European Integration and the Crisis of Social Democracy 3031088212, 9783031088216

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European Integration and the Crisis of Social Democracy James L. Newell

European Integration and the Crisis of Social Democracy

James L. Newell

European Integration and the Crisis of Social Democracy

James L. Newell MANCHESTER, UK

ISBN 978-3-031-08821-6    ISBN 978-3-031-08822-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08822-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 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 image: © Santiago Urquijo / Moment / 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

Praise for European Integration and the Crisis of Social Democracy “This is engaged scholarship at its very best, informing a book which puts forward a passionate argument in favour of a critically pro-EU left in Europe. Highly readable and well researched, the volume is recommended to scholars, students and the general reader keen to engage with hard questions about the future of European integration. Newell makes a powerful case (particularly against left wing Eurosceptics) about the opportunities that integration offers to build more equal societies on the continent, if only we can manage to steer the process in the right direction.” —Daniele Albertazzi, Professor of Politics and Co-Director of the Centre for Britain and Europe, University of Surrey, UK “Understanding Brexit, at a time when the EU is attempting to defend integration against the background of the post-Covid and Ukraine crises, is essential to comprehending the state of Western democracy and of left-wing parties. While national governments struggle to address complex global processes, principles of international solidarity defended by left-wing political thought seem unable to galvanise popular sentiments. It is therefore necessary to reflect, as this book does, on critical alternatives to the neo-liberal model and its attendant inequalities, and on the capacity of parties of the left to offer alternative political solutions.” —Marinella Belluati, Associate Professor of Sociology of Media and Media Studies, University of Turin, Italy “This book starts from an apparent oxymoron—being on the left and supporting Brexit—to interrogate the evolution of European integration and social-­democratic parties over the past few decades. The conclusion is that “another Europe is possible” but only through more democratic institutions and increased popular participation, and that parties of the left must re-adapt their narratives of key themes such as globalisation, climate change, and migration, and re-claim progressive values such as equality and solidarity. While engaging with complex topics and addressing epochal transformations, Professor Newell has produced yet another superbly written book that captures the attention of the reader from start to end: a must read for those who want to know more about “Lexit” and ‘critical Europeanists.” —Maurizio Carbone, Professor of International Relations and Development, University of Glasgow, Scotland, UK

“In this excellent book, Newell offers a sharp and compelling analysis shedding a critical light on the relationship between European integration and the crisis of social democracy. In doing so, he helps us not only to understand the roots and causes of current trends of ‘decline’ for the European left and the European project at large; he also sets a roadmap for change—showing that another, better Europe is possible.” —Arianna Giovannini, Associate Professor in Local Politics and Public Policy, De Montfort University, UK “This book is an important and timely analysis of social democracy and European integration in the wake of Brexit. Jim Newell has a sharp eye for the contemporary challenges facing social democracy and for the tensions on the left regarding the EU. His discussion presents a clear evaluation and a set of proposals for a critical engagement with the EU.” —Michael Holmes, Associate Professor of Political Science, ESPOL (European School of Political and Social Sciences), Université Catholique de Lille, France “This truly remarkable book by Newell makes a crucial contribution when it comes to understanding the state of the European left in the early twenty-first century. Beginning with a fascinating journey into Brexit, Newell’s elegant book provides a rich account of the contemporary challenges to social democracy and how an effective response to the most pressing issues of our time requires the political left to embrace core principles of equality and international solidarity in an increasingly globalised economy. Most importantly, at a time when many turn their backs on the European Union and some of its founding values and principles, Newell’s compelling analysis of the ‘crisis of social democracy’ comes as a useful reminder that no viable strategy for left-wing revival can dispense with transnational action and European integration, and that the ability to push for European solidarity and democratisation are key to the future of the left in Europe.” —Gilles Ivaldi, Researcher in Politics, CEVIPOF-Science Po, France “Starting with an impassioned dissection of the Brexit process from a self-confessed “sore loser”, James Newell proceeds systematically to assess and rebut “Lexiteer” arguments for disengagement with the EU. Instead, he argues that the centre-left needs to place itself more than ever before at the forefront of greater pan-EU transnational co-operation. Only this way can left parties reverse their secular decline and implement historic aims of greater equality and popular empowerment. Lucidly written, and with a keen grasp of historical detail and comparative example, this is a fascinating book, essential for understanding the European left’s past and future.” —Luke March, Professor of Post-Soviet and Comparative Politics, University of Edinburgh, UK

“Admirably weaving three (red) threads—Brexit; European integration; the attitudes and policies of left-wing parties—Newell has written a highly commendable book. His in-depth analysis of what is arguably one of the most important political phenomena of our times—how to put together all the European states—comes to a very important conclusion. Through popular empowerment and greater equality, another Europe will be possible. The bell tolls for left wing parties.” —Gianfranco Pasquino, Professor Emeritus of Political Science, University of Bologna, Italy “This book focuses on the study of a highly relevant topic—the connection between the crisis of the European project and the decline of social democracy—in which a novel and profound analysis of European politics pre-and post-Brexit is deployed. Most notable is Newell’s excellent exercise in political commitment and intellectual honesty, as he seeks to answer his and others’ questions about the controversies facing the traditional left in the advanced capitalist system and globalised world of the twenty-first century. Highly recommended for scholars and experts in the European political sphere and a must for left-wing practitioners concerned with the democratic dimension of the European integration process.” —Carolina Plaza-Colodro, Postdoctoral Researcher in Political Science, University of Salamanca, Spain “Whether the left will play an important role in the future will very much depend on its ability to make a proper reading of the coming age. In his original and thought-provoking book James Newell offers no less than such a reading, convincingly arguing in favour of the enhancement of popular democracy at the European level as a way out of the left’s crisis.” —Matthias Scantamburlo, Lecturer in Political Science Carlos III University of Madrid, Spain, and Member of the Regional Manifestos Project “In this book, James Newell addresses the crisis of social democratic parties from an original angle. Through a lively and insightful discussion, the author emphasizes that the social democratic principles he highlights are (or should be) akin to the EU integration project. Among the many merits of this volume, it should be underlined that Newell eludes the enticements of scepticism or oversimplification, while offering a perspectival discussion. The author, indeed, argues that the future of social democratic parties requires an explicit reclamation of the values advocated by the European Union.” —Antonella Seddone, Associate Professor of Politics, University of Turin, Italy

“This is a cogent analysis of a key issue in contemporary politics: does the process of European integration pose opportunities or constitute a barrier to the advance of social democratic values? Newell presents an incisive, lucid and well-written account of a tangle of problems raised by this question. Impressive in both the amount of information it conveys and the clarity of tis exposition, it is essential reading for all those interested in the prospects for social democracy.” —Eric Shaw, Honorary Research Fellow in Politics, University of Stirling, UK “The outbreak of the pandemic is a powerful reminder that politics matters, and that social democratic values remain as timely as ever. In a thoroughly researched new book prompted by Brexit, Newell analyses the left’s encounters with European integration over time. Adopting a critical Europeanist perspective, he invites the left to take advantage of a historic post-pandemic opportunity and place transnational democracy at the heart of a new political settlement. His call must be heeded.” —Dimitris Tsarouhas, Visiting Associate Professor, Virginia Tech, USA and Associate Professor, Bilkent University, Turkey

Contents

1 Introduction: Brexit and a Pro-European Fight-back  1 2 European Integration as a Social Democratic Project 15 3 The  Crisis of Social Democracy: Why Is the Mainstream Left in Europe Struggling, Electorally? 37 4 The European Union’s Crisis of Legitimacy 59 5 Social Democratic Opponents of Europe 89 6 ‘Critical Europeanism’123 7 Conclusion: What’s Left of the European Left?159 References187 Index205

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Abbreviations

ALDE CDU CSU CTOE DC DiEM25 DS DUP EC ECB ECI ECJ ECSC EEA EEC EFTA EMU ENEL EP EPP ERM ES EU FdI FI

Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe Christian Democratic Union of Germany (Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands) Christian Social Union in Bavaria (Christlich-Soziale Union in Bayern) Citizens Take Over Europe Christian Democrats (Democrazia Cristiana) Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 Left Democrats (Democratici di Sinistra) Democratic Unionist Party European Community European Central Bank European Citizens’ Initiative European Court of Justice European Coal and Steel Community European Economic Area European Economic Community European Free Trade Association Economic and Monetary Union Ente Nazionale per l’Energia Elettrica European Parliament European People’s Party Exchange Rate Mechanism European Spring European Union Brothers of Italy (Fratelli d’Italia) Forza Italia xi

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ABBREVIATIONS

FSU GDP IDEA IMF IO ISDS ISIL ITWF M5s MEP NATO NGEU NHS NRRP OAPEC PCI PD PDS PES PP PSI PSOE QMV SEA SGP SNP SPD TCA TFEU TPA TTIP TUC UCU UKIP UNHCR WTO

Finnish Seamen’s Union gross domestic product Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance International Monetary Fund international organisation investor-state dispute settlement Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant International Transport Workers’ Federation Five-star Movement (Movimento Cinque Stelle) Member of the European Parliament North Atlantic Treaty Organisation Next Generation EU National Health Service National Recovery and Resilience Plan Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries Italian Communist Party (Partito Comunista Italiano) Democratic Party (Partito Democratico) Democratic Party of the Left (Partito Democratico della Sinistra) Party of European Socialists People’s Party (Partido Popular) Italian Socialist Party (Partito Socialista Italiano) Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (Partido Socialista Obrero Español) qualified majority voting Single European Act Stability and Growth Pact Scottish National Party Social Democratic Party of Germany (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands) Trade and Cooperation Agreement Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union trade promotion authority Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership Trades Union Congress University and College Union United Kingdom Independence Party United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees World Trade Organisation

List of Tables

Table 1.1 UK general election 2019: results Table 3.1 Vote shares received by the mainstream socialist/social democratic parties in parliamentary elections (%) Table 3.2 Party membership/electorate ratio (%) (1980–2014) in fourteen European countries Table 3.3 Turnout at parliamentary elections (1980–2010) in fourteen European countries Table 6.1 ‘Critical Europeanist’ organisations in the UK, Italy, France and Germany Table 6.2 Blokker’s classification of European discourses

4 40 52 53 129 132

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Brexit and a Pro-European Fight-back

Although this is a book with a focus on Europe generally, the initial inspiration for writing it came from an event close to home: the Brexit referendum of 23 June 2016. This left much to be desired from a democratic point of view. Leaving aside the allegations of Russian interference in the campaign and the allegations of campaign spending irregularities on the part of ‘Leave’ campaigners, the outcome was the work of a passionate minority representing 37% of those with the right to vote. It was never made clear until after the vote what ‘Brexit’ actually meant. The centre-­ piece of the ‘Leave’ campaign—‘We send the EU £350 million a week lets fund our NHS instead’—was widely condemned as a lie; but what I learned from the campaign was that the claim was the more effective precisely because it was a lie: Remainers’ condemnations kept it at the centre of public attention, and their condemnations could easily be dismissed as lacking credibility. After all, they would say that, wouldn’t they? The counting of votes is not only or even mainly what gives a decision its democratic quality, and despots the world over are familiar with the use of plebiscites for the enforcement of their decisions. I learned this first-­ hand about eighteen months after the referendum when, as a member of the University and College Union (UCU), I took strike action in a dispute over pensions. After several weeks of action supported by student occupations at more than a dozen universities, it was apparent that for those actively involved in the strike, the issues at stake had begun to shift from the relatively prosaic ones of pension entitlements to the much more © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. L. Newell, European Integration and the Crisis of Social Democracy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08822-3_1

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significant one of the marketisation of higher education. It was at that point that union leaders urged UCU members, through an electronic ballot, to accept an employers’ proposal for the setting up of an ‘expert panel’ to consider the existing pensions arrangements, and to end the strike action. To be stood down, just when the struggle was turning radical, thanks to the votes of colleagues who had not been invited, first, to debate the issues; who had made no active contribution to the strike, and had perhaps not even been on strike at all was a bitter pill to swallow. So, yes, I am a sore loser. Sensibly, the writers of the Italian Constitution decided to stipulate that referenda on proposals to annul legislation were only valid if they achieved a 50% turnout—though this by no means eliminates the potential of referenda for passionate minorities. Danish referenda are even worse, as the 30% turnout requirement means that legislation can be annulled by mobilising just 15% plus one. What makes a decision more or less democratic is the quality of the deliberation that is enabled to take place before the decision is taken; and from the point of view of empowering people, what counts is not simply large numbers, but at least as importantly, the degree to which the large numbers are organised. My feeling of despondency deepened in the months that followed. By the spring of 2019, I had been dismissed by the University of Salford; the House of Commons had voted by a large majority to trigger Article 50, and Theresa May, at the head of a minority government, was struggling to get her ‘Withdrawal Agreement’ ratified by Parliament. As I guessed would happen (Newell 2019a), ratification was finally achieved, thanks to a series of errors on the part of that overwhelming majority of MPs who had campaigned for Remain in 2016 and who, had they not made these errors, might have been able to prevent Brexit happening at all. In the case of some members of the Labour opposition, these errors were made willingly. First of all, it might have been possible to avoid Brexit all together, had it been possible to secure a Commons majority for a second referendum in which voters would have been asked either to support the Withdrawal Agreement or to vote in favour of Remain. On 27 March 2019, a motion to that effect was defeated by just 27 votes, largely thanks to the opposition of a handful of Labour MPs, either because they were on the Leave side out of conviction or because they sat for constituencies with Leave-­ voting majorities. At any rate, by this time, opinion polls were suggesting that there was now a majority in favour of Remain—less because 2016 Leave voters had changed their minds than because those who hadn’t

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voted, or had been too young to vote, were by two to one skewed towards Remain. Second, in the autumn of 2019, there was another opportunity to secure a second referendum, but it too was wasted. By this time, a significant new development had taken place. Boris Johnson had become leader of the Conservative Party and prime minister in place of Theresa May— whose position had been undermined by her three failed ratification attempts—and he managed to secure European Council agreement to changes to the Withdrawal Agreement that were largely cosmetic but which now enabled him largely to unite his previously divided party behind it. Having achieved that much, since his party lacked a Commons majority, he now focussed on attempting to secure a ratification majority through the holding of a fresh general election. This created a fresh opportunity to secure a second Brexit referendum because a general election could only take place with the support of at least some of the opposition parties.1 Therefore, there was now an opportunity for those in the Commons who were opposed to Brexit, to insist on the need first to proceed with consideration of the new Agreement and on a second Brexit referendum as the price of its passage, before an election was held. Instead, a vote in favour of an election straightaway was passed by 438 to 20 votes with 127 Labour MPs supporting the Government. Along with 106 Labour MPs, the 34 Scottish National Party (SNP) MPs and the 19 Liberal Democrat MPs abstained, their less-than-firm opposition to the election probably driven by expectations based on opinion poll results that they would do well in a pre-Christmas poll. The third and fourth mistakes came with the election itself. The Conservative Party, now united behind Johnson and the Withdrawal Agreement, went into the election campaign under the slogan ‘Get Brexit done!’ So not surprisingly, in terms of both media framing and voters’ own understandings, Brexit was by far and away the biggest single issue in terms of what the election was ‘about’, or why it had been called in the first place. It was the most prominent substantive policy issue in TV and press coverage. And when voters were asked what the most important 1  In essence, since the last general election had taken place just two years previously in 2017, and since the Fixed Term Parliaments Act of 2011 provided that Parliament could only be dissolved if there were a two-thirds majority voting in favour, Johnson needed to secure the passage of an Early Parliamentary General Election Bill to circumvent the 2011 Fixed Term Parliaments Act—which he could not do on the strength of his own followers alone.

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issues to them were in deciding how to vote, a larger proportion (57%) mentioned Brexit (either ‘getting Brexit done’ or ‘stopping Brexit’) than mentioned any other issue.2 Moreover, polls also showed that voters now identified more strongly as Leavers or Remainers than they identified with any of the political parties.3 In these circumstances, with the Conservatives having now united behind a pro-Brexit position, what the opposition parties should have done is to reach stand-down arrangements with each other, uniting behind common Remain-supporting candidates and inviting the Remain-supporting majority in the country to cast a vote to stop Brexit. Then Johnson might have been denied an overall majority. Instead, because of the voting system, he ended up with an absolute seat majority while falling short of a majority in terms of votes (Table 1.1). Though the Conservatives’ vote share rose by just 1.3%, they won an overall majority of 80 seats, 48 more than they won in 2017. Together, the parties supporting a second Brexit referendum (Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the SNP, Plaid Cymru and the Greens) won over 50% of the vote and took 2,260,376 more votes than the Conservatives—but ended up 99 seats behind them. The fourth error was Labour’s ambiguous position on Brexit and this was probably decisive. Because it was split on the issue, it went into the Table 1.1  UK general election 2019: results Party Conservative Labour Liberal Democrats Scottish National Party Plaid Cymru Green Party Brexit Party Others Totals

Votes

Vote share (%)

Seats

13,966,454 10,269,051 3,696,419 1,242,380 153,265 865,715 644,257 1,176,569 32,014,110

43.63 32.08 11.55 3.88 0.48 2.70 2.01 3.67 100.00

365 202 11 48 4 1 0 19 650

2  https://lordashcroftpolls.com/2019/12/how-britain-voted-and-why-my-2019-generalelection-post-vote-poll/#more-16379 3  See, for example, the results of the November 2019 YouGov poll reported by The New European at https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/top-stories/yougov-poll-party-allegiancevs-brexit-1-6376478

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election campaign wanting to negotiate an alternative withdrawal agreement and hold a second referendum on EU membership—but its leader, Jeremy Corbyn, refused to be drawn on which side he would campaign for, a position that was simply not credible for one campaigning to be a prime minister. Not surprisingly, therefore, in attempting to please everybody Labour ended up pleasing nobody and largely failed to keep the ‘Eurosceptics’ among its supporters on board anyway. Thus, of those who voted Leave in 2016, 77% chose either the Conservatives or the Brexit party, including nearly a third (29%) of Leave voters who had chosen Labour at the previous election.4 The UK therefore left the EU on 31 January 2020, yes because of the 2016 referendum result, but also because of the mistakes made by those opposed to Brexit in the three-and-a-half years following the result. In attempting to come to terms with this carnage, I was heartened by three things that added to my motivation to write the book. The first was the realisation that Brexit is a process, not an event. It looks set to remain a significant issue on the agenda of British politics for a long time to come, this for reasons that will become apparent in the chapters that follow, especially Chaps. 5 and 6. And as long as it remains an issue, then it is, by implication, not entirely a ‘done deal’. One of the most widely touted potential consequences of Brexit that I want to spend some time on here has been the break-up of the United Kingdom. Ultimately, the suggestion rests on the effect of Brexit in reinforcing awareness of the UK’s status as a ‘union state’. Such a state is neither unitary nor federal. Rather, it is one that is created by the incorporation of at least parts of its territory ‘through personal dynastic union, for example by treaty’. Consequently, ‘[w]hile administrative standardization prevails over most of the territory, the consequences of personal union entail the survival in some areas of pre-union rights and institutional infrastructures which preserve some degree of regional autonomy’ (Rokkan and Urwin 1982: 11). The UK fits the ideal type of the union state almost perfectly. The only exception is Wales—which was simply incorporated into England, under uniform arrangements, in 1536; but it retained a sense of distinct identity by virtue of its language. Scotland came together with England and Wales beginning in 1603 when King James VI of Scotland succeeded Elizabeth 4  https://lordashcroftpolls.com/2019/12/how-britain-voted-and-why-my-2019-generalelection-post-vote-poll/#more-16379

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I of England while retaining the Scottish throne, and then in 1707 with the Acts of Union joining the parliaments of England and Scotland to form the Parliament of Great Britain. The two Acts guaranteed that Scots law would remain in force as before; restated the English parliament’s 1701 Act of Settlement limiting succession to the throne to Protestants, and established a customs and monetary union. In 1800, there was a similar merger of the Westminster and Irish parliaments though on much more unequal terms insofar as it was based on the economic, social and political domination of the Roman Catholic majority in Ireland by minority Protestant landowners, clergy and members of the professions. Consequently, it never enjoyed legitimacy among the leaders of Catholic Ireland. Political integration remained highly imperfect and eventually led to Irish independence, by force, in 1921, leaving behind the six counties of Ulster in what, since then, has been the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. ‘[E]verybody knows that the United Kingdom is a union of England, Wales, Scotland, and part of Ireland’ (McLean and McMillan 2005: 2). What are perhaps less well understood are the implications, the most important of which, for present purposes, is that centrally imposed uniformity is impossible in the UK. That is to say, the UK came about through a series of Acts of Union (in 1707 and 1800) which therefore guaranteed the continuation of separate institutions in the component territories (e.g. Scotland’s separate administrative and legal systems). The UK has therefore always had institutions that ‘prevent the central executive from simply giving orders to everybody in the land’ (McLean and McMillan 2005: 7). Legal scholars debate whether the Westminster parliament can or cannot repeal the Acts of Union short bringing about the dissolution of the state itself, that is, whether the doctrine of the supremacy of Parliament is legally correct. But whatever the position on this may be, separate administrative and other institutions have always obliged Parliament, on a wide range of issues, to have to legislate separately for the UK’s constituent components rather than being able to pass legislation applying to the UK as a whole.5

5  For example, in the early 1960s the Government wanted to address concerns about what was then called ‘juvenile delinquency’. Different legal systems meant that it was obliged to set up two committees of inquiry—the Ingleby Committee for England and Wales and the Kilbrandon Committee for Scotland—and arising out of the work of the latter, to pass a 1968 Social Work Act that applied to Scotland only.

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Consequently, the United Kingdom is a multinational state, whose citizens have a range of identities, sometimes overlapping (e.g. as when a person says that they feel both ‘Scottish’ and ‘British’) but where, significantly, no adjective exists to cover all of its citizens. Citizens of Italy are Italian, citizens of France, French and so on, but there is no corresponding adjective for the citizens of the United Kingdom. The only available identities are less inclusive ones: English, Welsh and so on. This is not simply because the UK is a multi-ethnic state: so is Switzerland, but the adjective ‘Swiss’ exists. Rather, it is because of the following crucial difference between Switzerland and the UK. Whereas Switzerland has a federal constitution providing the basis both for an overarching national identity and for guaranteeing the sovereignty of its constituent parts in matters the constitution assigns to them, the UK as a union state has no corresponding document. What it has is a series of constitutional treaties, which, since treaties are inherently transactional in nature, entails that integration is ultimately founded on premises of an instrumental nature. Once these premises cease to exist, their disappearance inevitably poses the question, ‘What, now, is the point of the United Kingdom?’ So my point is that the Brexit debate has, for UK citizens, posed this question in a particularly stark fashion. Until the UK made its first attempt to join Europe in 1961, the basis of what McLean and McMillan (2005) refer to as ‘popular Unionism’—the ‘glue’ binding the UK together in the popular imagination—was the Empire. Indeed, the two were inextricably linked. By creating an internal market and the growth in commercial and industrial power that went with it, Union provided the material basis for imperial expansion. At the same time, imperial expansion was the ideological basis for politicians’ efforts at nation building from the mid-eighteenth century. If these efforts were unsuccessful in the case of Catholic Ireland, then that was because the government of that component was itself imperial in nature. Because this world has completely vanished, the UK’s various components have in the intervening years come to reflect increasingly divergent political and social realities, which relate to the European Union in correspondingly divergent ways. First, the four components of the UK have completely different party systems. England has the familiar Labour-­ Conservative duopoly. In Scotland, the history of elections since the establishment of the devolved institutions in 1998 has essentially been one of SNP growth at the expense of all of the other parties. It now dominates Scottish politics. It has been the governing party in the Scottish Parliament

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since 2007, and in terms of Westminster seats has reduced the other parties to the small change of Scottish politics since 2015. Labour has dominated elections in Wales since before the War, while in Welsh Assembly elections since 1999, Plaid Cymru has often pushed the Conservatives into third place. Parties reflecting the Nationalist-Unionist divide have dominated elections in Northern Ireland since the early 1970s and UK-wide parties are unrepresented there. Second, the four components’ different party systems underpin significant differences in terms of political culture. In Scotland, for example, Labour’s traditional strength there meant that in order to compete, the SNP had to adopt a left- rather than a right-wing stance. Hence, it has become ‘one of the most-left wing minority nationalist parties in Europe’ (Budge et al. 2007: 228), giving a distinctly progressive flavour to Scottish domestic politics, distinguishing them from the politics of England. Consequently, in the Scottish Parliament, left-of-centre parties have always had massive seat majorities.6 Third, reflecting their cultural divergence is a corresponding divergence in national identities. If in England, a majority of citizens have a British identity that is at least as salient as their English identity, then in Scotland and Wales the reverse is the case, Scottish and Welsh identities being more salient. In the deeply divided Northern Ireland, Nationalists identify themselves as ‘Irish’, Unionists as ‘British’ or ‘Ulster’ (McLean and McMillan 2005: 3–6). Fourth, if England and Wales voted decisively to leave in the 2016 referendum (by 53% to 47%), then Scotland and Northern Ireland voted even more decisively to remain (by 62% to 38% and by 56% to 44% respectively)—as did those parts of Wales that are Plaid Cymru strongholds.7 Given all of this, the seeming inevitability of Brexit combined with the UK-wide decline of Unionism as an integrating ideology has led political leaders, especially in Scotland and Northern Ireland, to gain an increasing hearing for the view that their nations will be better off by exchanging the UK-wide single market for the single market of the EU. The fact that in 2019 Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland all produced sizeable election 6  Labour and the SNP combined held 71% of the seats in 1999, 60% in 2003, 72% in 2007, 82% in 2011 and 67% in 2016. 7  In the four seats held by Plaid Cymru, the Remain vote was 64% (Arfon), 55% (Ceredigion), 53% (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) and 47% (Camarthen East and Dinefwr). Figures, from House of Commons Library, available at https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/ parliament-­and-elections/elections-elections/brexit-votes-by-constituency/

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majorities for parties other than the one now pursuing Brexit from its position in Westminster, only reinforces this. A week after the election, the Scottish First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, published the Scottish Government’s case for amendments to the 1998 Scotland Act to transfer to the Scottish Parliament powers to hold an independence referendum.8 In the document she reiterated the view that the UK was a union state and therefore a voluntary association of nations, going on to refer to evidence of the negative economic implications of Brexit as justifying ‘the people of Scotland again considering their place in the UK’.9 The Westminster government has so far responded by rejecting the First Minister’s request, this on the basis that ‘the 2014 Independence Referendum was a “once in a generation” vote’.10 Although the debate over whether an independence referendum should be held is separate to arguments over whether Scotland should become independent, it is significant that recent polls have ‘confirmed a trend showing a gradual increase in support for leaving the UK’ to just above 50% with ‘pro-EU voters who previously rejected independence … now switching to yes’ (Carrell 2020). Although there is no guarantee that the trend will continue, if negative predictions of the consequences of Brexit are confirmed, then the less likely it is that continued Westminster resistance to a referendum will be sustainable. In Northern Ireland, the risk to the Union posed by Brexit is even more striking, if only because it has emerged so suddenly and had for so long seemed so remote as a possibility, thanks to the consistent majorities won by parties for which preservation of the Union was their avowed purpose. By undermining the ‘Good Friday Agreement’, which relied on the EU single market for its legal and institutional underpinning, Brexit has changed all that. In the 2016 referendum, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), by far the largest representative of Unionist opinion, campaigned for a Leave vote, but of its supporters who turned out, a significant minority (25%) sided with Nationalists who were almost unanimous in supporting Remain (Garry 2016). After the 2017 election, the party then spent 8   Available at https://www.gov.scot/publications/scotlands-right-choose-puttingscotlands-­­future-scotlands-hands/pages/1/ 9   Scottish Government, ‘Scotland’s Right to Choose: Putting Scotland’s Future in Scotland’s Hands’, 2019, p. 14. 10  Letter from PM Boris Johnson to Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, 14 January 2020, available at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/letter-from-pm-borisjohnson-to-scottish-first-minister-nicola-sturgeon-14-january-2020

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two years attempting to use its political leverage in a hung parliament to square the circle between the need to preserve both the benefits of the Good Friday Agreement and Northern Ireland’s integration within the UK. Given its failure in this endeavour, as revealed by the terms of the 17 October 2019 Northern Ireland protocol, it was perhaps not surprising that it suffered a disastrous 2019 election, which saw Northern Ireland return more Nationalist than Unionist MPs for the first time. Undoubtedly, those of the DUP’s supporters who followed its instruction in 2016 did not imagine that they were voting for Northern Ireland to become distinct from the rest of the UK, as it will under the terms of the protocol. Undoubtedly, in a referendum campaign characterised by ‘the marginal attention given to Northern Ireland or Irish issues’ (Pow 2019: 50), neither they nor their Nationalist counterparts were fully aware of the potential implications of Brexit for the border with the Republic, which only came onto the agenda of public discussion afterwards. However, once the issue became clear, the available polling evidence made apparent three significant features of Northern Irish opinion. First, there was growing opposition to the entire Brexit project. Second, there was broad consensus across supporters of all five main Northern Ireland parties in favour of remaining in the customs union and single market if the UK were to leave the EU. Third, 55% of respondents said that they would ‘probably’ or ‘certainly’ support a united Ireland in the event that the UK left without a deal (Pow 2019). Again, there is no guarantee about the movement of public opinion over the coming months; and again, the issue of whether or not there should be a referendum is different from the issue of what the outcome of such a referendum should be were there to be one. However, it is significant that the capacity to resist a referendum is arguably even weaker than it is in the Scottish case. This is because the Northern Ireland Act 1998 creates a legal obligation on the UK Government to hold one ‘if at any time it appears likely … that a majority of those voting would express a wish that Northern Ireland should cease to be part of the United Kingdom’. And though it is left unclear what would satisfy such a requirement, the Good Friday Agreement creates ‘a binding obligation’ on both the UK and the Irish governments, in the event that both Northern Ireland and the Republic voted in favour of reunification, ‘to introduce

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and support in their respective parliaments legislation to give effect to that wish’11 So Brexit, as mentioned, remains a live issue. It is the sense, therefore, that the 2016 referendum and its aftermath represent the loss of a battle rather than the war that constitutes the first reason for hope looking forward, and therefore for the production of this book. The second reason has been the realisation that there is much one can do on a practical level, in terms of activism. I have joined ‘Another Europe is Possible’ and the ‘European Movement’; and on the matter of activism I would suggest the following. In the immediate aftermath of the 2019 election, those who had campaigned against Brexit, seemed to fall into one or the other of two camps. On the one side were those like former prime minister, Tony Blair, and the Oxford academic and columnist, Timothy Garton Ash, whose positions were ones of resignation. In an interview with the New Statesman magazine, Blair said, ‘I’m afraid we have got to face up to one simple point: we lost. … I’m afraid you’ve got to pivot to a completely new position. … We’re going to have to be constructive about it and see how Britain develops a constructive relationship with Europe and finds its new niche in the world.’12 Meanwhile, in a Guardian article on 31 January, Garton Ash (2020) argued, ‘only the most selfish, vengeful ex-remainer would wish those who voted for Brexit to suffer as a result. We are as patriotic as any Brexiteer, desiring the best for our country as well as our continent. Therefore, we must now want—and indeed work for—our pessimistic predictions to be proved at least partly wrong. Having fought Brexit like the plague for four years we must, in this minimal sense, want Brexit to succeed.’ On the other side, were those whose positions were perhaps best summed up by the title of a speech given on 7 February by Brendan Donnelly, Director of the Federal Trust, ‘a research institute studying the interactions between regional, national, European and global levels of government’.13 The title of the speech was, ‘The resistance continues’, and in it Donnelly made what, to my mind, was the more inspiring and the more intellectually convincing case. 11  For further details and explanations of the legalities surrounding this issue, see the analysis provided by the Institute for Government at https://www.instituteforgovernment.org. uk/explainers/irish-reunification 12  https://www.newstatesman.com/spotlight/skills/2020/01/tony-blair-extremismyou-ve-got-destroy-ideas 13  https://fedtrust.co.uk/

