also maintained by the institutional configuration that it inspired. Aside from the everyday competition with the Council and the Parliament, a number of political events, regularly revived by actors to justify some practices pertaining to depoliticisation,8 have encouraged the crystallisation of this relationship with the political. 10.2.3   Theoretical Influences and Ideological Affinities: The Role of Reform Initiatives and Academic Literature in the EU’s Processes of Depoliticisation Another way to shed light on the relationship with the political of European institutions and their officials is to focus on its sources of theoretical inspiration. An initial approach concerns the influence of neoliberal thought, whose importance has been underscored by Denord and Schwartz (2009), from the early years of building the Community. According to them, it explains the lack of emergence of a significant social policy at the European level. However, the common distrust of European actors regarding mechanisms of majority democracy is also illustrated in their affinities with the reflections developed by F.  Hayek, W.  Röpke and followers of German ordoliberalism on these subjects (Solchany 2015). There are many points of convergence: the criticism of the link between political representatives and their constituents, condemned to produce clientelist elected officials 8  For example, this was the case for the blocking period of intergovernmental bodies following the introduction of qualified majority voting in the 1980s. First of all, this measure led national delegations to use negative votes more often, momentarily paralysing the institution, but lastingly convincing its actors of the negative effects of explicit oppositions and, a contrario, of the productivity of secrecy and the euphemising of conflict (on this history, see Novak 2011).

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and public budget gravediggers; distrust of parliamentary democracy and of its natural propensity to fuel the division of the social fabric and the allpowerful state; maintained suspicion regarding the contradictory debate, which must be replaced with one best way identified by rational elites. Although neoliberalism is its main matrix, other reform initiatives inspired by it would then find, for the same reasons, in the European political and institutional sphere, a context conducive to their fulfilment. This is particularly the case for the initiatives proposed in the 2001 White Paper on European Governance: whether they concern reforming the European administration, stakeholders’ participation in the policymaking process or the policy of transparency, their arguments refer to what B. Jobert rightly describes as “the myth of depoliticized governance which translates a visceral distrust of the games of majority democracy into the terms of new public management” (Jobert 2003). The success of these reform initiatives appears to be related to the academic literature. This is one of the subjects evoked by P. Mair, for whom EU studies have concentrated their theoretical efforts on identifying alternatives to representative democracy, also contributing to blur its lines and weaken its legitimacy. In support of this hypothesis, one could mention the audience of these works among Europe’s actors and the convergence of their criticisms of mechanisms of representative democracy, judged partially unsuitable for the European Union’s operation. One of the first criticisms challenges the very principle of popular sovereignty at this level: not only because power remains in the hands of the states, and the European “people” (demos) remain an abstract notion (Nicolaïdis 2013), but also because it imposes the tyranny of the majority and does not allow the most rational solutions to be identified (Majone 2011; Moravcsik 2002). A second argument relates to the methods of political exchange: explicitly engaged in the “paradigm of deliberative democracy” (Mouffe 1994), authors like E. Eriksen and J. Fossum (2000) or J. Neyer (2006), argue that political debate at the European level can and must, as a priority, take the form of a technical deliberation, between experts, aiming to identify consensual positions. Lastly, some authors agree on the incapacity of mechanisms of representative democracy to strengthen the EU’s legitimacy and to ultimately guarantee its survival. Following F. Scharpf (1999), these authors promote the legitimisation of public policy and of the EU through results (outputs), rather than by including citizens in its development processes (inputs), deemed more uncertain. As Kauppi et al. (2016) underline, most of the works on the

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politicisation of the EU defend a very pessimistic vision of it. Some, like S. Bartolini (2006), have taken a very explicit stance: according to the latter, by maintaining the illusion that voters can influence the EU’s future, and in particular challenge partly entrenched preferences, this political conflict above all contributes to further fuelling their distrust and disinterest regarding the EU. 10.2.4  Depoliticisation Incentives: Socialisation and Motivations Behind the Institutionalisation of Apolitical EU Governance Presiding over the genesis and construction of the European political and institutional space, several contextual factors seem to have fuelled a form of distrust regarding representative logics. Nevertheless, the persistence, even long-term accentuation, of these depoliticisation strategies emphasises their limited reversibility and sparks an interest in their institutionalisation methods. Here, we briefly recall some of the avenues explored in recent works. One line of thought relates to institutional configurations and the way in which they encourage depoliticisation; for example, this is the case of the Commission officials, mentioned supra, whose attachment to a technocratic conception of European Union governance thrives on the fact that it enhances their own resources—administrative and technical competencies, apolitical posture and claim to neutrality—to the detriment of those of their rival partners in the Parliament and the Council. The operation of intergovernmental negotiation, especially its confinement, can also explain its actors’ interest in circumventing logics of representation. Regarding intermunicipal bodies, Desage and Guéranger (2011) show that in such arenas, largely out of sight, the preservation of good relations with other negotiators, particularly through reciprocal concessions and the non-publication of disagreements, may be an essential objective. The representation of constituents is all the more easily subordinated to this objective, as it is masked and thus inexpensive for “representatives”. These effects of configurations do not, however, exhaust the diversity of the interests of depoliticisation and its success beyond the institutions. Several surveys have highlighted that a group of European professionals— political personnel (Beauvallet and Michon 2012), trade unionists (Wagner 2005) interest representatives (Laurens 2013), or even journalists—prefer to use a very similar “apolitical” register to that of euro-officials. For

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instance, the survey conducted by O.  Baisnée, at the beginning of this decade, on press correspondents in Brussels, shows how they mostly tend to appropriate—and relay—the social worldview conveyed by the Commission’s discourse, especially the way in which the latter defines what is a political matter and what is not (Baisnée and Smith 2006). These works thereby underline the socialising role of the Community administration, whose centrality and role of privileged interlocutor of interest representatives give it a determining role in constructing practices, discourses and forms of legitimate authority at the European level. These logics of the progressive configuration of actors to certain institutional practices, in the course of their establishment in the European political game, can also be observed in other bodies. This is the case for national officials and interest representatives in the Commission’s advisory groups, as well as the Council working groups and in Coreper, or even the trilogues, whose participants increasingly tend to systematically resort to early agreements over time (Reh 2014).

10.3   Conclusion As previously mentioned, depoliticisation is by no means an exclusive feature of Europe’s governance, and some of its determinants, such as the forms it takes, are well documented at national and international levels. However, in both the EU’s construction and its current operation, depoliticisation occupies a unique place. Far from boiling down to a seizure of power by agencies, or being confined to economic policy, the circumvention of mechanisms of majority democracy can be found in each phase of the European policymaking process. Interpreted today as answers to the economic crisis, or even to a more ostensibly critical opinion regarding the EU, these particular ways of formulating, legitimising, debating and negotiating public policies were not, however, invented at the end of last decade. Identifiable from the very genesis of the European project, the relationship with the political, and prejudices regarding the representative democracy, on which these depoliticising ways of doing rely, have played a fundamental role, inspiring the EU institutional architecture and practices. It is precisely by considering it from this perspective that depoliticisation seems likely to shed light on the current European context behind its academic success. First, it can constitute one of the explanations of the growing success of critical positions regarding the EU, even in favour of its dismantlement (see Chap. 7 in this book). Although many other factors

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contribute to this (increasing economic difficulties and inequalities, the perception of the EU’s roles in these developments, reconfigurations of national political scenes, etc.), the hypothesis can be made that depoliticisation has also helped make these EU discourses of rejection politically possible and profitable. Indeed, it strongly directs and restricts the EU’s repertoire of legitimisation, in other words, the way in which European public policy and those who produce it are seen. This is illustrated by the difficult legibility of its decision-­making processes, the weak visibility of political representation work outside the confrontation of national interests or even the massive recourse to technical forms justifying political choices to the detriment of a more voluntarist discourse based on values. Moreover, these forms of discursive depoliticisation “may result in depoliticised citizens” (Dupuy and Van Inglegom 2019, 272) in the sense that the “perceived lack of EU’s political agency” could nurture a form of fatalism and citizen indifference towards Europe institutions. At last, through its delegitimisation of conflict and debate, depoliticisation has also contributed to leaving little room for defending and confronting alternative projects for the EU, thus participating in lastingly assimilating these alternatives into positions hostile towards the European project itself.9 Although it can be argued that these logics of depoliticisation indirectly fuel the success of partisan groups opposed to integration, or the rise of absenteeism in elections, they also seem to us to play a key role in the European political system’s reactions to this situation. This context first reinforces the negative representations associated with politicisation: this is illustrated by the position that S.  Bartolini has defended since 2006. According to him, any reform seeking to politicise the EU through “an injection of the majority system in its consensual procedures” is bound to fail and would put the EU in danger. Emphasising “[increasing] divergences between voters and their representatives regarding European politics”, and “the citizens’ detachment, lack of interest and scepticism vis à vis Europe”, he concludes that “any politicisation of integration/independence issues risks widening the gap between parties and voters and tearing 9  This is the argument defended by Peter Mair, inspired by Robert Dahl’s seminal reflections on the adverse effects of a governance based on the permanent quest for compromise. The lack of room left to the opposition thus has two possible consequences: the rise in power of an opposition to the political system as a whole; and/or submission to the power in place (Robert Dahl [Ed.], Political Oppositions in Western Democracies, Yale, Yale University Press, 1966).

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European parties apart”. Furthermore, “if the issues constituting Europe were even modestly politicized, ‘the cure would be worse than the disease’” (Bartolini 2006, 44). Two other logics specific to depoliticisation processes also contribute to its self-perpetuation, even to its reinforcement, despite the political context. Indeed, these logics tend to strengthen power relations, to place and maintain already dominant actors in positions of power within this institutional space, especially because they possess recognised and valued capital. As the “Grand Coalition” in the Parliament illustrates—contested by its margins but appointed and supported by the most powerful political groups and by deputies with significant institutional capital—such a situation is hardly conducive to the emergence of internal contestation within the European political system. Finally, this prospect appears all the more remote, as the actors occupying a central place within it are, almost structurally, among the least exposed to the fluctuations of public opinion (to electoral defeat, to anti-European mobilisations): mostly recruited among the EU’s permanent professionals—civil servants, experts, long-standing EP deputies (Georgakakis and Rowell 2013)—they are seized in the mechanisms keeping them well away from citizens.

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SECTION IV

Politicisation from Global to Local

CHAPTER 11

Political Authority, Expected Consequences, and the Politicisation of International Institutions Andreas von Staden

11.1   Introduction “Politicisation” belongs to a set of social science concepts that are “essentially contested” (Gallie 1956), that is, they are being used in different ways without an existing or emerging consensus definition. This is quite apparent in the literature focusing on European integration and the European Union (EU) where use of the concept has flourished the most, but with notable semantic differences (for conceptual discussions, see e.g. Kauppi et al. 2016; Palonen et al. 2019; and Chaps. 2, 8, 9 and 10 in this book). In international relations (IR) (and related fields such as international law), politicisation can likewise mean different things, although conceptual variance has been more limited compared to EU studies. One common use of the term mixes normative and analytical elements and is usually employed to criticise that an institution or decision-making

A. von Staden (*) Universität Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 C. Wiesner (ed.), Rethinking Politicisation in Politics, Sociology and International Relations, Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54545-1_11

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process is allegedly characterised or influenced by the narrow, self-­ interested preferences and ulterior motives of relevant actors, a situation seen as hampering the achievement of its “true” objectives. A politicised institution (or process) in this sense is one that is not impartial, unbiased, or issue- or expertise-driven, as it presumably should be, but one in which actors use the institution “to achieve political objectives,” with “[m]any of those aims…not [being] connected to the work being done within” that institution (Freedman 2014, 20; see also Chap. 10 in this book). As Valentina Carraro has noted, it is especially in “legal scholarship and human rights discourse [that] politicisation is generally employed as a synonym for political bias and lack of even-handedness” (Carraro 2017, 946). In a review of research on the transition from the UN Human Rights Commission to the Human Rights Council, for example, “politicisation” has been identified alongside “selectivity” and “double standards” as a key factor undermining the legitimacy of the old Commission (Landolt and Woo 2017, 407). Elsewhere, the politicisation of international human rights, understood as signifying that their pursuit is “grounded in some political or economic interest,” has been distinguished from “a notion of human rights which has no agenda, which serves no political interests and which is truly universal” (Gordon 1997–98, 696; see also ibid., 787). Such negatively connoted uses of the term, often contrasted with functionalist, non-political views of international institutions and frequently observable in the normatively charged domain of human rights, also occur in other issue areas, both in political rhetoric and academic discourse (see e.g. Reich 2005). A second use of the term in IR is less normative and takes its principal cues from some of the dominant approaches to politicisation in EU studies (see also Chaps. 2, 8 and 9 in this book). In this understanding, the degree of politicisation captures the variable salience of international institutions within political discourse at the (mostly) national level. Politicisation in this sense has been described as being “present if collectively binding decisions increasingly become the subject of controversial public debates” (Rixen and Zangl 2013, 365) and been defined as “the demand for, or the act of, transporting an issue into the field of politics, making previously unpolitical matters political” (Zürn et al. 2012, 73). The field of politics, in turn, is defined as being “characterized by public communication about and contestation over collectively binding decisions concerning the common good” (ibid.). This relationship between politicisation and politics has been criticised as making politicisation unduly dependent upon an

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understanding of politics as a pre-existing “field” or “sphere” with more or less defined boundaries into which previously non-political issues may be transferred (or, in the case of de-politicisation, from which they may be removed) (Kauppi et al. 2016, 75–76, 80–81). By contrast, based on an understanding of politics as an activity, it is argued that politicisation is in fact constitutive of politics as it represents the very act of marking an issue or phenomenon as political by foregrounding its contingent character, that is, the availability of “alternative forms of action” which may then result in controversy as to which course to choose (ibid., 82; see also Chap. 2 in this book). (For the purposes of this chapter, no side needs to be taken in this debate; instead, I assume an understanding of politicisation that covers practices ranging from naming of phenomena as political to express contestations in public and semi-public settings, to demanding and making issues the subject of decision-making processes within political communities, practices that can be triggered and occur either top-­ down or bottom-up.) The main concern of this chapter is the “authority transfer thesis,” a major argument in the politicisation literature in both IR and EU studies, according to which politicisation is seen as a function, subject to the existence of political opportunity structures, of the extent to which authority is being transferred to institutions beyond the state (see e.g. de Wilde and Zürn 2012, 138–139): The more authority an institution has, the more likely it is that it will become politicised in comparison to institutions that have less authority. In EU studies, this expectation has come under critical scrutiny, with some authors concluding that the relationship is more tenuous than suggested: “Authority transfers to the EU undoubtedly play an important role in politicising European integration debates, but they have been neither the only source of conflict nor dominant in political controversies on European integration” (Grande and Hutter 2016, 40). In IR, by contrast, the authority transfer thesis appears to hold its ground in light of some empirical support: The increased centralisation and expansion of the functions of international organisations (IOs) in terms of rule-making, monitoring, norm interpretation, and enforcement; the extension of their regulatory authority from interstate to intrastate issues; and the move from consensus to supranational and majoritarian decision-making have been identified as factors contributing to the greater politicisation of IOs over time (Zürn 2018, 154–159; Rixen and Zangl 2013, 368–369, 385; Binder 2012). In this chapter, I do not contest the general observation that in the world of international institutions “higher levels of authority lead to