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In essence, it is a case that rests, first, on recognising what has always been the central contradiction involved in Brexit. That is, as mentioned above, in 2016 it was never spelled out by the pro-Brexit camp what leaving the EU actually meant—which only became apparent in the aftermath when the government was obliged to respond to the referendum outcome. In this context, thinking congealed around two ideas. On the one hand, there was the idea of a so-called hard Brexit of the kind the Government subsequently pursued. While this, more or less everyone agreed, would do the maximum amount of economic damage, it at least had the advantage of intellectual coherence in the sense that, if one didn’t like being in the European Union, then the alternative, so-called soft Brexit, made no sense either. It makes little or no political sense to remain aligned to EU rules and regulations without having any say in how the regulations are made. From this point of view, Brexiteers who argued against ‘soft Brexit’ on the grounds that it would amount to being a ‘vassal state’ were quite right. Second, therefore, what should now happen, Donnelly argued, is that ‘Remainers’ should become ‘Rejoiners’, since, alongside so-called hard Brexit, it was the only position that had intellectual coherence. So if some, like Garton Ash, were suggesting that it was too early—too implausible—to argue this—that ‘it [was] not’, in his words, ‘on the agenda for today’ (2020), my own inclination was to disagree—not because I think that re-joining is likely in the short term, but because otherwise, to complain about Brexit leaves one exposed to the accusation that one has nothing better to put in its place. And, logically, the only alternative to Brexit is to go back into the European Union. What are the prospects for this? Again, I defer to Brendan Donnelly: Those people who say “Oh its going to be at least ten years”, they may be right. There are no guarantees. But I don’t think it is inevitable. … And I think that one thing that will make it inevitable would be if people like us laid down tools and said, “Its much too embarrassing to say we want to re-­ join the European Union”. UKIP have never been afraid of embarrassment. At the beginning of their activities, they were very much the people who were on the fringe. We start from a much better position than they ever did. We have all the opinion polls. We have all the assets of a personal nature, of an organisational nature, which they never had. So it would be extraordinary if we just walked away from that. … UKIP were able to leverage their position within the British political system because they were able to command 8, 10, 12 percent of the electorate whose vote in a general election was going to depend entirely on where they perceived the parties as standing on

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Europe. And that’s why Cameron came up with the referendum … which backfired so badly on him. He wanted to be able to isolate and neutralise the 12 percent that he was afraid would be taken predominantly away from his party. I think that if we as a group … can present a similarly coherent body of re-join opinion … then I think that it is something that can be politically important.14

My final source of inspiration has been the need to clarify my ideas. Like many, if not most, UK citizens prior to 2016, I took the European Union for granted. I considered myself to be both British and European but paid little attention to the EU. Now I was aware that what was taking place was the most significant constitutional crisis perhaps since the so-called Glorious Revolution in the seventeenth century, certainly since House-of-­ Lords reform at the beginning of the twentieth. Though I knew a number of people who said both that they were left wing and that they had voted for Brexit, I was certain from my perspective that it was not possible to be both ‘of the left’ and to have voted for Brexit: that such a vote was an inherently right-wing gesture. But I needed to explain why. And if I were going to carry on a struggle against Brexit from a left-wing perspective, I had to clarify what it was I was fighting for. So this is a book about European integration and mainstream parties of the left, the main underlying question driving it being the following. Given that the communist left was fatally wounded by the collapse of the Berlin Wall; given that, since then, the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ have not infrequently been attacked (especially by populists) as being no longer useful for making sense of politics; given that social democracy, understood as ‘national Keynesianism’ no longer appears to be viable (as reflected in its long-term electoral decline), what does it mean to be on the left in the early twenty-first century and what can be done to revive its fortunes? My answer is that being on the left means embracing principles of equality and international solidarity, and that since the nation state is too small to respond effectively to climate change and the other most pressing issues of the present, no viable strategy for left-wing revival in Europe can dispense with European integration as a central element, of which European democratisation is a core component. 14   ‘The resistance continues’—speech by Brendan Donnelly to Stratford4Europe, 7 February 2020, available at https://fedtrust.co.uk/brexit-rejoiners-must-learn-fromtheir-mistakes/

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The six remaining chapters of the book seek to put flesh on the bones of this argument. Chapter 2 sets the scene by looking back at the origins and development of the European integration project arguing that parties of the left were never its main protagonists but rather adjusted themselves to it before later becoming its more or less enthusiastic supporters when in the 1990s, it appeared to offer an alternative to national Keynesianism as a road to the achievement of social democratic ambitions. These developments, however, made it increasingly difficult for parties of the left to distinguish themselves from their opponents on the right, thus adding to the other factors involved in their long-term electoral decline, explored in Chap. 3. They also meant that by the early years of the new century, the parties had become enmeshed in what Holmes and Roder (2021) call a European ‘integration trap’, so that when, thanks to the Eurozone and refugee crises, the EU suffered a major legitimacy crisis (discussed in Chap. 4), the left found itself vulnerable to the loss of large numbers of its traditional supporters, among the so-called losers of globalisation, to anti-­ European sovereigntist parties of the populist right. The upshot was that, in response, the mainstream left became increasingly divided—most obviously so in the British case, but in other countries too—into two broad camps. In the one were those who argued for disengagement from the European integration project and in the most extreme case for a left-wing project of complete withdrawal (dubbed ‘Lexit’). In the other were those who responded by arguing, on the contrary, that European institutions were reformable and available as vehicles for left-wing ambitions, and who therefore advanced a project of transnational democracy: ‘critical Europeanism’. The claims of ‘Lexit’ and ‘critical Europeanism’ are described and subjected to critical scrutiny in Chaps. 5 and 6. Chapter 7 concludes by arguing that ‘another Europe is possible’ and worth fighting for. To steal a quote from Ursula Von der Lyen, who apparently borrowed it from Vaclav Havel, ‘Work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed’.

CHAPTER 2

European Integration as a Social Democratic Project

Introduction One of the most entertaining features of an otherwise extremely serious and important debate about the future of the UK’s relations with the EU has been the way in which it has given rise to a whole series of portmanteaus: Brexit, Lexit and so on. If the latter stands for the left-wing case for Brexit, then the fact that it has entered the political lexicon is one indicator of the increasingly high profile acquired by left-wing ‘Euroscepticism’ in public debate in the UK and elsewhere since the referendum of 2016. Consequently, while media and academic attention has largely focused on the growth of ‘Euroscepticism’ in political parties of the radical right and among publics that have been attracted by the growing forces of populism in recent years, there is also a story about growing ‘Euroscepticism’ on the left that needs to be told. Though minority views, left-wing critiques of the European integration project are, as we shall see, not just confined to the radical left but have been increasingly articulated in social democratic circles, by politicians, journalists (e.g. Elliott 2018) and academics (e.g. Lapovitsas 2019; Whyman 2018), especially as the various Brexit deadlines have drawn closer. Concomitantly, with the EU’s deepening legitimacy crisis in recent years, pro-European social democrats have been increasingly thrown on the defensive as debate around the EU has become increasingly polarised. That is, arguably, European integration has, in recent years at least, been © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. L. Newell, European Integration and the Crisis of Social Democracy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08822-3_2

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widely seen as a basically social democratic project which those on the mainstream left, the aforementioned minorities aside, would support as a matter of course. Since then its social democratic supporters have been forced—through organisations and think tanks such as ‘Another Europe is Possible’, the Foundation for European Progressive Studies, ‘Social Europe’, ‘DiEM25’ and so on—to make the case for the potential of Europe for traditional left-wing concerns, afresh. This has been especially true since the Eurozone crisis, in countries like Greece and Italy, where membership of the single currency has placed severe constraints on the capacity of governments to pursue expansive economic policies designed to address problems of low growth and high levels of public debt. In these and other member states, the EU has come under increasing attack from populists for its alleged inability to respond to the needs and concerns of ‘ordinary people’, thanks to the democratic shortcomings of its institutions said, therefore, to be staffed by remote and unresponsive elites. Consequently, in 2020, with domestic political agendas in Western democracies dominated by matters related to the coronavirus, climate change and an increasingly unstable international order, it was fair to say that European integration dominated the agendas of European parties of the left. Until the 1990s, European integration had not gone far enough for it to figure highly in the domestic politics of member states; from the signing of the Maastricht treaty and the advent of the single currency onwards, it can be said not to have gone far enough to prevent it from doing so. With anti-European, right-wing populist parties having more or less everywhere in Europe grown in influence, the left has, in reaction, become ever more clearly divided into two broad camps: one views integration negatively, the other positively. For those in the former camp, integration as it has been realised so far has meant domination by international capital, which cannot be effectively governed through the European institutions.1 Rather, international capital successfully dominates these institutions, their processes and office holders partly because they are unaccountable— unlike the institutions, processes and office holders of the member states. Moreover, integration along with globalisation has increasingly deprived 1  The position is one with deep roots on the left. In 1949, Italian Communist Party leader, Palmiro Togliatti, for example, had during the course of a parliamentary debate re-affirmed his party’s basic position that only through the socialist transformation of society was the economic and political unification of Europe possible (Laneri 2017). In other words, the European institutions were unavailable as vehicles for a socialist project: they were un-reformable.

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member-state institutions of their power to pursue policies in the interests of ordinary people. Hence for some, the fact that European integration ‘has meant integration on neoliberal terms’ suggests that, there should be ‘a turn towards economic protection and controls over capital movements, and severe restrictions on immigration’, implying at least a severe limit to, if not total withdrawal from, the integration process (Crouch 2018: 6).2 For others in this ‘negative’ camp, especially those on the radical left, the conclusion is slightly different (Dunphy 2004; Dunphy and March 2019). They accept the critique of the form integration has taken but are reluctant to adopt positions that would align them with the populist right and keen to remain faithful to principles of internationalism. Consequently, they do not reject integration in principle, but argue that only if it comes about as part of change driven from below can it serve progressive goals. In other words, rather than advocating a retreat to the nation state, or attempts to reform the existing European institutions, they argue for radical alternatives to the latter, suggesting that the only integration worth having requires the popularly driven transformation of society. For those in the other, positive, camp, the ‘Europhile left’, a commitment to internationalism implies embracing globalisation and its undoubted benefits in terms of material prosperity, seeing integration as an opportunity to govern globalisation processes more effectively and to ensure that its benefits are more equally distributed. In other words, they see the European institutions as being both reformable and potentially available as vehicles for the pursuit of a progressive agenda. They therefore support the principle of integration. With regard to integration’s current form they may either downplay or minimise the defects highlighted by those in the other, ‘Eurosceptical’, camp, or else accept much of their critique while insisting on the possibility of reform. In other words, they reject both a retreat to the nation state and a complete alternative to the existing framework, arguing that the latter can be changed ‘from within’. Consequently, while some may confine themselves to defending the existing institutions from attack by both right and left, others in the camp argue in favour of ‘further transfers of sovereignty to Europe; of further democratisation of the way that sovereignty is exercised (Crouch 2018), 2  This position too is one with deep roots. The PCI deputy and former Resistance-fighter, Antonio Giolitti, expressed his party’s opposition to Italy’s involvement in the European Coal and Steel Community with the argument that it would damage the Italian steel industry to the benefit of the French and German industries (Laneri 2017).

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and more energetic attempts to create a genuine European public sphere’ (Skrzypek 2013; Schildberg et  al. 2014; Wainwright 2018) (Newell 2019b: 302). Meanwhile, as is well known, social democratic parties have been in a state of continuing if uneven decline throughout Europe for the past three decades (Ignazi 2017), with most of the explanations advanced to account for the malaise focusing on one or the other of two sets of factors. On the ‘demand’ side of politics, they have to do with the declining political significance of traditional social cleavages such as class (Mair 1984, 1998), this in turn due to a wide range of economic, social and political changes having to do with rising living standards, lifestyle changes and the way in which people relate to political parties. On the supply side, they have to do with the mediatisation and personalisation of campaigning; the rise of cartel parties (Katz and Mair 1995) and the decline of parties of mass integration; the decline of ideology, and change in the ways parties relate to voters (Manin 1997). At the same time, by depriving national governments of many of their powers to shape public policy and underpinning the emergence of the neo-liberal consensus, globalisation has rendered parties of the left vulnerable, in the face of the Great Recession, to the loss of large numbers of their former natural supporters to populist parties of the right. Unable to offer to the so-called losers of globalisation (Kriesi et al. 2006)—economically insecure and uncomfortable with the cultural effects of globalisation especially mass migration—proposals significantly different to those of their conservative rivals, social democrats have lost out to new outsider parties and political entrepreneurs claiming a unique affinity with ordinary people and their concerns. Against this background, the underlying argument of this book is that the two crises—of the EU and of social democracy—are intimately linked, and my purpose in writing it is twofold: first, to explore the substance and the merits of the social democratic case for further European integration in opposition to writers associated with Lexit and social democratic ‘Euroscepticism’ more generally. In essence, I will ask: To what extent is there a European policy agenda available that might credibly allow social democrats to reverse the ‘globalisation backlash’ in the sense of effectively getting to grips with the issues of economic and employment insecurity which constitute part of what it means to be a ‘loser of globalisation’ in the first place? Second, I shall ask: What does the available evidence tell us about the scope for incorporating such a project into an effective,

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vote-winning narrative capable of bringing globalisation’s losers back into the social democratic fold? The purpose of this chapter is to set the scene for this discussion by asking what contribution mainstream parties of the left have made to European integration as it has unfolded since the war. In order to do this, we begin by considering the term itself.

European Integration and Parties’ Stances As is well known, ‘European integration’ refers to the process whereby member states have increasingly transferred their sovereignty to the supranational, European institutions. Hence, there has been increasing uniformity in the rules and regulations governing an increasingly wide range of economic and social activities within the member states. This is because, in establishing the European institutions and European law, the treaties creating them have given rise, with respect to the member states’ legal systems, to a superior legal order whereby European law is directly applicable in the member states and cannot be overridden by domestic law. The principle was first established by an obscure case before the European Court of Justice in 1964. The processes and the legal arguments that led to the case coming before the Court were complex; but in essence, what became famous as the Costa versus Ente Nazionale per l’Energia Elettrica (ENEL) case arose from claims, by Mr Flaminio Costa, that nationalisation of the Italian electricity industry violated the Treaty of Rome as well as the Italian Constitution. The ruling was significant because it established the point that member-state citizens could challenge domestic law on grounds of its incompatibility with European law, since the latter would not be effective if they could not do so. In its ruling, the Court stated: By contrast with ordinary international treaties, the EEC Treaty has created its own legal system which, on the entry into force of the treaty, became an integral part of the legal systems of the member states and which their courts are bound to apply. By creating a Community of unlimited duration, having its own institutions, its own personality, its own legal capacity and capacity of representation on the international plane, and, more particularly, real powers stemming from a limitation of sovereignty or a transfer of powers from the states to the

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Community, the member states have limited their sovereign rights and thus created a body of law which binds both their nationals and themselves. The integration into the laws of each member state of provisions, which derive from the Community and more generally the terms and the spirit of the Treaty, make it impossible for the states, as a corollary, to accord precedence to a unilateral and subsequent measure over a legal system accepted by them on a basis of reciprocity. Such a measure cannot therefore be inconsistent with that legal system. The law stemming from the Treaty, an independent source of law, could not because of its special and original nature, be overridden by domestic legal provisions however framed, without being deprived of its character as Community law and without the legal basis of the Community itself being called into question. The transfer by the states from their domestic legal system to the Community legal system of the rights and obligations arising under the Treaty carries with it a permanent limitation of their sovereign rights.3

However, though it is common to speak of the ‘European integration project’, it is important to remember that integration has not proceeded according to any pre-ordained ‘master plan’. While the idea of a ‘project’ denotes an aspiration, the end state is frequently left unspecified (so that the resulting gap in political discourse often comes to be filled with negative images by the ‘project’s’ detractors). Consequently, while integration projects of varying scope have been proposed over the years, institutional and policy developments have been the result of political actors’ responses to specific needs in specific circumstances. In short, as the complexity of the European institutional framework and its procedures attest, integration has not been the result of the pursuit of any shared ‘end goal’, clearly defined by its protagonists from the outset. Nevertheless, since European integration is a process, commitment to it does imply commitment to the notion of ‘ever closer union’: to increasing supranationalism in an increasingly wide range of areas.4 There are several difficulties in the way of discerning where a party stands in relation to this process. First, if a party supports or opposes some specific proposal relating to it, then we cannot automatically assume that 3  Judgement of the Court of 15 July 1964. Flaminio Costa v E.N.E.L.  Reference for a preliminary ruling: Giudice conciliatore di Milano—Italy. Case 6-64. https://eur-lex. europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A61964 CJ0006 4  Meanwhile integration theories (e.g. Haas 1958; Moravcsik 1998; Pierson 1996), by offering to explain the process, implicitly hypothesise what the future will look like, so implying that there is something inevitable about this process all else equal.

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it supports or opposes integration in principle. Its stance in relation to the proposal could stem from a potentially infinite variety of motives. Again, a party’s stance on existing arrangements tells us nothing about its attitudes towards measures of further integration or even what this concept means to it. It is perfectly possible, as we have seen, to combine commitment to European integration in principle with strong criticism of the form integration currently takes, and in that sense to be ‘Eurosceptical’. However, this term is highly problematic for, if Euroscepticism is a variable, allowing us to distinguish between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ Eurosceptics, then it is by no means clear where the boundary between the two types must be drawn or even what or how many EU-related issues one must be critical of to count as a Eurosceptic of either variety (Mudde and Kopecký 2002; Beichelt 2004; Vasilopoulou 2009). And while scholars have developed several typologies of Euroscepticism, in the absence of agreement on what it amounts to, it is difficult to see what they add; for they ‘tend to differentiate between different degrees of the phenomenon without formulating a satisfactory definition’ (Crespy and Verschueren 2009: 381, cited by Carlotti 2018: 202) (Newell 2019b: 303).

To understand where parties stand on integration, then at the very least we have to understand the meanings they attach to the term as well as the objective circumstances facing them.

Parties of the Left and the Early Years of the Integration Process Leaving aside for the moment whatever pressure was exerted by the European movement,5 the first concrete steps on the path to integration were taken not by pan-European congresses pursuing ideals and blue-­ prints, but by individual ministers attached to national governments seeking immediate solutions to specific, more-or-less mundane, problems. And these ministers were not, in the main, representatives of the left. There is no reason to doubt that the two ‘founding fathers’ of Europe, Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman, shared high ideals concerning the continent. However, their plans for a supranational European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), announced in the Schuman Declaration of 5  The term used to refer to a range of civil-society organisations and interest groups that emerged in the late 1940s to advocate European unity.

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1950, were first and foremost driven by the immediate need to find means, in the War’s aftermath (a) to revive the French economy and (b) to reconcile German revival and French security. Neither of the main architects of the ECSC, Monnet and Schuman, had any affiliations with the left, and nor did any of the signatories of the 1951 Treaty of Paris giving life to the Community. This is not to say that the left was irrelevant, quite the reverse; after all, one of the most influential of the European movement’s leaders was the former communist, Altiero Spinelli, whose Ventotene manifesto set out the principles which inspired the foundation of the European Federalist Movement in 1943. But European integration at this time came much more naturally to the continent’s Christian Democrats whose Catholic followers, after all, ‘took part in the worship and work of a supranational church’ (Nelsen and Guth 2015: 160) and whose positive attitudes towards the project had roots which could be traced back to the battles of the Reformation era when the Roman church had sought to defend its pan-European hegemony. (Protestants, for the same reason, were widely assumed to be rather more lukewarm towards the project (Moravcsik 2016)). One might have expected, looking at the origins of European integration, to find the left playing a high-profile role in the integration process from the start. For one thing, the idea of integration speaks to the left-­ wing principle of international solidarity. Consequently, if integration was initiated with different aims, by forces other than ones on the left, then one might have expected the left ‘to establish a co-ordinated attempt to re-direct the process … towards its own distinctive objectives’ (Featherstone 1986: 1–2). For another thing, as Vernon Bogdanor (2013) has pointed out, in the immediate post-war years, the idea of Europe became, for a time, an element of the popular consciousness on the continent—partly because people had seen the struggle against Hitler as a supranational struggle. They perceived the war against him not merely as a conventional war between nation states but as a common European struggle for a certain conception of European civilisation. The war itself therefore seemed to take on the character of a war of belief on which nations themselves were divided. Two of the leading elements of the anti-Nazi Resistance were elements of the Catholic Church and the socialist movement. The Resistance therefore gave rise to the possibility of a revived international socialism and to a new political force: a democratic catholic party called Christian democracy. These two ideologies could therefore come together in the cause of European unity and they are still the two most powerful

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forces in the European Parliament. Yet, not only were parties of the left confined, by and large, to responding ‘to [integration] proposals initiated by others’ (Featherstone 1986: 1), but their responses were neither uniform nor uniformly positive. There were at least three reasons for this. First, the left was aware that, as originally conceived in the war’s immediate aftermath, integration was in many ways designed to undermine or at least contain it. The Cold War overshadowed everything, colouring domestic politics, and having real consequences for European states’ internal affairs (no more so than in Italy where the principal party representative of the left, and one of the two largest parties in the system, was a communist party). The European integration project at this time was closely associated, both in the popular imagination and in terms of historical fact, with the Marshall Plan and the establishment of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). If the purpose of the first was to contain Communism within European countries, then the purpose of the second was to defend these countries from the Communist threat from without. Meanwhile, the United States was a strong supporter of European integration. The reduction in trade barriers and other steps towards economic integration brought increased prosperity to the European countries and with it deeper and more extensive trading relationships with the US. This in turn helped to foster the development of the North Atlantic alliance. So in the early post-war period, many on the left tended to ignore Europe,6 perceiving the emerging European institutions entirely from the perspective of their Cold War implications and therefore as vehicles of an unwelcome US hegemony. Ideas that they could be effective vehicles of a progressive purpose were, if anything, a minority view among the main European parties of the left. Second, despite rhetorical commitments to principles of internationalism, parties of the left tended to see the things they stood for, in almost exclusively national terms. After all, extension of the welfare state—whose modern planks were laid in the immediate post-war years—was, precisely, a project for an expansion in the role of the national state. What came to be called Keynesian demand management (largely unheard of prior to Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’) apparently gave the national state a whole new battery of means of steering economies and therefore the tools to improve 6  For example, at the eighth PCI Congress in December 1956, ‘Togliatti devoted only one minute of his speech to Europe, almost as if to emphasise how marginal an issue it was’ (Maggiorani 1998: 47).

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the living standards of the left’s constituency: the working class. Not surprisingly, then, one of the most iconic figures on the post-war British left, Tony Benn, an ardent, life-long opponent of British involvement in the European integration project, entitled the volume of his memoirs dealing with the 1950s, Years of Hope, as Vernon Bogdanor (2014) explains. He asked Benn why he gave the volume that title, and says that the reply he got was: ‘“One had to remember the atmosphere of confidence then”. He said, “Britain had won the war, secured full-employment after it, a national health service, and a welfare state. She had secured collective security through the NATO alliance and through supporting America in Korea”. Benn said that there seemed almost nothing that Britain couldn’t achieve, if she set her mind to it.’ Lest one think that Benn’s mind set was peculiarly British (though it was that too), the Italian Communist Party (PCI) from its perspective was equally national in outlook. In the immediate post-war years, the party equated European integration with Italian subservience to the US. From 1956, it had the freedom (granted by the famous twentieth congress of the Soviet Communist Party) to pursue its own, national, ‘road to socialism’—but which it now had to defend from the attacks of communist parties in other European countries (notably France), where perspectives on what the right road to socialism was, were different. Third, in the immediate post-war period European integration was an essentially ambiguous project. On the one hand, the pressures driving integration forward were strong. It is enough to remember that the European Economic Community (EEC) and all the other European institutions of this period were conceived, negotiated, agreed upon, set up and got running during the course of little over a decade after the cessation of hostilities: a remarkable achievement if one compares it with the pace of integration in the years since then. The achievement is explained by the fact that in the war’s immediate aftermath, the six founding members of Europe were all defeated powers, which had been overrun by Nazism and which had to rebuild their political institutions from scratch. Countries like Italy, under the Christian Democrat, Alcide de Gasperi, contemplating post-war reconstruction, saw European integration, with its opportunities for free trade and export-led growth, as offering the prospect of a solution to the structural problems of the Italian economy, especially mass unemployment and an underdeveloped South, problems Mussolini had sought to resolve by pursuing imperial ambitions (Ginsborg 1990: 160). For France it offered the prospect of security, for Germany a way back into

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international polite society. On the other hand, the aims and objectives of the Schuman plan reflected traditional foreign policy goals adopted in pursuit of national interests, as Alan Milward has argued. European integration policy at this time was, Milward asserts, an ‘integral part of the reassertion of the nation-state as an organizational concept’ (Milward 1992: 3, quoted by Loth 2008: 13–14). This was because the policy constituted ‘a new form of agreed international framework created by the nation-states to advance particular sets of national domestic policies which could not be pursued, or not be pursued successfully, through the already-­ existing international framework of cooperation between interdependent states, or by renouncing international interdependence’ (Milward et  al. 1992: 182, quoted by Loth 2008: 14). Indeed, integration was initially a project to save the existing nation states after the battering they had taken at the hands of the 1930s depression and National Socialism and now, seemingly threatened by communism. Moreover, there was nothing new in any of this. European institutions with the objective of peaceful coexistence had existed at least as far back as the 1814–1815 Congress of Vienna where participants sought peaceful coexistence as the means to ensure the maintenance of traditional orders against radical threats inspired by the French revolution and American independence. Consequently, in the early years, the principal parties of the left in Europe developed stances towards integration that more directly reflected their distinct domestic circumstances and their perceptions of national requirements than they did any internationalist vocation, and any uniform or coordinated response was notable only for its absence. For example, the Belgian socialists, operating in a consociational environment, more often in government than in opposition, were from the outset at one with the other major Belgian parties in supporting European integration. Led by Paul-Henri Spaak, one of integration’s original architects, they, like their Dutch and Luxembourg counterparts, understood and accepted the geostrategic vulnerability and the economic limitations of a small state sandwiched between two large neighbours, and they were familiar with the conventions of seeking agreement through negotiation. The Spanish and Portuguese socialists were enthusiastic supporters of their countries’ accession in 1986 because they saw it as instrumental in the consolidation of democracy domestically. The West German Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), under Kurt Schumacher, opposed the Council of Europe and the Schuman plan, which it perceived as damaging to the cause of German unity. However, it supported the EEC proposal (aware of the

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popularity of the European ideal and its perceived association with prosperity) while remaining concerned with its restricted geographical scope, before becoming one of the socialist parties most strongly in favour of integration. The Danish social democrats, after the war, pursued cooperation with the other Scandinavian countries through the Nordic Council set up in 1952, but maintained a strictly pragmatic approach to international matters and in the face of widespread anti-German sentiments would not join any supranational European organisation as long as the UK, as its largest export market, would not. In the referendum on EEC membership in 1972, Danish social democrats were divided, many fearing that membership would benefit farmers at the expense of workers who would be exposed to new competitive pressures and forced to pay more for foodstuffs. While a majority in the party supported membership as an example of economic cooperation, the party as a whole reflected a broader consensus in the party system in opposing any extension of supranational competence and it campaigned against the Single European Act in the referendum of 1986. Finally, while socialist parties had been cooperating with each other since the nineteenth century and had formed the Socialist International in 1951 and the Confederation of the Socialist Parties of the EC in 1974, the latter’s decisions required unanimity. Not surprisingly, then, at the European Parliament elections of 1979 and 1984, the Confederation struggled to translate common socialist principles into a common platform all the parties could sign up to without insisting on ‘opt-outs’ from certain parts (the British and the Danes providing the most noteworthy examples) and it remained a minor influence in the parties’ internal workings. After the signing of the Treaty of Rome in 1957, the next great milestone on the road to European integration was the Single European Act of 1986. By then, the Common Agricultural Policy had been created; member states had established a customs union between themselves; Denmark, Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and the UK had joined; the European Monetary System, and direct elections to the European Parliament, had been established. The principal parties of the left in the member states had reached what Featherstone (1986: 3) refers to as ‘a fragile consensus’ on participation in the integration process, if not on its point of arrival. The consensus was the product of three factors. First, integration itself meant that the parties had long been obliged to come to terms with the European institutions as arenas of political contestation and decision-making and therefore as ones in which they had to be

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involved. In other words, with the emergence and development of the European institutions, the parties found themselves operating within a new and changing institutional framework to which they had to adapt. For example, the PCI, though it had initially been hostile to the European institutions, seeing them as indissolubly linked to American foreign policy interests in containing the Soviet Union, had by the 1960s begun to tread its own independent path. Having once seen the European institutions as an obstacle to peaceful coexistence between the superpowers, it now saw them as facilitators of peace. Consequently, the party now sought to overturn its exclusion from the European Parliament (EP). Before it was directly elected, the parliament’s members ‘consisted of representatives of each Member State elected by its Parliament or appointed by a procedure laid down by the latter’ (Muñoz 2016: 2–3), so that it was not until 1969 that the PCI was able to send representatives to the institution. Second, the so-called permissive consensus on Europe—the relative public indifference (shown by low EP election turnouts) to processes of EU policy making on the assumption that they would be conducted in the public interest (Lindberg and Scheingold 1970; Hooge and Marks 2009)—in many, if not all, cases freed party elites from pressures from within and outside their parties. Moving in European circles thanks to the first factor, these elites seem to have undergone a socialisation process, which might help to explain why they tended to be stronger supporters of integration than ordinary party members (Featherstone 1999: 310–12). Finally, integration has always had a clear economic rationale in terms of free trade, the theory of comparative advantage and the overall increase in welfare and prosperity that derives from that. Consequently, even though integration had taken place on capitalist terms, the ideological flexibility of at least the mainstream parties of the left meant that participation in Europe could be embraced for the purely pragmatic reason that it offered to increase the living standards of the parties’ supporters. For example, economic considerations, that is market access, were the primary, if not the exclusive drivers, of support on the part of the British Labour Party and the Danish social democrats for membership applications in the 1960s. And of course, economic considerations could also lead parties to adopt stances inimical to the European ideal—for example, the French socialists were tough on the Spanish and Portuguese applications, fearful of the consequences for southern French farmers—thus adding an additional component to the fragility of the consensus on participation.

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Parties of the Left and European Integration Since 1986 Thanks to the Single European Act (SEA) and subsequent developments, from 1986, integration began to raise issues that distinguished more clearly than hitherto between parties of left and right. In other words, if until then parties of the left had stances on integration that reflected national requirements and were therefore not especially distinctive from those of parties of the right, from the mid-1980s, alternative visions of Europe emerged which clearly distinguished the two groups. In the first instance, this was because of the implications of the SEA’s single-market objectives. As is well known, the SEA was ultimately inspired by objectives set out in the Treaty of Rome. Of these, the elimination of tariffs on intra-­ EC trade had largely been completed by 1968, but the elimination of non-tariff barriers and obstacles to the free movement of people, capital, goods and services had not. Moreover, by the early 1980s, EC policy makers and heads of member states were becoming increasingly concerned that fragmentation of the EC market was causing the Community as a whole to suffer a declining share of world trade along with increasing penetration in many markets by Japan and the US. They were aware that removal of tariffs in the 1960s had led to dramatic increases in trade between member states and believed that similar increases could be achieved through free movement and the elimination of non-tariff barriers. Consequently, when in 1985 Jacques Delors became president of the Commission a single-market programme embodying these objectives was announced as a means of relaunching an integration effort widely perceived as having stagnated in the 1970s, raising EC competitiveness in world markets and reducing prices and costs for European consumers and producers. The emphasis on deregulation meant that politicians such as Margaret Thatcher were enthusiastic. The SEA set out the formal procedures necessary to complete the single market by the end of 1992. These included an extension, to the relevant policy areas, of qualified majority voting in the Council. So the SEA represented a significant milestone in terms of European integration; and, what had perhaps been less clearly perceived to begin with, it created significant pressures for integration in areas of social policy (so giving some credence to ‘neo-functionalist’ theories of integration and their concept of spillover). For the elimination of trade barriers and enhanced competitiveness were understood to create

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the risk of social dumping as firms attempted to compete by exerting downward pressure on labour and related costs (Senior Nello 2012: 125–6). The Social Charter developed by the Commission to respond to this problem was greeted with hostility by many business groups and those on the right most notably Margaret Thatcher, but warmly welcomed by trade unions and those on the left. The Charter, signed in 1989 by eleven of the twelve heads of government, excluding Thatcher, set out a series of rights under a number of headings, including employment and remuneration, and improvement of living and working conditions. It provided the basis for a series of legally binding Directives on entitlement to maternity leave (1992), working time (1993) and protection of young people at work (1994). It also formed the basis of the Social Protocol to the Maastricht Treaty. This allowed the EC to adopt legislation in a wider range of employment-related areas (including health and safety, working conditions, gender equality and the information and consultation of workers) by qualified majority voting; and it enhanced the role of organised management and labour in implementing EC legislation. Finally, the Charter also provided the basis for the Commission’s Medium Term Social Action Programme for 1995–1997 published in April 1995, which stated, ‘it is not possible to ensure sustainable economic growth without taking the social dimension into account. Social progress and social solidarity must form an integral part of the European approach to competitiveness’ (cited by Lourie 1997: 11). Consequently, social democratic parties which in the earlier period had been divided or hostile to integration, most notably the British Labour Party, now became supportive. Significant, in this respect was the fact that the Charter’s principal architect, Delors, was a member of the French Socialist Party. He had helped to reverse earlier attitudes of hostility on the British left (expressed by Labour’s 1983 general election commitment to EC withdrawal) by a speech setting out at the Trades Union Congress (TUC) in 1988 his vision of a European Social Space. ‘Ron Todd, general secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union, the forerunner to Unite, declared that, with the Tories in power, Brussels was now “the only game in town” as far as his members were concerned’ (Stern 2019). The Social Charter was, therefore, much more than simply a technical solution to a specific economic problem but reflected ‘a political “project” (Hall 2011: 10), one focussed not just on a set of policies but on the attempt to alter, society-wide, modes of organisation, thought and value’ (Newell 2019c: 39). It reflected an idea of Europe, one which directly

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counter-posed Jacques Delors, as its principal representative, to Margaret Thatcher, as the principal representative of the opposing idea. Both saw themselves as engaged in a political and intellectual battle against the other to shape Europe’s future. For Thatcher, the European project was one to be based on ‘the liberalisation of markets, the deregulation of manufacturing and finance, the privatisation of state-owned enterprises, small government and balanced budgets’ (Bitumi 2018: 3); for Delors it was one which had to have social protection at its heart. The conflict between the two leaders was therefore a cultural one: an ethic of individualism versus an ethic of community. And it was no accident that Margaret Thatcher’s Bruges speech—in which she famously said, ‘We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them re-imposed at a European level’—and Jacques Delors’ TUC speech were delivered within two weeks of each other. The social democratic parties at this time therefore had a clear-cut rationale for positive engagement with the integration process. If the discourse around the idea of ‘a social Europe’ was ‘the antithesis to a raw free-market Europe’ (Worth 2006), and if the parties’ mission was, as Colin Crouch (2013) expressed it, ‘to make capitalism fit for society’, then integration now seemed to offer them a viable alternative to reform through national Keynesianism. This had appeared to run into the ground in the 1970s and 1980s, thanks to ongoing trade liberalisation;7 the decline of Fordist manufacturing in Western countries; shifts in the world division of labour and the emergence of global supply chains associated with the accelerating pace of globalisation. Famously, François Mitterrand and the French Socialist Party had come to power in 1981 on a radical programme involving nationalisation, wage increases and increases to the wealth tax—only to be forced to abandon Keynesian strategies in 1983 and to adopt more conservative policies to keep the franc in the European Monetary System. ‘This highlighted in particular how the constraints of an increasingly integrated West European economy could curtail the freedom of action of a more radical government’ (Holmes and Roder 2021). Before then, in 1976 the British Prime Minister, James Callaghan, had equally famously signalled ‘a turning point in modern British politics away from the traditional economic policies and instruments of the post-war 7  Through the successive rounds of global trade negotiations held under the auspices of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.

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consensus, and for some the death throes of Keynesian social democracy in an emerging era of so-called “New Realism”’ (Meredith 2013) by declaring: The cosy world we were told would go on for ever, where full employment would be guaranteed by a stroke of the Chancellor’s pen, cutting taxes, deficit spending, that cosy world is gone. … We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession, and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting Government spending. I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists, and that in so far as it ever did exist, it only worked on each occasion since the war by injecting a bigger dose of inflation into the economy, followed by a higher level of unemployment as the next step.8

Consequently, the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, which established the institutional framework for Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) and considerably extended Community competences, also appeared to offer the social democrats a viable alternative to national Keynesianism; for it was a further development of the single-market project provided for by the SEA. The perceived advantages of EMU were multiple. It would reduce firms’ transaction costs. By removing exchange-rate uncertainty, it would make firms’ planning and investment easier. In so doing, it would lead to an expansion of trade. It would enable the participating countries collectively to carry greater weight in their dealings with third countries. All of this would bring higher growth of ultimate benefit to European citizens generally. It was therefore supported by all the European social democratic parties, aware of their dependence on economic growth to provide the resources for reform, and to render politically feasible redistributive measures in the name of equality. Two of the principal architects of EMU, Delors and Mitterand, were men of the left. The June 1989 European Council meeting, ‘decisive for … the fate of EMU’ (Dinan 2004: 239) was chaired by the Spanish Socialist, Felipe González. In the UK, deep Conservative divisions on EMU combined with Thatcher’s bitter hostility to it was decisive in lining up the Labour Party behind the project, enabling it, in a two-party system, to exploit its opponent’s divisions in asserting the greater credibility of its own economic policies and to come to terms with globalisation (Featherstone 1999: 6). 8  From James Callaghan’s speech to the Labour Party annual conference, 1976, available at http://www.britishpoliticalspeech.org/speech-archive.htm?speech=174

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However, during the two decades following the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty, European socialists found themselves becoming increasingly caught up in what Holmes and Roder (2021) have referred to as ‘the integration trap’. That is, precisely because of the deepening of the powers allocated to European institutions, which they had supported, far from being able to dictate agendas at the European level, they were forced to adapt to agendas set by others. Moreover, these agendas were often, if not for the most part, inimical to the parties’ traditional objectives in terms of redistribution and welfare. There were three reasons for this. First, notwithstanding the broad consensus on integration they had reached by the early 1990s, European social democrats remained in other respects ideologically and therefore organisationally divided. They had embraced the idea of European-level ex-ante regulation to replace national-­ level ex-post demand management as a means of governing markets; but otherwise, their focus remained national and their outlook intergovernmental. Consequently, they had no shared vision of the future of integration; and when they came together to form the Party of European Socialists (PES) in 1992, their initiative was less an embrace of transnationalism than a pragmatic adaptation to institutional imperatives and the search for coordination in advance of European Council meetings (March 2013: 3). Its purpose was to aggregate, not to limit national party preferences. It remained an agent of national principals (Hanley 2008: 66, cited by March 2013: 3); and while it enhanced the policy influence its member parties collectively could exercise, it was confined mainly to exercising think tank and networking functions. Its manifestos did nothing to change the character of EP elections as second-order national elections (Reif and Schmitt 1980). As bland, lowest-common-denominator documents, manifestos failed, due to their vagueness, to function effectively as tools for action in relation to which the parties could be held effectively to account. Finally, the PES was divided from other forces on the left: the Greens and the radical left, which had their own European parties and were themselves divided on integration-related issues. For a brief period, between 1997 and 2002, when social democratic parties had held office in thirteen of the fifteen member states, it had seemed as though ‘a common agenda intended to influence the EU through coordinated action in its central institutions’ (Ladrech 2000: 1) had the potential to emerge. However, while it would be incorrect to

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suggest that a distinct and direct policy impact was completely absent,9 the difficulties involved in the realisation of a European social democratic project were already apparent at the time. They included dependence on national electoral cycles and ‘the lack of a facilitating institutional system at the European level’ (Ladrech 2000: 9),10 besides the national blockages and intra- and inter-party politics already mentioned. Second, following the marked acceleration of the 1985–1995 period, European integration ran into increasingly large obstacles. For one thing, the enlargements of 1995, 2004 and 2007 complicated matters. They inevitably made change more difficult by increasing the diversity of interests, and the number of veto players, the EU had to accommodate and contend with. Although the institutional changes contained in the Amsterdam (1997) and the Nice (2001) treaties were designed partly to address this issue, enlargement itself could not be resisted. With the end of the Cold War, the long-standing rhetorical claim to pan-European inclusiveness (not to mention its own long-term economic and security interests) meant that the EU could not close its doors to East European states also in search of the security and prosperity associated with membership (Dinan 2004: 267–8). Meanwhile, as EU policy making became an increasingly significant reality in the everyday lives of European citizens, complaints about Europe’s so-called democratic deficit became an increasingly significant theme in public discussion of its institutions. The theme had already emerged in 1992 when it had taken the Danes two referenda to get the Maastricht treaty ratified and when, in the French referendum, the treaty had passed by the narrowest of margins. An Irish referendum in June 2001 held up ratification of the Nice treaty. A Convention on the Future 9  For example, March (2013: 4) notes that the PES ‘played a critical role in getting the Employment Chapter inserted into the 1997 Amsterdam Treaty and developing the 1999 European Employment Pact’. 10  Only the European parliament is organised along partisan lines and its role in relation to the Commission and the Council is not the same as that of a national parliament in relation to its executive branch. Meanwhile, the Council provides a forum for intergovernmental bargaining in which interest inevitably trumps ideology. ‘Calls by Belgian and French socialists during the Amsterdam Treaty negotiations, for example, to provide protection for public services (state-run public utilities) from the vagaries of the EU’s competition policy have little relevance in states where these services are now in the private sector (the UK) or have been for generations (the Netherlands). Thus trying to mobilize sister parties around an issue that is clearly leftist—at least to Belgian and French socialists—found only minimal support’ (Ladrech 2000: 9–10).

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of the European Union, established by the European Council in December 2001, had aimed to enhance the efficiency, transparency and democratic legitimacy of the EU institutions. However, its draft ‘constitution’ had to be abandoned following rejection by French and Dutch voters in referenda held in May and June 2005. Democratisation was a demand that had been voiced on the left for decades; and the 2009 Lisbon treaty, bringing into being a number of the reforms that had been envisaged by the abandoned ‘constitution’, sought to close the gap between institutions and citizens by, among other things, enhancing the power of the European parliament. However, this provision clashed with demands to respond to the democratic deficit by returning powers to the member states and ratification once again provided the disaffected with an opportunity to derail integration in national referenda: as with Nice, it took two Irish referenda to get the treaty passed. Third, the Great Recession of 2008 revealed that integration as it had proceeded to that point made it impossible for socialists in government to avoid having to respond to the economic crisis with austerity measures of greatest damage to the ordinary people they claimed to represent. The Greek sovereign debt crisis exemplified the problem. As a member of the Eurozone, the Greek government was unable to deal with the situation by devaluing the currency. On the one hand, this would have made its debts cheaper by reducing the value of the bonds that had been bought by the holders of non-Eurozone currencies. On the other hand, the government needed to kick-start growth, which also required devaluation as productivity was generally lower than in other Eurozone countries. With interest rates and the level of debt beginning to spiral out of control, in May 2010 the Greek government was forced to accept a bailout of €110 billion from the EU, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Central Bank in exchange for severe austerity measures. Thanks to the continuing pressure on the debt from growing recession, the package proved inadequate and in July 2011, a further bailout of €109 billion had to be arranged. As it became clear that even this would not solve Greece’s problems, investors began to worry about other Eurozone countries with the risk that a self-fulfilling prophecy might take hold whereby rising interest rates on these governments’ borrowing brought about that very un-­ sustainability of debt that was driving rates up in the first place. Meanwhile, the possibility of financial contagion revealed that the crisis was one for the Eurozone as a whole. If the stronger countries refused to

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support the ones in difficulties, then the risk was that the situation might spin out of control with growing debt and spiralling interest rates on government bonds leading eventually to the weaker countries’ insolvency. However, to the extent that attempts to avoid such a scenario required bailouts and austerity measures, there was the likelihood and the actuality of resistance to austerity in the debtor countries, and popular resentment against financial aid packages in the creditor countries—with all that implied for any political project of European integration. The problem seemed to preclude its own solution. On the one hand, an EU-wide system of taxation, with the EU as a whole taking over responsibility for the indebted countries’ liabilities, would have made possible, between the economically prosperous and less prosperous regions of the Union, the resource transfers that happen as a matter of course between more and less prosperous regions within individual nation states. On the other hand, any such proposal would have had to come to terms with the need to get them approved through the Union’s weakly supranational governance structures and the difficulties of doing this given that the structures are dominated by governments, each of which is sensitive to the pressures exerted on it by its own national electorate.

Conclusion Social democratic parties have in the main been ‘rule takers’ rather than ‘rule makers’ in the process of European integration. Though rhetorically committed to principles of internationalism, their perspectives have always been nationally focused, and consequently they have struggled to develop a coordinated attempt to direct the process of integration towards their own preferred objectives. The mid-1980s marked a watershed in the process in that from then on, ‘Europe’ ceased to be a matter confined largely to the realms of foreign policy and to the horizons of the few that were interested in it, to become an increasing reality in the everyday lives of its citizens. Socialist parties thus came to see integration as a means of managing the globalisation that had undermined their earlier strategies for reform and therefore as a potential vehicle for the pursuit of their concerns. However, both the intergovernmentalism and the supranationalism of Europe seem largely to have defeated them: if the former has obstructed the coordinated pursuit of reform, then the latter has obliged social

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democrats, in government, to accept retrenchment. The Greek referendum on a third bailout in July 2015 called by the country’s leftist Syriza government was iconic. Though the bailout conditions were rejected by 61% to 39%, eight days later the government was forced, in order to stave off the risk of sovereign default, depression and a Greek exit from the Eurozone, to agree to a three-year bailout involving even harsher conditions than the ones voters had rejected. The event was emblematic of European citizens’ growing cynicism towards the EU, and of the left’s seeming powerlessness ‘to use democracy to address capitalism’s negative consequences’ (Berman 2020). Increasingly seen as a constraint on social democratic programmes rather than a facilitator of them, European integration appeared, far from revitalising social democracy, to have accelerated its decline. In the following chapter, we shall consider this decline in more detail.

CHAPTER 3

The Crisis of Social Democracy: Why Is the Mainstream Left in Europe Struggling, Electorally?

Introduction All over Europe, social democracy—the promise to use legislative reform to extend principles of equality and collective responsibility from the political to the economic and social spheres—is in dire trouble. Social democratic parties that once dominated the political landscape in Europe have since the Great Recession seen unprecedented falls in support. Starting in Greece, with the collapse in support for Pasok from 43.9% in 2009 to 4.8% in January 2015, and continuing in Ireland and Iceland in 2016 (with the Labour Party and the Social Democratic Alliance reduced to 6.6% and 5.7% respectively), social democracy seemed, by 2017, to be undergoing a veritable implosion in many countries. In the latter year, the once-mighty German SPD—the grandfather of European social democracy (Eaton 2018)—was reduced to 20.5% from the 34.2% it had enjoyed in 2005; in the French presidential election, the Socialist candidate, Benoît Hamon, received 6.4% of the vote, down from the 28.6% received by the party’s candidate, François Hollande, in 2012; in the Netherlands the Labour Party retreated to 5.7% from the 24.8% it had enjoyed in 2012. In the remainder of the chapter we discuss five alternative explanations for the malaise.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. L. Newell, European Integration and the Crisis of Social Democracy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08822-3_3

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Pasokification So dramatic were these falls that they were thought to represent a new phenomenon: ‘pasokification’ (the Economist, 2016, 2018; Barbieri 2017; Henley 2017; Eaton 2018), or as one suggested definition has it, ‘reducing a country’s main social democratic party to the smallest party in parliament as the result of the rise of a more radical left party’;1 and in fact, at the Greek parliamentary election of January 2015, Pasok’s 2009 position as the party with by far and away the largest number of seats was taken by the Coalition of the Radical Left (Syriza) while, in a perfect inversion of their relative sizes, its own seat share was reduced to just thirteen. In other cases, the collapse of the mainstream centre left was accompanied by rises and in some cases explosions of support for parties of a different stripe: sub-state nationalist parties (in the case of Scotland in the UK election of 2015); completely new and ‘big-tent’ parties (in the case of France in 2017 and Italy in 2018); far-right populist parties (in the case of the Netherlands in 2017) and Green parties (in the case of the European Parliament (EP) elections in Germany in 2019). Pasokification appeared to be more or less directly bound up with the Great Recession, coming, as it did, hard on the heels of the fall-out from the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008, and it was this which gave it the appearance of a new phenomenon; for it seemed to defy expectations that a capitalist crisis and hard times would work directly to the benefit of the left and its themes of redistribution and market regulation (Keating and McCrone 2013). On the contrary, in Greece, Pasok in office from 2009 soon found itself caught up in a vicious circle of declining support and austerity measures as it sought to get to grips with the debt crisis; while Syriza, its radical-left successor, suffered a similar fate when in office from 2015. In Spain, the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) too fell victim to the financial crisis. Losing the election of 2012 to Mariano Rajoy’s Partido Popular (PP), which was thus left alone in office to deal with the ongoing economic difficulties, it found itself unable to unseat Rajoy at the subsequent 2015 election when its support was nearly equalled by the anti-­ establishment Podemos at its first outing in a national election. Podemos, like Syriza, had emerged from obscurity as an expression of anti-austerity protests, so that pasokification was explained as the 1   https://www.collinsdictionary.com/submission/16117/pasokification https://www.fundeu.es/consulta/pasokizar-pasokizacion/

See

also

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consequence of social democrats either imposing or failing to deliver on promises to reverse, austerity and being punished by the defection of socially conservative voters to far-right nationalist parties (such as Alternative für Deutschland) and of other voters to more-or-less new, leftwing alternatives such as Syriza, France Insoumise, Die Linke in Germany or the Socialist Party in the Netherlands (Eaton 2018). Even where social democratic parties had managed to avoid outright pasokification, their decline seemed to lend support to this straightforward explanation for their difficulties: their apparent inability to act as vehicles for alternatives to austerity. The decision of the SPD in early 2018 to agree to a new grand coalition with the Christian Democratic Union of Germany/Christian Social Union in Bavaria (CDU/CSU) and their fall to an unprecedented 15.8% in the EP elections the following year seemed to support the thesis—as did the performance of the Labour Party in the UK general election of 2017, this precisely because it was a counter example.2 The pasokification thesis suffers from two difficulties as an explanation of the social democratic parties’ electoral travails. The less important of the two is that in one or two countries, social democrats have, despite their difficulties, managed to stage something of a come-back in the most recent period. In Spain, for example, PSOE managed to bring down the minority PP government, in June 2018, through a motion of no-confidence, and in the following year’s election emerged as the largest party for the first time in eleven years, mainly at the expense of Podemos, whose vote share declined by one-third.3 In Portugal, the Socialists in 2019 increased their seat share in the 230-seat parliament from 86 to 106 so consolidating the position they had held since 2015 as the principal party of government. In April and June, social democrats had staged modest recoveries in Finland and Denmark. So if the pasokification thesis had tended to predict the more or less imminent demise of social democrats, forced inevitably to renege on promises by the demands of international capital which they 2  The Labour Party fought the election on an explicitly left-wing, anti-austerity programme and to all-round surprise reduced what had been a 20% poll lead for the Conservatives at the start of the campaign to just two-and-a-half points by polling day (Newell 2017: 9). 3  At the second parliamentary election of 2019, on 10 November, PSOE retained its position as largest party, though it lost three seats and now faced a strengthened line-up of forces on the right, with gains for the PP (up from 66 to 88 seats) and an explosion in support for the far-right Vox, which increased its seats from 24 to 52.

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could not control, then these examples tended to undermine it. In Portugal, for instance, the Socialist-led government from 2015 had managed to combine both fiscal discipline and measures to stimulate the economy, so achieving both virtual elimination of budget deficits and a rate of growth higher than the EU average (Henley 2019). More importantly, pasokification struggles as an explanation of the social democrats’ electoral travails once it is borne in mind that the latter are in no sense recent, on the contrary. Mainstream parties of the left have been in a state of continuing if uneven decline throughout Europe for the past forty years (Table 3.1). This means that even if there is something to be said for the pasokification thesis, it is almost certainly not the whole story and, as it only refers to the period since the financial crash, it cannot by itself account for the decline over the four decades as a whole. Consequently, observers have turned their attention to alternative, long-­term, changes to account for the social democrats’ electoral difficulties.

Table 3.1  Vote shares received by the mainstream socialist/social democratic parties in parliamentary elections (%)

Austria Belgiuma Denmark Finland France Germany GB Ireland Italyb Netherlands Norway Portugal Spain Sweden

1980

1990

2000

2010

Most recent

51.0 12.4 12.7 38.3 23.9 37.5 42.9 36.9 9.9 40.2 28.3 37.2 27.3 30.4 43.2

42.8 12.0 13.5 37.4 22.1 34.8 33.5 34.4 9.5 29.7 31.9 34.3 29.1 39.6 37.7

33.2 9.5 10.2 29.1 22.9 24.1 38.5 40.7 10.8 16.6 15.1 24.3 44.1 34.2 36.4

29.3 9.2 13.7 24.8 19.1 29.4 23.0 29.1 19.5 37.6 19.6 35.4 36.6 28.8 30.7

21.2 6.7 9.5 25.9 17.7 7.4 20.5 40.0 6.6 18.7 5.7 27.4 36.4 28.7 28.3

Note: the figures relate to the parliamentary election closest in time to the date appearing at the top of each of the columns a Figures are for the Flemish socialist party (top line) and the French socialist party b Figures are for the elections of 1979 (PCI + PSI); 1992 (PDS + PSI); 2001 (DS); 2008 (PD); 2018 (PD)

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The Price of Success One school of thought attributes the decline of the mainstream centre left to its own success: to the idea that much of the traditional social democratic project has been achieved and is no longer contentious. The result has been that parties of the right have been willing to adopt as their own, policies originally championed by social democrats (the minimum wage in the UK would be a classic example), so depriving them of their distinctiveness and of a vision of the future (and thus their capacity for vote mobilisation). European social democratic parties emerged in the majority of cases in the final decades of the nineteenth century as parties of and for industrial workers. Once they had given up on the idea, first, of revolution as the means, and then, more hesitatingly, of the abolition of capitalism as the end, it followed that the goal of improving the lot of workers would have to involve using legislation to attempt to achieve the (not necessarily compatible) objectives of enhanced capitalist efficiency and greater economic equality. As it emerged in the aftermath of World War II, therefore, the social democratic project was one that sought to marry these two objectives through public ownership of key industries combined with Keynesian demand management, which together would stabilise the capitalist system and so provide the underpinning for an expansion of the welfare state and a regulated labour market, which in turn would enable workers to ‘become fully-fledged citizens of the consumer society’ (Sassoon 2013: 45). Even after the rise of neo-liberalism from the 1980s on (with its agenda of privatisation, outsourcing, the application of market principles to publicly provided services etc.), and notwithstanding neo-liberalism’s undermining of the social democratic project in some areas (e.g. labour-market regulation) and attempts to roll it back in others (e.g. welfare), basic planks of the social democratic edifice remained solidly intact. No one questioned the principle of publicly funded protection against ill-health and other potential causes of poverty (such as old age, dependent children, unemployment and so forth). The promotion of equality of opportunity, if not of outcome, was an obligation accepted by governments of all political colourings. The ‘success thesis’ thus has much to be said for it. The phenomenon of parties, especially single-issue parties, that struggle to survive once their

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objectives have been achieved is a fairly familiar one.4 Much of the social democrats’ core agenda for the regulated capitalist state, legislated for during the course of the twentieth century, was laid down at the end of the nineteenth5—in the immediate aftermath of which many of them achieved higher vote tallies than they were achieving at the beginning of the twenty-­ first century (Sassoon 2013: 39, table 2.5). Rhodes (2013) finds that comparing votes in 2000–2009 with the best average performance in any decade since the 1950s, losses have been greater in those countries where historically social democratic parties ‘were builders or co-builders of large highly decommodifying welfare states’ than in those countries ‘where welfare states have been weaker and labour markets less regulated’ (2013: 207); and that, though it is not the entire story, a large part of the difference has to do with the capacity of other parties in the former cases to change their welfare-state preferences, so weakening the electoral appeal of social democratic parties. Still, one might question the ‘success’ thesis on three grounds: first, recent increases in inequality,6 especially in the distribution of income and wealth, together with the increasing fragility of pensions systems among other things, raise questions about the durability of social democratic conquests: about how much ‘success’ there has actually been. Second, one would expect parties having lost, or in danger of losing, their raisons d’être to look for new ones; so as an explanation for social democratic difficulties, ‘success’ offers an account that is at best incomplete. Third, if the argument is that success means that people see little point in voting for the social democrats any more, then it becomes hard to explain why their most solid bases of support are among those in sectors of the labour market—with full-time permanent contracts and strong trade unions—that most closely resemble the social democratic ideal. On the face of it, at a time of unprecedented uncertainty and change all round, it seems more likely that their voting choices reflect a desire to defend their positions rather than a tendency for them to take their positions for granted. 4  A good, recent example, is UKIP. Having become Britain’s largest party at the EP elections of 2014 and so secured the 2016 Brexit referendum resulting in a majority vote to leave the EU, at the general election of 2017 it collapsed to 1.8% having lost its raison d’être. 5  In, for example, the German Social Democratic Party’s 1891 Erfurt Programme. This called for—among other things—free education, legal assistance and medical care to be paid for by graduated income and property taxes and an inheritance tax; an eight-hour day; a national system of employment insurance; abolition of payment in kind. 6  World Inequality Report 2018, World Inequality Lab, https://wir2018.wid.world/

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A further shortcoming of ‘success’ (and ‘pasokification’) is that they ignore the significant changes in the class structure in the period since the war, which therefore constitute another popular explanation of social democratic decline. As the parties traditionally sought to provide representation for the working class, it seemed to follow that support for them would decline if there were a decline in the size of this class or a decline in the proportions of the population accepting a working-class identity for themselves. The argument is that since approximately the late 1960s, both of these things have happened.

Working-Class Decline The term ‘class’ implies, first, the internal homogeneity of its members; second the existence of some qualitative distinction setting its members apart from those who are not members, and third, that these two things have a bearing on people’s self-understandings and their actions individual and collective. Given these three criteria, working-class status has traditionally been regarded as synonymous with being in manual employment since the latter reflected exclusion both from the control of physical production assets and from valued positions in the division of labour more readily accessible to those in non-manual occupations (Parkin 1979)—as a consequence of which, when seeking to address the problem of material security, manual workers were obliged to look to collectivist solutions, either through trade unions or political parties. Meanwhile, the sense on the part of manual workers that they shared a common identity and common interests was enhanced both by the nature of their employment (in close proximity in large, mass-production factories organised according to principles of scientific management) and by processes of social segregation and their interaction in distinct working-class neighbourhoods. Until the late 1960s, manual employment was sustained by a Fordist manufacturing system designed to produce large quantities of low-cost, standardised, products to be sold in protected domestic markets sustained by high wages and Keynesian demand management, making possible rising productivity and broadly shared prosperity. However, since Fordism was based on special-purpose equipment and machine-paced work performed mostly by unskilled labour, in the long run it reduced manufacturing employment since productivity gains could only be obtained by ever-increasing automation. Meanwhile, downward pressure on the number of manual jobs available in Europe and the West generally was also

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exerted by the so-called oil shock of 1973, the deregulation of international markets and the emergence of computer technology. The first of these three things refers to the quadrupling of oil prices that took place as a result of the 1973 Yom Kippur war between Israel and a coalition of Arab states led by Egypt and Syria, leading the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) to impose an oil embargo on countries perceived as supporting Israel, resulting in an increase in the price of oil globally of almost 400% by the end of the embargo in March 1974, and hence to increases in the prices of raw materials generally. The second of the three things, international deregulation, was partly related to the first insofar as the oil shock was thought to have been responsible for ‘stagflation’ which in turn led to Keynesian approaches to economic policy falling out of fashion and to the growing intellectual influence of neo-liberalism. It was also related to the 1947 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and, within that framework, to the successive rounds of international negotiations aimed at gradually eliminating tariffs and other barriers to trade. The overall result was a shift in the international division of labour, with capital flowing away from Western countries, and mass production being relocated in newly industrialising countries where labour power was cheaper and markets unregulated (Hilpert and Hickie 2013: 231). Meanwhile, the development of computer technology, the third element, made possible the emergence in the West of a new, ‘post-Fordist’, regime of capital accumulation. This was based on the production of small batches of less homogeneous, more diverse products and the emergence of global corporations looking to take advantage of economies of scope by offering a wide range of product lines—all made possible by the fact that the computer technology could both alter the characteristics of goods being produced and analyse data to produce goods in accordance with sudden shifts in demand. Instead of the unskilled manual worker of the Fordist economy, the ideal-typical employee of the post-Fordist firm was a highly skilled, flexible, white-­collar employee. There were a number of social and economic developments, more or less closely related to the emergence of post-Fordism, which reduced the likelihood that this employee would—as a worker, as a consumer and as a citizen of the late twentieth/early twenty-first century—have a working-­ class self-perception. First, deregulation and the new Internet technologies made possible outsourcing, vertical disintegration and the emergence of global supply chains. Hence, unlike his/her Fordist forebear (employed in a large plant and possibly living in a town whose economy was

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dominated by a single industry or company), the post-Fordist worker was as likely as not to be employed by a small firm specialised in a particular area of expertise. Second, s/he would be better educated than his/her forebears, more likely to see his/her future as determined by his/her own efforts than by collectivist endeavours (Hilpert and Hickie 2013: 239); and as a consumer would be targeted in a different way, as mass markets for consumer essentials became, relatively, less important as compared to markets for luxury, custom and positional goods—all of which worked in the direction of heightened senses of individualism; the encouragement to think of self in terms of new identities, and a breakdown in cultural uniformities. Finally, as a citizen of the early twenty-first century s/he would have opportunities, virtual and real,7 for escape from traditional work-class milieux, for exposure to cosmopolitan influences, which his/her parents’ generation of the 1950s and 1960s would only have been able to dream of. A major embarrassment for ‘working-class decline’ as an explanation for the social democrats’ travails is that, though the size of the class may have declined (leading one to expect some shrinkage in social democratic support for that reason), nevertheless some of the parties’ biggest setbacks in recent years have been found within the working class. Otherwise put: while it is true that the old Fordist, semi-skilled and unskilled workers have been declining as a proportion of the population as a whole, it is precisely among their ranks that the social democratic retreat has been at its greatest.8 ‘Work-class decline’ on its own struggles to explain this and indeed  Thanks to the Internet and low-cost air travel.  One of the clearest illustrations comes from the UK case where (despite some party-­ system fragmentation as elsewhere) the Conservatives and Labour have, thanks to the electoral system, broadly retained their overwhelming combined share of the vote and where, in the early post-war years, the class distribution of support between them was marked. Taking the odds of a person in a non-manual occupation voting Conservative rather than Labour and dividing by the corresponding odds for a person in a manual occupation gives an odds ratio of 6.4 for the 1964 election and 2.9 for the election held 41 years later in 2005 (Denver 2007, Table 4.2 p. 69). At the 2017 election, which saw Labour support rise across the board, the party advanced less among manual workers than among the rest of the population, bringing a further decline in the size of the correlation between class and vote (source: Ipsos MORI, https://www.ipsos.com/ipsos-mori/en-uk/how-britain-voted-­2017election?language_content_entity=en-uk). One of the most striking outcomes of the Italian general election of March 2018 was what was referred to as ‘the return of class voting, but in reverse’: the tendency of the centre-left Partito Democratico (Democratic Party, PD) to perform significantly better among those who perceived themselves as upper-middle class than among those who thought of themselves as working class: see De Sio (2018). 7 8

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would—given its account of the basis of working-class support for the social democrats in the first place—have if anything led us to expect the opposite trend; for the processes of economic and social change described above have, as Hilpert and Hickie (2013: 236) note, been ‘experienced by semi-skilled and unskilled workers as problems of unemployment and falling incomes’—this as the result of a twofold process: as the demand for mass-produced goods came increasingly to be met by robots or from outside the West, industrial restructuring here was accompanied by growing regional disparities; for the new knowledge-intensive, high-technology industries tended to develop in urbanised and metropolitan centres where the scientific and technical knowledge was most strongly present—with knock-on effects for the rest of the local economy. Thus displaced workers with few skills found themselves at a double disadvantage, first because of their lack of qualifications; second because any alternative jobs were likely to be located far away from where they lived. Given this, a fourth approach to explaining the social democratic malaise focuses on what is missing from accounts focusing exclusively on economic and social changes, namely, what social democrats have had to offer in recent years, that is, the nature of the political supply.