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higher levels of politicisation” (Zürn 2018, 159), but argue that authority is merely a (partial) proxy for a more basic, underlying driver of politicisation, namely, a governance arrangement’s existing or expected consequences: Actors may politicise an institution or its output not as such because of the authority it possesses—whether understood in solid or relational, liquid terms—but because of the effects that the exercise of its authority does or may yield. Where an institution is endowed with greater authority than another institution, it will, ceteris paribus, be able to generate effects that are more widely, deeply, or strongly felt by stakeholders and thus be more likely to trigger politicisation as a response. Importantly, though, while the significance and size of the consequences of institutional action may often be correlated with differences in relative institutional authority, major instances of politicisation have occurred with respect to institutional arrangements that have little to no recognised political authority, but that may still generate possibly major and far-­ reaching consequences. But if it is indeed the existing or expected factual  consequences that trigger politicisation, and if the politicisation of institutions with little or no authority, but major expected consequences, can exceed that of governance arrangements with more widely recognised political authority, but smaller or less controversial consequences, then authority is no longer either a necessary or a sufficient condition for politicisation, but only one possible factor that may affect an institutional arrangement’s “consequentiality.” The chapter proceeds as follows: In the next section I discuss the authority-politicisation thesis, focusing in particular on the nature of international institutions’ “political authority” within this relationship. I then expand on the argument that (expected) institutional consequences are the true driver of politicisation, not authority, and argue that replacing authority with consequentiality can explain more instances of politicisation than the authority-politicisation thesis. I then present three institutional arrangements—the UN General Assembly, the G7/8/20, and coalitions of the willing—as illustrative examples to show that lack of political authority does not mean lack of politicisation. The final section concludes.

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11.2   The Authority-Politicisation Thesis The authority-politicisation thesis seems intuitively plausible: The greater the authority of a particular institution, the greater the likelihood that this institution will be able to make consequential decisions that have an impact on people’s lives and the political communities of which they are part. The greater such impact—actually or probabilistically—the greater the probability, ceteris paribus, that affected stakeholders will be willing to mobilise and devote resources to engage with, and contribute to, a discourse about the desirability of the nature of such authority and/or of the specific output that it generates, and to propose alternative courses of action. In the field of EU studies, de Wilde and Zürn have thus argued that the “politicisation of European integration is driven by its increasing political authority indicated by the transformation from a traditional international organization to a more encompassing ‘political system’” (De Wilde and Zürn 2012, 138 [reference omitted]). Moving beyond European integration, the “politicisation of international institutions” is said to “occur[] to the extent that those institutions exercise or are expected to exercise political authority” (Zürn et al. 2012, 73). If variance in institutional authority is a key explanatory variable for variation in the politicisation of international institutions, then the definition of what constitutes authority in international relations is crucial. Authority, however, is another contested concept which has been conceptualised in different ways. One principal distinction is that between understandings of “authority as command” and of “authority as deference” (Krisch 2017, 239–242). Approaches in the first group take their cues from state-centric, government-based notions of authority in which institutions are seen as possessing authority if they have the right to issue “commands” that imply a correlative obligation to comply with them and which can, if need be, enforced in the case of non-compliance (see e.g. Lake 2009, 17–18). Many approaches in this category ground the authority of international institutions in formal-legal acts of delegation or pooling of authority from states to IOs, with the concrete terms of such delegation or pooling usually being specified in the institution’s constitutive treaty (Lenz et  al. 2014, 133–136; on “formal-legal authority” see Lake 2009, 24–28). One illustrative example of such an approach can be found in the work on “measuring international authority” which focuses expressly on “legal rational authority based in a codified legal order” and links the extent of an international organisation’s authority to its “capacity

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to bind its member states by creating legal obligations” (Hooghe et  al. 2017, 13–14). Conceptualisations of authority as deference, by contrast, move away from the emphasis on commands, obligation, and formal-legal empowerment and instead frame authority as “the ability to induce deference in others” (Avant et  al. 2010, 9), that is, the acceptance of an authority’s output “without being necessarily forced or persuaded to do so” (Zürn et al. 2012, 86). Such approaches seek to “shift the focus toward the plurality of authority structures emerging, in the contemporary world, from social processes without an anchor in formal or legal powers and operating through informal tools” (Krisch 2017, 241). The “authority as deference” approach broadens the research horizon to investigate not only the more “solid” forms of authority in international relations which are typically attached to formal and usually legalised institutions, but the much more numerous forms of what Nico Krisch has labelled “liquid authority:” “If authority is detached from ideas of command, delegation and formally binding obligations, it may appear in gradations, be dispersed over multiple actors, and its recognition based on a variety of sources, procedural and substantive. Instead of being concentrated in a single, solid and commanding institution, authority might then be spread out over a process in which it is hard to locate, and which is in constant flux” (ibid., 243), involving a variable number of both governmental and non-governmental organisations and sites of decision-making. Despite their differences, all these definitions agree that authority as a social form of power is inherently relational and depends on “the recognition, even if only tacit or informal, of others” (Avant et al. 2010, 10). As David Lake writes in the context of his command-type definition of authority, “authority is not a claim made by the ruler, but a right granted by the ruled. A does not possess authority unless B acknowledges a duty to comply with A’s will” (Lake 2009, 20). Such recognition, and hence the strength of an institution’s authority, is not fixed and can vary over time. This variable aspect centrally enables the “liquidity” of liquid authority (Sending 2017). It is also fundamental for Michael Zürn’s concept of “reflexive authority” in which states’ recognition underwrites the authority of regional or global governance arrangements with a view to providing certain functional and epistemic benefits, but where such recognition remains subject to continuous reflection and, if no longer found to be warranted, subject to possible alteration, withdrawal, and reallocation (Zürn 2017, 263–268, 2018, 45–47).

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Zürn’s reflexive authority is said to operate primarily through institutional “requests and interpretations with behavioral implications” (Zürn 2018, 60), and only rarely through “commands.” Its relative strength would then presumably be evidenced by the extent to which states are willing to accept these requests and interpretations and to act accordingly. It is not clear, however, how this understanding of reflexive authority squares with Zürn’s own definition of the sub-type of “political authority” which is defined as “implying the right to make collectively binding decisions” and as “rest[ing] on the assumption that someone should be entitled to make authoritative decisions in order to advance the common good and to avoid chaos” (Zürn et al. 2012, 85), echoing David Easton’s definition of politics as the “authoritative allocation of values,” where “authoritative” implies “binding” (for Easton, it is this binding quality that “distinguishes political from other types of allocations;” see Easton 1965, 50). As Nico Krisch has noted, this definition of political authority “comes close to the command model again” (Krisch 2017, 243). Since political authority is presented as one of two sub-types of reflexive public authority in IR (Zürn 2017, 269)—the other being “epistemic authority”—it remains unclear how the presumed binding character of its decisions relates to the “requests” of reflexive authority which are conceptualised as non-binding in that the freedom of choice whether to act according to them or not remains with the addressees. In any event, the political authority of international organisations in both its rule-making and enforcement dimensions is said to have increased significantly since the end of the Cold War (Zürn 2018, 127–128). One other important aspect in the conceptualisation of authority concerns the relationship between political authority and legitimacy. In many, if not most, definitions legitimacy is seen as a constitutive element of political authority, understood as “legitimate power” (Hooghe et al. 2017, 14) or as “rightful or legitimate rule” (Lake 2010, 591), so much so that the phrase “legitimate authority” is seen as being “redundant” (Hurd 2007, 61 fn. 116). For Zürn, however, they are separable. While authority and legitimacy both rely on recognition, they do so with respect to different aspects: Authority is based on the recognition that it “is considered per se functionally necessary in order to achieve certain common goods. Therefore, an authority is granted the competence to make certain decisions and judgments, that is, institutions have authority when the addressees of their policies recognize that these institutions can make competent judgments and binding decisions” (Zürn et al. 2012, 83). Legitimacy, by

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contrast, signals “the acknowledgement of the rightful exercise of authority in the context of a given stock of normative beliefs in a community. According to this view, political authority and rule are legitimate when the norms, rules, and judgments produced are based on shared beliefs about the common good and procedural fairness” (ibid.). As a result, the existence of “illegitimate authority” thus becomes possible, at least for some time, and institutions may become politicised, not because the recognition of the functional necessity of their competences—their authority—is being questioned, but because the legitimacy of the exercise of that authority becomes contested. To summarise: Authority in international relations—as elsewhere—is constituted by the recognition of those to whom its output is being addressed and acts a second-order reason for accepting and complying with the latter; such output may consist of collectively binding and (more often) non-binding rules, decisions, requests, and interpretations; authority may be rather “solid” and attached to a particular organisation or it may be liquid and span, as well as move between, different more or less institutionalised sites of decision-making; and the authority of regional and global governance arrangements has increased over time, in both its political and epistemic manifestations. Because increased authority does or can be expected to result in increased impact, it will correlate with more politicisation of such sites of authority.

11.3   “(Expected) Consequences” as an Alternative to “Authority” As noted in the introduction, I do not take issue with the conceptualisations of authority as such or dispute the general empirical findings of the IR literature on politicisation which appear to lend some empirical support to that literature's  theoretical expectations. I do question, though, whether the focus on authority is actually necessary when it appears that the politicisation of international institutions responds in particular to the consequences of their actions. If that is the case, then the relative strength or weakness of an institution’s authority seems to act merely as a proxy for the true driver or politicisation, the actual or expected consequences of a particular governance arrangement or of its concrete output. Use of a proxy may be useful when the true explanatory factor cannot be measured well, but the proxy can; from a theoretical point of view, however, formally recognised

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authority appears to be neither the sole nor necessarily the most important factor determining an arrangement’s likely or actual consequences and related politicisation: There are numerous instances of institutions that have little recognised political or epistemic authority, but that nonetheless become politicised because they do or may have far-­reaching consequences. Other institutions may become politicised precisely because they lack authority and meaningful consequences when those engaging in politicising them believe that there should be more of both. And yet other institutions may indeed become politicised because of specific delegations of political authority, or its increase over time, which suggests a concomitant increase in consequentiality. The upshot is that in all cases politicisation occurs ultimately in response to observable or expected institutional effects and such effects may be generated by institutional arrangements that are normatively grounded or simply as a result of the factual exercise of governance activities which need not be recognised as authoritative to have tangible effects. The reasons for politicising an institutional arrangement or its output because of its (expected) consequences can be diverse: Actors may object to the imposition and/or distribution of material costs and benefits; they may question the scope and depth of a given institutions competences; they may oppose institutional effects for normative and value-based reasons irrespective of their material/immaterial nature and whether they are themselves affected or not; and they may also be motivated by considerations as to an arrangement’s input-, throughput- and output-legitimacy (which, however, mostly occurs because of concerns about how these will affect outcomes). The main point here is that focusing on (expected) consequences as the driver of politicisation promises to explain more instances of politicisation than a narrower focus on political and epistemic forms of authority as trigger. Expected consequences, but also the assessments of consequences that have already materialised, necessarily contain a subjective element: Rational observers can disagree on what material and non-material consequences to expect from an institutional arrangement and its policy output, and they can likewise diverge with respect to how to assess such consequences in terms of how important they are for themselves and for others, materially, politically, and normatively. As a result, some people will be moved to politicise an institution and/or its policies while others are not. There is no predefined correspondence between certain institutional outputs and certain degrees of politicisation; what we should expect is a positive

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correlation between the subjective assessments of the magnitude and significance of (expected) institutional consequences and people’s willingness to make these the subject of political contestation. One might object that the perceptions of the (expected) consequences of an institutional arrangement, especially if broadly understood to include both material and immaterial effects, and how significant they are for actors, are very difficult to measure ex ante and can at best be reconstructed after the fact with substantial margins of error. But if the role of expected consequences can only be known through its effects, that is, the extent of their politicisation, then they cannot effectively function and be operationalised as an independent variable. That is a valid concern, but it bears pointing out that the same problem besets the recently proposed relational approaches to authority in international relations. The measurement of changes in the social practices of recognition and in the resulting centres of gravity of authority across institutional sites and time that would be needed to show the “liquidity” of authority are a daunting methodological task, and none of the contributions to the International Theory symposium section on “Liquid Authority in Global Governance” (vol. 9, issue 2 (2017), 237–351) actually engage in such measuring beyond a limited snapshot manner, remaining mostly at the conceptual level instead. Zürn’s model of reflexive authority likewise suggests dynamic social interactions between international institutions and states across time and with respect to their concrete output which, but what is seemingly being measured in the database to identify variation in political and epistemic authority, are primarily the formal delegations of competences in the constitutive treaties and subsequent protocols. But looking only at more or less formal-­ legal delegations at select moments in time does not exactly enable inferences as to the “depth of recognition of the interpretations and decisions by an institution” in ongoing practice (Zürn 2018, 108–109). In any event, challenges in the measurement of the indicators of a theoretically justifiable explanatory variable should not result in throwing out the variable, but in trying to find suitable methodological solutions. One further reason why (expected) consequences of institutional activity are, in my view, theoretically preferable to authority as an explanation of politicisation is that they allow dispensing with certain problems of recognition in the construction of international authority. At the level of interstate relations, it remains unclear whether institutional sites of decision-­making should be seen as having authority even vis-à-vis states that do not recognise or that even expressly reject them. Alternatively, one may ask

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how many states have to recognise authority before it may be considered to operate erga omnes. In formal IOs, one may look at ratifications of their constitutive instrument to separate those states recognising in principle an IO’s authority from those that do not, but IOs often have effects for nonmembers. The notion of (expected) consequences is able to capture both phenomena without having to problematise the nature of recognition practices and their effects on the constitution of authority. The situation is even more problematic at the level of individuals and of non-state actors who are regularly not participants in the primary practices of recognition that spawn international authority. What is more, the politicisation of international institutions appears frequently pushed forward at least in part by actors who precisely do not recognise the authority of those institutions. From the “Battle of Seattle” in 1999 to the many protests surrounding the G20 meeting in Hamburg in 2017, political groups from different political corners often politicise institutions precisely because they question or deny their authority (and not only the legitimacy of their activities). Rather than weighing claims and counterclaims with respect to recognition-based authority of regional and global governance arrangements, focusing instead on the (expected) consequences of these arrangements for different types of actors allows to take these into consideration simply as social and political facts with which to engage and which may fuel politicisation, irrespective of whether actors expressly or tacitly recognise these institutions or their output as authoritative or not.

11.4   Illustrative Examples In this section, I discuss three examples of institutionalised forms of governance at the international level that, as institutions, are either characterised by quite low levels of political and epistemic authority, if any, or that at best have such authority for only a small segment of the international community, but whose activities and output can be quite consequential. While aware of the importance for the argument presented here as well as the methodological challenges of reliably measuring, ex ante, expectations as to consequences, the following sidelines the issue of measurement for the time being and focuses on highlighting the institutional-empirical contexts in which the notion of “(excepted) consequences” would need to be operationalised and investigated as a driver of politicisation.

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11.4.1  United Nations General Assembly The General Assembly (GA) is one of the six principal organs of the United Nations, and although it is the most visible UN body after the UN Security Council, and the only one in which all UN members are represented, it has little political authority, at least in formal terms and certainly if understood as the ability to make binding decisions. While it can take such decisions with respect to a few organisational matters—such as the admission of new members (Article 4 (2) UN Charter) and the approval of the UN’s budget (Article 17 (1)—the majority of the General Assembly’s output is non-binding. While the Assembly’s ambit is broad in that it “may discuss any questions or matters within the scope of the … Charter,” its principal policy instrument are “recommendations” (Articles 10 & 13 (1)), not “decisions,” “orders,” or “rules.” Even such widely heralded documents as the “Uniting for Peace” resolution (UNGA Res. 377 (V), Nov. 3, 1950) and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UNGA Res. 217 (III), Dec. 10, 1948) remain, as pronouncements of the General Assembly, formally non-binding, a fact which states rarely fail to note when confronted with uses thereof that they disagree with. And in many, if not most cases, in which the Assembly’s “requests” to consider the recommendations included in its resolutions are being honoured by states, it is doubtful whether this truly occurs as a result of second-order reasoning that links such behaviour to the recognised authority of the Assembly as an institutional actor. Nor is it persuasive to assert that the General Assembly possesses epistemic authority. States hardly follow its resolutions because they believe in the superior knowledge or wisdom of the collectivity of states assembled in the GA over their own. Rather, it will often be the case that they do so either because their own policy positions are aligned with the substance of a resolution or for instrumental reasons, for example, because it allows states to signal support to other states whose cooperation or backing they wish to obtain in other matters. In short, it is ambitious to assert either genuine political or epistemic authority to the General Assembly that would let it act and have effects qua its recognised authority. What the General Assembly does is provide information about policy preferences and their distribution across states as well as bestow a degree of legitimacy on the positions of the majority. These are important political functions, but none that require assumptions about epistemic superiority of the institution or the right to issue collectively binding decisions. And GA resolutions may well be

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consequential and have political effects when states follow the recommendations included therein, but again, not primarily because it is the General Assembly as an “authority” that has adopted them, but because the Assembly functions as a diplomatic forum that allows for the bundling of state preferences and the identification of compromise solutions through strategic signalling and vote-buying (see only Carter and Stone 2015; Brazys and Panke 2015). General Assembly resolutions are thus mostly endogenous results of intergovernmental negotiation and bargaining, which draw their strength or weakness from the political process of their production. (Similarly, the effectiveness of some of the GA’s subsidiary organs, such as the Human Rights Council, appears not to be rooted in its political or epistemic authority, but to operate through shaming utilising interstate strategic relationships; see Terman and Voeten 2018). Despite the absence of demonstrable political and epistemic authority as an institutional actor, as well as a good deal of uncertainty about its actual effectiveness in bringing about changes in line with its resolutions, the General Assembly is not only a forum for the politicisation of other UN organs (Binder and Heupel 2015), but is subject to politicisation in its own right at both the levels of elites and of average citizens. Such politicisation of the General Assembly’s agenda—often with respect to specific topics and/or specific countries—occurs especially when the Assembly is in session, physically in the streets and as part of increased NGO activity and media reporting during that time (see e.g. Toure 2017; CIVICUS 2018; UN Watch’s homepage at https://www.unwatch.org/en/; and Becker 2014 on the relationship between media reporting and the use of GA sessions). In part, such politicisation merely seeks to take advantage of greater visibility, using the General Assembly sessions as part of an institutionalised “opportunity structure” to convey one’s political messages, but the politicisation of the General Assembly, often as part of the United Nations more broadly, has also occurred more or less steadily on principled (often cosmopolitan) grounds with respect to the GA’s institutional design and its role in global governance, both in elite and academic discourse (see only de Wilde et al. 2015; Habermas 2008; Scheuerman 2008; Archibugi 1993) and at the level of average citizens (Ecker-Ehrhardt 2014). The important point here is that the politicisation of the General Assembly is often driven by the belief that it does not have enough functionally necessary authority - rather than too much - and/or the wrong design, to serve a normatively attractive and effective role in global governance.

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11.4.2  G7/G8/G20 If the UN General Assembly is a good example of showing that politicisation of institutions can occur in the absence of meaningful levels of political and/or epistemic authority, then this is even more so the case with respect to the intergovernmental meetings of the most powerful states known as the G7/8 and the G20. Although not international organisations, the G7/8 and G20 summits are institutionalised fora for the coordination of policies that have, as institutions, no more expressly recognised authority than most ordinary intergovernmental meetings. When the G20 emerged in 1999 in response to the Asian financial crisis as a group comprising 19 states and the EU—meeting initially at the level of finance ministers and central bank governors—it was intended to be “an informal mechanism for dialogue among systemically important countries, within the framework of the Bretton Woods institutional system” (Group of Seven 1999, sec. II. A.). The G20, like the G7/8, lacks “a charter, votes, or legally binding decisions,” has no secretariat or permanent staff, and aims at “reaching consensus on important issues,” rather than imposing majority positions (Group of Twenty 2008, 24). This basic approach did not change when the G20 was “upgraded” to meet at the level of heads of state and government in 2008. Assessments of the overall effectiveness of the summits with respect to actual policy implementation yield mixed results, and there appears to be more compliance with some types of commitments than with others, with the G7/8 being seemingly better at delivering on political commitments and the G20 with respect to macroeconomic policies (Larionova and Shelepov 2017; Kirton 2006, 461–462). Although informal, non-binding and without express delegation or pooling of sovereignty, the summits are frequently strongly politicised, triggering debate in the media and protests in the streets (Nonhoff et al. 2009), including mass (and partly violent) demonstrations in the places where the summits took place, such as in London in 2009, in Toronto in 2010, and in Hamburg in 2017. Although these protests around the summits occur as peaks that abate again in intensity after the event is over, during those times, their politicisation often exceeds that of other institutions that enjoy much greater recognised authority, especially when one considers  that the G7/8/20 meet and generate output over only short periods of time each year in comparison to permanent institutions that do so over the entire year, such as the EU or UN (see Schmidtke 2013, 9, for some statistics). Part of the protests may not be particularly institutionspecific, but any quick search of the Internet also reveals many NGO

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contributions and organised activities that target specifically the topics and policies to be discussed at a given G7/8/20 meeting. Politically minded actors recognise that the summits can have considerable consequences in some policy areas even in the absence of political authority, which motivates them to mobilise around these meetings. One could criticise this argument by noting that the characterisation of the summits as being without delegated or pooled political authority is mistaken. While this may be true formally in that there is no treaty or other formal document that specifies the decision-making authority of the summits, one could argue that summits always and inevitably pool the political authority of the participating “systemically important countries,” even if they only do so informally. When the political and economic heavyweights of the world get together and debate guiding principles for enacting policy in the near future, the argument might continue, it is not important whether they do so through formally delegated or pooled authority or “merely” do so factually. Still, in order to remain within the relational understanding of authority, one would have to show that this informally pooled authority of the G7/8/20 is indeed being recognised at least by the participants themselves so that it could then subsequently function as a second-order reason for adhering to the summits’ commitments. Given the chequered record of compliance with the latter, this argument is difficult to make, at least in general terms. It is more plausible to consider the summits as simple coordination devices between national political authorities (and the EU, in the case of the G20) that try to sound out overlapping interests and preferences and that subsequently may or may not adhere to any of the summits’ compromise commitments in light of their own interests. The summits may thus still be consequential, but the mechanism is different from authority-following, and it seems reasonable to conjecture that the extent of their politicisation is a function of their expected consequences, perhaps amplified by their thematic “un-­ boundedness” (Nonhoff et al. 2009, 264, relatedly refer to the G8’s perceived “omni-competence“), without having to construct implicit recognitions of the summits’ institutional authority. 11.4.3  Coalitions of the Willing The problem of recognition as being constitutive of authority which in turn drives politicisation becomes even more problematic when considering other weakly institutionalised governance arrangements in international

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relations that serve objectives seen to be politically, legally, or morally suspect and in the interest of only a small group of states. An example of this sort is the “coalition of the willing” which, under the leadership of the United States, invaded Iraq in 2003 and toppled the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. The coalition essentially operated within a “top-down, hierarchical and asymmetrical framework” in which a dominant United States exercised unchallenged command and control over objectives and tactics of the mission (Cooper 2005, 2–4). Although limited in time and scope, the coalition nonetheless represented an institutional form of cooperation in that it comprised stable rules and practices that defined the positions of the members within the coalition and structured their relationships and interactions (compare Ostrom 1986, 5). Within the coalition, the United States, as its leader, exercised key authority over the other members which recognised the United States in that role. That can hardly be said about those states and non-state actors that contested and opposed the actions of the coalition which, as is well known, invaded Iraq without authorisation by the UN Security Council. In the absence of such authorisation, many actors disputed that the coalition would have the authority to go ahead with the mission. In other words, outside of the coalition itself, it did not have widespread, recognised authority. But it did have serious material and political consequences in Iraq, the region and beyond, and promised to do so from early on when the idea of a military intervention in Iraq was first floated. And the decision to intervene and its execution were heavily politicised in debates in international and domestic political fora, in the mass media, and in demonstrations on the streets of major cities across the globe (see e.g. the contributions in Walgrave and Rucht 2010). The direction of the argument should be clear by now: The politicisation of the actions of the coalition is not well explained by linking it to the extent of the recognised authority that the coalition presumably possessed, but can be made much better sense of by understanding it as driven by the expected, and then realised, consequences of the coalition’s actions.

11.5   Conclusion I have argued in this chapter that foregrounding international institutions’ “authority” as the key driver of their politicisation will result in many blind spots that are not well explained by it. The relative extent of an

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institution’s political authority can be a factor influencing its perceived consequentiality and hence its politicisation. But politicisation can also be triggered by the expected consequences of institutional arrangements that possess little or no formally or socially recognised political authority. Many actors will politicise multilateral institutions and their output because they encounter their consequences as political and/or material facts with which they agree or disagree, irrespective of any normatively grounded recognition of those institutions’ authority, whether by themselves or by others. The recognition of political authority thus appears to be one contextual factor that may condition the expected consequences of a governance arrangement, but by itself, it is neither necessary nor sufficient for politicisation; the magnitude of expected institutional consequences and their perceived significance for stakeholders, by contrast, are arguably more consistently drivers of politicisation, and these factors need not be positively correlated with an institution’s authority. To that extent, then, the notion of “(expected) consequences” is a broader and more general concept that promises to explain more of the empirically observable instances of the politicisation of international institutions—including those relating to institutional inaction and to the non-allocation of functionally desirable competences to international institutions—than the narrower focus on their recognised political authority.

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Habermas, Jürgen. 2008. “The Constitutionalization of International Law and the Legitimation Problems of a Constitution for World Society.” Constellations 15 (4):444–455. Hooghe, Liesbet, Gary Marks, Tobias Lenz, Jeanine Bezuijen, Besir Ceka, and Svet Derderyan. 2017. Measuring International Authority: A Postfunctionalist Theory of Governance. Volume III. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hurd, Ian. 2007. After Anarchy: Legitimacy & Power in the United Nations Security Council. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kauppi, Niilo, Kari Palonen, and Claudia Wiesner. 2016. “The Politification and Politicisation of the EU.” Rediscriptions 19 (1):72–90. Kirton, John. 2006. “Explaining Compliance with G8 Finance Commitments: Agency, Institutionalization and Structure.” Open Economies Review 17:459–475. Krisch, Nico. 2017. “Liquid Authority in Global Governance.” International Theory 9 (2):237–260. Lake, David A. 2010. “Rightful Rules: Authority, Order, and the Foundations of Global Governance.” International Studies Quarterly 54 (3):587–613. Lake, David A. 2009. Hierarchy in International Relations. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Landolt, Laura K., and Byungwon Woo. 2017. “NGOs Invite Attention: From the United Nations Commission on Human Rights to the Human Rights Council.” Journal of Human Rights 16 (4):407–427. Larionova, Marina, and Andrey Shelepov. 2017. “Gx Delivery Legitimacy: Compliance by Members.” Studia Diplomatica 68 (3):123–144. Lenz, Tobias, Jeanine Bezuijen, Liesbet Hooghe, and Gary Marks. 2014. “Patterns of International Authority: Task Specific vs. General Purpose.” In Internationale Organisationen: Autonomie, Politisierung, interorganisationale Beziehungen und Wandel (Sonderheft 49 der Politischen Vierteljahresschrift), edited by Eugénia da Conceição-Heldt, Martin Koch and Andrea Liese, 131–156. Baden-Baden: Nomos. Nonhoff, Martin, Jennifer Gronau, Frank Nullmeier, and Steffen Schneider, 2009. “Zur Politisierung internationaler Institutionen: Der Fall G8.” Zeitschrift für Internationale Beziehungen 16 (2):237–267. Ostrom, Elinor. 1986. “An Agenda for the Study of Institutions.” Public Choice 48:3–25. Palonen, Kari, Claudia Wiesner, Veith Selk, Niilo Kauppi, Hans-Jörg-Trenz, Claire Dupuy, Virginie Van Ingelgom, and Philip Liste. 2019. “Rethinking Politicisation.” Contemporary Political Theory 18 (2):248–281. Reich, Arie. 2005. “The Threat of Politicisation of the WTO.” University of Pennsylvania Journal of International Economic Law 26:779–814.