The Social Democratic Message Historically, social democracy has been an outgrowth of nineteenth-­ century Marxism with its emphasis on the international solidarity recalled in the famous slogan that concluded the 1848 Manifesto of the Communist Party, ‘Working Men [sic] of All Countries Unite!’ By the time this document was written, the importance of workers’ solidarity to overcome the inherent power imbalance between masters and labourers in settling the terms of employment contracts was already well understood and established in the early trade unions: what the document did was to extend the principle’s purpose from the defensive and reactive one of placing a floor under wages and conditions of work within capitalism to the aggressive and proactive one of uniting the working class in the effort to achieve a new order of things. What it also did was to suggest that solidarity would have to be universalistic in scope. In an early statement of the thesis of economic globalisation, it argued that ‘[m]odern industry [had] established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the way’; for ‘[t]he need of a constantly expanding market for its products [had chased] the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe’, so that

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‘[i]n place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we [had] intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations’. Consequently, the revolutionary abolition of private property would not be possible in one country alone; for, as Engels put it in ‘The Principles of Communism’ written a few months prior to publication of the Manifesto, ‘big industry [had] already brought all the peoples of the Earth … into such close relation with one another that none [was] independent of what happen[ed] to the others’.9 It seemed to follow from this that efforts to bring about the workers’ emancipation would have to be organised internationally and that workers’ parties would have to oppose wars between capitalist states which, in the words of the resolution adopted at the seventh International Socialist Congress in 1907, were ‘favoured by the national prejudices … systematically cultivated … in the interest of the ruling classes for the purpose of distracting the proletarian masses from their own class tasks as well as from their duties of international solidarity’.10 Famously, the Second International disintegrated as its constituent parties found it impossible to maintain a united front against the outbreak of World War I; but the tradition of international solidarity lingers on in the social democratic parties in the form of their opposition to all forms of racism and xenophobia; their preference for what international-relations scholars call ‘liberal internationalist’ as opposed to ‘realist’ approaches to international diplomacy, and their positive attitudes to cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism. Related to the commitment to international solidarity is social democracy’s ambition to guarantee to all members of society certain social and economic rights through public services provided universally, regardless of recipients’ backgrounds (Rothstein and Steinmo 2013). This distinguishes social democrats from conservatives. Arising from their view of society as an organic entity whose continued existence depends upon each of its differentiated components performing its allotted function in harmony with all of the others, conservatives are as concerned as social democrats to relieve poverty and as far as possible to eradicate Beveridge’s five

 https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf  https://www.marxists.org/history/international/social-democracy/1907/militarism.htm 9

10

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evils of want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness.11 However, their approach to welfare and public services reflects the normative position that the harmonious society is one in which the better off recognise their social obligations to the less well endowed, and their approach is therefore based on targeting and means-testing. Social democrats tend to oppose this. For them, welfare is not about poor relief; rather, it is about using public services as a vehicle to achieve positive freedom12 and the elimination of inequality in this respect (whether it arises from differences of gender, age, race, economic background and anything else the individual is powerless to determine). It is therefore about the provision of guaranteed minima to everyone without distinction. Finally, social democracy has a liberal as well as a Marxian political heritage, thanks to the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution, and therefore to its belief in the power of, and the benefits to be obtained from, the application of reason to human affairs (about which conservatives, in contrast, are instinctively sceptical). The Enlightenment was a wide-ranging process of intellectual development, reaching the height of its expression in the eighteenth century, which grew out of the scientific and philosophical discoveries of the Renaissance, and which centred on the idea of reason as the source of all knowledge. It therefore coincided with a declining hold of traditional forms of authority and their gradual replacement with the rational-legal forms,13 as well as with the first stirrings of the industrial revolution. Together, the two processes provided the driving forces behind the breakdown of feudalism and absolute monarchy and the establishment of rule-of-law principles and constitutionally limited government by consent. Consequently, working-class movements of the early nineteenth century, such as the Chartists, were movements 11  William Beveridge was a Liberal economist who was responsible for drafting the government report of 1942, entitled ‘Social Insurance and Allied Services’ which proposed a series of reforms to the system of social welfare designed to slay what he referred to as ‘five giants on the road to reconstruction’, and which was largely implemented through a series of Acts of Parliament by the Labour government which took office in 1945. 12  In other words the capacity to act according to one’s will as opposed to the absence of external constraints on one’s actions (understood as negative freedom). 13  The distinction was made by the late nineteenth/early twentieth-century sociologist, Max Weber, who saw the two types (along with a third, which he called ‘charismatic authority’) as different ways in which exercises of political power were legitimised. Thus traditional authority is said to pertain when the exercise of political power takes place in conformity with long-established cultural patterns, rational-legal authority when its exercise is legitimised by virtue of its conforming to legally enacted rules and regulations.

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that sought to bring workers within the framework of constitutional government by extending to them the franchise that had been won by manufacturers, as well as guarantees on equality before the law, freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, the absence of which had until then hampered the development of their organisations. This meant that, from the beginning, working-class demands involved an implicit commitment to the fundamental liberal principle of limited government: to the idea that the only circumstances in which the state might legitimately prevent people from doing as their reason dictated was when this harmed the freedom of others to do likewise. Thanks to this heritage, modern-day social democrats share with liberal parties a commitment to principles of tolerance and anti-discrimination: a commitment, that is, to the defence of diversity and rights of freedom with regard to religious expression, sexual preferences, lifestyle choices and similar matters. The fourth explanation for social democrats’ travails, then, is one which argues that this agenda—in a world characterised by the insecurities associated with globalisation; by the emergence of identity politics, and by the growing significance of right-wing populism—is of declining appeal, especially among the social democrats’ traditional core constituency of the manual working class. The term ‘identity politics’ refers to the idea that one of the consequences of globalisation—the decreasing significance of geographical barriers for the way in which different parts of the world affect one another—has been the hybridisation of cultures around the world with a consequent fragmentation of the identities people accept for themselves and therefore a change in the way they act politically. The fading of old class and religious cleavages and the so-called silent revolution have also been contributory factors. The term ‘silent revolution’ refers to the suggestion, based primarily on the work of Ronald Inglehart (1977, 1990), that with the passage of time, value priorities in advanced industrial societies are undergoing a shift from the material to the post-material (i.e. from concerns related to physical and economic needs to those having to do with autonomy and self-expression) as younger generations, whose formative years were ones of relative prosperity, gradually replace the older ones whose formative years were ones of relative economic scarcity. As a consequence of such processes, then, the argument centred on the notion of identity politics is that people are less likely now than in the immediate post-war years to see themselves and society as divided into monolithic groups such as those of class or religion; rather, their views reflect a plurality of identities—of gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, generation,

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religious affiliation and so on—and these have replaced the old identities in terms of political significance: where political conflicts once revolved around large, all-encompassing divisions such as class, to an increasing degree political conflict reflects the claims, arising from shared experiences of injustice, of a plurality of mainly non-economic categories such as women, the disabled, ethnic minorities and so on. While these claims find a receptive audience among the well-educated, post-Fordist, ‘winners of globalisation’, and while they find willing champions among social democrats with their commitments to principles of equality and anti-­ discrimination, they find much less receptive audiences among the old Fordist ‘losers of globalisation’ (Kriesi et  al. 2006). Older and less well educated than average; more likely, therefore, to have conservative social values, these voters, so the argument runs, feel unable to relate to the new claims for equality and feel ‘left behind’ or forgotten, thanks to the emphasis social democrats give to them. As a consequence of all this—the argument continues—social democrats’ loss of support among these voters seems to have worked to the increasing advantage of new, right-wing, populist parties, which speak to the concerns of the ‘left behind’ more effectively—this by claiming to be the authentic representatives of a white working class whose members have come to feel themselves ‘strangers in their own land’.14 Discriminated against by political and economic elites more concerned with the rights of minorities, they, not the minorities, are the real victims of injustice in the right-wing populists’ narratives; for they are the ethnic majority ‘who have built up the country and played by the rules’15 Supported by the elites, welfare recipients, immigrants and other minorities are not playing by the rules, taking more out of the country than they are putting in. Populist appeals are especially persuasive since, as Vernon Bogdanor has put it, ‘populism “is a straightforward emotion; it is easy to understand, and it engenders a mood which seeks to explain away the difficulties of government. The problems involved in balancing different claims, in balancing spending and taxation, in balancing strength and conciliation, are

14  This is the title of a book (by Arlie Russell Hochschild 2016) on the white American working class—as Vernon Bogdanor pointed out in a BBC ‘Briefings’ lecture, looking back at Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 US election, given on 7 November 2017. 15  From the lecture cited in Note 14

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conjured away. They are seen as difficulties deliberately erected by the elite in order to prevent the people from exercising power”’ (Newell 2019).16

Mainstream Party Decline Unfortunately for this fourth, as for the three previous accounts, social democratic party decline has been taking place concomitantly with a decline in support for mainstream parties in general—and therefore with a decline in their effectiveness as mediators between citizens and government in a vicious circle. This suggests that social democratic decline is part of a larger phenomenon, not just a consequence of changes among its own constituents and/or in its own political agendas: something more is involved. This ‘something more’ has to do precisely with a decline in the effectiveness with which mainstream parties perform their mediating function: their effectiveness in acting as vehicles for the expression of interests from the ‘bottom up’, and in mobilising popular support for public policies from the ‘top down’. Two crucial sets of evidence support the ‘mainstream party decline’ thesis: the decline in party membership (Table 3.2) on the one hand, and the decline in turnout (Table  3.3)—along with growing electoral volatility and party-system de-institutionalisation (Chiaramonte and Emanuele 2017)17—on the other: four trends that have gone hand in hand with the social democrats’ decline in Europe over the last forty years. The first reflects a change in the nature of parties as organisations and, hence, in the way they relate to voters; the remaining three the growing popular disenchantment with mainstream party politics that has been the consequence of this. As far as the first change is concerned, historically, the organisational characteristics of parties have evolved to reflect the changing conditions under which they have had to perform their state-society linkage function. Thus, until the nineteenth-century extensions of the franchise, parties were typically ‘parliamentary groupings or committees with a loose structure of individuals who comprised both the state and the polity. With the extension of the vote to the working class and to women, it was no longer  From the lecture cited in Note 14  The term refers to the process whereby in European party systems, the routine, stable and predictable patterns of interaction between component parties have become much less so in recent years, this thanks to growing aggregate volatility combined with the disappearance of old parties and the emergence of new ones. 16 17

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Table 3.2  Party membership/electorate ratio (%) (1980–2014) in fourteen European countries

Austria Belgium Denmark Finland France Germany GB Ireland Italy Netherlands Norway Portugal Spain Sweden

1980

1990

2000

2010

28.75 8.97 7.30 14.62 2.52 4.64 4.12 5.00 9.70 4.47 15.12 4.87 1.57 27.05

23.61 9.15 5.60 13.38 1.76 5.13 3.25 4.67 9.43 3.20 15.75 5.08 1.28 19.17

16.28 6.55 4.45 8.72 1.20 2.91 1.78 2.99 2.72 2.51 8.50 4.43 2.48 5.38

14.03 4.77 3.72 7.62 1.39 2.25 1.11 3.81 2.47 2.51 4.74 3.82 4.36 3.79

2014

2.15 0.73

2.32 4.62 2.70

Source: Ignazi (2017: 182–8)

only the propertied men who constituted the polity. A distinction appeared within the polity, which could be characterised as between governed and governors. The mass party emerged with the new need to link the state and the polity’ (https://rtuc.wordpress.com/2010/02/25/the-­ concept-­of-­a-­mass-­party/). And since the need arose concomitantly with the growing influence of the ideas of socialism, with their emphasis on the importance of the working class as a political force, mass parties were originally parties of the left which sought ‘to make up in many small membership subscriptions for what [they] lacked in large individual patronage; to make up in organized numbers and collective action for what [they] lacked in individual influence; and to make up through a party press and other party-related channels of communication for what [they] lacked in access to the commercial press’ (Mair 1998: 99). Since these parties aimed ‘at a radical redistribution of social, economic and political power’, they demanded ‘a strong commitment from their members, encapsulating them into an extensive party organization that provide[ed] a wide range of services via a dense network of ancillary organizations’ (Krouwel 2006: 254). And as an organisational form, the mass party became the model adopted by more or less all parties with any influence:

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Table 3.3  Turnout at parliamentary elections (1980–2010) in fourteen European countries

Austria Belgium Denmark Finland France Germany Ireland Italy Netherlands Norway Portugal Spain Sweden UK

1980

1990

92.59 % 94.56 % 87.77 % 75.73 % 70.87 % 88.57 % 76.22 % 89.02 % 87.03 % 81.99 % 85.45 % 79.83 % 91.45 % 72.81 %

86.14 % 92.71 % 82.85 % 68.39 % 68.93 % 77.76 % 68.49 % 87.44 % 78.75 % 75.85 % 68.18 % 77.05 % 86.74 % 77.83 %

2000 84.27 % 91.63 % 87.15 % 66.71 % 60.32 % 79.08 % 62.57 % 81.44 % 79.06 % 75.48% 62.84 % 68.71 % 80.11 % 59.38 %

2010 74.91 % 89.37 % 87.74 % 67.37 % 55.40 % 71.53 % 69.90 % 75.19 % 74.56 % 78.23 % 58.03 % 68.94 % 85.81 % 65.77 %

Source: Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) database, https://www.idea.int/data-­ tools/data/voter-­turnout Note: in each case, figures show turnout at the parliamentary elections held in 1980, 1990, 2000 and 2010 or at the first parliamentary elections held after those dates

On the one hand, with electorates numbering in the millions rather than in the thousands, the informal networks of the caucus party were inadequate to canvass, mobilize and organize supporters. On the other hand, the growing acceptance of the mass-party model of democracy (popular control of government through choice among unified parties) undermined support, even among their own natural electoral base, for the more traditional organizational and government styles practised by the established parties. (Mair 1998: 100)

If the mass party originally emerged to represent the interests of a well-­ defined segment of society, then after a while it found that it could not restrict its appeals to that segment—either because it did not represent a majority or because less than the entirety of those belonging to that segment would vote for the party. In particular, it faced competition from other parties seeking to mobilise voters on the basis of alternative identities, and especially from the traditional parties which, precisely because

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they had been the parties of the established elites, could not restrict their appeals to these segments and sought, rather, to attract support from all segments by maintaining their earlier ideological commitment ‘to an idea of a single national interest that cut across sectional boundaries’ (Mair 1998: 101). Thus, parties became catch-all parties (Kirchheimer 1966), seeking to win overall majorities in the legislature by programmes that would enable them to appeal beyond their constituencies of reference to voters generally.18 Then, through an interlinked series of developments, from some time in the 1970s, parties evolved further. As they were catch-all parties, they competed, to an ever-increasing degree, not on position issues but on valence issues: not on the old issues dividing left and right but on their capacity to deliver states of affairs (such as prosperity) all voters wanted. Thanks to the development, first, of television and then, of the new media, parties and candidates were able to appeal directly to voters, thus diminishing the requirement for good party organisation, based on mass memberships, in campaigns. Reliant, to an ever-increasing extent, less on their members than on the mass media to get their message across, they were obliged to bow to media imperatives, including a focus on the entertaining and the personal. They thus competed, to an ever-increasing extent, less by drawing attention to their policy differences than by drawing attention to the personal qualities of their candidates and especially their leaders, who thus became celebrities and whose significance for their parties’ electoral performance enabled them to acquire greater power within their 18  For example, ‘By 1945, the Labour Party, with its manifesto “Let Us Face the Future: A Declaration of Labour Policy for the Consideration of the Nation” announcing Labour as a party of the nation, the whole people, had moved from a party formed in response to the demand that the working class should have a party of its own—a party to serve the interests of the working class and to represent its voice in Parliament—to … a party with a comprehensive series of policies judged from the viewpoint of their contribution to the efficiency of the entire social system’ (https://rtuc.wordpress.com/2010/02/25/the-concept-of-amass-­party/). It still used the word ‘socialism’. ‘However, the 1945 manifesto defined socialism in terms of “public ownership” and a country “free, democratic, efficient, progressive, public-spirited, its material resources organised in the service of the British people”. The issue of the working class was left out, and barely mentioned in the manifesto. Its line of demarcation with the other parties was drawn along “the degree of control of private industry that is necessary to achieve the desired end”. Labour became the party of big government; the Conservatives, the party of liberalisation and ostensibly less state intervention in the economy’ (https://rtuc.wordpress.com/2010/02/25/the-concept-of-a-mass-party/).

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party organisations (Poguntke and Webb 2005; Palladino 2015). Media campaigning, with its requirement for communications experts and spin doctors, was expensive. Parties thus relied, to an ever-increasing extent, less on their members to finance their campaigns, than on large donations and on public subventions. Their representatives in parliament and government became more powerful vis-à-vis their extra-parliamentary machines and the party on the ground, in the localities. As a consequence of all these developments, the parties began to act collusively, by, for example, laying down rules on things like broadcasting and campaign advertising, on public subventions and electoral representation thresholds that would advantage the large established parties and disadvantage newcomers. And so was born the cartel party, which Katz and Mair (1995, 2009) define as one ‘characterized by the interpenetration of party and state and by a tendency towards inter-party collusion’ (2009). ‘The election campaigns that are conducted by cartel parties are capital-intensive, professionalized and centralized, and are organized on the basis of a strong reliance on the state for financial subventions and for other benefits and privileges’ (2009). Consequently, competition between cartel parties focuses more and more ‘on the provision of spectacle, image, and theater’; and so parties become less effective in representing interests and acting as intermediaries because they are less and less about aggregating and conveying demands, from the bottom up, from civil society to the state, than they are about exploiting their positions, within the state, to manipulate people from the top down. Voters, from having been to various degrees actively engaged in political life (especially if party members) become more or less passive spectators (as revealed by various indicators of declining engagement such as turnouts) in what Bernard Manin (1997) has called ‘audience democracy’. Against this background, the decline of old social cleavages and the emergence of new ones; the attenuation of ideological conflict between mainstream parties of left and right; growing awareness of ‘the diminished capacity of national-level government in an era of complex interdependence to deliver public goods’ (Hay 2007: 56)19; the withering of traditional parties’ organisations on the ground; the growing significance of 19  With a concomitant ‘tendency to “depoliticise” public policy by displacing responsibility for policy making and/or implementation to independent [but not in a direct way popularly accountable] public bodies, such as operationally independent central banks’ (Hay 2007: 57).

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‘personal parties’ (Calise 2007)—with no other raison d’être than furthering the political ambitions of the celebrity politicians who give life to them—and the advent of the new communications technology—opening the door to innovative forms of participation and political organisation, to the hyper-mediatisation of politics and society and to plebiscitarian forms of democracy: all this has had a profound impact on voters. No longer are their voting choices heavily influenced by their hereditary and prescriptive ties. No longer do they vote in a more or less automatic way for the mainstream parties, seeing in them the representatives of the social group to which they themselves belong, but more critically, dependent on ‘their evaluations of past party performance and their confidence in future performance’ (Ignazi 1996: 550)—where their preferences may, as likely as not, be for new, ‘outsider’ parties rather than parties of the mainstream, or for no party at all.

Conclusion We are therefore led to conclude that the crisis of social democracy is a crisis whose explanation is multi-faceted: single-factor explanations will not do; though all of the factors discussed above have something to add. We will set out the explanation distilled from the foregoing accounts by presenting it as a set of interrelated propositions: ‘verbal propositions … [provide] a strict and testing way of summarising a theory, since most ambiguities which slip into general discourse are mercilessly exposed. Hidden postulates must also be explicated, since otherwise the chain of reasoning presented in the propositions remains incomplete’ (Budge and Farlie 1983:149; cited by Newell 1991: 28). 1. The ‘crisis of social democracy’, meaning the constant if uneven process of electoral decline of mainstream centre-left parties in Europe over the last forty years, can be explained by reference to changes on the ‘demand side’ of politics, on the ‘supply side’ and by the ways in which political demand and supply have been brought together. 2. On the demand side (meaning the social and economic environment within which parties compete with each other), the most important changes have been the decline in the size of the social democrats’ traditional core constituency among the manual work-

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ing class, together with the opening up of a new social cleavage between the ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ of globalisation: between the well-educated workers of the post-Fordist economy, cosmopolitan in outlook, and the less well-educated, economically insecure, workers of the Fordist economy, socially conservative in outlook. 3. Social democrats have found it difficult to hold the two together in coalition because doing so requires them to reconcile their commitments to economic redistribution (favoured by losers but not necessarily by winners) with their commitments to diversity (favoured by winners but not necessarily by losers). 4. On the supply side (meaning what parties have to offer voters in terms of political projects and political narratives), using the language of marketing, the social democratic ‘brand’ has lost its ‘unique selling point’ because some objectives have been achieved and are uncontentious, and because other objectives are difficult to achieve, thanks to the decline in the power of national governments in a globalised economy. 5. As a consequence of 4, social democrats have found it increasingly difficult, when in office, to distinguish their policy making strategies from those of their opponents on the right. 6. Interlinked changes on both the supply side (especially party organisational changes) and the demand side of politics (especially the declining hold of hereditary and prescriptive ties) have changed the nature of party-voter interactions and thereby diminished the authority of mainstream political parties generally: a tendency to which the social democrats have not been immune. In the following chapter we continue the discussion by considering how the crisis of social democracy bears on the legitimacy crisis facing the EU and vice versa, since the two are intimately related. This is so, first, because if until the 1990s European integration had not proceeded far enough for it to feature as an especially significant issue in political debate in member states, now, arguably, it has not gone far enough to prevent it doing so—and, indeed, the period since the early 1990s has seen a decline in the so-called permissive consensus20 and the consequent Europeanisation 20  Meaning broad public support for the principle of European integration and relative indifference to processes of EU policy making on the assumption that they would be conducted in the public interest (Lindberg and Scheingold 1970; Hooge and Marks 2009).

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of domestic public spheres. Second, controversy over European integration, we shall suggest, is an indicator of the fact that national solutions to the problems of the left are no longer available, that a revival of its fortunes requires it to re-establish its connections with the internationalism of its origins. Given this, the following chapter paves the way for the discussion in the two chapters after, where we consider the positions of left-­wing Eurosceptics and what we call ‘critical Europeanists’; for, by offering competing perspectives on European integration, these two increasingly influential and polarised bodies of opinion offer competing perspectives on how, in the early twenty-first century, the fortunes of the left in Europe might be revived.

CHAPTER 4

The European Union’s Crisis of Legitimacy

The European Union has, since at least the time of the international financial crisis of 2008, widely been perceived as undergoing a legitimacy crisis (e.g. Schmidt 2020) of which Brexit has been only the most dramatic manifestation. The purpose of this chapter is to ask about the causes of this crisis, exploring the part played by Europe’s social democratic parties in bringing it about, and to ask how, in turn, it has affected their fortunes. The issue is an important one to consider because it bears directly on this book’s core argument, namely, that in the early twenty-first century, for any social democratic or socialist agenda to be viable (in the sense of reversing the electoral decline discussed in the last chapter) it cannot dispense with embracing further European integration as a core aspiration. By this I mean that central to these parties’ discourses must be the aim of transferring further powers from the national to supranational institutions—a European government, parliament and court—so that, as in the US, ‘these central bodies would exercise power over citizens directly, bypassing the constituent states, their legitimacy resting on a European electorate’ (Middelaar 2013: 2). We shall proceed first by exploring the meaning of a ‘legitimacy crisis’ and then by discussing the evidence for such a crisis in the case of Europe. The third section considers what has been responsible for it, and the fourth its impact on the left. The final section concludes.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. L. Newell, European Integration and the Crisis of Social Democracy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08822-3_4

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Legitimacy Crisis and Europe In political science, the concept of legitimacy is inseparable from the concept of authority in that institutions have authority only insofar as they have legitimacy and vice versa. Legitimacy and authority, in turn, are rooted in perceptions concerning the proper (or appropriate) exercise of power. Hence legitimate exercises of power are ones that are proper or appropriate insofar as they have been undertaken in accordance with ‘due process’ or in accordance with the rules—where a ‘rule’ is a criterion of behaviour that indicates right and wrong ways of doing things and whose infringement is to some greater or lesser degree morally condemned in the group whose social existence gives rise to it. What counts are perceptions— as Schmitter’s (2001: 2) definition of legitimacy acknowledges. He defines legitimacy as A shared expectation among actors in an arrangement of asymmetric power, such that the actions of those who rule are accepted voluntarily by those who are ruled because the latter are convinced that the actions of the former conform to the pre-established norms. Put simply, legitimacy converts power into authority—Macht into Herrschaft—and, thereby, simultaneously establishes an obligation to obey and a right to rule.

Where decisions are perceived as appropriate (i.e. legitimate), there is political stability; government by consent is possible; the use of coercion can be kept to an indispensable minimum. Hence, as Lenz and Viola (2017) have pointed out, legitimacy is important to organisations as it enables them to rely on compliance with their decisions even when they lack power to enforce them and/or the decisions involve some loss for those affected. The concept of legitimacy is closely related to David Easton’s notion of political support. For him, ‘support refers to the way in which a person evaluatively orients himself to some object either through his attitudes or his behavior’ (Easton 1975: 436). On this basis, he distinguishes between specific and diffuse support. In the former case the object is the political authorities, support for which consists of (a variable level of) satisfaction with their perceived behaviour. In the latter case, the object is the political system or regime, support for which consists of a general reservoir of goodwill towards it. In short, support is a function of positive or negative evaluations—as is legitimacy. The two would appear to be reciprocally

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related. Where authorities or the regime enjoy support, it is likely that they will also enjoy legitimacy; if they enjoy legitimacy, then they will likely enjoy support. The distinction between the two is that support is the more general concept, arising from citizens’ orientations in whatever they are rooted, whereas legitimacy is a function of citizens’ convictions concerning rights and obligations. Support, specific and/or diffuse, can in principle be present even in the absence of much legitimacy—that is, when support for the authorities and/or the regime is rooted in something else, for example, expediency: the feeling that the authorities or the regime are worth supporting because, regardless of their adherence or otherwise to pre-established norms, they produce valuable outputs. On the other hand, it seems contradictory to suggest that a political system enjoys legitimacy but no support. Institutions suffer legitimacy crises ‘when the level of social recognition that [their] identity, interests, practices, norms, or procedures are rightful declines to the point where [they] must either adapt (by reconstituting the social bases of [their] legitimacy, or by investing more heavily in material practices of coercion or bribery) or face disempowerment’ (Reus-Smit 2007: 158). Consequently, one sign that the EU has been facing a crisis of legitimacy in recent years is said to have been the Lisbon Treaty (signed on 13 December 2007; effective from 1 December 2009) since it was intended, in part, to close the gap that was perceived to have opened up between the Union’s practices, norms and procedures and norms of democracy. In other words, the Treaty was in part meant to reduce the Union’s legitimacy deficit that resulted from the incongruence of its procedures with underlying democratic norms, which had accumulated over prior waves of efficiency-driven institutional reform. Normative standards based on democratic principles had, arguably, not changed, but the IO’s procedures needed to be updated to match these standards. (Lenz and Viola 2017)

The Lisbon Treaty sought to achieve this through five specific changes. First, it increased the power of the European Parliament by establishing, in place of the consultation procedure, the ordinary legislative procedure for almost all areas of policy. Under the consultation procedure, the Council of the European Union (aka the Council of Ministers) can adopt (by unanimity or qualified majority depending on the policy area concerned) legislation based on proposals of the Commission having sought

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the views of Parliament without being bound by its position. Prior to a 1982 judgement of the European Court of Justice which established that the Council must wait for Parliament’s opinion before deciding, not infrequently, the Council would ignore Parliament to the extent of reaching agreement before receiving its opinion. Under the ordinary legislative procedure, legislative proposals can only become law if the Council and Parliament are able to agree on a jointly worded text. Second, the Treaty established that Council deliberations on proposed legislation had to take place in public. Third, it amended article 17.7 of the Maastricht Treaty so that, in proposing a candidate for President of the Commission, the European Council had to take into account the elections to the European Parliament. This led the European parties to nominate candidates (known as Spitzenkandidaten) for Commission President prior to the elections, in anticipation that the candidate of the largest party would be able—through the authority acquired by virtue of being the election ‘winner’—effectively to force the Council’s hand. This, in turn, would raise the stakes in EP elections, so raising turnout and with it the EP’s legitimacy. Fourth, the Treaty expanded the role of national parliaments in EU law-making by giving them a right to scrutinise Commission proposals with the purpose of assessing whether they respected subsidiarity. This is the principle that— except in areas, such as the customs union and trade policy, where the EU has exclusive competence—the EU can only act where action will be more effective than at the national level. Objection by one-third of the parliaments obliges the Commission to reconsider its proposal. Objection by a majority of them enables the Council of Ministers and the Parliament to exercise a power of veto in relation to the proposal. Finally, the Treaty established a new agenda-setting instrument, the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI), which allows one million citizens from at least one-­ quarter of the member states, formally to request that the Commission propose legislation falling within the area of its competence. The significance of the ECI is that since it relies on the mobilisation, across Europe, of individuals and groups that might otherwise remain uninvolved in the EU’s processes of consultation of civil society organisations, it was envisaged as having the potential to contribute to the emergence of a European public sphere (García 2013: 6). The potential for legitimacy crisis was inherent in the European institutions from the start since, as we saw in Chap. 2, the main drivers of integration in the early years were prosperity and national security, much less, if at all, the creation of a European demos. Consequently, there was very

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little, if any, sense among the mass publics of the member states, of ownership of the European institutions, much less any real knowledge of their workings and significance. This situation contrasts radically with national politics. Every day any national government—in Poland, say—takes decisions that can be contested to varying degrees by opposition parties, be disliked by voters, even trigger protests or strikes. As a general rule, however, even the protestors accept the legitimacy of the Polish government itself. They might want the Polish prime minister to leave office tomorrow, but they would still consider him ‘our (infuriating) prime minister’ and speak of ‘our (disappointing) parliament’ and ‘our (bad) laws’. Political identity trumps the outcome of the political process. (Middelaar 2013: xiv)

In short, few people considered European decisions to be ‘our’ decisions, European institutions to be ‘our’ institutions, European politicians to be ‘our’ representatives—and yet in the final analysis, it is precisely this sense of ownership that confers legitimacy on authorities and their decisions. The fundamental problem, then, was that the European institutions were not underpinned by any concept of European citizenship, that is, any concept of membership—a relationship between the European institutions and individuals whereby the latter have both rights (principally, the right to protection and, in democratic systems, the right to influence the conduct of the political system) and duties (principally allegiance). Until the early 1990s, none of this mattered because, until then, the process of integration had not gone far enough for it really to figure very highly in the domestic politics of the member states. Integration—the process whereby sovereignty over increasingly wide areas of political life is transferred from the member states to the EU—had progressed in fits and starts (see Chap. 2), but it had not, by and large, given the EU institutions, or European policies, much visibility in the public sphere, in the everyday lives of ordinary citizens (Wood 2017; McNamara 2015). Hence, European integration was not salient as an issue for most European citizens; it was not the subject of strong attitudes, and elections to the European parliament were ‘second-order national elections’ (Reif and Schmitt 1980)—that is, elections in which national, rather than European issues and candidates dominated; which were seen by voters, the parties and the media as ‘less important’ than the ‘first order’ elections determining the government or the executive power in the national system, and which were therefore used

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by voters to punish, often by voting for protest parties, or to reward, the national incumbents. Consequently, until the early 1990s, with the signing of the Maastricht Treaty, the EU was subject to what was called ‘the permissive consensus’. This referred to the idea that there was broad public support for the principle of European integration and relative indifference to processes of EU policy making on the assumption that they would be conducted in the public interest (Lindberg and Scheingold 1970; Hooghe and Marks 2009). Indeed, for a brief period, in the late 1980s, indifference gave way to a degree of enthusiasm (Eichenberg and Dalton 2007: 12) as the assumption seemed to be confirmed by the implications of the Single European Act (SEA) and the single-market programme. Thanks to their promises to do away with seemingly archaic regulations and irrational barriers to trade, for a time integration captured the popular imagination to some extent, coming to mean increased prosperity, enhanced economic and social rights, passport-free travel and consumer benefits (Dinan 2004, ch. 6) symbolised, in the British case, by the popularity of ‘booze cruises’.1 The first indications that the potential problem had become an actual one came with the process of ratification of the Maastricht Treaty which shifted public attention away from the outputs of EU policy making, heightening the salience, instead, of the processes. Completion of the single market had meant deregulation at the national level combined with reregulation at the European level. Consequently, alongside the perceptions, on the part of some, of its benefits, European integration began to acquire, for others, such negative connotations as ‘interference’, ‘meddling’, ‘high-handedness’—connotations whose salience the provisions of the Maastricht Treaty served to heighten; for, besides extending the range of policy areas subject to qualified majority voting, the Treaty included provisions for ‘economic and monetary union, ultimately including a single currency’.2 In addition, it brought—albeit on an intergovernmental rather than a supranational basis—foreign and security policy, justice and home affairs within the purview of the Union which was to be ‘served by a single institutional framework’ to ‘ensure 1  Ferry trips to France where wine and other alcoholic drinks could be bought at prices much lower than in the UK and could now be brought home, free of taxes, in virtually unlimited quantities. 2  Title I, article B, Treaty on European Union, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/ EN/ALL/?uri=CELEX :11992M/TXT.