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Rixen, Thomas, and Bernhard Zangl. 2013. “The Politicisation of International Economic Institutions in US Public Debates.” The Review of International Organizations 8 (3):363–387. Scheuerman, William E. 2008. “All Power to the (State-less?) General Assembly!” Constellations 15 (4):485–492. Schmidtke, Henning. 2013. The Entry of the Laity into the Altar of International Relations: Why International Institutions Become Publicly Contested. Paper prepared for the 7th ECPR Annual Conference, Bordeaux, September 4–7, 2013. Available at https://ecpr.eu/Filestore/PaperProposal/8487e12f-­7b6a-­43dc­bace-­c72ddf28f150.pdf. Sending, Ole Jacob. 2017. “Recognition and Liquid Authority.” International Theory 9 (2):311–328. Terman, Rochelle, and Erik Voeten. 2018. “The Relational Politics of Shame: Evidence from the Universal Periodic Review.” Review of International Organizations 13:1–23. Toure, Madina. 2017. “A New Yorker’s Guide to Protests throughout UN General Assembly Week.” Observer, September 20. https://observer.com/2017/09/ united-­nations-­general-­assembly-­protests/. Walgrave, Stefaan, and Dieter Rucht (eds.). 2010. The World Says No to War: Demonstrations against the War on Iraq. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press. Zürn, Michael. 2018. A Theory of Global Governance: Authority, Legitimacy, and Contestation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zürn, Michael. 2017. “From Constitutional Rule to Loosely Coupled Spheres of Liquid Authority; A Reflexive Approach.” International Theory 9 (2):261–285. Zürn, Michael, Martin Binder, and Matthias Ecker-Ehrhardt. 2012. “International Authority and its Politicisation.” International Theory 4 (1):69–106.

CHAPTER 12

In-Between Juridification and Politicisation: Zooming in on the Everyday Politics of Law Philip Liste

12.1   Introduction1 The modern constellation is characterised by a mode of rational governance for which critical theorists have found some rather dystopian descriptions. Somewhat extending Max Weber’s famous metaphor of a “Gehäuse der Hörigkeit” (cage of serfdom), they sketched a dark vision of modern progress (Benjamin 1980a, 697–8) or talked about the “verwaltete Welt” (administered world, Adorno 1973). This pessimism even continues to have an effect in Jürgen Habermas’ notion of the colonisation of the lifeworld staged by way of “juridification” (Habermas 1981). Today, the modern constellation operates on multiple scales, though not without furthering its dense modes of governance. This chapter builds 1  This chapter builds upon the  rich discussion on  an  author’s workshop at  University of  Hamburg. For  the  highly productive comments on  a  previous version, I  am  grateful to Friederike Kuntz and Claudia Wiesner.

P. Liste (*) Fulda University of Applied Sciences, Fulda, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 C. Wiesner (ed.), Rethinking Politicisation in Politics, Sociology and International Relations, Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54545-1_12

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upon the assumption that while facing a now transnational modern constellation, the critical theorists’ work on modernity still has something to offer. Walter Benjamin’s angel (Benjamin 1980a, 697–8) is still subject to the storm, which has perhaps even become stronger. In this chapter, I seek to make sense of critical theory for the debate on politicisation beyond the nation-state. In international studies, the phenomenon of politicisation is especially addressed as an answer to an increasing amount of authority by international organisations (Zürn 2018; for the debate, see Chap. 11 in this book). In fact, international organisations such as the United Nations or the World Health Organization make authoritative decisions that affect the lives of people. In turn, people in various locales may not always agree with how they are internationally governed and may want to contest the international decision-making bodies’ authority. At times, issues governed through international organisations are thus “politicised.” Yet, while international studies have thus addressed the interplay between international authority and politicisation (see Chap. 11 in this book), the debate has been surprisingly disconnected from an elaboration of law as media of global governance (Abbott et al. 2000), let alone a critique of the international proliferation of law and bureaucracy (Chimni 2004; Gill and Cutler 2014). In other words, a critique of juridification as it has traditionally been articulated in critical theory is widely absent in international studies. The aim is to outline a critical international theory of politicisation and juridification by taking into account the dialectical relation between the two moments. Where juridification is understood as a limitation and politicisation as (re-)opening of political contingency, the two modes are in contradiction since the latter practice seeks to recover the political room of manoeuvre that the former suspends. In this sense, juridification depoliticises so that politicisation can be understood as a critique of juridification. However, this view does neither exhaust the critique of juridification as articulated by critical theorists (Habermas 1981; Kirchheimer 1976; Teubner 1987), nor does it account for the blind spot that politicisation and juridification share as analytical perspectives. This blind spot is the politics of law, that is, the problem that the workings of law are themselves “political.” By drawing on critical legal theory, I argue that juridification and politicisation are at work simultaneously in the everyday practice of international law and bureaucracies (see also Chap. 10 in this book).

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In Sect. 12.2, the chapter juxtaposes the two lenses, politicisation and juridification, to clarify the blind spot on the politics of law. In Sect 12.3, I introduce a third perspective by drawing on a “realist” tradition of thought in critical legal theory that stresses the politics of law under conditions of an ongoing uncertainty and indeterminacy of legal norms. In Sect. 12.4, I attempt to carry home the fruits by suggesting that a dialectical view on politicisation, juridification, and the workings of politics within law adds to a body of research, which is under way in the emerging field of global law and society studies.

12.2   Politicisation and Juridification As the suffix “-isation” indicates, politicisation points to a transformation from one status to another. Something—a process, an institution, and so on—is politicised, be it to critique an arguably too exclusive mode of decision-­making, to enable broader participation, to get access, that is, to change the status quo. In this sense, the phenomenon often implies a public discontent with established modes of governance. Since we can act on the assumption that there are only very few (if any) non-regulated issues in the modern constellation, politicisation will arguably occur against the background of institutional arrangements already in place. Technically, this points to two major elements of modernity, bureaucracy and the legal code. While these elements serve the organisation of a political system, politicisation is a process through which a mode of this organisation is put into question and thus a re-entry of the political in institutionalised politics (see Chap. 4 in this book). Hence, politicisation is a modern phenomenon for it reacts to a form of political organisation that characterises modernity (Weber 1980). While, in principle, everything can be political or can become a matter of political controversy (see Wiesner 2019 and in this book), here the focus is somewhat narrower. In the modern constellation, politicisation usually implies that something has been depoliticised before, and a major mode of such modern depoliticisation is juridification. Provisionally, juridification can be defined as the proliferation of law for the organisation of sociopolitical relations. Yet, it is crucial to note that this does not mean that such relations are no longer political. Depoliticisation is itself political, even where it remains uncontested. To be sure, a critical theory of both politicisation and juridification (and both at the same time) must take this paradox into account. In this section I argue that work in international studies has rarely observed phenomena of politicisation from

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a critical theoretical perspective in this sense. To unfold this argument, it will be necessary to elaborate on some of the uses of politicisation and juridification (and the related concept of legalisation) in international studies before entering into a discussion of their contradictions by drawing on critical accounts in political and legal theory. 12.2.1  Theory of Politicisation Scholars in the field of international relations (IR) argue that an increased public awareness of the political character of governance can be observed with regard to international institutions (see e.g. Zürn et al. 2012). One major concern in this body of work is the emergence of authority beyond the nation-state (see Chap. 11 in this book). From a normative perspective, this shift implies a new requirement regarding the legitimacy of governance. The more international institutions govern effectively and, in doing so, affect the lives of people across nation-state boundaries, the more does this governing practice require modes of legitimation. Put differently, we may want to assume that a regime of governing can only be legitimate if those governed are able to consider themselves also as authors of the rules upon which they are governed. At the same time, we may observe that authoritative governing practice shifts from the local to the global and/or the national to the inter- and transnational (see Sassen 2006). The normative implication of this scenario would then be that mechanisms through which legitimacy is provided locally must also be introduced globally. As a major contributor to the debate in IR, Michael Zürn rightly holds that “the notion of international cooperation as purely executive, legal, or technocratic matter misses some decisive features of world politics today” (Zürn 2018, 138). However, whether the people also claim their right to author international rules is an empirical rather than a normative question (see Kuntz 2020). In fact, a major aim in Zürn’s Theory of Global Governance is to establish a relation between two empirical phenomena— the emergence of international authority, on the one hand, and what he calls the politicisation of international institutions, on the other. As a consequence, this involves the analytical question of how to know the phenomena when seeing them. As to politicisation, Zürn holds that the most fundamental question is to define the sphere of the political, and thus to decide where something needs to be moved before we can speak of

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­ oliticization. […] A debate is therefore only then political if it presupposes p the possibility of making a collectively binding decision or interpretations that change the status quo. Not only private issues can be drawn into the political sphere, but also issues and institutions that were formerly located in economic, legal, administrative, or technocratic realms or function systems. (Zürn 2018, 139–40, italics in original)

If we take this understanding of the political at face value, if, in other words, the political is characterised by the possibility of choice, then politicisation means to generate this very possibility. It is this insight in the qualitative changes of the political process that characterises Zürn’s approach to global governance. For Zürn, politicisation is more than only a phenomenon that affects institutional development. Although interested in the empirical interplay between politicisation and (the authority of) international institutions, his approach builds upon a deeper elaboration of the political, not to forget an indeed normative consideration on legitimate governing. However, while unfolding this argument, Zürn introduces a number of distinctions, which are problematic (see also the discussion of sphere concepts of politics by Palonen and Wiesner in this book). First, the distinction between political and societal actors (Zürn 2018, 138) seems to be in contradiction to the emphasis on the public sphere. It is the societal actors who act politically while, at the same time, the political actors tend to “depoliticise” by pointing to given necessities. While this formulation may give a fair description of real-world scenarios, it hardly converges with the idea that societal actors become themselves political (actors) by furthering the politicisation of an issue. Second, the idea that things become political (only) by being moved from, say, economic or legal spheres to the political invites a reading in which the former spheres are qua definition non-political. Third, the notion of politicisation as “making previously unpolitical matters political” (Zürn 2018, 139) introduces a likewise problematic temporal distinction between before and after—thus implying that prepoliticised issues were non-political. While these objections do not necessarily diminish the explanatory power of Zürn’s theory, they do point to some blind spots that the approach itself generates. I argue that this holds true, especially where we are interested in the political quality and consequences of processes, which are not (or not yet) politicised. This point becomes clear in another account of politicisation that, I argue, avoids the mentioned problems. Kari Palonen (2003) points to

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some of the theoretical consequences of the concept by drawing on Max Weber’s notion of power as chance (see Weber 1980, 28). In a painstaking yet highly insightful effort, Palonen extrapolates his terminology from the traditional distinction of policy, polity and politics only to add two additional terms: politicking, which somewhat relates to the performative moment of Weber’s Politik treiben (see Weber 1992) and politicisation, meaning a process through which the room for political manoeuvre is widened (Palonen 2003, 175). As Palonen puts it, by politicization we can mark a phenomenon as political, as a Spielzeitraum for contingent action. Politicization thus refers to the act of naming something as political, including the controversies surrounding the acceptance of this naming. There is no politics ‘before’ politicization, either in a logical or a temporal sense, and politicking is possible only if a Spielzeitraum has been opened for action by politicization, while a polity is a result of previous politicizations. (Palonen 2003, 182, italics in original)

The metaphor of a Spielzeitraum is indeed appealing. The opening of a Spielzeitraum—a somewhat temporal space for political activity2—is essential for the understanding of politics. However, for Palonen, the key to understanding politicisation—if not politics in general—is contingency, which relates to the groundlessness of action, though with regard to a reservoir of possible alternatives, that is, those alternatives of action, which are in fact available in time and space (see also Palonen 1998, 14–17). We find a differentiation between politicking as a practice that operates under conditions of limited contingency, on the one hand, and politicisation as a process of doing away with these limitations, on the other. At the same time, politicisation is addressed with respect to its temporality. Instead of a move from one sphere to another, politicisation is addressed as an activity, which only makes sense when understood as part of a series of events. Thus, it does not make sense to study politicisation in isolation of the regulatory phenomena in which processes of politicisation are embedded. Politicisation only occurs against the background of a previously staged polity and the corresponding mode of politicking.

2  Spielzeitraum could perhaps be translated as a match period, though the German term also contains the spatial element “-raum.” Literally, it would thus be match-time-space, perhaps in the sense of one-half in a football match, that is, a temporal frame related to a certain activity demarcated in a space such as a playing field.

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The obvious scenario of an oscillation between the two activities, politicking and politicisation, reminds us of Benjamin’s notion of an oscillation between two modes of violence—lawmaking and law-preserving violence (Benjamin 1980b). While we can of course argue about whether violent forms of protest shall be understood as a variation of politicisation, what is important is that in Benjamin’s Critique of Violence lawmaking violence is addressed as a means to overthrow an order. Yet, as soon as this endeavour is successful and a new regime has been established, lawmaking violence transforms into law-preserving violence—right in the way that politicisation opens the Spielzeitraum for a new polity that, in turn, enables and structures a new mode of politicking. Put differently, politicking relates to a polity, which is a result of a previous politicisation but may, at some point, become subject to a new wave of politicisation, and so on and so forth. It is this parallel that brings me to the next stage of my argument. Although mainly interested in a distillation of “pure violence,” Benjamin hints at a technique of governance, which remains somewhat hidden in the accounts of politicisation discussed thus far: the politics of law. Although Palonen, by drawing on Weber, keeps an eye on bureaucracy, the legal code of this type of practice is somewhat neglected. In the next section, I thus point to the relation of law, legal practice and contingency as a door opener to a critical elaboration of politicisation. 12.2.2  Theory of Juridification In a farsighted remark, Max Weber has pointed to the irreversibility of bureaucracy—once achieved, a state of bureaucracy will hardly disappear, except perhaps in the course of an overall societal collapse (Weber 1980, 834). Thus understood, we can say that politicisation, as activity, challenges the workings of bureaucracy but will hardly be able to do away with it.3 Instead of “de-bureaucratization” the result of (successful) politicisation will likely be the introduction of new codes for further bureaucratic practice, that is, the making of new law, perhaps of even more law. It is here that politicisation relates to another phenomenon, which I argue is widely neglected in the politicisation debate: juridification.

3  As Benjamin argues, this even holds true for revolutionary scenarios—except for a stage of “devine violence” (Benjamin 1980b).