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the consistency and the continuity of the activities carried out in order to attain its objectives’.3 In short, the Treaty represented a considerable extension of the reach of the European institutions within the domestic public spheres of the member states; for the first time, terms such as ‘Euroscepticism’ and ‘democratic deficit’ began to gain wide currency in public discussion of Europe, and it gave rise to the first in what became a series of EU ratification crises.4 In the years following the signing of the Maastricht Treaty, therefore, the so-called permissive consensus gave way to what Hooghe and Marks (2009) referred to as the ‘constraining dissensus’. That is, if, prior to Maastricht, European integration had largely been ‘a non-issue for the public’ (Hooghe and Marks 2009:  6), post-Maastricht, it came increasingly to feature as an issue in public debate within the member states: it came increasingly to engage mass publics; it became increasingly politicised. This is not to say that public opinion overall became increasingly hostile to European integration, rather that the issue came to acquire an increasingly high profile in elections and party competition within the member states and therefore became increasingly salient for voters: those (if anything) hostile to integration, became more vociferously so. Consequently, if integrating elites—driven by the objective material gains to be derived from pooling sovereignty—could once ignore public opinion, they could now no longer do so; for integration, post-Maastricht, had come to engage questions of national identity, having extended market integration to monetary union and having placed political union once again on the public agenda. Political union had effectively been eliminated from the agenda with the defeat of the proposal for a European Defence Community in the French National Assembly in 1954, but was now firmly back on it with Maastricht’s explicitly stated objective of ‘[continuing] the  Title I, article C, Treaty on European Union cit.  Danish citizens narrowly rejected the Treaty in a referendum held on 2 June 1992, before endorsing it in a second referendum, held on 18 May 1993, after their government secured the same derogations on the single currency that had already been granted to the UK. On 20 September 1992, in a referendum whose outcome had initially been thought to be a foregone conclusion, French voters surprised commentators by agreeing to ratify the Treaty by the narrowest of margins (51% to 49%). In the UK, where the Government’s majority had been reduced to twenty-one, thanks to the outcome of the April 1992 general election, Prime Minister John Major could only secure ratification against hostility among his own backbenchers, by making it a matter of confidence. 3 4

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process of creating an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe’ to include ‘[establishing] a citizenship common to nationals of the [member] countries’.5 When, in 2005, French and Dutch citizens voted against the ratification of the Constitutional Treaty, they confirmed the existence of a new, powerful, constraint on further integration. Traditionally, integration had been the project of mainstream parties of the centre right and the centre left—the former driven by its prospects for trade liberalisation and therefore deregulation, the latter by the prospect that taming capitalism could be achieved by extending the scope of integration. Leaders of parties in both categories had been keen to avoid politicising the issue, aware of its potential for party disunity—between market liberals and nationalists in the former case, between cultural liberals and social protectionists in the latter. The French and the Dutch referenda confirmed that they were no longer able to do so, for the referenda reinforced public awareness—which had already gained a hold, thanks to the circumstances surrounding the ratification of Maastricht—that there was a significant gap between elite and popular attitudes on integration—so reinforcing ‘the populist notion that important EU decisions could no longer be legitimized by the executive and legislature operating in the normal way—direct popular approval was required’ (Hooghe and Marks 2009: 21).6 This in turn meant that national governments became increasingly wary of treaty bargaining for further integration, fearful either of defeat in referenda7 or in any case of

 Preamble, Treaty on European Union cit.  For example, all three main parties in the UK general election of 1997 felt obliged to promise that any decision to join the euro would be subject to a confirmatory referendum, despite the challenges referenda pose to the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty; and in 2004, the then-prime minister, Tony Blair, announced plans for a referendum on the Constitutional Treaty. As Hooghe and Marks (2009: 20) point out, referenda are propitious for political actors seeking to mobilise voters around perceptions of a conflict between national identities and European integration, ‘because they reduce the role of political parties. Voting in national elections is often cued by party loyalty and other considerations that affect a citizen’s choice of government, whereas referendums put issues directly before the citizen.’ 7  Referenda can place considerable veto power in the hands of passionate minorities. For example, in Denmark, legislative proposals are null and void if opposed by 50% of voters in a referendum provided only that turnout is 30% or above—meaning that, potentially, opponents of proposals can block them by mobilising just 15% plus 1 of the electorate. In the Brexit referendum, the ‘Leave’ side prevailed by mobilising 37.4% of the electorate. 5 6

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the electoral consequences of their European policies (Hooghe and Marks 2009: 21). Since 2005, a further nine referenda have been held in member states on ratification of treaties,8 on EU policies9 and on continued EU membership (the Brexit referendum). Of the nine, six resulted in a defeat for what was the ‘pro-EU’ position in the referendum concerned; and all this took place against a background of other signs of popular disenchantment, most notably turnout in European Parliament (EP) elections which had been in decline since 1979 and reached a new low of 42.5% in 2014. On the one hand, the decline could be taken as an indicator of growing indifference rather than hostility—indifference due to the low salience of the issues dealt with by the EU (Moravcsik 2002: 616) and/or the absence of any ‘demonstrable political consequences’ of the outcomes of EP elections (Bogdanor 2007). On the other hand, it was taken, by critics of the EU, as a key component of their case that Europe lacked democratic legitimacy; for by undermining the capacity of the parliament to represent European citizens, low turnouts were corrosive of the institution’s claim to have authority to make decisions on citizens’ behalf. Claims that the EU reflected a democratic deficit did not go uncontested. Ward (2010: 115), for example, argued that claims concerning the democratic deficit rested on comparisons of the EU ‘with the standard democratic governance arrangements of a Member State’ and that such comparisons were inappropriate given that the EU was ‘a sui generis entity; a peculiar mix of supranationalism and intergovernmentalism’. However, it could be argued that the very fact that commentators such as Ward felt it necessary to defend the EU—the very fact that applicability of the term democratic deficit was contested—was itself confirmation of the existence of a crisis; 8  The Irish referenda on 12 June 2008 and 2 October 2009 on ratification of the Treaty of Lisbon, and on 31 May 2012 on ratification of the Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance in the Economic and Monetary Union (otherwise known as the Fiscal Stability Treaty); the Danish referendum on 25 May 2014 on ratification of the Agreement on a Unified Patent Court; the Dutch referendum on 6 April 2016 on ratification of the Ukraine-­ European Union Association Agreement. 9  The Greek referendum on 5 July 2015 on acceptance of the bailout conditions in the country’s government debt crisis proposed by the European Commission, the IMF and the ECB; the Danish referendum on 3 December 2015 on whether to abolish certain of the country’s opt-outs on home and justice matters; the Hungarian referendum on 2 October 2016 on the September 2015 agreement of EU interior ministers to the principle of sharing refugees between member states.

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for a crisis is a turning point: an unstable situation in a process of negative change such that the entity subject to change undergoes either recuperation or demise. From this point of view, the Brexit referendum represented the most dramatic manifestation to date of the legitimacy crisis for it was, precisely, a turning point: a moment in which British membership of the EU would either be confirmed or come to an end. It was decisive; for it involved citizens speaking directly on the most fundamental question of all concerning their relationship with a polity: whether to belong to it at all. It was therefore a referendum on the EU’s legitimacy, for agreeing to membership of a polity implies a willingness to be bound by its rules; and ultimately, since ‘legitimate’ means ‘rightful’, legitimacy manifests itself in ‘persons subject to the binding rules made by political authorities, or at least the overwhelming majority of them, [accepting] that the political institutions making those rules have the right to do so’ (Dobson and Weale 2003: 160, cited by Ward 2010: 116). In the Hungarian migrant quota referendum, later the same year, the challenge it represented to the EU’s legitimacy in the area of migration policy was explicitly articulated by the Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, when he declared that the proposed EU quota system would ‘redraw Europe‘s cultural and religious identity’ and represented ‘an abuse of power’.10 In short, referenda are legitimacy conferring and legitimacy withholding devices and therefore have necessarily posed challenges to the EU’s authority when called in relation to some larger or smaller aspect of its governance.

What Has Been Responsible for the Legitimacy Crisis? Vernon Bogdanor (2007:  4) argues that ‘[t]he European Union was founded to promote democracy in Europe’. More accurately, one might suggest that, like any other political institution, the EU was founded to solve problems: ‘Governance is a means to achieve collective benefits by coordinating human activity’ (Hooghe and Marks 2009:  2). Where a political institution is perceived as ineffective in solving problems, there is it likely to run into problems of legitimacy. The EU is no exception: ‘A challenge to the EU’s output legitimacy based on the ineffectiveness of its 10  ‘Migrant crisis: Hungary to hold referendum on EU quota plan’, BBC News, 24 February 2016, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-35652655.

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policy performance can be swiftly transformed into a negative assessment of the EU’s undemocratic governance structures, its input legitimacy’ (Murray and Longo 2018: 416). Hence, a first avenue of exploration in the search for causes of the EU’s legitimacy crisis lies in the direction of its failings as problem solver. Perhaps the most high-profile examples of these in recent years concern its responses (1) to the international financial meltdown and the resulting sovereign debt (Eurozone) crisis, and (2) to the refugee crisis. The Eurozone Crisis The former started with the US subprime mortgage crisis, which in turn originated in the early years of the twenty-first century when US mortgage lenders were encouraged to market to low-income households by low interest rates—designed to stimulate the economy in the wake of the Twin Towers attack—and by securitisation,11 enabling lenders to avoid the risks of mortgage defaults. The resulting boom in subprime lending, with a relaxation (underwritten by government policy to expand home ownership) of the traditional barriers to buying a home, encouraged low-income borrowers to purchase—while growing demand led to a boom in house prices thus further encouraging subprime lending: lenders and investors felt guaranteed, by rising property prices, against the possibility of defaults by subprime borrowers. Borrowers likewise felt guaranteed by rising prices: if they got into difficulties they could sell the property at a profit, pay off the mortgage and walk away or else borrow against the increased value of the property; but in any case defaults among subprime borrowers were relatively low at this time, thanks to economic expansion generally. The decision by the Federal Reserve under Alan Greenspan to raise interest rates from late 2004 made house purchases more expensive— causing a slowdown in the property market, preventing subprime borrowers from refinancing their mortgages, leaving many of them with mortgage repayments they could not afford, creating an increase in foreclosures and billions of dollars of losses. Because of the way in which the mortgages had been securitised, it was uncertain which financial institutions—which relied on short-term, low-interest loans from other institutions in order to purchase the mortgage-based securities—were most and which less exposed to the subprime loans. This created a liquidity crisis as banks  The bundling together of large numbers of mortgages, sold on to banks and investors.

11

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reacted to this general uncertainty by refusing to lend to each other. Meanwhile, the collapse in the housing market began to affect the broader US economy, thanks to a drop in construction and a decline in consumer confidence, with knock-on effects for retailing and other sectors. Fears of an economic slowdown brought a cutback in the availability of credit for businesses and individuals—the so-called credit crunch—while governments around the world stepped in to rescue financial institutions reporting bad debts, and to reassure consumers by guaranteeing their deposits. In order to appreciate how and why this led to the Eurozone crisis, it is necessary to understand how economic and monetary union (EMU) and the advent of the Euro affected governance in the EU and the member states. EMU had not been mentioned in the 1957 Rome Treaty, partly because it was believed that the Common Agricultural Policy would make exchange-rate adjustments between member-state currencies impossible, partly because the international monetary system was governed by the fixed exchange rates of the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement whose signatories also agreed not to impose import controls without the permission of the IMF (Senior Nello 2012:  216–217). EMU therefore first came onto the agenda of the EU from the late 1960s when it became clear that the Bretton Woods system was coming under strain and bearing in mind that exchange-rate fluctuations constitute a barrier to trade. From the latter perspective, then, EMU was a logical extension of the single-market and free-movement measures provided for by the 1986 SEA, a classic example of the ‘spillover’ referred to by theorists of European integration (Haas 1958; Lindberg and Scheingold 1970; Schmitter 1969).12 The EMU project was therefore formally launched in 1989, following the SEA, in the Delors Report—which among other things highlighted what economists refer to as ‘the impossible trinity’: the idea that of three policy positions—a fixed exchange rate, free capital movement and an independent monetary policy—governments can pursue two, but never 12  ‘This term [“spillover”] refers to the realisation on the part of policy makers that European integration in one area of policy, if it is to be successful, requires integration in another area and so forth. Consequently, integration in one area (for example, energy production) creates pressure for integration in another (for example transport) in a cumulative manner. According to this view, completion of the Single Market project created pressure for monetary integration by creating the risk that, as one of the few remaining barriers to trade, national currencies might be used as the basis for competitive devaluations among countries’ (Newell 2010: 266).

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three, at the same time.13 In accordance with this idea, since the single market and the promotion of trade required free movement of capital and fixed exchange rates, it followed for Delors that member states would have to sacrifice sovereignty in the area of monetary policy. His Report was therefore eloquent in clarifying, first, that there was pressure for EMU arising from preceding measures of integration and, second, that it involved a considerable new transfer of sovereignty from the member states ‘upwards’. The Maastricht Treaty then set out a series of five ‘convergence criteria’ countries participating in EMU were required to meet, including the stipulation that candidate countries had remained within the ‘normal’ band of the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) for two years without having initiated depreciation.14 Significantly, the ERM was a kind of precursor to EMU in that it was system of fixed but adjustable exchange rates which had been introduced in 1979 and which had in the UK in the 1980s already created divisions between nationalists and market liberals on the right, generating significant expressions of anti-integration sentiment in the process. The remaining criteria included the stipulation that the candidate country’s public debt was not to exceed 60% of GDP, its budget deficit not to exceed 3%, and these were written into the ‘Stability and Growth Pact’ (SGP), agreed at the Dublin Council of 1996, which would provide the framework for fiscal policy on the part of Eurozone member governments.15 13  If a government wants a fixed exchange rate and free movement of capital, then it has to set whatever interest rates are necessary to ensure exchange-rate stability, so losing monetary sovereignty. If it wants monetary sovereignty and free movement of capital, then it has to allow the exchange rate to fluctuate. If it wants monetary sovereignty and a fixed exchange rate, then it has to impose controls on the movement of capital. 14  That is, they had to remain within +2.5 and −2.5% of their entry rates (within +15 and −15% from August 1993). 15  ‘The rationale for the SGP is that under conditions of monetary union the incentives on governments to pursue “responsible” budgetary policies are fewer than they are when the governments have their own, national, currencies. When governments have their own currencies, the possibilities for “excessive” budget deficits are limited by their effects on interest and exchange rates and therefore on countries’ capacities to export. In a monetary union, member countries are not subject to such constraints. Moreover, if a number of them run excessive deficits they may create inflationary pressures obliging the central bank to raise interest rates with the result of depressing economic activity even in countries without, or with lower, deficits (Bini Smaghi 2001: 46). So ultimately, the rationale for the Pact has to do with perceptions of equity between members of the eurozone’ (Newell 2010: 267).

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EMU therefore involved the participating countries relinquishing control over monetary policy and accepting significant constraints in the area of budgetary policy. Hence, it represented a significant restriction on the political power of participating countries’ governments—something which the 2008 financial crisis threw into sharp relief, thanks to its downward pressure on growth rates and the impact of this, in turn, on countries, such as Greece, which had run large structural deficits during the period of high growth of the initial years of the century,16 and now faced mounting debts, thanks to the decline in tax revenues and the costs of growing unemployment. Investors realised that Greece was borrowing very large amounts compared to the size of its economy and began demanding higher interest rates—which aggravated the debt problem even more. As described in Chap. 2, as part of the euro, Greece’s options for dealing with the situation were considerably limited since it could not devalue; and as it became clear that bailout arrangements put in place in 2010 and 2011 might prove unable to prevent rising interest rates bringing about that very un-­ sustainability that was driving rates up in the first place, investors began to worry about other Eurozone countries such as Italy (whose public debt in 2011 stood at €1.9 trillion representing about 120 of GDP and second in size only to that of Greece), Spain, Portugal and Ireland—all countries obliged to take restrictive measures, since any threat of government insolvency automatically threatened the survival of companies and financial institutions with significant investments in public debt—with all the knock-on effects that this would entail. In these countries, therefore, Eurozone membership soon became synonymous, for increasingly large swathes of the public, with austerity and high unemployment, as public spending was restricted, taxes raised and public assets sold off to retain the confidence of investors, and the absence of fiscal integration meant that countries’ debts could not be mutualised. In short, the Eurozone crisis was a potent symbol of the way in which European integration, having heavily constrained member-state governments’ choices in the area of macroeconomic policy, had contributed to a deep recession. The result was a significant increase in the insistence with which public opinion questioned European governance, especially because 16  They had been able to do this due to the fact that the rules of the SGP were not properly enforced during the early years of the century and due to the assumption of investors that EMU itself meant that lending to Greece was as safe as investing in the stronger northern economies—with the result that the Greek government had been able to borrow very cheaply.

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national politicians often referred to ‘the demands of Europe’ as a convenient scapegoat to deflect public hostility to unpopular economic decisions. Attention focused on the so-called democratic deficit. In particular, the obligations on member states annually to seek Commission and Councilof-Ministers approval of the budgetary and other measures they were taking or proposing to take to meet their economic policy objectives given their SGP obligations, heightened the sense of the EU as a remote and unaccountable organisation: voters were aware that elections ‘d[id] not determine or even substantially influence the development of the Union’ (Bogdanor 2007: 7); that their parliaments were ill-equipped to hold the Council effectively to account (they could at best react, after the event, to positions taken by ministers); that the Commission was unelected and therefore could not claim any kind of democratic mandate for its decisions. The way was therefore paved for new, populist, ‘sovereigntist’ political entrepreneurs to make headway with demands for a reassertion of ‘national control over national destiny’ (Ladrech 2000:  47). If the international financial meltdown and the Eurozone crisis had already heightened the purchase of populist narratives around ordinary people being ‘screwed’ by financial elites, then its aftermath helped to undermine trust in political elites at both the European and the national levels; for the tendency of mainstream politicians to blame ‘Brussels’ for unpopular but necessary policies undermined not only the public standing of the EU, but also their own as voters were at least vaguely aware that their tendency to do this conveniently enabled them to avoid taking responsibility for the policies. Mainstream parties of the left played a not insignificant role in these political developments and in the advance of sovereigntist populism; for they had by then lost much of their ‘programmatic distinction and identity from other parties, especially right of center, in competitive national politics’ (Ladrech 2000: 4). On the one hand, if their raison d’être had been to use the levers of the state to exert democratic control over the workings of capitalism in the interests of ordinary people and the underprivileged (by definition a majority of national electorates), then their capacity to do this had been compromised by the transfer of much economic policy making upwards to the European level in which they themselves had collaborated. On the other hand, attempts to recreate such a project at European level were significantly hampered by the nature of the EU’s governance structures and institutional architecture, which, quite simply, does not provide for party government when the project itself requires it. The upshot of this has been a fading of the clear left-right distinction in

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mainstream party offerings that once structured domestic partisan competition: a fading that has taken place at both the national and the European levels. At the national level, already from the late 1980s, the commitment to monetary union ‘and the mix of interest rate and debt ratios’ (Ladrech 2000: 32) necessary to bring that about had begun to reduce the scope for radical alternatives in economic policy on left-right lines within the member states. At the European level, ‘officially sanctioned partisan activity is absent in the work of the European Commission and the Council of Ministers’ (Ladrech 2000: 30), while in the EP, the two largest groups of left and right, represented by the Party of European Socialists (PES) and the European People’s Party (EPP), work together since the main line of division is between pro-integration and anti-integration groups. This in turn has resulted in a steady decline in the sense among the traditional supporters of mainstream parties of the left of the relevance of these parties to their concerns with a corresponding increase in the appeal of sovereigntist populism whose messages have been much clearer, much more distinct. To a degree, therefore, a new divide seems to have displaced, or at least competes with, the traditional left/right divide as the main political division in EU member states. This is the divide that arises from the marriage of sovereigntism—the belief in the uncontested primacy of national-level politics and the call to recover at this precise level (institutionally as well as territorially) power that has slipped away to more distant and diffuse layers of governance (Kallis 2018: 299)—and populism: a conception of ‘“the people-as-underdog” … a unique entity identified in terms of its powerlessness in opposition to elites in power, which are often lacking the legitimacy that is conferred by popular support’ (De Rosa 2022: 202). The Refugee Crisis The EU’s inability to solve problems, we have said, has been responsible for its legitimacy crisis, by enhancing the degree to which European citizens have questioned the rightfulness of its governance structures and processes. If one such problem was the Eurozone crisis, then another has been the refugee crisis; for it too has enhanced the appeal of sovereigntist populist parties in recent years (Fig. 4.1). Claiming to be the only authentic representatives of ‘the people’ and its interests, these parties are hostile to migrants because their conception of ‘the people’ is exclusive in nature:

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40 35 30 25 20 15 10 5 0

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34.3 34 26.8 24.9 15.6

16.1

6.5 5.7 4.5

9.8 5

10.2 6.3

7.1 6.2

1999

2004

2009

2014

AfD

Front National

UKIP

23.3 11

2019 Lega

Fig. 4.1  Per cent vote for sovereigntist populist parties in European Parliament elections, 1999–2019. (Note: United Kingdom Independence Party [UKIP] split just prior to the 2019 election giving rise to the Brexit party. The percentage shows the combined support for UKIP [3.2%] and the Brexit party [30.8%])

because, that is, they define ‘the people’ in national terms and therefore in terms of ‘cultural, political and geographical boundaries considered inviolable’ (De Rosa 2022: 202). Although refugees had been reaching Europe for a number of years previously, the crisis essentially began in 2015 when, driven by a combination of conflict, violence and repression in the Middle East, Afghanistan, Iraq, Eritrea and Nigeria, the numbers arriving to claim asylum peaked at 1.3 million, the largest number since the war. Thanks to EU Directive 2001/51/EC,17 they were unable to fly to Europe to request asylum, 17  This states: ‘In order to combat illegal immigration effectively, it is essential that all Member States introduce provisions laying down the obligations of carriers transporting foreign nationals into the territory of the Member States’—while providing that foreign nationals refused entry are to be returned to their countries of departure at the carrier’s expense. While this is ‘without prejudice to the obligations resulting from the Geneva Convention relating to the Status of Refugees’, by creating for the airlines an economic risk, transferring to their staff the responsibility of deciding who is and who is not a genuine refugee, it means that airlines refuse to allow passengers without visas to board (Burris 2015; Rosling 2015). Unable to fulfil the criteria to get visas (such as those concerning the possession of means of subsistence or those concerning the purposes of intended stay etc.) and unable to seek asylum until they have arrived in a country and asked for it, migrants are consequently forced into the hands of the so-called people smugglers, many of them losing their lives in the process.

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being forced instead to make dangerous sea crossings from North Africa across the central Mediterranean to Italy or (the predominant route in 2015) from Turkey across the Aegean to Greece. Land crossings across the Turkish-Greek border and across Turkey’s border with Bulgaria had essentially been rendered impossible since the construction there of border fences in 2012 and 2014 respectively; for while article 33(1) of the 1951 Refugee Convention makes it illegal under international law to ‘expel or return (‘refouler’) a refugee’ to ‘territories where his life or freedom would be threatened on account of his race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion’, a country has no legal obligation to the refugee until s/he actually arrives in the country. Numbers arriving across the Aegean spiked in 2015 thanks, first, to the Greek general election of January 2015, which brought the radicalleft Syriza to power and with it an end to ‘Operation Xenios Zeus’, a set of draconian migration regulations,18 which had attracted criticism for its human rights abuses and violations of international law.19 A second— ‘push’—factor was the siege of Kobanî launched by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in September 2014, which generated a wave of Syrian refugees—whose numbers, by January 2015, had reached 400,000—into neighbouring Turkey. The deteriorating economic conditions in Turkey, which was home to some two million refugees, led it to 18  Launched in August 2012 by the then-minister for Public Order and Citizen Protection, Nikos Dendias, Operation Xenios Zeus ‘initiated document checks in the streets of Athens (and other areas of the country), during which people were stopped on the basis of racial profiling and ethnic difference, their documents were checked, several people were taken to police stations and those without residence permits were transferred to detention centres’ Rosakou (2018: 191). The policy was introduced against a background of rising xenophobia and racism, which saw the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn elected to the Greek parliament for the first time in 2012, and an asylum system that functioned poorly and rarely resulted in refugee status being granted. As Rosakou (2018:  192) notes, a ‘politics of invisibility’ prevailed: migrants arrested at the Greek border and issued with a deportation order would often not abide by it in an effort to continue their journeys to other European countries; and as the economic crisis took hold, the centre of Athens in particular acquired ‘a large population of foreigners living in extreme poverty, occupying abandoned buildings, town squares, and parks’ with ‘[c]oncerns about rising crime and urban degradation [becoming] a dominant feature of everyday conversations as well as political discourse’ (Human Rights Watch 2013). ‘Operation Xenios Zeus’ thus ‘signalled a shift from this politics of invisibility to one of proclaimed total institutional visibility and control. Immigrants would no longer be undocumented. They would be thoroughly recorded, detained and, finally, deported’ (Rosakou 2018: 192). 19  See, for example, Human Rights Watch (2013) and Smith (2012).

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refuse to issue work permits to the new arrivals who, with few prospects in that country and aware of the abolition of Xenios Zeus, now left for Europe. The influx of refugees created two problems for the EU, both related to the Schengen Agreement. This is a treaty, originally signed in June 1985 by the Benelux countries, France and Germany, which abolished border controls on people and goods moving between them. Although originally quite separate from the treaties governing the functioning of the EU, the Agreement was incorporated into European law by the 1997 Treaty of Amsterdam, meaning that (with derogations for the UK and Ireland) the number of Schengen area countries then rose to thirteen and that new member states would be bound to adopt the Schengen rules as part of the pre-existing body of EU law.20 Since Schengen abolished ­‘internal’ borders between its member countries, it implied a common ‘external’ frontier, thus giving rise to a common visa policy—whereby access to any one Schengen member state normally gives access to all of them21—and to the development of large-scale IT systems22 for collecting information on third-country nationals, shared between member states, to prevent travellers and migrants refused entry to the Schengen Area by one member state attempting to gain entry via another member state. It also gave rise to the so-called Dublin System, which establishes the member state responsible for considering an asylum application based primarily on the first point of entry and obliges the state concerned to take back those who have lodged applications in a different member state. Given these arrangements, the large-scale arrival of migrants and persons seeking asylum in 2015 put under particular strain the asylum systems of member states with external Schengen borders, such as Greece and Italy, which were often unable to offer applicants adequate support and 20  Norway, Iceland and Switzerland became part of the Schengen Area having signed association agreements with the EU in 1999 and 2004, but as non-EU member states they have few formally binding means of influencing the development of the Schengen rules. 21  In exceptional circumstances, Schengen member states may issue visas permitting travel only to the member states for which they are valid and the Schengen Convention and the Schengen Borders Code permit member states to require third-country nationals crossing an internal border to report their presence to the police. 22  Principally, the Visa Information System allowing member states to share information on visas applied for and granted; the Schengen Information System allowing member states to share information on people refused entry to the Schengen Area or who are wanted in connection with criminal proceedings; Eurodac enabling member states to compare the fingerprints of asylum applicants to ascertain whether they have previously applied for asylum in another member state or crossed the external border irregularly via another member state.

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protection. For example, already in 2008, the European Council on Refugees and Exiles had condemned ‘the unacceptable conditions for asylum claimants in Greece, the obstacles to accessing a fair determination procedure and the risk of other serious human rights violations’—while Norway and Germany had suspended the return of persons seeking asylum to Greece, where in 2007 the approval rate of applications had been less than 1% (Goldirova 2008). That, then, was the first problem. The second problem was that the crisis threatened the integrity of the Schengen system as a whole, by encouraging member states to re-impose border controls between themselves on the grounds of ‘a serious threat to public policy or internal security’;23 for, while the Schengen Borders Code placed an obligation on member states to consult with the Commission and other member states, ultimately, the re-imposition of controls was a prerogative of the member state concerned. Notwithstanding the Dublin System, most of the migrants arriving in Greece in 2015 attempted to make their way through the Balkans to the more northern European states, both because they were more likely to be accepted as refugees there (Beauchamp 2015) and because Dublin was by no means a watertight system: ‘take back requests’ had to be based on evidence; where based on a Eurodac hit (footnote 22) they had to be made within two months, and within three months if based on other evidence; transfer decisions could be appealed; detention for the purposes of transfer was legal only in the event of ‘a significant risk of absconding’.24 Consequently, one by one EU member states either erected fences at the external Schengen border or else re-­ imposed internal border controls giving rise to a domino effect whereby Hungary began building a fence on its border with Serbia in July directing the flow of refugees into Croatia—prompting Slovenia to erect fences along its border with Croatia; on 16 September, Austria re-imposed controls on its borders with Hungary and Slovenia following the re-­imposition of controls by Germany on its Austrian border three days earlier. Sweden, France, Norway and Denmark followed, re-imposing controls on 12, 13, 26 November and 4 January 2016 respectively, thereby continuing to undermine freedom of movement and with it the cost savings on trade due to Schengen (Felbermayr et al. 2016, 2017). The EU’s response to the migration crisis was, as Sir Richard Dearlove, put it, ‘hesitant and irresolute, complicated by the differing reaction of  Article 23, Schengen Borders Code (Regulation EC No. 562/2006).  Articles 23, 24, 27, 28 Regulation EU No. 604/2013.

23 24

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member states and the extent to which their national interests [were] effected’.25 From 1999, the EU had sought to put in place a Common European Asylum System consisting of a series of regulations and directives designed to align member states’ legislation to ensure greater uniformity of asylum outcomes in them and to enhance cooperation and responsibility sharing among them. However, the system’s impact at ground level was significantly limited by ‘hugely varying national systems constrained by national politics, shaped by culture and history’ (Traynor 2015). Consequently, outcomes remained highly disparate with national governments resistant to more common and coordinated policies unless they themselves benefitted, since the principle of responsibility sharing necessarily entailed a system of quotas whereby migrants and refugees would be relocated on a more equitable basis between them according to such criteria as their size and wealth. With growing numbers placing the authorities in Greece and Italy under increasing pressure, the Commission in May proposed relocating 40,000 people seeking asylum from these countries to other member states but the proposal foundered on the resistance of the countries of Eastern Europe and Spain. After Germany had decided, in an effort to lead by example, to process Syrian asylum applications for which it was not responsible under the Dublin regulation, another relocation plan was adopted by the Council of the European Union in September. However, this merely served to diminish the authority of the EU still further. Not only did the countries opposed to the proposal refuse to implement it, but the fact that it had been forced through the Council on a formal vote26 hardened the positions of those (Hungary, Slovakia, Romania and the Czech Republic) placed in the minority; increased 25  ‘The Migrant Crisis: A Spymaster’s Perspective’, BBC Radio 4, 16 May 2016, https:// www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b07bqk3y. 26  This was unusual. Normally, Council presidents seek agreements based on negotiated compromises so that matters can be decided consensually, without voting, in order to avoid placing members in a minority, with the risk that the members so isolated seek revenge in subsequent negotiations on other matters. At the same time, members aware of the absence of a blocking minority against a proposal see no interest in voting against it because, among other things, they want to avoid drawing attention to themselves as ‘obstructionists’, aware that they will have to negotiate again with the same partners on subsequent proposals, and because they wish to avoid being seen, back home, as failures in negotiations. So as Novak (2011) points out, it is not that the rarity of formal votes shows that qualified majority voting plays no role in the deliberations of the Council; rather, it is that its role is implicit rather than explicit: ‘It is the possibility of a vote that leads participants to reach agreement’ (Novak 2011: 16).