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To begin with, juridification can indeed mean the making of law. From a liberal perspective, juridification, like politicisation, receives a rather positive connotation, though for a different reason. While politicisation entails the demand of the people to be heard and have their claims considered in the processes of governing, juridification can be understood as the legislator’s realisation of the people’s preferences in the form of law. However, critical theories of juridification have also used the term “juridification” to point to phenomena, which are much less desirable, for example, to criticise legislative excesses, the “explosion” of law, the legal “expropriation of conflict,” and thus “depoliticisation” (Teubner 1987, 6–13). This does not mean that theories of juridification have evolved in an anti-democratic intellectual context. Rather, they have addressed situations in which the self-organisation of societies and the proliferation of the legal code are in contradiction. Most prominently, Habermas theorises juridification as a colonisation of lifeworlds (Habermas 1981). Also drawing on Weber, and especially on the notion of bureaucracy as a “lebendige Maschine” (living machine, Weber 1980, 835), Habermas holds that the “metaphor of the living machine departs itself from the model of ends and suggests the notion of a system that stabilizes itself vis-à-vis a contingent environment” (Habermas 1981, 455, my translation). With respect to the idea that politicisation is an activity that opens contingency (Palonen 1998), it is interesting that Habermas also establishes this link by pointing to bureaucracy (and juridification) as limitation of contingency. In making this argument, Habermas’ notion of juridification as colonisation of lifeworld draws on an earlier tradition of critical thinking (see Habermas 1981, 524). It is Otto Kirchheimer who has arguably introduced Verrechtlichung (the German term for juridification) to an academic discourse during the 1920s, addressing it as a means of perpetuating class relations (Kirchheimer 1976, 37). Hence, juridification originally appears as a critical approach, that is, as a term to critique a societal phenomenon, which has been understood to be a part of the modern constellation. By interfering and thus introducing a bureaucratic, legal or economic coding into societal lifeworlds, by perpetuating class relations, juridification takes part in what we may call with Palonen a fixation of power shares (see above). Juridification does not work as an opener to a new Spielzeitraum but as a limitation of contingency. It is thus in opposition to politicisation and, arguably, even operates as a mode of depoliticisation. This connection becomes obvious already in Kirchheimer’s early usage of the concept.

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Man schritt aus allen Gebieten zur Verrechtlichung, … alles wird neutralisiert dadurch, daß man es juristisch formalisiert. Jetzt erst beginnt die wahre Epoche des Rechtsstaats. … Der Staat lebt vom Recht, aber es ist kein Recht mehr, es ist ein Rechtsmechanismus, und jeder, der die Führung der Staatsgeschäfte zu erlangen glaubt, bekommt stattdessen eine Rechtsmaschinerie in die Hand, die ihn in Anspruch nimmt wie einen Maschinisten seine sechs Hebel, die er zu bedienen hat. Das rechtsstaatliche Element in seiner nach der Überwindung des reinen Liberalismus nunmehr sichtbaren Gestalt, die spezifische Transponierung der Dinge vom Tatsächlichen ins Rechtsmechanistische, ist das wesentliche Merkmal des Staates im Zeitalter des Gleichgewichts der Klassenkräfte. (Kirchheimer 1976 [1928], 36–37)

This description generates no associations with a liberal promise of liberty. Rather, what Kirchheimer describes is a dystopia. Neutralisation and the transposition of things from the factual to the juridico-mechanistic— in this critique, juridification somewhat appears to be the radical opposite to politicisation. The practice of “political” decision-making on the facts is replaced by mere calculation (see also Derrida 1990), and this means for Kirchheimer to “replace” contingency in such a way that the dominance of the ruling class is perpetuated. Juridification is but a stage in the development of liberalism that reacts not only to the emergence of a working class but to the fact that during the nineteenth century, the bourgeoisie and the working class did no longer share a common basis in their resistance to feudal rule (Kirchheimer 1976, 32–33). Liberal constitutionalism is thus complemented by the juridification of labour relations with the result that mass political struggle is tamed by a mode of governance that allows for juridico-­mechanistic calculation. Thus, the public discourse on how society shall be governed has been brought to an end. In this light, the introduction of law represents a lasting decision on societal order that limits the future scope of political action. Juridification is, as Teubner (1987, 3) puts it, “an ugly word – as ugly as the reality which it describes. […] The bureaucratic sound and aura of the word juridification indicate what kind of pollution is primarily meant: the bureaucratization of the world.” Karl Marx’s legal scepticism resonates here (e.g. Marx and Engels 1990, 326) as does Max Weber’s notion of bureaucracy as “geronnener Geist” (congealed spirit), which is at work to manufacture the “Gehäuse der Hörigkeit” (cage of serfdom) in which future generations will be forced to obey (Weber 1980, 835).

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12.2.3  Legalisation Without this critical impetus, a phenomenon somewhat related to juridification is addressed in the field of IR as legalisation (Abbott et al. 2000). What is meant is a transformation during which international regimes adopt a legal character. Basically, the legalisation approach provides a typology that enables us to distinguish between more or less “legalised” international regimes. To this end, the protagonists of the approach establish three major criteria: obligation asks for the extent to which states are legally obliged to obey the rules of an international regime; precision asks for how precise the corresponding normative prescriptions are formulated; and delegation asks for the availability of court-like bodies that can take decisions in cases of disputes concerning the regime’s jurisdiction. In doing so, the legalisation approach builds upon earlier regime theory in IR and transforms its major research question from whether regimes matter to whether the legal form of regimes matters. However, while it is indeed a declared objective in this approach to interrelate international politics and law (Abbott and Snidal 2013), this connection remains rather static. To be sure, the protagonists of the approach do not deny that politics continues also when a legal regime is in place, that is, when an issue area has been legalised (Abbott et al. 2000, 419). With regard to the “intertwined relations between law, legalization, and politics,” Ken Abbott and Duncan Snidal tend to build their model in terms of ideal types. As they put it: We begin from the notion that law at a point in time serves to remove issues (albeit incompletely and temporarily) from the realm of ordinary politics. In the ideal characterization of a legal system, once issues are subject to law, they are decided (ideally) according to established legal principles, discourses, and rules, overseen (ideally) by impartial judges or other legal authorities, who (ideally) interpret and apply what has been to a large extent politically decided (i.e., the content of the law). When there are multiple possible interpretations, one is chosen as a matter of law, not of politics. (Abbott and Snidal 2013, 35)

In a non-ideal world, politics continues to interfere even where, empirically, a regime has come close to the state in which the workings of law are strictly separated from politics, that is, a highly legalised regime. To be sure, Abbott and Snidal do acknowledge an ongoing interrelation between law and politics, even where politics have been legalised. As they put it,

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“law remains subject to distinctive forms of legalized politics and can always be changed by politics over time” (Abbott and Snidal 2013, 36). Yet, it is here that law and politics are temporarily linked. The process through which politics remains an important moment in law (in the sense of legalised and thus de-politicised practice) is modelled in sequences. While, for Abbott and Snidal, the involved actors’ values and interests affect the process of legalisation and thus the resulting law, it is the law that, in turn, has an impact on the actors’ values and interests. However, when issues are “repoliticised” (Abbott and Snidal 2013, 36) and are made subject to political argumentation, this occurs under different conditions, that is, against the background of already legalised procedures. “Thus, law provides boundaries for politics yet is itself bounded by politics; politics changes those boundaries, yet is itself bounded by law” (Abbott and Snidal 2013, 36).4 In other words, the legalisation approach does not deny that politics and law mutually affect each other. It assumes an ongoing interaction between the two. Especially the more recent reformulations of the approach account for a co-­constitutive relation, thus generating an openness also to the more constructivist approaches to international law.5 However, in distinguishing politics and law, the approach remains in a mode of ideal modelling borrowing from legal positivism. In this view, political and legal practice can clearly be distinguished—political practice consists in the making of law, legal practice in the application of law. Where law is already in place, politics may interfere either by following the legislative procedures that the law provides or by breaking the law. Politics and law thus appear to operate in somewhat alternating stages but never simultaneously. Thus, the legalisation approach

4  The whole passage reads: “In sum, although law (at a point in time) is significantly insulated from ordinary politics, it is never (except in its idealization) completely separate from politics; law remains subject to distinctive forms of legalized politics and can always be changed by politics over time. Although legalisation (over time) is always political, it always occurs in the context of, and is shaped by, the existing body of law. Thus, law provides boundaries for politics yet is itself bounded by politics; politics changes those boundaries, yet is itself bounded by law. As legalisation progresses, we move closer to (but never reach) the ideal type: law plays a more important role and politics a lesser and different one. Because law, legalisation, and politics are intertwined in complex ways, neither law nor politics can be said to come first  – they come together and coevolve over time” (Abbott and Snidal 2013, 36). 5  For an early critique, see Finnemore and Toope 2001.

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does not allow for an in-depth insight in the workings of politics in the course of the law’s everyday practice.6 It is thus a static model of the interaction between politics and law that creates a critical blind spot, which can be demonstrated with regard to the criterion of precision. Even when the wording of a norm, say in an international legal treaty, is seemingly precise, this norm will be made subject to interpretation in the course of legal practice. This means that lawyers will establish relations between the norm and a certain description of “reality.” What is important is that this process affects the meaning of both elements—the meaning of the described reality and the meaning of the norm; for example, it matters for the meaning of an international incident whether it is addressed as an intervention into the internal affairs of another state or as an armed attack in the sense of Article 51 of the UN Charter.7 In turn, when a norm is applied to a class of events to which it has not been applied before, for example, in the sense that a terrorist attack engenders a right to self-defence (again, Article 51), this can affect the meaning of the norm. As soon as a court or another legally relevant body sets a precedent, this can have severe repercussions for the future applicability of a norm.8 In other words, the meaning of legal norms is not set once and for all but subject to an ongoing “Kampf ums Recht,” a struggle for the law (Jhering 2003/1872). As Jan Klabbers puts it, “rules may be carved in stone, but their meaning is not” (Klabbers 2006, 298). Norms are indeterminate, and this needs to be so since the complexity of future cases cannot be anticipated when norms are legislated. Legal practice consists in the art of establishing the relevance of a norm with respect to the facts at hand. The fact alone that state actors are willing to opt for a more or less “precise” wording and to consent to the validity of the thus emerging norms does not tell the whole story. Even where states give birth to certain norms, they do not necessarily control the beasts they have created. With regard to the law’s everyday practice, the precision of norms is an imprecise criterion (Fischer-Lescano and Liste 2005). The “precise” meaning of a norm only evolves in context, which may change from one 6  Abbott and Snidal do acknowledge this as a research desideratum (see Abbott and Snidal 2013, 35). 7  Military and Paramilitary Activities in und against Nicaragua (Nicaragua v. United States of America). Merits, Judgment. I.C.J. Reports 1986, p. 14. 8  For a discussion on the consequences of the legal discourse on the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the meaning of Article 51, see O’Connell 2003.

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application to the next. What makes a norm applicable is not its precision but its indeterminacy. This indeterminacy of law is the critical point of entry for the politics of law, and it is placed exactly in the blind spot of the discussed approaches. 12.2.4  Blind Spots Interestingly, both perspectives, politicisation and juridification (including legalisation), attempt to generate insights by building upon a seemingly clear distinction—or distinguishability—of politics and law. When observed through the lens of juridification, the political is displaced through the introduction of law and the legal reconstruction of societal realities. In turn, the lens of politicisation tends to suggest that the political can only be reactivated by reversing the depoliticisation embodied in form of the legal and/or bureaucratic script, that is, by putting into question the juridified status quo. Politics and law are thus addressed in the sense of an either-or, and it is here that somewhat “complementary” blind spots are generated. In spotlighting politicisation as an activity directed at the opening of new political possibilities, this lens distracts attention from the political choices in everyday legal and bureaucratic practice. Interestingly, the juridification and legalisation approaches somewhat parallel this shortcoming. Arguably, neither the critique of juridification nor the more descriptive legalisation approach imply that a juridified world is per se non-political. As Abbott and colleagues in fact put it by paraphrasing Clausewitz, “law is a continuation of political intercourse, with the addition of other means” (Abbott et al. 2000, 419). However, the model implies that politics comes to a halt where arrangements are made by legal means. Juridification is addressed as a materialisation of politics, the latter understood either as class interest (Kirchheimer 1976) or state interest (Abbott et al. 2000). The sequence of a materialisation of politics in the form of law, the mechanistic operation of the legal programme, and perhaps the return of politics where the programme no longer operates as planned by the sovereigns is too static. The dynamics of legal practice and the corresponding political repercussions of everyday law get out of sight. In the remainder of the chapter, the aim is to explore a more dialectical approach to the nexus of politics and law by focusing on this lacuna: the everyday political workings of law or, put differently, the workings of politics within law.