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tensions between them and the ‘frontline’ countries, Italy and Greece, and exposed divisions between the Commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker, and president of the European Council, Donald Tusk, for whom the policy was unworkable if not on the basis of consensus. Ultimately, the EU only managed to reduce the dimensions of the crisis by externalising its borders through a March 2016 ‘refugee return agreement’ with Turkey,27 which came at the cost of a further diminution in its authority as doubts were expressed about the agreement’s legality,28 as its closure of ‘the Balkan route’ drove refugees to other routes, as it seemed to fly in the face of the EU’s own foundational values such as those associated with solidarity, protection of human rights, the rule of law and the furtherance of mutual respect among peoples. Meanwhile, the conflation in the rhetoric of some EU leaders of refugee and security concerns arising from such incidents as the November 2015 Paris attacks merely provided an alibi to sovereigntist forces seeking to use the issue of immigration to fuel hostility to the EU—as happened, for example, during the lead-up to the Brexit referendum in the UK when the agreement with Turkey (which provided for visa-free travel for Turkish citizens and the re-opening of EU accession talks) provided the basis for the infamous but effective claim on the part of ‘Vote Leave’ campaigners that continued EU membership ‘would put Britons in danger as a result of a high level of criminality among Turkish citizens’ (Boffey and Helm 2016). The refugee problem therefore revealed that there was a very significant self-reinforcing element to the EU’s legitimacy crisis: on the one hand, the EU’s lack of authority prevented it from finding workable solutions to the problem; on the other hand, its inability to find workable solutions only undermined its authority still further. As Murray and Longo (2018: 422) note, ‘The failure of EU leaders to respond decisively promote[d] a legitimacy-eroding perception of the EU as incapable of responding effectively to a complex challenge’. Member states’ unwillingness to embrace principles of responsibility sharing, to reach consensus on EU policies to address the challenge, by undermining the EU’s authority to act, merely 27  Involving the Turkish government agreeing to take back refugees arriving irregularly in Greece in exchange for money and diplomatic favours. 28  For example, the country’s human rights record raised a question about whether the international-law prohibition on refoulement made it legitimate for an EU member state to refuse to consider a claim from a person arriving from Turkey, and another question about ‘the compatibility of mass returns with asylum seekers’ right to an individual assessment of their claim’ (Nebehay and Baczynska 2016).

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strengthened an unwillingness that prevented the EU from acting in the first place—especially as parties seeking to nationalise and securitise the refugee issue encouraged mainstream parties and governments to respond by themselves pandering to anti-immigrant sentiments and adopting nationalist discourses. Parties of the left were by no means immune to this tendency, on the contrary. In the UK, for example, where, following the EU enlargement of 2004, immigration was regularly the most cited when voters were asked to name the most important issue facing the country,29 the Labour governments from 1997 took a series of restrictive measures in the area of asylum which added to a mounting impression of migrants and refugees as “sneaking into the UK”, “cheating” the system and “living off benefits”. Advisers of the time acknowledge that a negative view of asylum was seeping more widely into hostility to all migrants. The hope, according to one home office adviser, was that “if people saw we were dealing with abuse but also improving the channels for legal migration, we could get public trust back”. (Shabi 2019)

By the 2015 general election, the Labour Party was even producing a promotional mug bearing the slogan, ‘Controls on immigration’ (Perraudin 2015), in reference to its campaign pledges to ‘respond to people’s concerns about immigration, with proper controls’30 including limiting EU migrants’ access to the social security system. It was not very surprising, therefore, that in the following year’s Brexit referendum, ‘Vote Leave’ campaigners were able to emerge victorious on the basis of a campaign one of whose main planks rested on immigration and ending freedom of movement. Occasionally, the ‘Remain’ campaign, backed by the Labour leadership along with the leadership of the Conservative Party, sought to challenge the assumption that immigration was problematic and ought to be controlled, this by referring to its benefits in terms of filling gaps in the labour market, meeting skills shortages and so forth—and yet it was noteworthy that even then, arguments tended to fall short of 29  ‘UK Public Opinion Towards Immigration: Overall Attitudes and Level of Concern’, The Migration Observatory, 20 January 2020, https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/ resources/briefings/uk-public-opinion-toward-immigration-overall-attitudes-and-level-ofconcern/. 30  ‘The Labour Party Manifesto 2015’, p. 6, https://b.3cdn.net/labouruk/e0e65bbcfdd383c61f_mlbr0j2o6.pdf.

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s­uggesting that immigration was something good, referring to it instead as something that was ‘necessary’ (Goodman 2017: 47). In Italy—to give another example—the centre-left Partito Democratico (Democratic Party, PD), in government from 2013, too ‘mirrored public anxieties and security concerns, endorsing emergency narratives, aggressive policing and militarised border control’ (Castelli Gattinara 2017: 318), so providing credence to the claims of the parties of the radical right (Matteo Salvini’s Lega (League) and Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy, FdI)) that both the government (criticised for the outcomes of the negotiations on responsibility sharing) and the EU were unfit to tackle the perceived emergency. As a result, the PD took an increasingly harsh stance on migration, which included a February 2017 agreement with the UN-recognised government of Libya led by Fayez al-­ Serraj, which in many respects mirrored the 2016 EU agreement with Turkey, in that it externalised migration controls (in this case, by providing money, training and equipment to strengthen the Libyan coastguard). This led to a dramatic reduction in the numbers of migrants reaching Italy from across the Mediterranean, from 119,369  in 2017 to 23,370  in 2018,31 leading the PD leader, Nicola Zingaretti, later to claim that while Salvini sought to foment hostility around problems, the PD sought to resolve them (Newell 2019d: 356). The difficulty, however, was if that was indeed the case, then it was being implied that Salvini had correctly diagnosed what ‘the problem’ was in the first place (i.e. the presence of ‘too many migrants’)—so that it was not at all clear, as Cundari (2019) pointed out, why voters would not also look to him to provide the problem’s solution. And in fact, notwithstanding the Libya agreement, at the general election of 2018 when immigration was the most high-profile campaign issue, the PD suffered a crushing defeat, winning its lowest share of the vote (18.8%) ever, while the League saw an equally unprecedented jump in its support. In short, social democratic parties seem to have been unable to mitigate the EU’s legitimacy crisis, and in some respects they have contributed to it. They have been unable to mitigate it thanks to their inability, since the movement of monetary policy upwards and the constraints on budgetary policy this has entailed, to advance a clear alternative, in the wake of the Eurozone crisis, to the politics of austerity. They have contributed to the legitimacy crisis by virtue of having been unable to stem the rise of  UNHCR data, https://data2.unhcr.org/en/situations/mediterranean/location/5205.

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populist sovereigntist formations whose narratives they have in effect reinforced, having been unwilling to challenge populists’ nationalisation and securitisation of migration as an issue, thus undermining the EU’s capacity to develop a policy based on principles of responsibility sharing. The consequence of all of this, I now want to argue, has been that if until recent years, the issue of Europe and its future had animated discussion mainly on the right, then as the new challenger parties have begun to peel off support from parties of the left as well, so there has been a revived discussion of the issue among these parties too (Newell 2019b: 302).

The Revived Discussion of European Integration in and Among Parties of the Left As we saw in Chap. 2, by the 1990s, social democratic parties had for the most part come to engage positively with processes of European integration on the basis that, with the achievements of the Single European Act, further integration beyond it seemed to offer the prospect of the development of a ‘social Europe’ based on actions provided for by the 1989 Social Charter and the Social Protocol to the Maastricht Treaty. Hostility to further integration was therefore mainly expressed by business groups and parties of the right. However, following the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty and the development of monetary integration, parties of the left found that if the intergovernmental features of Europe often obstructed the coordinated pursuit of reform, then its supranational features often obliged them, in government, to bow to a politics of retrenchment despite themselves. My argument here is that the growing legitimacy crisis we have discussed in this chapter has brought awareness of this problem to a head, with the result that within parties of the left, increasingly challenged by the growth of populist sovereigntist formations, we have seen a growing radicalisation and polarisation of positions on Europe, positions that have become increasingly divided between those responding to the problem by advocating disengagement from integration altogether and those advocating exactly the opposite, namely, a further deepening of integration processes. For the former, the response to the EU legitimacy crisis spearheaded by the populist sovereigntists has been the increasing articulation of hostility to the present transnational institutional arrangements combined with the desire to see a reversal of what has been achieved so far. For the latter, the response has been to argue for reform of the present

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transnational institutional arrangements combined with an extension of integration to new areas. The division was given heightened public salience in the run-up to the 2019 European Parliament (EP) elections. On the one hand, the elections were once again a series of second-order national elections (Reif and Schmitt 1980) with domestic political agendas dominating campaigns, and voters using the occasion to protest against incumbent parties. On the other hand, domestic political agendas in many cases revolved around the country’s place in Europe, and therefore around (the future of) Europe itself, on which opinion was increasingly polarised. This was reflected in the increased turnout (which at 51% was at its highest for twenty years) together with losses for mainstream and incumbent parties in favour of nationalist parties on the one hand, and Green parties, as well as other parties with EU integration agendas, on the other—resulting in the European People’s Party Group and the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats losing the combined majority they had had in the EP. (Newell 2019b: 301–302)

Against this background, the UK Labour Party offered what was arguably the most striking example of a party of the left deeply divided on Europe, because the consequences were so dramatic. On the one side, there were about ten of its MPs and the organisation, ‘Labour Leave’, which had campaigned in favour of Brexit, joined after the referendum by ‘[b]etween forty and sixty’ Labour MPs in ‘an internal “Respect the Result” caucus’ (Jones 2020: 198). On the other side were the remainder of the parliamentary party, the majority of the party’s members and the internal pressure group, ‘Another Europe is Possible’, formed in February 2016 ‘to campaign for a Remain position in the EU referendum from a specifically left, progressive perspective’.32 Among the ordinary party members, Jones suggests, the older generation had ‘been broadly ­convinced by the Delors speech to the TUC in 1988’ and ‘had come to see the EU as a lifeboat in a sea of icy Thatcherism’; while the younger generation ‘had never heard a Eurosceptic argument which hadn’t been made by some arch-reactionary’, and ‘associated Euroscepticism with migrant-bashing Farageists’ (Jones 2020:  185). Another Europe is Possible ‘believed that the anti-Brexit movement should be embraced by  https://www.anothereurope.org/about/.

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the left because it was bound up with progressive causes such as immigration, environmentalism and internationalism’ (Jones 2020: 190). In the aftermath of the 2016 Brexit referendum, the Labour leadership had attempted to straddle the division in its own ranks (which reflected a corresponding division among its voters). On the one hand, it declined to support the EU withdrawal agreement negotiated by a Conservative government lacking a parliamentary majority and whose own followers were divided on the issue; but equally, it failed to give unambiguous support to those who envisaged reversing the 2016 outcome by means of a second referendum allowing voters to choose between the Withdrawal Agreement or maintaining the EU membership status quo. At the 2019 EP election, Labour scored a smaller percentage of the poll than at any time since 2010 (Shaw 2021: 190); for by then, with the Government having failed three times to persuade Parliament to ratify its Withdrawal Agreement, and with Parliament unable to agree on any other alternative, opinions on Europe had become so polarised that the ground in between was virtually uninhabited. Consequently, Labour’s position of ‘constructive ambiguity’ on how to respond to the Brexit referendum was essentially an appeal to an empty auditorium. Italy offers another striking example of the growing divide within the mainstream left, precisely because at first sight it seems such an unlikely case given that the historical setting there is so radically different from that of the UK. In the UK, the Labour Party’s divisions had deep historical roots reflecting the perennial ambivalence of the country’s political elites generally towards Europe. Having emerged as victors from the War and believing that their security was assured by the so-called special relationship with the US, and by their colonies, they had only ever sought EU membership for reasons of expediency. If the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty and the capacity tightly to manage parliamentary business gave them the freedom and autonomy they needed to govern a union state based on constitutional contracts between territorial components without uniform competences, then it meant that they were always suspicious of ideals of European integration based on the constraints of supranationalism and the politics of bargaining and compromise. For Italy’s political elites, the situation was the exact opposite. Called upon to govern through a weak state whose inefficiencies were compounded by governing instability and the easy penetration of interest groups, Italian elites viewed integration and the vincolo esterno (‘external constraint’) thus created as a vehicle for a hardening and hollowing out of the state (Della Sala 1997)

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and therefore for an improvement in the quality of Italian governance all round. Consequently, European integration had for long been a matter of near consensus across the party spectrum including the mainstream left, with dissenting voices, prior to the 2000s, for the most part confined to the far-right fringe. Therefore, the party, ‘Patria e Costituzione’, founded in September 2018 by the left-wing former deputy finance minister and PD member, Stefano Fassina, although small to say the least, was nevertheless a clear indicator of emerging cracks in the mainstream left consensus, its perspective a genuine novelty in that part of the political spectrum. Defining internationalism as the ‘virtuous interaction of nation states’, it argues that ‘the nation state is the only possible instrument for ensuring the primacy of democratic politics over the economy, for the construction of the welfare state and the realisation of personal rights and freedoms’; that the project of ‘democratic European sovereignty’ is therefore illusory, and that the danger posed by the forces of sovereigntist populism must be met by ‘a constructive and shared withdrawal from what is an unrealisable historic political project in order to avoid a chaotic rupture’. 33

Conclusion Against the background of the EU’s early development and the declining fortunes of the mainstream left discussed in Chaps. 2 and 3, in this chapter we have sought to understand the role of the mainstream left in the EU’s legitimacy crisis. If the potential for crisis was inherent in the European institutions from the start, then the institutions’ authority started to decline from the signing of the Maastricht Treaty when the reach of EU institutions became increasingly visible within the public sphere. By highlighting the inadequacies of these institutions in maintaining prosperity and in living up to their own professed values of prosperity combined with solidarity, the Eurozone and the refugee crises have arguably been the most significant triggers of the current legitimacy crisis; for governing institutions are prone to crises of legitimacy when they are perceived as unable to produce promised outcomes deemed desirable and appropriate. Mainstream parties of the left have been unable to mitigate and in some respects have contributed to the crisis. If the examples presented in the preceding section are sufficient to make the case that one of the effects of 33  All quotations taken from Stefano Fassina’s ‘Presentazione’, http://patriaecostituzione. it/manifesto/.

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the EU’s legitimacy crisis has been to prompt the emergence of a novel brand of social democratic ‘Euroscepticism’—one seeking an actual reversal of integration and therefore one with obvious overlaps with the positions of some on the radical left and certainly with those of the sovereigntist right—then it remains to be seen exactly how widespread it is and how it can be understood in its own terms. What, in other words, is the case it seeks to make, and how persuasive is that case? These are the questions we shall seek to address in the chapter that follows—before contrasting the case, in the chapter following, with the opposite case: the left-wing case for further integration.

CHAPTER 5

Social Democratic Opponents of Europe

Introduction Social democratic wariness of European integration has a political heritage stretching back to the beginnings of the project itself, as we saw in Chap. 2. What is new in social democratic circles is that there is now a strand of thinking that goes beyond mere wariness to argue explicitly in favour of a dismantling of at least some transnational European institutions (such as those associated with the Euro) or else disengaging from them altogether, through a Brexit-style withdrawal from the EU. In this chapter, we shall explore this strand of thinking first by drawing on the work of left-leaning intellectuals, politicians and journalists, to provide a summary account of the basic arguments on which it rests, and then by subjecting them to critical scrutiny. Our contention is that the strand of thinking builds its case on four basic propositions all of which are defective to varying degrees. They are (1) that the national state is the only vehicle through which social democratic goals can feasibly be pursued; (2) that the institutions of the EU are inherently resistant to the pursuit of such goals, which therefore (3) cannot feasibly be pursued through them; (4) that economic prosperity can more easily be achieved through withdrawal from the EU than it can within it.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. L. Newell, European Integration and the Crisis of Social Democracy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08822-3_5

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The Social Democratic Case for Withdrawing from the EU The point of departure for what, for convenience, we shall call ‘Lexit’, a term apparently coined by the UK journalist, Owen Jones (2015), is the social democratic commitment to ‘the primacy of politics over markets and the democratisation of all spheres of society’ (Wolkenstein 2020: 1350). This commitment is significant in two ways. First, it highlights that Lexit draws directly on the traditional social democratic ambition to use the levers of the state to ‘make capitalism fit for society’ (Crouch 2013) and therefore its tendency to resist anything that would place limits on its capacity to do that.1 More profoundly, however, the commitment to democratising economy and society is a commitment to popular self-rule and is therefore strongly connected to the notion of sovereignty, without which it has little or no meaning; ‘for democracy is an integral part of popular sovereignty and extends far beyond the mere ability to vote periodically’ (Lapovitsas 2019: 5). By themselves, the notions of ‘popular self-rule’ and of ‘sovereignty’ leave open the questions of who ‘the people’ are and who or what is, or should be, ‘sovereign’: it does not automatically follow that a social democrat would equate ‘sovereignty’ with ‘national sovereignty’, so the tendency of advocates of Lexit to do just this needs explaining. Again, there are two issues involved. First, the notion of sovereignty has to do with primacy in terms of the legitimate exercise of power. It has therefore traditionally been closely associated with the modern state, of which it is a defining feature—as Max Weber famously pointed out when, in his 1918 lecture, ‘Politics as a Vocation’, he described the state as a ‘human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory’. Second, for proponents of Lexit, the absence of a European demos suggests that popular self-rule cannot be exercised but on national lines, the nation state being ‘the only possible instrument for ensuring the primacy of democratic politics over the economy’.2

1  As Bugaric (2013: 6) puts it, social democratic parties, while not opposing European integration in principle, were unenthusiastic because ‘[t]heir primary concern was to keep the welfare state and its redistributive policies firmly within the jurisdiction of the nation state’. 2  http://www.patriaecostituzione.it/manifesto/, my translation.

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In short, Lexit represents a retreat to the nation state as the only feasible form of defence against the negative impacts of globalisation (the increasing relevance for other parts of the world of what goes on in any one part of it) and neo-liberalism (an ideology ‘marked by a strong belief in the merits of free markets and private enterprise coupled with an equally strong antipathy towards the public sector, collective agents, and organized labour’ (Lapovitsas 2019: 8)). This means that Lexit rejects suggestions that the EU is, or can be, a progressive force; for it sees the EU as a set of institutions suffering from a democratic deficit, so that its agenda is set for it by big business and international capital. Denial that the EU is a progressive force rests, to a significant degree, on observation of the consequences of the Maastricht Treaty and Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), thereby highlighting the way in which Lexit has been given considerable impetus by the Eurozone crisis as described in the last chapter. Writes Lapovitsas (2019: 3–5): The response of the EU to the crisis pointed to cold calculation rather than solidarity as its operating principle. Sharply hierarchical power structures and hegemonic behaviour made themselves acutely felt within the union. The paramount objective was to rescue the common currency, the euro, for its collapse would have delivered a mortal blow to the structures built after the Maastricht Treaty. The costs of this rescue were imposed overwhelmingly on the weakest member states. … The policies of the EU to confront the Eurozone crisis have further favoured capital while worsening the conditions of labour.

Newspaper articles by Owen Jones (2015), George Monbiot (2015) and Suzanne Moore (2015) among others are eloquent about how the fall-out from the Eurozone crisis was traumatic for many among those on the left, at least in the UK. By raising the salience of associated issues (e.g. the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, subsidies to wealthy farmers and so on) and by creating a sense of injustice, it was clearly driving many of them in the direction of a ‘Leave’ vote in the 2016 referendum. However, for the proponents of Lexit it is not enough to argue that the EU is not a progressive force: they also have to make the case that it cannot be. The essence of this case is that neo-liberal policies are ‘inherent in the institutional functioning’ of the EU: that ‘[t]he EU and the EMU are not a neutral set of governing bodies, institutions and practices that could potentially serve any socio-political forces, parties, or governments, with

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any political agenda, depending on their relative strength. Rather, they are structured in the interests of capital against labour’ so that ‘[t]he EU and the EMU are beyond left-wing reform, and probably beyond major structural reform altogether’ (Lapovitsas 2019: 10–11). Bojan Bugaric (2013) and Alex Callinicos (2015) among others have sought to put flesh on the bones of this argument. Bugaric begins by reminding us that it was Friedrich Hayek (1939) who first suggested that inter-state federalism would place structural barriers in the way of electorates enacting dirigiste and redistributive policies, this owing to the lack of inter-state solidarity necessary to sustain them.3 He then goes on to suggest that Hayek’s suggestion may well have come to pass insofar as the original vision of Europe’s ‘founding fathers’—combining international free trade with domestic state interventionism—has since been replaced by a regime in which ‘it is structurally impossible to develop an EU version of social market economy’ (Bugaric 2013: 4). This suggestion is borrowed from the work of Fritz Scharpf (2010) who focuses on the role of the European Court of Justice (ECJ). Originally established in 1952 as the Court of Justice of the European Coal and Steel Communities, the ECJ (alternatively known simply as the Court of Justice) is now one of two courts making up the Court of Justice of the European Union (the other being the General Court). Its purpose is to interpret EU law in order to ensure that it is applied in the same way in all member states. It does this mainly by receiving from national courts references for preliminary rulings on how they are to interpret EU law; and its rulings, once made, also bind all other courts before which the 3  The barriers would operate both at the level of the federation as a whole and at the level of the individual member states. As an economic union involving freedom of movement of capital, labour and goods, the federation would find it impossible to introduce measures such as the limitation of working hours, unemployment insurance and so on because their effect is to subsidise one group of people, while imposing a sacrifice on others. ‘In the national state current ideologies make it comparatively easy to persuade the rest of the community that it is in their interest to protect “their” iron industry or “their” wheat production or whatever it be’ (Hayek 1939). In the federation, in contrast, variation in economic conditions between member states would ensure that while some would support the measure in question, others would not. Meanwhile, freedom of movement of capital, labour and goods would ensure that the member states themselves were driven to a lowest common denominator in terms of the various forms of state intervention. ‘The conclusion that, in a federation, certain economic powers, which are now generally wielded by the national state, could be exercised neither by the federation nor by the individual states, implies that there would have to be less government all round if federation is to be practical’ (Hayek 1939).

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same problem is raised. It also acts as a court of appeal, but only on points of law, against judgements of the General Court.4 Of crucial importance are, first, the principle of the primacy of EU law over national law (which, as we saw in Chap. 2, was established in 1964 by the ECJ’s ruling in the Costa vs. Ente Nazionale per l’Energia Elettrica [ENEL] case). Second, the principle of the direct application of EU law (established in 1963 by the Court’s ruling in the Van Gend & Loos case) obliges national courts to apply EU law in full within their spheres of competence, so conferring on EU citizens a direct guarantee of their rights under EU law before national courts. Against this background, Scharpf’s argument is, first, that in the period following the achievement of the customs union (1968) and the first enlargement (1973), politics for long struggled to drive forward the process of integration and harmonisation (owing to the diversity of the member states and therefore the difficulty of achieving the necessary consensus). However, the primacy and direct application of EU law made possible a judicially driven process of integration and harmonisation, which was difficult for member-state governments to resist. For one thing, the fact that national courts could ask the ECJ for preliminary opinions on issues requiring the interpretation of European law, in effect, gave them the power to rule on the validity of national legislation. For another thing, if at the national level judicial interpretations (of legislation or constitutions) can be corrected, ex-post, through legislative action, then at the EU level they can only be corrected—where based on primary law—through Treaty revisions (requiring ratification by all member states), or else—where based on secondary law—only through an initiative of the Commission (and, in most cases, the initiative’s acceptance by a qualified majority of the Council and an absolute majority of the EP). Second, through its interpretations of the Rome Treaty’s provisions concerning free trade, the ECJ was progressively able to extend its control over the substance of national policies to the extent that eventually, ‘no area of national law, institutions and practices remained immune to the potential reach of European economic liberties and the rules of undistorted market

4  The General Court assesses the conformity with EU law of the acts of an EU institution, where references may be made by another EU institution, a member state or an individual provided that the individual can demonstrate that the contested act concerned him or her directly and individually.

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competition’ (Scharpf 2010: 220).5 Third, the cases that come to the Court tend to be those brought by organisations with sufficient resources to pursue an interest in increased factor mobility by seeking redress against national regulations. Consequently, ‘most of the Court’s case law responds to the economic interests of business enterprises and capital owners’ (Scharpf 2010: 222), so that the main thrust of judicial action is to extend the reach of negative, rather than positive, integration.6 Fourth, ECJ decisions interpreting Treaty-based freedoms have constitutional status; and therefore, since they cannot be reversed by the adoption of secondary legislation (regulations and directives) ‘political attempts to use legislation in order to limit the reach of liberalization … are likely to be frustrated by the subsequent evolution of the case law’ (Scharpf 2010: 227). Consequently, over the years, the ECJ and its rulings have been powerful drivers of integration along neo-liberal lines and there has been very little that either the member states (thanks to the primacy and direct applicability of EU law) or other EU institutions (thanks to the need for qualified majorities) have been able to do to stand in the Court’s way. In short, the original constitutional settlement, embodied in the Rome Treaty, which struck a balance between economic freedoms (as the key instrument of integration) and national social protection (excluded from the ambit of the European institutions’ jurisdiction), was progressively undermined in practice by the ECJ’s case law. If the activities of the ECJ provide one basis for the contention of Lexit that the EU institutions are unavailable for the pursuit of progressive politics, then another concerns the legislative changes7 and a new Treaty (the Treaty on Stability, Co-ordination and Governance in the Economic and Monetary Union (2012)) that came into force in the wake of the Eurozone crisis. In combination, these measures were aimed at strengthening the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) and achieving greater coordination of member states’ economic policy making, as it was weaknesses in these 5  For example, in the 1974 Dassonville case, the ECJ established that any national rules or practices that might—even ‘potentially’—hinder intra-community trade, could be construed as illegitimate non-tariff barriers. 6  That is, the elimination of barriers restricting the movement of goods, services and factors of production—as distinct from ‘positive integration’, which ‘refers to the creation of a common sovereignty through the modification of existing institutions and the creation of new ones’ (Learn Europe, http://www.learneurope.eu/index.php?cID=306). 7  The European Semester (2010), the European Financial Stability Facility (2010), the Euro-Plus Pact (2011), the Six-Pack (2011), the European Stability Mechanism (2012).

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areas that were perceived to have been among the most significant contributors to the Eurozone crisis in the first place. Most significantly, Title III of the Treaty (known as the ‘Fiscal Compact’) obliges all Eurozone member states (and non-Eurozone countries the moment they adopt the Euro) to transpose into their national legal orders, ‘through provisions of binding force and permanent character, preferably constitutional’,8 a ‘balanced budget rule’.9 If the Commission concludes that a member state has failed to comply with the transposition requirement, it may bring the matter before the Court of Justice, which is given the power to impose a financial penalty on the offending state of up to 0.1% of its GDP. In the event of deviation from the balanced budget rule, ‘a correction mechanism shall be triggered automatically’ where, ‘on the basis of common principles to be proposed by the European Commission’, the mechanism is to be ‘put in place at national level’ along with independent institutions responsible for monitoring compliance.10 Recommendations submitted by the Commission within the framework of the excessive deficit procedure, in respect of a state in breach of the rule, are to be considered adopted unless a qualified majority of the Council rejects them (the so-called reverse qualified majority voting procedure). States with public debts above 60% of GDP are obliged to reduce them ‘at an average rate of one twentieth per year’.11 In short, from the perspective of Lexit, a certain approach to economic policy making has become ‘hard wired’ into the EU’s legal structure: already undermined by the Single European Act (SEA), Maastricht and EMU (with its constraints on fiscal policy in the SGP), Keynesian-type counter-cyclical measures have, in effect, been outlawed at the national level, so consolidating the member-state governments’ loss of budgetary autonomy and thereby limiting the range of choices available to them in the pursuit of redistributive social policies. 8  Article 3, paragraph 2, Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance in the Economic and Monetary Union, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CE LEX:42012A0302(01)&from=EN. 9  Meaning that budget deficits cannot exceed 3% of GDP and that structural deficits can at most be 0.5% of GDP for states with public debts of more than 60% of GDP, 1% for states with public debts below 60%. 10  Article 3, paragraphs 1(e) and 2, Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance in the Economic and Monetary Union, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/ PDF/?uri=CELEX:42012A0302(01)&from=EN. 11  Article 4 Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance in the Economic and Monetary Union, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELE X:42012A0302(01)&from=EN.

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Another way of putting it is to say that with the passage of time, powers have been sucked towards the centre away from the member states; and that, as the centre is not subject to ‘the familiar mechanisms that ensure political responsiveness in national politics’ (Scharpf 2010: 229), a dominant austerity policy has become ‘baked into’ the legal orders of both EU and the member states. Moreover, all this has taken place in the context of the activities of the ECJ. Whereas, at the national level, courts are (at least in federal states) normally constrained by constitutions setting out divisions of competence between national and sub-national levels, the ECJ is relatively unconstrained in this sense given that EU ‘case law does not recognize a sphere of national autonomy’ (Scharpf 2010: 231). Yes, the EU Treaties have explicitly ruled out legislation in certain areas (e.g. pay and collective bargaining), but this has not prevented the ECJ from disallowing national legislation in the same areas when it has conflicted with (the Court’s interpretation of) Treaty-based liberties. In addition, ‘[t]he principle of ‘subsidiarity’, which was inserted into the Treaties at the insistence of the German Länder, [can] at best impose limits on European legislation’ (Scharpf 2010: 230, my emphasis): it cannot limit judicial interpretations of the Treaties. ‘Lexiteers’, therefore, speak of an ‘integration trap’. This refers to the idea that social democratic parties, having come to see European integration as a potential vehicle for the advance of their distinctive agendas, then discovered that it was ‘a constraint on social programmes rather than a facilitator of them’ (Holmes and Roder 2021: 22). As we saw in Chap. 2, social democrats had become supportive of integration following the SEA in the belief that the latter created pressure for supranationalism in social policy as means of averting the risk of social dumping. Subsequently, promises of faster growth with EMU seemed to offer an alternative to national Keynesianism (already undermined by processes of globalisation), as a basis for policies of redistribution. Hence, as suggested in the last chapter, social democrats eventually came to lose much of their programmatic distinctiveness from opponents on the right, at least in terms of economic policy making. Consequently, if in government, they found it impossible to avoid responding to the 2008 Great Recession and subsequent Eurozone crisis with austerity measures. By this time, many of them were beginning to realise ‘that key aspects of the EU integration process … were detrimental to the wider realisation of traditional social democratic policies’ (Holmes and Roder 2021: 33). However, ‘when Lehman Brothers imploded, the left’s intellectual cupboard was bare’ (Jones 2020

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cited by Holmes and Roder 2021: 34) implying that by then integration had rendered alternatives to austerity not only institutionally impossible but also impossible to conceive. Having had as their raison d’être the transformation of capitalism, the social democrats were finding, through their embrace of European integration, that it was capitalism that was transforming them—with all of the electoral consequences discussed in Chap. 3. However, the suggestion that progressive reform is impossible through the EU, that integration is therefore a trap, leaves the case for Lexit exposed on another front. That is, European integration might still be preferred to Lexit on the grounds that, even if integration cannot be used to tame capitalism, in the long run (i.e. aside from the specific circumstances of the Eurozone crisis) it nevertheless enables capitalism to deliver more all-round prosperity than does the Lexit alternative. In short, Lexiteers have to make the case that life would be better economically speaking with their solution than with the European status quo. The issue is one that had a high profile during the campaign leading up to the UK’s Brexit referendum on 23 June 2016. While those on the Remain side emphasised the potentially negative economic consequences of a vote to leave, their opponents dubbed the claims ‘project fear’, by which they meant an unscrupulous attempt to scare people into believing false claims about the economic dangers that would arise from a change in the status quo. Evidently—given the referendum outcome—the ‘project’, if such it was, failed to achieve its intended results, for reasons that may have had to do with voters’ attitudes to risk and uncertainty as the behavioural economist, Fabio Tramontana (2019) explains. Imagine that you have to choose between investment A, which will give you a return, with absolute certainty, of €24,000, and investment B, which will give you a 25% probability of a return of €100,000 and a 75% probability of nothing at all. Even though the average gain in the second case is higher (= 0.25 × €100,000), most choose investment A because it has the advantage of certainty. This suggests that people are risk-averse. But they are not always so. Faced with the choice between option C, a certain loss of €75,000, and option D, a 75% probability of losing €100,000 and a 25% probability of losing nothing, most choose D, even though the average loss (= 0.75 × €100,000) is the same in both cases. So whether people are risk-averse or not depends on whether they perceive the alternatives as gains or losses. In roulette, for example, rather than accepting a certain loss and quitting, they may be willing to risk losing even more by continuing to play, in the hope of

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winning back what they have lost even though the probability is low. Such reasoning may explain Brexit. Given that the referendum took place not long after the Great Recession, in a context of austerity, it is possible, if not probable, that for many voters, the referendum represented a choice between a certain loss and the chance to take a bet. ‘On the day of the vote, who knew what would happen in the event of a decision to leave the European Union? Promises of catastrophe and paradise filled the newspapers lined up on each side, meaning that for the average voter, a vote to leave represented a hazardous choice, but one that was more attractive than the status quo of ‘Remain’, viewed by many as representing a certain loss’ (Tramontana 2019, my translation). Be this as it may, a not inconsiderable amount of effort was put into making a positive economic case for EU withdrawal by Lexiteers associated with the organisation, ‘Labour Leave’, whose co-founder, Brendan Chilton, echoed Tramontana’s suggestion in seeking to account for the outcome of the Brexit referendum (Rampen 2017): “In terms of austerity, the key thing was that people had suffered the cuts to health and all the rest of it over a long period of time, and so there was a kind of ‘what have we got to lose?’ mentality,” Chilton says. He recalls “a feeling of hopelessness” after even the biggest rallies. “The Remain side, one of their fundamental mistakes was to say how wonderful everything was if we stay in and how awful it would be if we leave,” he says. “People didn’t feel everything was wonderful at the moment, they felt it was pretty awful, actually”.

In October 2015 Chilton founded Labour Leave together with the entrepreneur, John Mills, who later claimed (2019) that the organisation’s activities may have been decisive in the outcome of the Brexit referendum. He has a point. Kevin O’Rourke, author of A Short History of Brexit (2019: 175), noted that ‘Brexit was not inevitable: Leave only won by a small majority. Thirty-three million six-hundred thousand people voted in the referendum. If just 635,000 of these had voted to Remain rather than Leave’—he went on to say—he ‘would not [have been] writing [his] book’. He points out that there were two Leave campaigns: Vote Leave— bringing together those hostile to European integration from across the political spectrum and designated as the official Leave campaign by the Electoral Commission—and Leave.EU, run by the entrepreneur, Arron Banks, and United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) leader, Nigel

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Farage. He goes on to mention that the political journalist, Tim Shipman (2017), in his book on the referendum campaign, suggested that having two Leave campaigns may have been beneficial. On the one hand there was a ‘respectable’ campaign, and on the other a campaign delivering what Shipman describes as ‘edgier messages designed to appeal to working-­ class voters’. Many of these edgy messages were populist, nativist and anti-­ immigrant: they appealed above all to a fairly unreconstructed English as opposed to British nationalism.

So the activities of Labour Leave may have been beneficial in a similar way, successfully appealing to loyal Labour supporters who (especially given uncertainty among them as to where their party stood on Brexit: Mason 2016) might otherwise have been unpersuaded to vote Leave because put off by the Conservatives’ effective domination of Vote Leave, on the one hand, and by the stridency and extremism of Leave.EU, on the other. Labour Leave made its economic case for Lexit through, among other things, a pamphlet edited by Kevin Hickson and Jasper Miles (2016), a propaganda film entitled Lexit: the Movie12 and a book produced after the referendum by the economist, Philip Whyman (2018). Synthesising these materials suggests that, in essence, Lexit posits a causal relationship between throwing off the obligations of EU membership, and prosperity, that runs through three linking mechanisms: trade, financial contributions and public support for domestic enterprise. Many of the points made under the three headings circulated widely during the campaign leading up to the 2016 referendum, so that in those respects at least, there was little to distinguish left-wing opponents of EU membership from their counterparts on the right. Both, for example, subscribed to the hypothesis of a downward impact of immigration on the wages and employment of existing workers and opposed EU freedom of movement for that reason. Under the heading of trade, the main argument was that the UK would be able to pursue an independent trade policy. This would have the advantage that, with the EU taking a declining share of UK exports and the rest of the world a correspondingly greater share (44% of UK exports went to the EU in 2017 as compared to 55% in 2006 (Morris 2019)), and with EU trade deals often slow to negotiate due to the difficulties of getting  Available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pq72f81kkM4.

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agreement between all of the member states, ‘[i]n a rapidly changing global economy, the flexibility for the UK to cut its own new deals could be valuable’ (Lilico 2016). Focusing on the large trade deficit with the EU, Whyman (2018: 20) suggested that ‘management of the exchange rate could offset all or part of any increase in trade costs’ that would flow from being outside the EU single market and customs union. Under the heading of financial contributions, the argument was that ‘leaving the EU would result in an immediate cost saving, as the country would no longer contribute to the EU budget’ (The Week 2019): a circumstance referred to by Whyman (2018: 33) as ‘the Brexit dividend’. The Week (2019) pointed out that, ‘[i]n 2016, Britain paid in £13.1bn, but it also received £4.5bn worth of spending’ so that the UK’s net contribution was £8.5bn—going on to observe: ‘What was harder to determine was whether the financial advantages of EU membership, such as free trade and inward investment, outweighed the upfront costs’. Under the heading of public support for domestic enterprise, the argument was that not having to comply with single-market competition and state-aid rules would enable the development of the industrial and procurement policy ‘required to deal with the long standing problems inherent in the UK economy’ (Whyman 2018: 81). Identifying these problems as ones related to poor productivity growth, low levels of capital formation, a large trade deficit, weaknesses in the labour market and a need to re-balance the economy, Whyman (2018: 6) argued for the negotiation of a free-trade agreement with the EU, as this, in his view, would allow ‘more policy independence than EEA and customs union options, thereby making it easier to achieve the economic transformation of the UK economy, [while avoiding] most of the trade costs associated with the WTO option’. In summary, then, Lexit bases its case on four propositions: (1) Democratic control of the economy can only be achieved through the institutions of the nation state as these are the only institutions currently available for the exercise of popular sovereignty. (2) The institutions of the European Union suffer from a democratic deficit and therefore have their agendas set for them by the interests of large business corporations. (3) The institutions of the European Union are therefore unavailable for the pursuit of progressive agendas in the sense that the pursuit of such agendas through them is not possible. (4) Withdrawal from the institutions of the EU makes possible a path to economic prosperity that is currently closed off by the constraints of the Union’s state-aid and competition rules.

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The Pros and Cons of Lexit We now consider what can be said in favour of Lexit, and what appear to be its shortcomings, taking each of its four propositions in turn. Proposition 1, with its reification of the nation state, often leads social democratic opponents of European integration to take positions that are difficult to distinguish from those of the nationalist right. For example, the aforementioned pamphlet, ‘The Labour case for Brexit’, included a piece by Frank Field, a Member of Parliament well known for his radical stances on the issue of poverty, entitled ‘Patriotism and the Left’. In it, he expresses views clearly reflecting the welfare chauvinism characteristic of the populist right for whom the safety nets of the welfare state should be restricted to those who belong to the community, where ‘the community’, in turn, excludes migrants as they are deemed to be a drain on societal resources. For Field (2016: 42), migrants are clearly to be treated as outsiders since their arrival will restrict our own poorest citizens’ access to housing, healthcare and places at decent schools, [thus grating] away at that part of our identity that longs for fair play in the allocation of public resources. … It will chip away simultaneously at two further aspects that are fundamental to any national identity: a common set of memories and shared experiences.

Hence the Labour Party should get ahead of the game in looking at how entitlement to welfare, health and housing can be reformed to ensure our own people are at the front of the queue, based on their residence and prior contributions. Any move in this direction would show that the Party is in tune with voters’ sense of fair play.

Seemingly aware of the potentially unsavoury implications of such views, trade unionist Paul Embery attempts to distinguish them from the xenophobia of the populist right: I think you start from the position of saying that, look, anybody who is in your country, regardless of where they’ve come from, you defend them, you expect equal treatment for them—as a trade union official I want them organised into trade unions fighting for better pay and conditions for them—and you absolutely oppose attacks on immigrants on a personal level, you certainly oppose any kind of racism; but there is no contradiction

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between that and also saying, but look, we’ve got a policy of open borders which is having an effect on our communities, which is putting pressure on public services, which is, if you read some of the evidence, leading to the undercutting of wages; and that is not to blame immigrants personally, that is simply to recognise that governments and EU commissioners have made decisions that have not been in the interests of working people and also to recognise that, look, the mass free movement of labour can be as disruptive in some cases to local communities as the free movement of capital. We need to understand that, and trade union leaders have, I think, been too silent about that up until now.13

Finally, it is impossible not to be struck by the echoes of Donald Trump in the words of former Labour MP, George Galloway who also echoes the nostalgia for a golden past typical of the narratives of the populist right: But we were not nothing, you know, before we joined the European Union in 1973. I was lucky enough … to have lived through Britain in the 1960s when we were really, really something. In fact Britain, you could argue, was the centre of the world in the 1960s. … I find it insulting to the British to hear us described as some kind of basket case only kept afloat by the European Union. Now I know that when we save £350 million a week as we would if we leave, that Conservative politicians will want to spend that 350 million a week in a different way to what I would; but I would spend it on making Britain great again … in making Britain great again—and I believe it could be; I believe the world could be our oyster, that we could reconnect with the commonwealth that we shamefully abandoned.14

In short, Lexit can in the first place be criticised on the grounds that it is driven to take up positions that are difficult to distinguish from, and therefore tend to reinforce, the xenophobic right, besides being of doubtful empirical validity.15

 Lexit: the Movie, available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pq72f81kkM4.  Ibid. 15  For example, research by the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford, into the labour market effects of immigration, fails to support the hypothesis of significant downward effects on wages and employment: https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/ resources/briefings/the-labour-market-effects-of-immigration/. See also Chu (2016, 2017). Meanwhile, it seems likely that in the face of ageing populations, EU member states cannot afford to cut immigration without incurring more or less significant costs in terms of higher taxes and cuts to welfare spending which hit the poor hardest. 13 14

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Proposition 2—that EU policy making is systematically biased in a neoliberal, anti-progressive, direction—is much more difficult to critique; for, among other things, it is one that appears to be corroborated by two important examples (which, not surprisingly, are frequently cited by proponents of Lexit): the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) on the one hand, and the Viking and Laval cases on the other. TTIP was a controversial trade agreement that was to have been concluded between the EU and the US through a series of negotiating rounds launched at the G8 summit at Lough Erne in June 2013, and would have been the largest bilateral trade initiative ever negotiated. Originally conceived as a response to the global recession caused by the economic crisis from 2008, TTIP was promoted by its supporters as a potential ‘game changer’, one that, in the words of the then-EU Commission President, José Manuel Barroso, would ‘bring more jobs, more growth to Europe and the United States’.16 Claims concerning the economic benefits of TTIP were matters of controversy,17 but were never established one way or the other since negotiations were halted by Donald Trump, and the negotiating directives for TTIP declared obsolete by the Council of the EU in April 2019. Left-wing critics had four areas of concern regarding TTIP. First, they felt that the way in which it was negotiated acted as a powerful symbol of the EU’s democratic deficit. In the first place, as John Hilary, executive director of War on Want pointed out, as a non-elected body, but the body responsible for directing negotiations on the European side, the Commission took its mandate directly from business.18 His point was that 16   Stephen Morris, ‘The Trouble with TTIP’, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Qdra6zr_mwg. 17  For example, according to Bollyky and Bradford (2013), the agreement had the potential to ‘liberalize one-third of global trade and generate millions of new jobs’, while Baker (2013) in contrast argued that the most likely effects on GDP growth would not amount to more than ‘0.015 percentage points annually’. 18  Talk given to Friends of Le Monde Diplomatique at Café Diplo, London, 4 November 2013, available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTHw9gauWno&list=RDLVrTHw 9gauWno&start_radio=1&t=722s. In September 2013, following the submission of an access to documents request, Corporate Europe Observatory suggested that 93% of the Commission’s meetings with stakeholders during preparations for the TTIP negotiations had been with big business, and that ‘the official civil society consultation [had merely been] an information session after the talks were launched’. https://corporateeurope.org/en/ trade/2013/09/european-commission-preparing-eu-us-trade-talks-119-meetingsindustry-lobbyists.

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this was a very different set of circumstances to the ones in which governments, accountable to voters—either directly or indirectly through legislatures—find themselves in such situations, since their continued hold on office depends on their skill in balancing the demands of business with those of other interest groups. The Commission, though it undoubtedly consulted non-business interest groups, was, unlike governments, in no way constrained by them. In the second place, the EU’s only directly elected body, the Parliament, had no input into the negotiations. True, it had the power potentially to scupper the entire agreement once finalised, but it had no power to amend or revise it, either during the course of its negotiation or once negotiations had been concluded.19 Second, critics pointed out that although referred to as a ‘trade agreement’—with the likelihood that it would be perceived as a positive development, bringing a further reduction in tariff barriers and with it a wider selection of cheaper products—TTIP actually had very little to do with tariffs, which had already been almost entirely eliminated on trade between Europe and the US. Rather, it had to do mainly with regulations and production standards that might be construed as non-tariff barriers to trade because of the way in which they prevent producers from selling into foreign markets unless they can meet the standards set by the authorities of the country they want to export to. So, as the United States is known to have a more liberal standards regime, generally speaking, than does the EU and to have insisted on its principles aggressively in trade talks, the argument was, first, that TTIP would involve the importation of a US regulatory model conceding an undesirable amount of space to business demands. For instance, standards regimes in the US tend to be dominated by the so-called science-based approach meaning that rather than manufacturers having to demonstrate that their products are safe before being allowed to market, they are free to market until such time as regulators can offer conclusive evidence that the products are dangerous. This contrasts with the so-called precautionary principle, followed by the EU, which shifts the burden of evidence-production from the regulator to the 19  Although defenders of the Commission were able to point out that it could not be accused of actively excluding the EP which was kept informed of negotiations and their progress through the EP’s International Trade Committee which regularly discussed the negotiations and was able to exert influence of a sort through passing resolutions on how the negotiations should proceed. See, European Commission, ‘Negotiating EU trade agreements: Who does what and how we reach a final deal’ at https://trade.ec.europa.eu/doclib/ docs/2012/june/tradoc_149616.pdf.

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manufacturer by allowing the authorities to limit or ban the marketing of products unless the manufacturers can produce conclusive evidence that they are safe. Second, ‘[m]odern trade deals spend a lot of effort trying to level (or “harmonise”) … standards. They do this by judging different regulations that achieve the same goal as “equivalent”’ (Dearden 2020: 19)—with the arguable risk of placing producers in countries with the more rigorous, if ‘equivalent’, standards under pressure to demand looser ones as the price of remaining competitive. So, in addition, there was a fear that, by undermining standards and protections in this way, TTIP would in effect restrict the freedom of the EU and member governments to make certain choices considered unacceptable by the market but necessary on welfare grounds, and so reduce democratic space to the advantage of corporate power. Third, it was argued that, by including provisions to increase mutual access to government procurement markets, TTIP would in this way restrict governments’ ability to determine public policy still further, this time making it impossible for them to—for instance—decide on appropriate levels of involvement of the private sector in health care and other services. A third criticism levelled at TTIP by the left was that it was negotiated with very little transparency. Concerns about a lack of transparency led to the European Ombudsman20 becoming drawn into the controversy and asking the Commission to improve public access to important TTIP documents (Webb 2015: 8). A cause of particular fury was the July 2015 decision of the Commission, following a leak of reports on the negotiation rounds, that authorised readers (limited to Commission negotiators, MEPs and member-state MPs) would only be able to access the reports in secure rooms at the Commission where, obliged to maintain secrecy, they would be able to take nothing other than a pencil and paper. As critics (e.g. Moody 2015) pointed out, politicians with other demands on their time could be expected to be unlikely to visit Brussels to consult the documents with the result that they would remain uninformed about the talks, that democratic oversight would be correspondingly reduced and that public suspicious about TTIP would be enhanced. 20  The European Ombudsman investigates complaints from individuals and organisations about maladministration on the part of EU institutions and seeks to promote transparent, ethical and effective administration, doing so by conducting enquiries and in the context of such enquiries making proposals and recommendations designed to address complaints and bring about administrative improvement. See https://www.ombudsman.europa.eu/ en/home.

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However, the feature of TTIP that caused by far the greatest furore was the proposal to include provisions for investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS). Though it sounds rather innocent, ISDS had become notorious for the way in which it allowed corporations to bring legal cases against sovereign governments in tribunals outside those governments’ own domestic legal systems. ISDS had a long history in bilateral investment treaties having been originally conceived in the 1950s as a means of reassuring investors in developing countries that their assets would not be seized by the countries’ governments and their contracts with them upheld. Under ISDS, investors, who believe that rights granted to them under a treaty have been violated by the government in whose country they are investing, can sue the government through an international arbitration tribunal (such as, e.g., the World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes or the London Court of International Arbitration). Supporters of ISDS argue that it benefits host countries by increasing the motivation to invest under the protection that ISDS affords; but it had become notorious for three reasons. First, a number of high-­ profile cases had suggested that investor claims or the threat of them undermined democracy by preventing governments from passing legislation designed to address legitimate public concerns.21 Proponents of ISDS denied the suggestion, pointing out that governments retain their ability to regulate if agreements contain clauses to that effect and that ISDS cannot overturn local laws; at most it can award compensation to investors adversely affected by such laws. In response, critics argued that this in itself was likely to deter governments with regulatory ambitions. Second, at the time that TTIP was being negotiated, the number of ISDS claims around the world appeared to be increasing dramatically so that the issue was acquiring a considerably heightened profile. Finally, ISDS appeared to undermine the rule of law. Only investors can sue states under international investment treaties: states cannot bring claims against investors because the latter are not parties to the treaties and so cannot be in breach of them. By allowing corporations to sue countries before international 21  The examples are numerous, ranging from Philip Morris and the Australian government over cigarette packaging to Lone Pine and the Canadian government over fracking. One particularly notorious case concerned a French company, Veolia, which allegedly took action against minimum wage legislation in Egypt when, based on a bilateral agreement between France and Egypt, it sued for ‘breach of a contract for waste disposal in the city of Alexandria. The city had refused to make changes to the contract which Veolia wanted in order to meet higher costs—in part due to the introduction of a minimum wage’ (Eberhardt 2014: 6).

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tribunals, ISDS was, according to John Hilary, ‘unparalleled in its implications, in that it elevate[d] transnational capital to a legal status equivalent to that of the nation State’ (cited by Webb 2015: 12). Prior to TTIP, in 2007, the Viking and Laval cases had already added grist to the mill of the second proposition of the Lexit case; for they had suggested that there was a conflict between the freedoms of movement and establishment, and the lawfulness of industrial action, and they placed new limitations on the latter. In other words, by making the right of trade unions to take collective action subject to the requirements of the freedoms of movement and establishment, the ECJ undermined recognition of collective action as a fundamental right22 according to EU law. In the Viking case, the Finnish company of the same name operated a ship between Finland and Estonia and wanted to re-flag the vessel as an Estonian ship so that it could pay lower, Estonian, wages. The case arose from the threat of industrial action on the part of the Finnish Seamen’s Union (FSU) and the decision of the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITWF) to ask its affiliated members, including the relevant Estonian union, not to enter into negotiations with Viking. Since the ITWF is based in London, Viking sought an injunction, through the English courts, requiring the ITWF to withdraw its request and the FSU to refrain from action ‘which interfered with its economic freedoms under the EC Treaty’ (Bell n.d.: 2). Laval, on the other hand, arose in the Swedish courts after the Latvian construction company of the same name had posted workers to Sweden to work for a subsidiary. The subsidiary went bankrupt after losing a contract, thanks to industrial action on the part of the Swedish construction union. This aimed at obliging Laval ‘to accede to the collective agreement for the building sector, which includes a process for negotiating salaries’ (Bell n.d.: 6). Laval wanted a declaration by the courts that the action was illegal, and compensation for damage to its business. In both Viking and Laval, the ECJ was asked to make preliminary rulings concerning the applicability of EC law to the cases.

22  Essentially, fundamental rights are rights with constitutional status meaning, in the case of the EU, rights enshrined in the treaties. Article 28 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, which, with the coming into force of the Lisbon Treaty, was given the same legal value as other European Union treaties, guarantees, ‘in accordance with Union law and national laws and practices, the right to negotiate and conclude collective agreements at the appropriate levels and, in cases of conflicts of interest, to take collective action to defend their interests, including strike action’.

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The ECJ held that while the right to take industrial action was a fundamental right in community law, as a right arising from that law it could only be exercised in a manner compatible with it. Consequently, insofar as industrial action restricted freedom of movement and establishment, also fundamental rights, it could only be lawful if were justified and proportionate. While leaving to the national courts the task of deciding what was justified and proportionate, the ECJ did provide guidance on the issues, holding that ‘national courts should assess whether the union taking industrial action has “other means at its disposal which were less restrictive of freedom of establishment” and has “exhausted those means”’ (Ornstein and Smith n.d.). It appeared that the significance of the two cases was limited, as the judgements would only apply in instances of firms operating across member-­state borders. However, for three reasons it could be argued, as did Ornstein and Smith (n.d.), that the restrictions on the lawfulness of industrial action contained in the judgements applied more widely. They noted, first, the cases’ confirmation that the magnitude of any restriction to the freedom of movement or establishment was irrelevant. This meant that an act of a trade union could be challenged by an employer on community law grounds even if it only resulted in a trifling restriction to free movement or establishment. Secondly, there was scope for companies to plan their business affairs in a way that enabled them to rely on an international element to challenge industrial action. Thirdly, it was arguable that the ability to invoke community rights only where there was an international element was of itself a restriction of community rights. This was on the grounds that if an employer had lesser protection against industrial action in relation to, say, a move from Manchester to Liverpool than a move from Manchester to Lodz, this of itself operated (albeit indirectly) as a restriction of an employer’s freedom of movement and establishment in the UK because the employer was less free to operate in the UK than in Poland. In short, both TTIP and the Viking and Laval cases appeared to add grist to the mill of Lexiteers’ contention that both EU policy making and the Union’s legal system were biased in favour of business interests. Of course the policy making and legal systems of the member states were, in principle, potentially vulnerable to exactly the same claim. For instance, in the aftermath of Brexit and the 2019 general election in the UK, it looked for a while as though the United Kingdom would in short order conclude a trade agreement with the US that in all essentials looked very little

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different from TTIP.23 However, the Lexiteers’ point was that the bias in the EU case, in contrast to the cases of the member states, was inevitable and unchangeable, thanks to the lack of popular accountability at the heart of the EU institutions and to their inability, unlike the institutions of the member states, to provide for party government. This is proposition 3 of the Lexit case, which, on closer inspection, rests on two, more specific, claims. One is that the constraints of EU membership limit the scope for progressive policy making at the national level. The other is that the EU institutions themselves are unavailable as vehicles through which to pursue a progressive agenda at the Union level. With regard to the first, opponents of Lexit can make at least two points. First, EU rules impose no restrictions on the level of public spending. The restrictions involved in the Fiscal Compact only concern the extent to which governments can finance public expenditure by borrowing rather than by raising taxation. Moreover, the Compact itself is, arguably, not merely a constraint, but also a facilitator, as Philip Lane has argued, calling it ‘a gateway reform’, that is one that ‘opens the gate to more interesting reforms which are more important’.24 His argument, in essence, is that by reassuring member states collectively about the impossibility of free-riding by any of them individually, the Compact provides the political cover they need to assume the joint liabilities involved in such initiatives as joint bond issuance and European-level fiscal projects, for example. Such initiatives, one might add, acquired particular importance within the framework of the Next Generation EU package in the context of EU responses to the coronavirus.

23  See Dearden (2020). Initially, the UK hoped to conclude the agreement before 1 July 2021 when, in the US, trade promotion authority (TPA) was due to expire. Originally introduced in 1975 pursuant to the Trade Act 1974, TPA was further extended pursuant to legislation passed in 2015. It grants power, on a temporary basis, to the President to have trade agreements passed by Congress on a majority vote rather than the two-thirds majorities that would otherwise be required, provided certain conditions are met. These include the requirement that the agreement is concluded during the time period for which TPA is in effect, and that it advances a series of negotiating objectives set out in the TPA statute. However, by 2021 Joe Biden had taken over the presidency and seemed unwilling to negotiate an agreement with the UK, this for a variety of reasons including apparent scepticism towards trade agreements in general on the part of a significant minority of the US public (de Ruyter and Hearne 2021). 24  Philip R. Lane, ‘The Economics of the Fiscal Compact’, lecture given at Trinity College Dublin, 13 March 2012, available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGmNdf_62lA.

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Second, if, in the context of the Brexit referendum, much was made by proponents of Lexit of the idea that EU state aid and competition rules would render illegal radical economic restructuring on the part of a Labour government, then this was strongly contested by Lexit’s social democratic opponents (Biondi and Tarrant 2017a, b; Donovan n.d.; Dunt 2017; Tarrant n.d.). For example, Biondi and Tarrant (2017a) noted that stateaid rules are integral to the single market and in that context are designed to prevent member states from free-riding by preventing them from subsidising individual domestic firms at the expense of competitors in other member states. Where state aid is designed to meet a public-policy goal, then it is allowed by a series of exceptions which are either always applicable (e.g. natural disasters) or else discretionary—in which case aid qualifies as legitimate in one of two ways. Either it is notified to, assessed by and approved by the Commission, or it falls into one of a number of predefined categories of legitimate aid (e.g. general public expenditure on research and development) and so is exempt from the requirement of prior Commission notification. This means that while state-aid rules shape how member states can pursue active industrial strategies, they do not prevent them per se, as Nick Donovan (n.d.: 10) noted.25 As for the competition rules, Biondi and Tarrant (2017b) noted that while it is true that they prevent nationalisation in the sense of preventing member states from establishing publicly owned monopolies in certain sectors, this does not mean that they prevent public ownership in and of itself: it means only that it has to adhere to certain criteria. These are twofold. First, where there is a functioning market, ‘the state’s investment must be a rational economic investment of the type a private investor would also make’ (Biondi and Tarrant 2017a: 5). Second, where there is a need (e.g. rural postal deliveries) that private undertakings will not meet to the extent or under the conditions that the member state considers to be in the public interest, then it is allowed to meet it through a subsidised public provider. Furthermore, opponents of Lexit could (and did) point out that the rules also serve progressive purposes. For example, state aid rules were originally designed to avoid a repeat of the tit-for-tat export subsidies and 25  ‘Obviously, states can support whole economies through actions such as changing tax rates—without engaging state aid rules. … Aid to specific companies and sectors is permissible if the outcome sought is in the public interest and the market cannot deliver that outcome, there is a clear and transparent public policy outcome that can be attributed to the aid, and the benefits of the aid outweigh any costs in terms of damage to trade’ (Donovan n.d.: 9).

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counteracting tariffs that were a feature of international trade in the 1920s and 1930s and thought to have contributed to the rise of fascism. They help to prevent tax avoidance by large multinational corporations, as highlighted by the recent cases of Apple in Ireland, Starbucks in the Netherlands and Amazon in Luxembourg.26 By targeting state-sponsored tax evasion, they help to protect government spending (Biondi and Tarrant 2017a: 6). Open access rules, obliging member states—for example—to make track and other railway systems available to competing operators in place of public-sector utility monopolies, have allowed rail freight to become competitive with the far-less environmentally friendly road haulage by making possible the emergence of trans-continental freight services. ‘Without the ability to compete across borders and thus the restriction of freight providers to the delivery of national services, rail freight had become largely irrelevant’ (Tarrant n.d.: 13). ‘Similarly, the promotion of renewable energy requires that there is access to continental “grid” (made up of former national monopoly networks) which allows the wide distribution of intermittent wind, solar and tidal energy’ (Biondi and Tarrant 2017b). In short, Lexit claims that EU membership limits the scope for progressive policy making at the national level, appear to be overstated. What, then, of the suggestion that progressive policy making is impossible at the Union level? The suggestion rests, as we have seen on (a) the notion of an ECJ-driven ‘neo-liberal bias’ in the EU constitution and (b) the implications of EMU. Opponents of Lexit can make at least three objections. First, constraints on progressive policy making at the Union level have at least as much to do with shortcomings of the European social democratic parties themselves as they do with the constraints of the EU institutional order within which they have to work; in other words, if the EU has tended to be overshadowed by a neo-liberal ethos in recent years, then this is less because its institutions are ‘unavailable for’ or ‘beyond’ progressive reform than that the left itself has failed to take opportunities for reform 26  The Apple case has had an especially high profile. It arose from the decision of the Irish government to allow Apple to attribute nearly all of its EU earnings to a single head office based in the Republic and the Commission’s contention that by allowing the company to avoid paying tax on the earnings, the decision constituted illegal state aid. In August 2016, the Commission ordered Apple to pay €13 billion in back taxes to Ireland. In July 2020, the European General Court ruled that the Commission had not shown to the requisite legal standard that Apple had received tax advantages from Ireland and ruled in favour of Apple. In September 2020, the Commission announced that it would appeal the decision before the ECJ.

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when presented with them. For example, in the late 1990s, social democrats were in office in thirteen of the then fifteen member states and therefore had an opportunity to use the Treaty of Amsterdam (on which negotiations had begun in 1995 and which came into force in 1999) to constitutionalize their social democratic agenda and thus re-balance the dominant neoliberal thrust of the previous two Treaty changes. However, at the meeting of socialist leaders in Malmö, shortly before the Amsterdam Council, it became clear that the diversity of views within the European Left was so big that it prevented a concerted Left approach in the negotiations leading to Amsterdam Treaty. (Bugaric 2013: 19)

Negotiations within the framework of the European Constitutional Convention, the forerunner of the Lisbon Treaty, were similarly marked by divisions between the social democratic parties, with those of the Nordic countries and Tony Blair’s New Labour in particular unwilling to accede to extensions of European competences fearing that they might undermine their national welfare models. The upshot was that although the Amsterdam and Lisbon treaties did represent some progress in terms of the furtherance of left-wing objectives,27 ideological divisions among the social democrats, and their national defensiveness, prevented them from counterbalancing the neo-liberal tendencies of the European institutional/legal order with a distinctive agenda of their own. Second, notwithstanding the argument of Friedrich Hayek, it is not the case that the EU has been unable to wield economic and social powers of the kind exercised by national states. On the contrary, there have been sufficient examples of market intervention through EU legislation to give the lie to suggestions that international organisations like the EU must ‘inevitably’ reflect principles of limited government in the way that Hayeck suggested. Indeed, when Jacques Delors was president of the European Commission, drives in the direction of social-democratic policy making were so strong that for a time the most salient issue underlying left-right divisions in some member states, notably the UK, was European integration, as the latter had come to mean a series of social protections opposed 27  The Treaty of Amsterdam in various ways strengthened the Union’s commitment to policies aiming to promote full employment, environmental sustainability and the rights of migrant workers and to combat discrimination on grounds of gender, race and sexual orientation. The Lisbon Treaty established the European Citizens’ Initiative as well as other democratising measures as we saw in the last chapter.