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12.3   Critical Legal Thinking: The Politics of Law While the identity of law is somewhat characterised through its separation from politics, by far not all traditions of legal theory have stressed this difference. Across traditions in legal thinking, authors have turned to the nexus of law and power. While, Marxists and IR realists alike have theorised law with regard to its embeddedness in power structures and thus widely addressed law as an epiphenomenon of power, another realist tradition—legal realism—has turned to the nexus of law and politics in a more practice-oriented way (Horwitz 1992).9 Emerging out of an antiformalist critique of how law was practiced in US courts, early twentiethcentury legal realists left their mark in US law schools and influenced various schools of legal thought including the critical legal studies (Frankenberg 2011) and the law and society studies (Macaulay 2005). Legal realists seek to understand how law is embedded in its societal context and how everyday legal practice reproduces this in fact power-laden context by operating under conditions of legal uncertainty. The indeterminacy of law is what makes legal practice political. For our purposes, at least two critical arguments need to be stressed. First, legal realists assume that law has a distributive function and that societal structures of power are inscribed into but, at the same time, made invisible by the law (Hale 1923). Thus understood, law is not neutral but expresses and/or affects societal relations of power. Second, legal realism entails critical arguments on the entries of extra-legal forces into the legal process, especially with regard to legal practice in the courtroom. Inasmuch we have established that the indeterminacy problem is of a major importance for our endeavour, it is here that legal realism has indeed something to say. While lawyers—and even more so practicing lawyers—would hardly wonder about the interpretive openness of legal norms and the corresponding possibilities to apply the law to the benefit of their clients, legal realists point to the divergence between this confession of law’s uncertainty, on the one hand, and a common belief in the objectivity of law, on the other. In a 1930 book that has indeed coined the label “legal realism,” Jerome Frank translates this insight into some painstaking questions:

9  Note that legal realism is widely unrelated with political realism in IR theory. For a distinction, see Shaffer 2016.

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Why, it may fairly be asked, do they keep alive the popular belief that legal rules can be made predictable? If lawyers are not responsible for legal indefiniteness, are they not guilty, at any rate, of duping the public as to the essential character of law? Are they not a profession of clever hypocrites? (Frank 1930, 7)

For the legal realists, the consequence to be drawn was this: if law is indeterminate, the key to its understanding must lie elsewhere. This meant to search for the extra-legal causes of legal decision-making, to zoom in on legal practice and, to be sure, the workings of power within law.10 However, for the law, this shifted focus is a double-edged sword. Are not legal realism and its empirical turn to power leading us into some cynical relativism? If law is as indeterminate as legal realists arguably want us to believe, and if the objectivity of the law is thus effectively put into question, how can the law persist as a socially relevant normative infrastructure? An interesting answer to such questions is provided by Martti Koskenniemi whose more recent work on international law in fact draws on the realist tradition of legal thought. If the law cannot determine legal practice and, thus, the authoritative decision of the legal case must emanate from elsewhere, the identity of law as opposed to politics is indeed put at risk (Koskenniemi 2005, 16–7). However, facing the indeterminacy problem, Koskenniemi overcomes a major limitation in legal realist analytics by shifting the focus from an endeavour of explaining legal outcome in a non-ideal world to one of understanding what politics means for law as a societal practice. In other words, he in fact generates a new perspective on the problem by addressing the law’s indeterminacy and the corresponding contingencies as an everyday challenge that legal practice must accept. The law, for Koskenniemi, needs to maintain its proximity to the social reality in which it is embedded, and to which is has to answer while, at the same time, creating a distance to the facts upon which it has to judge. The law, in other words, must be concrete and normative at the same time; it “enjoys independence from politics only if both of these conditions are simultaneously present” (Koskenniemi 2011, 38). However, the legal attempts to meet this challenge are doomed to fail since normativity and 10  While legal realism has passed its peak in the 1940s, if not earlier, it has indeed left a significant mark in US law schools (Macaulay 2005). More recently, legal realism resonates in the field law and society studies (Mertz et al. 2016), with the latter strand of work currently undergoing a global turn (Darian-Smith 2013; Klug and Merry 2016; Merry 2006).

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concreteness are mutually exclusive. Oriented towards concreteness, law tends to become a mere depiction of actual relations of power. As a “law of the strongest,” it is a mere epiphenomenon. In this variant, law is political for being apologetic. By contrast, when oriented towards normativity, the emphasis must be on the law’s distance from existing power. While, in this variant, a legal rule provides a normative instrument for the criticism of concrete power, it also tends to become disconnected from the social context, that is, the concrete relations of power. Here, the law risks its societal irrelevance for not being able to make a difference in social reality. Law is political for being utopian. For Koskenniemi, this points to a major theoretical problem. On both sides, law is political and tends to fail for this very reason. The fact that positions are constantly taken and solutions justified by lawyers, demonstrate that the structure does not possess the kind of distance from politics for which the Rule of Law seems to posit. It seems possible to adopt a position only by a political choice: a choice which must ultimately defend itself in terms of a conception of justice – or then remain substantively unjustified. We accept it because that is what we do. (Koskenniemi 2011, 40, italic added)

To avoid law becoming too political—and thus socially irrelevant by losing its identity—the law itself turns to political choice. While this answer to the indeterminacy problem is arguably paradoxical, it adds a micro perspective that the earlier legal realists have not fleshed out. “The main point” in this, as Koskenniemi (2011, 35) holds “is to show how indeterminacy works in international legal argument.” The “law in action” is no longer only an entry point for power but a site in which power operates.

12.4   Zooming in on Politics Within Law While some politicisation approaches have turned to processes of a (re-) opening of contingency (Palonen 2003; Wiesner 2019 and in this book), and juridification approaches have described the introduction of law as a limitation of contingency (and thus depoliticisation), critical legal theorists have addressed contingency by pointing to the indeterminacy of the law. In this endeavour, a core question has been on what indeterminacy does to practice. What is at stake from a legal realist perspective is no longer a depoliticising juridification versus a de-juridifying politicisation but a

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contradiction and, at the same time, ongoing oscillation between the two. The site of this contradiction is the everyday workings of law and bureaucracy. While indeterminacy has been understood to be a problem with regard to the law’s identity as objective and separated from politics, some of the more recent variations of the legal realist theme allow for a transformation of the problem to a site where the workings of power can be observed. It is this site that has been neglected by juridification and politicisation approaches. The workings of power within law kick in after juridification, that is, when law has been made. Yet, the insight in the fact that these workings of law are deeply political is obscured by the assumption that politics kick (back) in only where legal and/or bureaucratic operations are politicised. The law’s everyday is thus addressed as a Spielzeitraum in which politics is absent, in which politics has been suspended at least temporally, that is, until the next round of politicisation and juridification kick in. From this perspective, law may affect politics (by structuring what political moves are constitutional) and politics may affect law (through legislative juridification). Yet, the (everyday) politics of law are neglected. As a consequence, we need to zoom in on the politics of this in-between site left out where social processes are (mis-) understood as a sequence of juridification, politicisation, and again juridification. This is what a critical theory of the politics of law has to offer. In the meantime, new legal realists in the field of law and society studies have not only established analytical—and very often ethnographical—perspectives on such in-between sites but have also applied corresponding analytical lenses to the global.11 In other words, they have started to study the workings of politics within global law.12 In doing so, they present theoretical and empirical solutions that especially scholars in IR may learn from. On the one hand, they effectively fill the critical gap not addressed by either juridification or politicisation approaches. On the other hand, and by making sense of the legal realist insights, they account for empirical phenomena that have rarely been accounted for in IR—neither by the legalisation approaches that have mainly turned to state actors and international regimes (Abbott et al. 2000) nor by the politicisation approaches that have turned to the politicisation of international governmental 11  For the new legal realism in law and society studies, see Macaulay 2005; Mertz et al. 2016; for the global turn in this field, see Darian-Smith 2013; Klug and Merry 2016; Merry 2006. 12  For the concept of global law, see Teubner 1997.

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organisations (Zürn 2018).13 The problem with this analytical limitation is that while the concept of politicisation indeed opens the debate for how civic actors are involved in the contestation of governance, private regulatory phenomena are easily overlooked. By contrast, law and society studies have demonstrated how politics operate beyond state and inter-state regulatory frameworks, that is, in the everyday of private governance; for example, while the lens of politicisation has been used to study public contestation of ­international governmental organisations in the course of global financial crises, this view effectively neglects how private legal technique somewhat operates underneath the radar of both, (inter-) state regulation and (transnational) public debate about new institutional design. For Annelise Riles, it is the everyday practice in the “back offices” of globally operating banking houses that structures how financial goods are traded (Riles 2011). Similar to IR feminists who have turned to the mainly invisible international encounters between men and women to demonstrate how global structures of power are produced and reproduced in the everyday (Enloe 2014), this ethnographical type of work in law and society studies suggests zooming in on the invisible workings of politics within law.14 In doing so, this type of work zooms in on exactly those sites and processes that the lenses of politicisation and juridification fail to address when sticking to their contradictory blind spots. Yet, where law is politics, the practices of politicisation and juridification operate simultaneously and within the law. Their Spielzeitraum is the law itself.

References Adorno, Theodor W. 1973. “Dissonanzen.” In Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. 14, edited by Rolf Tiedemann. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Abbott, Kenneth W., and Duncan Snidal. 2013. “Law, Legalization, and Politics: An Agenda for the Next Generation of IL/IR Scholars.” In Interdisciplinary Perspectives on International Law and International Relations. The State of the Art, edited by Jeffrey L. Dunoff and Mark A. Pollack. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  For the latter, see the critique by Scholte 2019.  Here, the politicisation lens fails putting an eye exactly on those sites in which global banking is effectively regulated without any direct involvement of state or interstate actors. It needs to be mentioned that this is not necessarily an argument against the study of politicisation. Quite the opposite. Annelise Riles (2011, 223–247) in fact calls for more public awareness of that what takes place in the “back offices.” 13 14

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Abbott, Kenneth W., Robert O.  Keohane, Andrew Moravcsik, Anne-Marie Slaughter, and Duncan Snidal. 2000. „The Concept of Legalization.” International Organization 54 (3):401–419. Benjamin, Walter. 1980a. „Über den Begriff der Geschichte.“ In Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. I.2 Abhandlungen, edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, 691–704. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Benjamin, Walter. 1980b. “Zur Kritik der Gewalt.” In Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. II.1 Abhandlungen, edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, 179–203. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Chimni, B. S. 2004. “International Institutions Today. An Imperial State in the Making.” European Journal of International Law 15 (1):1–37. Darian-Smith, Eve. 2013. Laws and Societies in Global Contexts. Contemporary Approaches. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1990. “Force de Loi. Le “Fondement Mystique de l’Autorité”/ Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundation of Authority”.” Cardozo Law Review 11(5–6):919–1045. Enloe, Cynthia H. 2014. Bananas, beaches and bases. Making feminist sense of international politics. Berkeley: University of California Press. Finnemore, Martha, and Stephen J. Toope. 2001. “Alternatives to ‘Legalization’. Richer Views of Law and Politics.” International Organization 55 (3):743–758. Fischer-Lescano, Andreas, and Philip Liste. 2005. „Völkerrechtspolitik. Zu Trennung und Verknüpfung von Politik und Recht der Weltgesellschaft.“ Zeitschrift für Internationale Beziehungen 12 (2):209–249. Frank, Jerome. 1930. Law and the Modern Mind. New York: Brentano’s. Frankenberg, Günter. 2011. “Down by Law: Irony, Seriousness, and Reason.” German Law Journal 12 (1):300–337. Gill, Stephen, and A.  Claire Cutler. 2014. “New Constitutionalism and World Order: General Introduction.” In New Constitutionalism and World Order, edited by Stephen Gill and A.  Claire Cutler. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1981. Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns. Band 2: Zur Kritik der funktionalistischen Vernunft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Hale, Robert L. 1923. “Coercion and Distribution in a Supposedly Non-Coercive State.” Political Science Quarterly 38 (3):470–494. Horwitz, Morton J. 1992. The Transformation of American law 1870–1960. The crisis of legal orthodoxy. New York u. a.: Oxford University Press. Jhering, Rudolf von. 2003/1872. Der Kampf ums Recht, 8. Auflage, Frankfurt am Main. Kirchheimer, Otto. 1976. “Zur Staatslehre des Sozialismus und Bolschewismus.“ In Von der Weimarer Republik zum Faschismus: Die Auflösung der demokratischen Rechtsordnung, edited by Wolfgang Luthhardt, 32–52. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

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Klabbers, Jan. 2006. “The Meaning of Rules.” International Relations 20 (3):295–301. Klug, Heinz, and Sally Engle Merry, eds. 2016. The New Legal Realism. Volume II: Studying Law Globally. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Koskenniemi, Martti. 2005. From Apology to Utopia. The Structure of International Legal Argument (Reissue with New Epilogue). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Koskenniemi, Martti. 2011. The Politics of International Law. Portland: Hart Publishing. Kuntz, Friederike. 2020. “We the Heads of State …”: Pitfalls of Global Constitutional Practice. Global Constitutionalism (First View), 1–30. https:// doi.org/10.1017/S2045381720000301 Macaulay, Stewart. 2005. “The New Versus the Old Legal Realism: Thing Ain’t What They Used to Be.” Wisconsin Law Review: 367–403. Marx, Karl, Friedrich Engels. 1990. “Die deutsche Ideologie.” In Werke, edited by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Berlin: Dietz. Merry, Sally Engle. 2006. “New Legal Realism and the Ethnography of Transnational Law.” Law & Social Inquiry 31 (4):975–995. Mertz, Elizabeth, Stewart Macaulay, and Thomas W. Mitchell, eds. 2016. The New Legal Realism: Translating Law-and-Society for Today’s Legal Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. O’Connell, Mary Ellen. 2003. “Re-Leashing the Dogs of War.” American Journal of International Law 97 (2):446–456. Palonen, Kari. 1998. Das „Webersche Moment“: Zur Kontingenz des Politischen. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Palonen, Kari. 2003. “Four Times of Politics: Policy, Polity, Politicking, and Politicization.” Alternatives 28: 171–186. Riles, Annelise. 2011. Collateral Knowledge. Legal Reasoning in the Global Financial Markets. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sassen, Saskia. 2006. Territory, Authority, Rights. From Medieval to Global Assemblages. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Scholte, Jan Aart. 2019. Beyond Institutionalism in Global Governance Theory. Unpublished Manuscript, University of Gothenburg/University of Duisburg-­ Essen, February 2019 (on file with the author). Shaffer, Gregory. 2016. “New Legal Realism and International Law.” In The New Legal Realism. Volume II: Studying Law Globally, edited by Heinz Klug and Sally Engle Merry, 145–159. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Teubner, Gunther, ed. 1987. Juridification of Social Systems: A Comparative Analysis in the Areas of Labor, Corporate, Antitrust and Social Welfare Law. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

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Teubner, Gunther. 1997. “Global Bukowina. Legal Pluralism in the World Society.” In Global Law Without the State, edited by Gunther Teubner. Aldershot: Dartmouth. Weber, Max. 1980. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Grundriss der Verstehenden Soziologie. Tübingen: Mohr. Weber, Max. 1992. “Der Beruf zur Politik.” In Soziologie—Universalgeschichtliche Analysen—Politik, edited by Johannes Winckelmann. Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner. Wiesner, Claudia. 2019. “Rethinking Politicisation as a Multi-Stage and MultiLevel Concept.” In “Rethinking Politicisation. Critical Exchanges.” edited by Claudia Wiesner, Contemporary Political Theory 18 (2):255–59. Zürn, Michael. 2018. A Theory of Global Governance: Authority, Legitimacy, and Contestation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zürn, Michael, Martin Binder, and Matthias Ecker-Ehrhardt. 2012. “International Authority and its Politicization.” International Theory 4:1, 69–106.

CHAPTER 13

Conclusion: Rethinking Politicisation: What Have We Learned? Claudia Wiesner

The chapters in this book have expanded the discussion on politicisation into fertile new grounds in many respects. I shall in the following sum up the main findings, starting by resuming the book’s main goals. This book aims at a conceptual clarification of politicisation and at connecting the discussion in different subfields and epistemic communities. Politicisation as a concept, as said in Chaps. 1 and 2, refers to several levels of meaning, namely a theoretical and normative level of understanding (macro); a meso level of institutions, actors, issues, processes, arenas, and spaces of politicisation; and, finally, a micro level of concrete analytical understanding and operationalisation of these research dimensions. Four fields have been introduced as being crucial for conceptualising politicisation:

C. Wiesner (*) Department of Social and Cultural Sciences, Fulda University of Applied Sciences, Fulda, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 C. Wiesner (ed.), Rethinking Politicisation in Politics, Sociology and International Relations, Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54545-1_13

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1. the theories, understandings, and/or definitions of politics and the political the conceptualisations of politicisation relate to; 2. the who, where, and what of politicisation: dimensions, actors, issues, objects, addressees, areas, arenas, and spaces of politicisation; 3. the relation of politicisation to concepts such as democracy, depoliticisation, juridification, legalisation, populism, or Euroscepticism; 4. the methodological toolbox, and the approaches and dimensions of empirical study of politicisation. What have we learnt throughout the book regarding these dimensions? 1. Theories, Understandings, and Definitions of Politics and the Political: Rethinking Politicisation Across (Sub)disciplines On the theoretical or macro level, it has proven to be extremely fruitful to unite different approaches and subdisciplines in the book. The discussion results have a cross-disciplinary value for conceptualising and applying the concept of politicisation in all of the Social Sciences. The first important result concerns the clarification of the concept of politicisation itself. The authors differ in their definition of politics—there are various usages of system, sphere, and field notions of politics, in different combinations with, or in opposition to, action or conflict-oriented approaches. Despite these different approaches and theoretical backgrounds, the joint punchline of the chapters is that politicisation refers to creating controversy, conflict, contentiousness, or contestation. It means an increase in visibility (in terms of salience, quantitatively measured, and in terms of appearance) of an issue, or an actor, and it refers to the notion of the public space and/or issues that are publicly shared. Accordingly, all chapters understand politicisation as a phenomenon related to politics (in the different possible understandings of the concept), to collective action or collectives, to publicity or a public, and to the fact that an actor or an issue is an object of debate or contestation. In sum, politicisation as discussed in this book relates to the fact that an issue or actor is public, collective, and contested. It means to mark something as collectively and publicly relevant and debatable and as an object of politics. This definition fixes basic conditions for both a theoretical and an empirical understanding of politicisation. Publicity, or the fact to have a public, and collectivity, refer to several actors being addressed or concerned by politicisation—it remains, then, to be decided for the operationalisation what is the minimum number of actors concerned, for example,

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if a private conversation is enough. Contestedness means there must be some disagreement—and again it remains to be decided if the productive disagreement in a peaceful deliberation is counted by the researcher or if open conflict or even violence is at stake. The contributing authors would probably differ in their approaches in these respects, but they all indicate that it is crucial to reflect when and where politicisation actually starts (see especially Chaps. 2, 3, 5 and 12). Wiesner gives the broadest possible definition in this respect—politicisation starts with the act of marking an actor or issue as political, and the fact that this marking is possible refers to a kind of public being addressed in a communicative situation. Similarly, Schmidt-Gleim asks for the moment, the event in which the political comes to the fore. Other authors emphasise publicity (Chap. 8) and conflict (Chap. 12). These different notions of the beginnings of politicisation might also incite us to conceptualise politicisation as a process that can start with a simple act of marking an issue as political even in a private conversation or the social media. This act can gain impact by involving more and more actors who join in on the claim and make it more public until the respective issue or actor enters the classical political system (see Chap. 2). The conceptualisation of politicisation noted earlier has a concrete value in both theoretical and analytical respect. It is precise enough to be the basis for an operationalisation and also open enough to allow for different degrees of concretisation and depth of analysis. This definition is, therefore, a substantial result and a thorough basis for future research in the Social Sciences. 2. The Who, Where and What of Politicisation: Beyond a Systems Perspective The who, where, and what of politicisation refer to both the macroand meso level of politicisation. What was just said underlines the importance of including actors, arenas, issues, and stages of politicisation outside a systems approach to politics into analyses, in order to get a comprehensive picture of politicisation dynamics. As has been discussed, what can be termed a mainstream model of politicisation operates mainly with quantifiable indicators, focusing on actors in the classical political system (parties and institutions) and the mass media. Many of the respective approaches in their heuristics assume what has been termed a top-down perspective (Chap. 2 in this book): parties, governments, and elites politicise issues or cleavages, and the citizens that react to their activities.

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Most chapters in this book go beyond this systems model. They use concepts of politics, politicisation, and democracy that also take dynamics outside the classical political system into account—or, and equally as important, dynamics inside the classical system that cannot be found with instruments and lenses focusing only on parties, institutions, and media and working only with quantifiable indicators. The authors are inspired by various sources, be it Critical Democratic Theory or Agonistic Democratic Theory (Chaps. 3 and 5), classical traditions of democratic thinking (Chaps. 2 and 4), Bourdieusian and Habermasian perspectives (Chap. 8) or Critical Legal Theory (Chap. 12). The chapters have not only advanced well beyond the state of the art in politicisation research in this respect, they have also lined out a huge field for future research outside the political systems approach, including actors and dynamics beyond parties and institutions. 3. Politicisation, Democracy, Depoliticisation, Juridification: Cultivating the Garden of Concepts The garden of concepts around politicisation also concerns both the macro- and meso level of conceptualisation. A number of chapters address the relation of politicisation and democracy and underline that this relation has to be conceptualised openly by offering different pathways— instead of simple answers and dichotomies. First, a number of authors in this book have underlined that politicisation can have positive effects on democracy: it has been argued that politicisation is a basic activity of politics and hence also democracy (Chaps. 2 and 5), and that it brings the political to the fore (Chaps. 2, 3 and 5). Hence, there is democratic politicisation (Chaps. 2, 3 and 5), both within and outside of democratic institutions such as parliaments and/or assemblies (Chaps. 4 and 11). The conceptual move to regard democratic institutions explicitly as sites and arenas for politicisation is rare in the academic politicisation debate, but it is particularly fruitful as it builds a useful middle ground: institutions are neither per se politicisation-hindering nor are they per se politicisation-­ triggering. All depends on how they are filled with political action (Chaps. 2 and 4). Second, there definitely is anti-democratic or populist politicisation (Chaps. 2, 5, 6 and 7) as well, and decidedly, these types of politicisation can be harmful to democracy—but it is not politicisation per se that is harmful (Chaps. 2 and 5). Politicisation is neither simply “good” nor simply “bad” for democracy. A similar argument goes, as especially

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Schmidt-­Gleim shows, for movements: while they all can be judged as triggering politicisation, they are neither democracy-enhancing nor antidemocratic per se (see Chap. 5). Depoliticisation, on the other hand, is discussed by a number of authors as being harmful to democracy (Chaps. 2 and 10). As Chaps. 10 and 12 have underlined, the role of seemingly depoliticised actors and instruments needs to be more closely scrutinised, and these studies need to be better connected to the debate on politicisation. This goes not only for research on expert circles but also for laws and their effects. Law can be a powerful tool for withdrawing issues from public and political debates, and hence juridification can act as depoliticisation. On the other hand, the usage and interpretation of law is political action (see Chap. 12 in this book). The discussion in the book thus has underlined that it is not only fruitful, but decisive, both conceptually and analytically, to explore the garden of concepts around politicisation systematically and to connect the debates on politicisation to the debate on neighbouring concepts such as democracy, depoliticisation, juridification, legalisation, populism, or Euroscepticism. This describes another huge area for further study: the mechanisms, practices, and actions that politicise or depoliticise via laws, legal politics, experts, and bureaucracies and their consequences for democracy. 4. Broadening the Methodological Toolbox: Integrating Linguistic and Practice Turn The chapters have also highlighted decisive and innovative research dimensions and methods in politicisation research. First, regarding the research dimensions, depoliticisation research teaches us to analyse governmental strategies (and hence actions, practices, documents, or speech acts) systematically, and to focus on the relations between depoliticisation and politicisation (see Chap. 10 in this book). Critical Legal Theory directs the perspective to the workings and effects of law and legal politics and hence to texts, practices, and the micropolitics of law (see Chap. 12 in this book). The politicisation of International Organisations and their legitimacy has been driven by protest movements (Chap. 11 in this book) and hence by people who do not even recognise their authority, as has been shown by the protests against the G20 summits. Protest movements (see also Chap. 5) used to be an important topic in Political Theory, Democracy Research, and Comparative Politics some decades ago, but the

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interest has ebbed down somehow. So far, they are also rarely thematised in research on European Union (EU) politicisation at the exception of some very public issues such as Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). Last but not the least, the chapters underline that politicisation research needs to study linkages from macro- or inter-­ transnational levels to micro- or local levels of action, in order to study the linkages between global and local problems and dynamics (Chaps. 11 and 12 in this book). These research dimensions go along with the adequate research methods. Several authors (Liste, Schmidt-Gleim, von Staden, Wiesner) have indicated the importance of studying actions or practices—this relates to what is referred to as the practice turn in the Social Sciences—as well as language and language-bound activities (Liste, Kim), as argued by proponents of the linguistic turn. The book thus makes a claim for adopting action-oriented and/or speech-act oriented approaches to politicisation, and for using micropolitical research strategies (see especially Chaps. 2, 8, 10 and 12). The action-oriented, language-oriented, micropolitical, and bottom-up approaches that have been suggested indicate a rich resource for future research that will help to cover many blind spots in politicisation research. All in all, the above underlines that it is necessary, and worthwile, to invest much more time into the conceptualisation of politicisation and the theoretical background of the respective  research design before starting empirical research.

13.1   The EU as a Site and Trigger of Politicisation Besides these findings, most authors have put a particular emphasis on the European Union and its role for politicisation and neighbouring concepts and processes (Chaps. 2, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11). This underlines that the EU is a site of politicisation, and EU integration is a trigger of politicisation—even when and where the EU itself is not especially at stake (see especially Chap. 5). The EU is also a case in point that underlines how and why the different  challenges and problem fields related to politicisation and discussed in the chapters of this book—populism, depoliticisation, Euroscpeticism—are connected. In that sense, the book has delivered a crucial addition to the state of the art in politicisation research. The effects of current (EU) politicisation

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are yet to be more systematically analysed, as Anders (Chap. 9) convincingly summarises. The discussion in the book has underlined that academics should approach these effects of EU politicisation openly, regarding the conception, the empirical analysis, and the possible effects. This is all the more so since the conceptual lenses and the concrete operationalisations of the politicisation model used influence findings on EU politicisation effects (see Chaps. 2, 4, 8 and 9). The interrelation between politicisation, democratisation, and support of EU integration is an example for the importance of these choices. European integration, following an open theoretical and analytical model, triggers politicisation in both democratic and anti-democratic shape. This means there are different avenues for EU politicisation and its relation to democracy (see Chaps. 2 and 10). There is a positive or optimist version in which EU politicisation triggers democratisation, and there is the pessimist version in which politicisation is mainly anti-democratic and integration-­blocking (see Chap. 2 in this book). The text by Kim explicitly shows how EU-critical politicisation comes about, that is, how EU integration has been constructed by (mainly right-­ wing) populist politicians as a threat, in order to (a) create opposition and (b) trigger anti-EU sentiments and positions. As summarised by Anders, Kauppi and Trenz, Robert, and Wiesner (Chaps. 2, 8, 9 and 10), in EU studies, this specific type of EU politicisation is mostly judged as negative, related to irrational, populist, inadequate behaviour, and as something that must be circumvented. But, as Jörke underlines (Chap. 7), it is by no means irrational to vote for populist or anti-EU parties—it can be a very rational choice for a certain type of voter. Research should take voters and their reasons seriously here. The chapters have also underlined EU depoliticisation to be seldom discussed in connection to EU politicisation—despite the fact that the EU is also a site of depoliticisation. As the chapters have shown, there are different depoliticising dynamics at work, namely the setting up of new expert bodies, the bureaucratisation and juridification of formerly political processes (on juridification see also Chap. 12), and the legitimacy deficits this creates (Chaps. 2 and 10). Accordingly, as a number of authors in this book argue (see Chaps. 8, 9, 10 and 12), the dynamics of politicisation and depoliticisation are linked and should be studied as countervailing forces (Chaps. 8 and 10). These findings lead to two more decisive conclusions for EU studies. First, they invite to rethinking the oft-cited role of “the end of permissive

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consensus”. Indeed, the overall support for EU integration has been going down in the EU population since the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty, and EU criticism has become more frequent. But it is not the EU criticism per se that has to be interpreted as politicisation—in the sense discussed at the beginning of this conclusion, it is the fact that EU integration as an issue has become more public, collective, and contested. It has been marked as collectively and publicly relevant and debatable and object of politics. This indeed, means an end of permissive consensus in the sense of an end of the silent acceptance of the population. But, once more, it underlines that politicisation means to contest or debate an issue—it does not equal EU-criticism or populism. Accordingly, researchers, politicians, activists, and citizens are invited to reflect why the apparent politicisation of the European Union, then, has been taken up and driven mainly by EU critics? Where are the EU defenders in the dynamics and processes of EU politicisation? As Chap. 10 suggests, EU officials have not been willing to enter into the politicisation dynamics of the EU and continued to apply their old recipes. Issues have been kept out of public debates and representative institutions and moved (back) into expert circles, which can be seen as an attempt to create a substitute form of legitimacy. This means that at least in some cases, the reaction of the EU elites to politicisation has been to continue depoliticisation. But this, as Robert convincingly shows, has only fuelled the dynamics of EU criticism, populism, and anti-democratic movements further. In sum, the bypassing of representative democracy in the EU—and, here, the circle between politicisation, depoliticisation, and repoliticisation closes—triggers distrust of representative democracy. Those phenomena are all different but interrelated facets of the bundle of dynamics that is European integration in current times. A second decisive conclusion to be drawn from the earlier discussion regards EU studies and the role of grand theories of integration in research. So far, EU scholars still tend to strongly rely on the instruments developed in EU integration theories and the classifications that follow from them. The discussion results in this book invite to rethink this approach. I suggest that it would be extremely useful and beneficial for EU politicisation research to import the theoretical, conceptual, and methodological tools and approaches used in subdisciplines such as (International) Political Theory, Comparative Politics, Political Sociology, International Relations, or Critical Legal Studies. In this context, it is important to underline the historicity of the EU and EU integration as a process—while some

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problem fields remain the same, the settings, institutions, and actors, and also the member states and policy fields, are historically changing (Chaps. 2, 4 and 10).

13.2   Lessons Learned: Further Avenues in Research In the introduction, several decisive gaps in current politicisation research have been named. First, many approaches to politicisation are under-­ theorised, and second, under-specified. Third, the differentiation of subdisciplines and epistemic communities adds to existing lacunae, as it hinders a fruitful transfer of ideas, concepts, and results. Fourth, and linked to this, the garden of concepts around politicisation is not systematically explored. Fifth, the methodological toolbox in politicisation research is not yet fully completed. The discussions in this book have indicated how to close these gaps in further research. What are the lessons learned? First, theorise. Politicisation often is under-theorised because researchers tend to take the second step of empirical research before the first necessary step of concept specification. The chapters in the book have underlined how important it is to be cautious in one’s theorisation of both politics and politicisation: the respective definitions or understandings decisively shape the analytical lens and the research dimensions that are studied. The chapters have underlined the huge potential of different theoretical models of politics and politicisation and different strands in political and social theory in conceptualising politicisation—from Parliamentarism and Republicanism to Agonism, and from Bourdieusian Sociology to Critical Legal Studies. These avenues offer huge potential for future research. Second, be precise and reflected. A well-grounded theoretical definition of politics and politicisation given, it is furthermore decisive to be clear and precise in defining the research dimensions that are concretely studied. If politics is theorised as action, researchers need to study action and hence use action-oriented methods; if researchers search for the countervailing effects of politicisation and depoliticisation, they need to study techniques and effects of both politicisation and depoliticisation, and if researchers want to study the role of law, they need to reflect what kind of law, in what context, and what situation they want to study, and so on. To be reflected, clear, and precise in setting up research dimensions, methods and techniques is indispensable.

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Third, advance beyond the boundaries of epistemic communities and their standard truths. The cross(sub)disciplinary discussion in this book has opened up a huge variety of innovative research agendas and questions that are fruitful in one (sub)discipline but yet rarely explored in the other, and there are so many of these cross-fertilisations that they cannot again be recollected here—they have been summarised in the introduction and above. All of them invite further thinking and further research. Fourth, explore and cultivate the garden of concepts. The garden of concepts around politicisation merits further cultivation. One way is to continue to reflect on, and clarify, the conceptual linkages between politicisation, politics, democracy, depoliticisation, bureaucratisation, juridification, legalisation, populism, post-democracy and Euroscepticism. Another one is to add new and more concepts to the garden, such as politification. Last but not the least, the concepts in the garden can be further operationalised, for instance, by research designs that focus on the intersections of politicisation, depoliticisation, and democracy. Fifth, use the full methodological toolbox. A great number of suggestions to broaden the methodological toolbox of politicisation were developed throughout the book. It is especially necessary to overcome the apparent limitations of taking a classical systems model of politics as the sole model applied for studying politicisation. As has been argued, this is not because this model is not useful—it is because it only contains, and hence reflects, parts of the politicisation dynamics at work. To grasp politicisation dynamics in their full range, or at least a broader range, innovative analytical models of politics and democracy are needed. This means that the methodological toolbox needs also broadening when it comes to methods and techniques. Besides the dominant quantitative approaches, the micropolitical, action-, practice- or language-oriented approaches suggested in this book are very promising and offer a large field of future research. This book, all in all, has delivered decisive new insights and a huge agenda for future research. Let’s take up the challenge.

Index1

A Agonism, 10, 11, 49, 54, 56, 58, 59, 275 Antagonist, 98 Anti-democratic politicisation, 6, 7, 27–29, 33 Anti-populism, 12, 13, 107–125 Apolitical, 215–216 Authority as command, 229 as deference, 229, 230 epistemic, 231, 233–238 liquid, 230 political, 14, 166, 225–241 reflexive, 230, 231, 234 Authority-politicisation thesis, 14, 228–232 B Bagehot, Walter, 66 Bourdieu, Pierre, 157, 162 Bureaucracy, 15, 30, 32, 55, 66, 68, 246, 247, 251–253, 261, 271

C Christian Democratic Union (CDU), 13, 109, 122–125 Civil rights movements, 11, 91, 92, 94, 98, 100, 103 Civil society, 91, 92, 101, 130, 132, 133, 178, 189, 209–210 Coalitions of the willing, 14, 239–240 Comitology, 30, 204n3, 207, 208n6, 212 Commercial mediatisation, 94, 102 Commission (EU), 30, 31, 77–81, 133, 160, 180, 182, 189, 190, 192, 202, 205–211, 206n4, 208n6, 213, 215, 216 Common Assembly of European Coal and Steel Community, 75 Comparative Politics, viii, 2, 8, 271, 274 Competence(s), 74, 133, 170, 176, 184, 186, 190, 191, 231–234, 241

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

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Consequences, 13, 14, 23, 32, 34–36, 45, 49, 55, 59n8, 68, 91, 111, 130, 132, 136, 138, 146, 175, 176, 179, 184, 185, 187, 191, 192, 203, 211, 217n9, 225–241, 248–250, 256n8, 259, 261, 271 Constructivism, 255 Contingency, 5, 21, 25, 46, 54, 56, 57, 59, 72, 186, 203, 246, 250–253, 259, 260 Controversy, 46, 73, 81, 122, 157, 176, 178, 179, 190, 203, 206n4, 227, 247, 250, 268 Council (EU), 30, 32, 65, 75, 78–80, 132, 138, 180–182, 189, 207–209, 208n7, 212, 213, 215, 216, 236, 237, 240 Critical Legal Studies, 258, 274, 275 Critical legal thinking, 258–260 D Deliberative democracy, 214 Democracy, vii, ix, 3, 6–14, 19–39, 43n2, 49, 58, 69, 89–104, 109, 110, 115, 124, 129–132, 134–142, 146, 169, 170, 180, 192, 201–218, 268, 270, 271, 273, 274, 276 Democratic learning, 154, 170, 171 Democratisation, vii, 29–37, 72, 90–94, 104, 130, 133, 141, 273 De-politicisation, 2, 3, 7, 9, 13, 14, 22, 32, 36, 59, 93, 133, 153–171, 182, 191, 193, 201–218, 202n1, 227, 247, 252, 257, 260, 268, 270–271, 273–276 Depoliticised, 153, 161, 165, 167, 169, 170, 204–210, 217, 247, 271 Die Linke, 12, 121–125 Discourse theory, 108, 109, 112, 125

E Elections, 12, 66, 70, 71, 93, 95, 99, 100, 107–125, 129, 131, 132, 135–141, 140n1, 142n2, 143n3, 145, 146, 165, 180, 181, 184, 185, 187–190, 202, 217 European Communities, 75, 78, 80 European integration, 13, 24, 33–35, 75, 76, 81, 132, 134, 142, 154, 158, 159, 161, 166, 167, 171, 175, 176, 179, 183–187, 189, 192, 193, 202, 225, 227, 229, 273, 274 Europeanisation, 74–75, 78, 142, 181 European Parliament, 30, 32, 74, 133, 134, 138, 160, 165, 180, 182, 189, 190 European Parliamentary Assembly (EPA), 75–76, 78, 80, 81 European policymaking, 175, 176, 179–183, 192, 204, 216 European political field, 13, 153–171 European public sphere, 133, 163, 181 European Union (EU), vii, 2, 7, 13, 14, 19, 29–37, 75, 81, 111, 114, 115, 119, 133, 134, 140–144, 146, 153, 154, 163–171, 175–193, 201, 210–216, 225, 272–275 Eurozone crisis, 134 (Expected) consequentiality, 228, 233, 241 Expertise, 14, 165, 169, 170, 204–206, 204n3, 209, 212, 213 F Financial crisis, 31, 36, 133, 156, 238 Front National (FN), 99, 116, 120, 121, 125, 142, 143

 INDEX 

G General Assembly, 14, 228, 236–238 Global, 43n1, 47, 132, 163, 230, 232, 235, 237, 247–249, 259n10, 261, 261n11, 262, 262n14, 272 G7/G8/G20, 14, 228, 238–239 H Haas, Ernst B., 34, 159, 183 Hegemony, 48, 108–112 Human rights, 58, 226 Human Rights Council, 226, 237 I Informal governance, 207–209 Institutions, 3, 22, 26–27, 47, 65, 90, 109, 130, 155, 180, 202, 225–241, 247, 267 International institution(s), 5, 9, 14, 182, 225–241, 248, 249 International Organisation(s), 74, 75, 78, 229, 231, 238, 246, 271 International Relations (IR), viii, 1–15, 36, 77, 225, 229, 230, 232, 234, 239–240, 248, 274 J Juridification/juridified, 3, 7, 8, 14, 15, 245–262, 268, 270–271, 273 K Kirchheimer, Otto, 246, 252, 253, 257 L La France Insoumise (LFI), 12, 117, 118, 125 Law, 9, 14, 15, 23, 30, 31, 47, 70, 76, 78, 93, 120, 124, 202, 204, 206,

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206n4, 207n5, 225, 245–262, 271, 275 Le Pen, Marine, 99, 111, 116–121, 143 Left-authoritarianism, 145 Legal, 8, 15, 32, 46, 49, 71, 92, 113, 132, 159, 226, 229, 230, 246–249, 251–262, 256n8, 261n11, 271 Legalisation, 3, 7, 248, 254–257, 261, 268, 271, 276 Legitimacy, 36, 46, 52, 54, 81, 98, 137, 139, 140, 154, 158, 161, 162, 164, 167, 170, 171, 180, 205, 209, 211, 214, 226, 231–233, 235, 236, 248, 271, 273, 274 Lindberg, Leon N., 34, 159, 161 Local, 39, 73, 248, 272 Losers of modernisation, 12, 130, 142, 143, 145, 146 M Macron, Emmanuel, 109, 119–121, 125 Mélenchon, Jean-Luc, 111, 117–120 Merkel, Angela, 26, 92, 121–124, 130, 132 Modern constellation, 245–247, 252 N Neoliberalism, 22, 214 Non-voting, 11, 12, 129–146 P Parliament, 10, 26, 29, 33, 46, 63–77, 79–81, 96, 132, 133, 188, 207, 213, 215, 218, 270 Parliamentarisation, 10, 33, 63–81 Parliamentary freedom, 70–71 Parliamentary government, 65–67

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Parliamentary procedure, 67, 68, 70, 74, 76, 80 Parliamentary rhetoric, 69–70 Parliamentary time, 65, 72, 80 Participation, 12, 45, 47, 49, 80, 89, 90, 92, 129, 132, 134, 137–140, 171, 214, 247 Party for Freedom (PVV), 13, 108, 112–116, 125 People, ix, 11, 28, 50, 91, 103–104, 108, 131, 142n2, 162, 188, 214, 229, 246, 271 Permissive consensus, 34–36, 161, 171, 183, 184, 186, 201, 273–274 Political, viii, 3, 21, 43, 44, 63, 89, 90, 95–103, 108–124, 130, 153–171, 175, 184, 201, 207–216, 225–241, 246, 268–269 Political Science, 9, 10, 19, 43, 47, 58, 67, 131, 135 Political Theory, viii, 2, 4, 5, 8, 10, 13, 36, 43, 44, 44n3, 49, 58, 131, 154 Politicisation, 1–15, 19–39, 43–60, 63–81, 89–104, 108–110, 129, 133, 134, 140–145, 153–171, 175–193, 201, 225–241, 245–262, 267–276 Politicking, 21, 64, 250, 251 Politics, 1–15, 19–39, 44, 63–73, 90, 107–125, 131, 154–158, 166–171, 175, 203–210, 226, 245–262, 268–269, 271, 274 Polity, vii, 21, 25, 31, 35, 50, 51, 56, 64, 65, 75, 137, 141, 146, 156, 166, 180, 182, 250, 251 Popular vote (referenda), 11, 89, 94, 99, 101, 191 Populism, 3, 7–9, 11–13, 99, 100, 107–125, 140–146, 268, 271, 274, 276

Populist protest, 94, 95, 100 Post-democracy, 4, 9, 11, 89–104, 131, 132, 134, 135, 146 Post-foundational, 12, 108, 109, 112 Post-national constellation, 132 Post-politics, 12, 107–125 Power, 14, 22, 45, 47–49, 53–56, 59, 65, 67, 73–81, 95, 108–110, 113–115, 118–121, 123–125, 131, 133, 155, 156, 158, 161, 162, 165, 168, 180, 202, 204, 206–209, 211, 214, 216, 217n9, 218, 230, 231, 249, 250, 252, 258–262 Pre-politicisation (potentiality), 159 Privatisation, 142 Proletarian, 95, 96 R Rationality, 52, 53, 55, 57, 60, 108, 111, 143 Recognition, 52, 70, 79, 97, 113, 132, 183, 230–232, 234, 235, 239, 241 Reflexivity, 154, 160 Regime(s), 46, 48, 65, 74, 80, 93, 100, 103, 108, 131, 141, 146, 248, 251, 254, 261 Re-policisation/re-politicised, 110, 111, 125, 170, 205, 255 Representation, 11, 48, 52, 92, 94–98, 100–102, 104, 162, 209–210, 215, 217 Representative democracy, vii, 7, 9, 10, 13, 14, 20, 25–29, 31, 33, 35, 89, 91, 92, 94, 104, 136, 201–218, 274 Republicanism, 10, 49, 51, 52, 56, 57, 275 Right-wing populism, 99, 111, 116, 124, 140–146 Rutte, Mark, 114–116

 INDEX 

S Scheingold, Stuart A., 34, 161 Shielding strategies, 186, 191 Simulation, 135–140 Skinner, Quentin, 49, 66–68, 70, 81 Socialisation, 210–216 Socialist Party (SP), 12, 113–117, 125 Social media, 11, 38, 39, 89, 94, 95, 99, 100, 102, 103, 177, 178, 269 Social Sciences, 1, 2, 48, 176, 225, 268, 269 Social Theory, 275 Sociology, viii, 1–15, 163, 167, 171 Sovereign, 11, 96–98, 103, 104, 118, 123, 257 Spectator democracy, 135 Supranationalisation, 130, 136, 138, 191 T Technocracy, 165, 204, 212 Transnational, 9, 138, 154, 164, 169, 171, 181, 246, 248, 262

281

Transparency, 30, 32, 182, 204n3, 214 Treaty of Maastricht, 35, 274 Treaty of Rome, 75, 80 Trilogue, 30, 182, 190, 207, 208, 216 U UN Charter, 236, 256 United Nations (UN), 14, 226, 228, 236–238, 240 V Verrechtlichung, 7, 252 Voting, 6, 11, 12, 38, 71, 121, 129–146, 182, 188, 208n7, 213n8 W Weber, Max, 44n3, 46, 55, 64–66, 68–70, 77, 245, 247, 250–253 Welfare-chauvinism, 145 Wilders, Geert, 13, 108, 112–116