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by free-market Conservatives. ‘[I]n quite a few areas, such as work safety, consumer protection and environmental protection, European legislation has adopted rather demanding standards that represent impressive achievements of positive integration’ (Scharpf 2010: 225). Third, while the ECJ has been a driver of negative integration, it is not the case that its decisions have only favoured the interests of capital. Since negative integration derives from attempts to achieve legal redress for encroachments on individual rights, the implications of the Court’s decisions have sometimes been progressive as well. For example, the Court has, from early on, protected the social rights of migrant workers against discrimination on grounds of nationality, and it has expanded the guarantee of equal pay for men and women (Art. 141 ECT) into a workplace-­ oriented regime of gender equality … it has also approximated the status of mobile students to that of migrant workers, and … the combination of EU citizenship, freedom of movement and non-discrimination on grounds of nationality is used to minimize national residency requirements that would limit migrants’ access to national welfare systems. (Scharpf 2010: 222)

In short, Lexit once again overstates the case. While it may be true that ‘the EU constitution systematically biases policy making in the neo liberal direction’ (Bugaric 2013: 18), it is not true that this is all that it does, or that European social democratic parties are powerless to overcome or circumvent such bias. Proponents of Lexit are, arguably, guilty of what might be called ‘institutional determinism’: ‘a structural determinism that leaves no room for the potential of creative agency’ (Scharpf 2010: 213). This means that if the European left has been unable to give a progressive slant to integration in recent years, then the search for causes must look beyond the EU’s institutional order and legal structure to consider the impact of the outlooks of the social democratic parties themselves and the limitations these have placed on the potential for concerted action among them, an issue we shall return to in the chapter that follows. In the meantime, with regard to the fourth proposition of the Lexit case—that economic prosperity is more likely outside the framework of EU membership than within it—the experience of the United Kingdom since it left the EU is, while obviously not conclusive, at least relevant to the case, suggesting that whatever the economic advantages, life outside the EU also comes with costs.

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Professional economists interrogated about the long-term consequences of Brexit during and immediately after the 2016 referendum were by no means unanimous, though it did appear to be the case that negative predictions were more numerous among them than were positive ones.28 Equally, however, there appeared to be consensus, or at least near consensus, that any costs of Brexit for the UK economy, if such there were, would depend very much on the specifics of post-Brexit trading arrangements, with any costs being the greater the larger were the impediments to trade involved. This was understandable given the sheer importance of the EU as a UK export market29 and given the theory of comparative advantage. The theory of comparative advantage was first described by the British economist, David Ricardo, in 1817. It states that even if a country is more efficient at producing all imaginable goods than another country, it will still pay both countries to concentrate on producing the goods in which their relative advantage is greatest and to engage in free trade with each other, rather than attempting to produce everything without engaging in trade. To illustrate the theory, Ricardo asks us to imagine that the world economy consists of two countries, England and Portugal, and two commodities, wine and cloth. In this imaginary economy, Portugal is more efficient than England in producing both commodities. Hours of work necessary to produce one unit

England Portugal

Cloth

Wine

100 90

120 80

What is apparent from this table is that Portugal can produce a unit of cloth with 90 hours of labour whereas in England it takes 100 hours to produce the same unit. Likewise, Portugal can produce a unit of wine with just 80 hours of labour whereas in England it takes 120 hours. However, England is relatively more efficient in producing cloth than wine, and 28  See, for example, the results of the online survey of members of the Royal Economic Society and the Society of Business Economists conducted by Ipsos MORI in May 2016 and which are available at https://www.ipsos.com/ipsos-mori/en-uk/economists-views-brexit. 29  The EU is the UK’s largest trading partner, ‘accounting for 42% of UK exports and 52% of UK imports in 2019. Total UK trade with the EU was £662 billion in 2019 (£291 billion of exports and £371 billion of imports)’ (Fella et al. 2020).

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Portugal in producing wine than cloth. So, if England gives up producing wine, it can spend 220 hours to get 2.2 units of cloth (rather than one unit of each). Likewise, if Portugal gives up producing cloth it can spend 170 hours to get 2.125 units of wine (rather than one unit of each). So instead of England Portugal Total output

Cloth

Wine

1 1 2

1 1 2

before specialisation, we have

England Portugal Total output

Cloth

Wine

2.2 0 2.2

0 2.125 2.125

after specialisation. Consequently, if countries specialise in what they are best at in this way then global production of both commodities goes up. Moreover, if both countries engage in free trade with each other (rather than attempting, as before, to produce both commodities and refusing to trade) then both can consume more of both commodities than they would otherwise have been able to do. So of central relevance to any conclusions about the likely long-term economic consequences of Brexit must be the arrangements that were put in place to govern trade once the UK left the EU single market and customs union on 31 December 2020. There were various possible arrangements, but in The Left Case for Brexit Whyman (2018), as we have seen, argued for the negotiation of a free-trade agreement in preference to trading on WTO terms on the one hand or remaining part of the EEA or customs union on the other. Trading on WTO terms was considered undesirable among (but also well beyond) left-wing opponents of European integration, since it was understood to

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involve significant tariff barriers to trade.30 Remaining part of the EEA or customs union was considered equally undesirable; for, while it avoided trade barriers, it implied continuing to accept EU regulations without having any role in their formulation.31 The UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) concluded at the end of 2020 avoided both of these things and was a free-trade agreement. Therefore, it appeared to involve the kind of trading arrangements Whyman and other social democratic opponents of integration had envisaged. The TCA provides for continuation of the zero tariff/zero quota regime on trade in goods that applied when the UK was an EU member state; but goods must meet certain ‘rules of origin’ in order to qualify for zero tariff/zero quota treatment. ‘Rules of origin are the criteria needed to determine the national source of a product’32 and are used in order to, among other things, prevent traders from evading their commercial policy obligations. For example, in the absence of rules of origin, goods manufactured in countries subject to EU tariffs might avoid the tariffs if they were first dispatched to the UK and imported into the EU from there, taking advantage of the zero tariff. Rules of origin are especially significant for complex products such as cars, which may be manufactured using components sourced from several different countries; and crucially, they entail that free-trade agreements cannot on their own eliminate border controls, as these are required to monitor compliance with the rules (as well as with the importing country’s standards in terms of safety, health and other public-policy areas). Rules of origin can therefore be expensive for businesses required to demonstrate the origins of their products and

30  This was understood to be inevitable since the WTO’s ‘most-favoured-nation’ rules oblige its member states to treat every other WTO member state with which it does not have a trade agreement in the same way. Consequently, it was not open to the UK to lower or eliminate tariffs on EU imports in the hope that the EU would reciprocate, unless it was prepared to lower or eliminate tariffs on the same goods imported from anywhere else. 31  The EEA had come into being in 1992 as a means of enabling the then-EFTA member states to gain access to the single market while remaining outside the EU, this by extending to them EU legislation concerning freedom of movement of goods, services, persons and capital. This means that, together with Turkey, which participates in the EU customs union but is not a member of the EU, these states retain notional sovereignty as non-EU members but are obliged to accept legislation over which they have no say. 32  World Trade Organisation, ‘Technical Information on Rules of Origin’, https://www. wto.org/english/tratop_e/roi_e/roi_info_e.htm.

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meet customs formalities, and they may prevent them from qualifying for tariff-free access altogether.33 Service providers, meanwhile, lost the automatic right they had, when the UK was part of the single market, to offer their services across the EU and instead had to comply with the rules of individual EU countries as they no longer benefited from passporting rules, where authorisations issued by one EU country allowed access to the whole single market. For example, previously, professionals such as doctors, lawyers, architects and engineers, holding qualifications from the UK, were able to benefit from a simplified and often automatic recognition system in other EU countries allowing them to practice throughout the Union. As of 1 January 2021, as a general rule, those with UK qualifications have had to have their qualifications recognised in the relevant member state on the basis of that state’s rules applicable to the qualifications of third-country nationals. Other barriers limiting the scope of service providers to operate in both the UK and the EU include the terms for short-term business trips: The TCA allows for British short-term business visitors to enter the EU visa-­ free for 90 days in any given six-month period, but there are restrictions on the activities they can perform. Crudely speaking, the list of permitted activities shows that while meetings, trade exhibitions and conferences, consultations and research are fine, anything that involves selling goods or services directly to the public requires an actual work visa. (O’Carroll 2020)

Given these post-Brexit barriers to trade, and given the theory of comparative advantage, it was reasonable to expect trade between the UK and the EU to shrink in volume bringing a corresponding loss of welfare on both sides. The analysis of post-Brexit trade flows offered by Andrew Black (2022) bears out such expectations—at least partially if not completely—enabling us to make four specific points. First, between the end of 2019 and the middle of 2021, there was an 11.6% drop in the volume of exports of goods to all markets (as was to be expected, given the pandemic) as compared to a more modest 10.8% drop in the volume of exports to the EU. ‘This suggests that export relationships with the EU remain stronger [despite the new trade barriers] than those with other 33  For example, ‘cane sugar imported from the Caribbean and refined in the UK will not qualify for access to the EU tariff-free, nor will basmati rice imported from India and milled in the UK’ (Institute for Government, ‘UK-EU future relationship: the deal’ https://www. instituteforgovernment.org.uk/publication/future-relationship-trade-deal/goods).

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markets. British exporters prefer maintaining links with their partners in the EU, who have persisted in ordering goods from the UK’ (Black 2022). Second, however, the aggregate position masks considerable variation by sector with—for example—‘miscellaneous manufacturing’ (many of whose products are supplied by small- and medium-sized firms, least likely to be able to cope with new trade barriers), falling by over 30%. Third, left-wing proponents of Brexit, as we have seen, expected any increase in the costs of trading with the EU to be offset by an expansion of trade with non-EU countries, with a corresponding decline in dependence on EU markets. However, while there were some sectors where export volumes increased while the EU’s share of those volumes declined,34 generally, the picture was one of reduced volumes overall combined with increased dependence on the EU. Finally, the volume of imports from the EU declined by 9.2%, as compared to a 5% drop in import volumes from all sources. Service exports to the EU fell by just under 25%, while imports fell by 42%. Whatever the precise contribution of Brexit (as opposed to everything else) to these changes, they do not point in the direction of any marked short-run improvement in the UK’s economic fortunes. If one cost of departing the single market was the erection of barriers to trade, then another was the end of free movement of persons, which had allowed EU citizens to live and work anywhere within the Union without restrictions. This had given firms access to a labour pool of enhanced size and therefore potential access to labour of higher quality than they would otherwise have been able to obtain. While free movement potentially worked to the disadvantage of poorer member states through ‘brain-drain’ effects, it had the advantage of enabling EU economies collectively to operate with smaller pools of labour in some sectors than they would have needed had they each been obliged themselves to provide all of the labour they required all of the year round. A good example of this was road transport since free movement meant that goods vehicle drivers were especially responsive to geographical shifts in demand. Brexit meant that the UK effectively lost its access to this shared labour pool with the result that the early autumn of 2021 saw the emergence of a driver shortage with the apparent risk that it might lead to supply-chain disruptions and therefore rising prices. The government attempted to deal with the

 Food/livestock; beverages; transport/machinery; materials manufacturing.

34

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problem through a relaxation of the rules on cabotage;35 but the UK Road Haulage Association perceived this as damaging to its members’ interests as it would mean foreign haulage companies taking work in the UK as opposed to foreign drivers working for UK haulage companies. Meanwhile, other sectors—the low-wage agriculture, food processing and hospitality sectors—also began to complain about labour shortages, and it seemed reasonable to think that Brexit had at least contributed to them. The complaints coincided with a fall in the employment of EU nationals from 2.4  million in January–March 2020 to 2.2  million in April–June 2021. The fall was mainly caused by Eastern Europeans known to be more likely than other EU nationals to work in the sectors concerned. The post-Brexit immigration rules made it more difficult to recruit new workers from the EU (Manning 2021). Finally, in its October 2021 Economic and Fiscal Outlook, the Office for Budget Responsibility suggested that the labour shortages and supply bottlenecks could ‘be expected to hold back output growth in the coming quarters, while raising prices and putting pressure on wages’, with inflation in 2022 possibly hitting ‘the highest rate seen in the UK for three decades’.36 Rather than pointing in the direction of the prosperous post-­ Brexit future the proponents of Lexit had envisaged, this pointed in the opposite direction. The point is not to suggest that the economic arguments made by proponents of Lexit have nothing to say for them.37 Rather, it is to suggest that evidence from the UK case at least reveals that withdrawal from the EU inevitably involves economic disadvantages as well as 35  Cabotage refers to the collection and delivery of goods within a state by a foreign haulier following their arrival in the state and before they leave again. Although international road transport had been fully liberalised in the EU, cabotage operations were still subject to restrictions, with regulation (EC) No 1072/2009 laying down the conditions under which non-resident hauliers could supply transport services within a member state. In essence they could carry out three cabotage operations in a member state, including the UK, within the seven days following an international operation into that country. Following Brexit, the number of cabotage operations was reduced to two, while UK hauliers taking freight to the EU were limited to one cabotage operation plus two cross-border journeys. 36  Office for Budget Responsibility, Economic and Fiscal Outlook October 2021, Executive Summary, para 1.2 p.  7, https://obr.uk/docs/dlm_uploads/Executive_summary_ Economic_and_fiscal_outlook_October_2021.pdf. 37  For instance, they might reasonably argue that trade barriers can actually benefit some sectors of an economy if they are able to respond to higher import prices by expanding production. In other words, if trade barriers make imports more expensive, then they may give rise to import substitution and enhanced investment in some sectors.

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advantages, and it is not clear that the proponents have made the case beyond reasonable doubt, or perhaps even on the balance of probabilities, that the latter outweigh the former.

Conclusion Social democratic opponents of Europe draw attention to what have been a number of very real shortcomings in the functioning of the EU in recent years, from weaknesses in terms of norms of democratic accountability to significant institutional obstacles in the way of enactment of dirigiste and redistributive policies at both member-state and Union level. The functioning of the ECJ and of the institutions associated with EMU lend powerful support to arguments concerning the existence of an ‘integration trap’ whereby social democrats, having looked to integration as an alternative vehicle to national Keynesianism for the pursuit of their distinctive agendas, then found that it was a constraint upon them. TTIP, and the Laval and Viking judgements, provide powerful support to the thesis of a neo-liberal bias in the functioning of EU institutions, and it was understandable that they were loudly denounced by social democrats and others on the left. Ultimately, however, Lexit is unconvincing, and this for three main reasons. First, it overstates its case. While it is true that there are powerful institutional constraints on the pursuit of progressive agendas, it is too much to insist, as proponents of Lexit do, that the institutions of the EU are ‘unavailable’ for the pursuit of such agendas, and their reform impossible. To take such a position is to embrace a kind of ‘institutional determinism’ and seems not to be borne out by the empirical evidence. Second, its claims concerning the advantages of withdrawing from the EU seem doubtful in light of the very clear disadvantages, especially those associated with erecting trade barriers and ending free movement. Creating barriers to trade and to the mobility of factors of production cannot but bring about a general reduction in welfare, all else equal. Third, as they consider the EU institutions to be unavailable as vehicles for progressive reform, and as they believe the institutions deprive the member states of the capacity so to act, proponents of Lexit are driven to defend the nation state from what they perceive as undesirable EU encroachments and restrictions. In so doing they are driven to take positions, which, as we have seen, are sometimes difficult to distinguish from those of the nationalist right. In this way they unwittingly reinforce such positions (and associated

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xenophobic and anti-immigrant attitudes)—this from a position that is mistaken because the assumptions on which it is based are mistaken. There are three further drawbacks associated with the positions of social democratic opponents of European integration. First, their prospects do not look especially good insofar as, beyond the UK, withdrawal is perhaps unlikely to be emulated by any other EU member state any time soon. The experience of Brexit may have acted as a deterrent, if only because of the way in which it has shaped public support for the EU in the remaining member states. True, in the immediate aftermath of the 2016 referendum, British withdrawal seemed to be associated with enhanced fortunes for populist nationalist formations, such as the Front National in France and the Lega in Italy, revealing that Brexit itself was not an isolated phenomenon. But since then, citizens appear to have responded to the difficulties of the withdrawal process and to the consequences of Brexit for the UK by coming to feel more positively about their own country’s membership; and meanwhile, fewer Eurosceptic, challenger, parties across the EU now advocate emulating the UK than was the case before the 2016 referendum.38 Second, UK experience suggests that there is a very real sense in which EU withdrawal has been, and cannot but be, illusory. When one reflects on the terms of the TCA and on the multiple governance structures it has required in order to oversee its operation, the experience of Brexit suggests that a member state withdrawing from the EU would most likely simply exchange one set of international constraints for another. Brexit seems set to remain a salient political issue in that negotiations concerning the UK’s relationship with the EU seem likely to continue indefinitely. Finally, the EU itself has not stood still since Brexit; and despite the setbacks of recent years, a number of recent developments, to be considered in the following chapter, suggest that the project of ‘ever closer union’ remains very much alive. All of this therefore throws a spotlight on the issue to which we now turn, namely, the prospects for the perspective that directly competes with Lexit among social democrats: what I shall call ‘critical Europeanism’. 38  Details are provided by Sara Hobolt during the course of a London School of Economics lecture given on 27 October 2021 and available at https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=rG8R_4s-vls. As Hobolt points out, citizens’ feelings are in principle open to change depending on future post-Brexit developments. If in 2019 large majorities of EU citizens interviewed for the European Elections Survey thought that the UK would be worse off as a result of Brexit, such perceptions were not necessarily stable.

CHAPTER 6

‘Critical Europeanism’

Introduction In the previous chapter we discussed ‘Lexit’, the left-wing case for withdrawal from the European Union. In this chapter we consider the opposite case, the one that calls, in direct contrast to Lexit, for further European integration through further transfers of sovereignty from the member states to the EU and through the democratisation of its institutions. It is an outlook that has for long been reflected, beyond the confines of the left, in movements such as that of the European Federalists, and it is one that takes its point of departure from the left’s internationalist commitments. I shall refer to it as ‘critical Europeanism’1 because its proponents are not mere defenders of the EU status quo against the attacks of its critics, whether from the right or the left. Rather, they accept many of the criticisms levelled at the EU by proponents of Lexit, but unlike the latter they believe that the problems are best addressed by reform rather than withdrawal, as they reject the latter’s ‘retreat to the nation state’. This 1  A term that has also been used by other authors, for example Della Porta (2006) and Pirone (2020). However, because of its emphasis on the notion of ‘Europeanisation from below’, other authors have tended to consider ‘critical Europeanism’ mainly as a perspective expressed by civil society organisations, non-institutional actors and social movements. My claim is that it reflects a division that around the time of Brexit and the 2019 European Parliament election was apparent within the mainstream or social democratic left as well.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. L. Newell, European Integration and the Crisis of Social Democracy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08822-3_6

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retreat, for reasons I shall outline in the section immediately below, they see as being incompatible with the liberal-democratic principles of equality and non-discrimination. As in the previous chapter, I shall first provide a summary account of the basic arguments on which the outlook rests, before then subjecting them to critical scrutiny. As with Lexit, so too in the case of ‘critical Europeanism’, we are dealing with a perspective or vision that has to some extent been explicitly articulated, but which is in other respects under-­ theorised (Fabbrini 2020: 76). This means that my description is a reconstruction from disparate sources: an articulation of what the perspective would look like were it fully articulated in all its aspects. In the final chapter I explain why, in my view, critical Europeanism is central to what it means to be on the left in the early twenty-first century and why (i.e. the sense in which) it is crucial to reversing the decline in fortunes of the mainstream left, which we examined in Chap. 3. The remainder of the chapter is organised as follows. First, I discuss the causes of the growing division between proponents of Lexit and critical Europeanism that became apparent round about the time of the 2019 European Parliament (EP) elections when a division that had always been apparent on the right began to acquire salience on the mainstream left as well. Then I consider who the critical Europeanists are, by ‘cataloguing’ the organisations that represent the outlook. The next two sections outline its basic claims and explore how well they stand up. The final section concludes.

Lexiteers and Critical Europeanists: A Growing Divide The division between proponents of Lexit and critical Europeanism apparent in 2019 was due partly to anxiety concerning the rise of populist and xenophobic parties that had notable successes in appealing to the left’s working-class constituency and the ‘left behind’. Lexit supporters sought to counter xenophobia by suggesting that it stemmed from ‘legitimate concerns’ arising from the cultural and economic consequences of neo-­ liberal globalisation. Supporters of critical Europeanism sought to challenge the ‘concerns’—especially insofar as they reflected nationalist attitudes—head-on.

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More profoundly, however, the division was rooted, first, in the contradiction at the heart of social democracy between its commitment to national welfare states on the one hand, and its commitment to principles of equality and non-discrimination on the other. The first of these led social democrats to emphasise welfare as a citizenship right, and this was the emphasis underlying the Lexit position. To be a citizen is to be a member of a political community and therefore to have certain rights and obligations. By definition, those who are not citizens cannot claim the rights of those who are. Hence the tendency of proponents of Lexit to take positions that sometimes echoed the ‘welfare chauvinism’—the idea that access to welfare services should be restricted or denied to immigrants not perceived as being part of the national community—often expressed on the more-or-less extreme right. The second commitment is one that, in contrast, leads social democrats to emphasise welfare as a universal rather than a citizenship right, on the basis that citizenship is typically conferred on individuals by reference to criteria (the identity of their parents and/or the location of their birth) they are unable to control. This second commitment would appear to reflect the more or less conscious awareness of a contradiction at the heart of the modern liberal-­ democratic state, a contradiction rather similar to the one Hannah Arendt (1951) famously drew attention to in her critique of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. ‘In her writing, Arendt claims the declaration itself embodies a contradiction: the declaration requires states to protect the “universal” and “inalienable” rights of all human beings, whereas the modern institution of the state is grounded on the principle of national and territorial sovereignty’ (Azar 2019). In other words, assertions of universal rights imply that the individual human being is sovereign, whereas sovereignty is claimed by the state, as it recognises no authority above it. Hence ‘inalienable’ rights can only be protected and enforced by states, and as a consequence, they cannot be ‘universal’. The existence of refugees and stateless persons demonstrates the point since they are persons who have been excluded from the domain of citizenship and hence from the legal domain of human rights protection. Similarly, one might suggest that the claims of the modern liberal-democratic state to be founded on principles of political equality and the rule of law are likewise contradictory since, as an institution claiming sovereignty over a given territory, the state is only able to guarantee such principles by defending its borders and therefore only by the permanent threat to contravene the principles in the case of non-citizens—as happens most

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notably in the event of war. If this provides the basis for the tendency of social democrats to be committed to principles of multilateralism in international affairs, to upholding international organisations as fora for the peaceful resolution of disputes between states, then it has also led to a commitment to cosmopolitanism and cultural diversity which, at the level of voters, has given social democrats, and especially the pro-Europeans among them, an appeal to better educated urban dwellers in secure, well-­ paid jobs (the so-called winners of globalisation) even while social democrats’ traditional supporters among the ‘left behind’ have been attracted to Lexit or to anti-Europeans on the right. Second, the EU’s legitimacy crisis, discussed in Chap. 4, also played a role in the growing divide between Lexiteers and critical Europeanists. Whereas European integration had for long been supported as a matter of course on the mainstream left—with critical expressions being confined mainly to a minority on the radical left—the EU’s deepening legitimacy crisis (Schweiger 2016) had seen social democrats, if they had not taken a Eurosceptic turn, thrown on the defensive—forced, in other words, to consider the potential of European integration for traditional social democratic concerns, afresh. It was a split that was certainly manifest in the UK, where the Labour Party’s attempt to straddle its internal divisions on the issue meant that it was unable to satisfy anyone, with the result that it ended up scoring a derisory 13.6% at the 2019 EP election to come in third behind the Liberal Democrats and the Brexit Party. But it was manifest at this election even in countries like Italy, notwithstanding the near unanimity and great enthusiasm of the moderate left there for the cause of European integration. On one side, stood politicians like Stefano Fassina, for whom Europe, ‘with its undemocratic institutions has helped to popularise and impose neo-liberal policies that have resulted in economic crisis, austerity and growing inequality’—and for whom ‘the only solution to this state of affairs [was] to withdraw from the Union and return to a policy focussed on the nation states’. On the other side, Francesco Laforgia and Luca Pastorino said that they wanted to offer ‘hope to millions of voters who refuse to resign themselves to a Europe of xenophobia and racism but who refuse to resign themselves to generic anti-sovereigntist fronts that defend Europe as it currently is’ (Valentini 2019, my translation). Finally, the Lexiteer/critical Europeanist divide reflects a division in favour of or opposition to European integration that has affected social democrats as other party families because it represents the sudden emergence of a highly polarising issue cross-cutting the traditional left-right

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divide. This, obviously, could be seen in its most extreme form in the UK at the time of the Brexit referendum when the issue, far from pitting the two main parties against each other, divided both of them and had considerable emotional charge, to the degree that voters came to identify more strongly as ‘Leavers’ or ‘Remainers’ than they did with any of the political parties. Meanwhile, the issue more or less eliminated what residual impact social class had in structuring the vote in the UK.2 As Luana Russo and Marco Valbruzzi (2022: 173) have noted, the sudden emergence in politics of cross-cutting, salient, issues with considerable affective load brings with it ‘an increase in the volume of political activism and in the likelihood that such activism is potentially dangerous’.

Who Are the Critical Europeanists? ‘Critical Europeanists’, then, are those who, like proponents of Lexit, are critical, rather than supportive of, current institutional arrangements within the EU, but who disagree with them in that, rather than advocating change in the direction of lesser integration, they advocate that the latter be further pursued—as is implied by the essence of their political project: that of democratising the EU and its institutions. As it is a project understood in terms of greater and greater accountability of the EU architecture in its entirety to European citizens as citizens of Europe, it implies further integration almost by definition. Unlike the proponents of Lexit, critical Europeanists believe that the EU can be reformed, that a democratic European polity can be built through appropriate changes to the existing arrangements. This perspective is well exemplified by the manifesto3 of the transnational Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (or DiEM25), led by the former Greek minister of finance, Yanis Varoufakis. It defends the European Union as ‘an exceptional achievement, bringing together in peace European peoples … across a continent that was, not long ago, home to murderous chauvinism, racism and barbarity’. But it also criticises the European institutions as ones that have made it possible for industrial and financial conglomerates ‘to prevent Europeans from exercising democratic control over their money, finance, working conditions and 2  See, for example, ‘How Britain voted in the 2019 general election’, YouGov, available at https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2019/12/17/how-britain-voted2019-general-election. 3  Available at https://diem25.org/manifesto-long/.

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environment’. However, while it accepts that what has been responsible for the recent rise of ‘[n]ationalism, extremism and racism’ has been the lack of accountability in processes of European policy making, it rejects the idea of member-state disengagement from such processes and goes further. An insufficiently integrated, undemocratic Union has threatened to march the member states ‘off the cliff of competitive austerity’ turning Europeans against each other such that ‘[t]wo dreadful options dominate: Retreat into the cocoon of our nation-states. Or surrender to the Brussels democracy-­free zone.’ Therefore, the manifesto argues, ‘The European Union will be fully democratised. Or it will disintegrate.’ Critical Europeanists are to be found in a wide range of national and transnational organisations, in political parties, social movements and think tanks, among politicians, journalists and academics self-identifying with the left. Table 6.1 shows the national-level parties, party factions and pressure groups that were actively campaigning for the perspective in what were then the four largest EU member states at the time of the 2019 EP elections. Of the national-level organisations, ‘Another Europe is Possible’ perhaps reflects critical Europeanists’ opposition to the claims of Lexiteers in the most self-conscious way, as it came into existence in February 2016 precisely in order to counter the appeal of Euroscepticism within the Labour Party by campaigning for a ‘Remain’ position in that year’s referendum from an explicitly left-wing position. The national-based groups are joined, at transnational level, by at least four organisations. They are, first, European Alternatives, a transnational civil society organisation established, in March 2007, by the Italian philosopher Lorenzo Marsili and by Niccolò Milanese, ‘to promote democracy, equality and culture beyond the nation-state’ by articulating ‘a radical, long-term vision of democratic, just and culturally-open politics, society and culture beyond the nation-state for Europe and for the world’.4 Second, there is New Europeans, a not-for-profit association founded in June 2013 by one-time Labour MP, Roger Casale, ‘to work for a Europe of citizens: a democratic, inclusive and peaceful Europe of equality and social justice anchored in human rights’.5 Third, there is the above-mentioned movement party

4 5

 https://euroalter.com/mission-and-values/.  https://neweuropeans.net/mission-statement-and-statutes.

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Table 6.1  ‘Critical Europeanist’ organisations in the UK, Italy, France and Germany Country

Organisation

Organisation type

Date of Main focus foundation

UK

Another Europe is possible

Pressure group

February 2016

Italy

To campaign for a Remain position from a left-wing perspective Left Unity Political party November To unite the diverse 2013 strands of socialist politics in the UK to the left of Labour L’Altra Political-­ January To contribute to the Liguria cultural 2015 renewal of the left in association Italy and Europe based in through political Genova overhaul including the construction of a supranational European democracy Articolo Political party February To seek to advance a Uno— 2017 left-wing agenda Movimento through the values of Democratico socialism, liberalism, e Progressista environmentalism and Christian democracy with special emphasis on the world of work Possibile Political party June 2015 To promote a progressive platform inspired by the principles of social democracy, environmentalism, social liberalism and participatory democracy

Membership

1230 (July 2016)

22,000

5000 (January 2016)

(continued)

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Table 6.1 (continued) Country

Organisation

Organisation type

France

Génération.s

Political party July 2017

Nouvelle donne [New Deal]

Germany Demokratie in Europa

Demokratie in Bewegung [Democracy in Motion]

Partei Mut [Courage Party]

Date of Main focus foundation

To bring together the forces of the left in France on the basis of the principles of European federalism, environmentalism and democratic socialism Political party November To bring about social 2013 and economic transformation inspired by principles of equality, environmental sustainability and market regulation Political party To promote, in Germany, the political project launched, in February 2016, with the foundation of DiEM25 Political party April 2017 To promote democracy, participation and transparency based on principles of sustainability and economic, political and social justice Political party June 2017 To promote social based in justice and diversity, Bavaria peace and environmental sustainability

Membership 50,000

2500 (2016)

397 (December 2018)

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(Kitschelt 2006),6 DiEM25, launched in February 2016, which at the time of writing (February 2022) claimed to have ‘more than 114000 members in more than 195 countries and territories’.7 Fourth, there is Volt Europa. A transnational progressive party formed in March 2017 as a direct reaction to the previous year’s Brexit vote, Volt Europa in the 2019 EP elections was successful in electing its vice-president, Damian Boeselager, who sits as a member of the Greens-European Free Alliance group.8 Of these four groups, DiEM25 and European Alternatives especially have been discussed in the literature as examples of a new category of left-­ wing ‘transnational populism’ (e.g. De Cleen et al. 2019) defined in terms of its positing a transnational ‘people’ whose interests are damaged by an international or global elite. Here we are less concerned with whether the groups actually fit the category or with the validity of the category itself, than we are with taking seriously what they say and therefore with describing the substance of the case they make in opposition to Lexit and in favour of European reform, and with assessing the robustness of the case. However, we note in passing that Volt Europa would appear to sit less comfortably in the ‘transnational populist’ category than the other two groups.9 More useful for our present purposes, we think, is the suggestion, 6  ‘Movement parties’ are ‘coalitions of activists who emanate from social movements and try to apply the organizational and strategic practice of social movements in the electoral arena’ (Hutter et al. 2019). 7  https://internal.diem25.org/members. 8  In an early promotional video, the party describes itself as being neither of the right nor of the left. We include it because its ‘About us’ web page (https://www.volteuropa.org/ about) describes it as a ‘progressive’ party that strives ‘to empower people’ and ‘to promote diversity’; because it came into existence in opposition to nationalism and the right, and because its policy documents give a high profile to the pursuit of ‘social equality’, billed as one of what it calls ‘5+1 fundamental Challenges that need to be addressed in each European country and in Europe as a whole’ (https://www.volteuropa.org/policy-portfolio). 9  Like DiEM25 and European Alternatives, it wants radical reform of the EU but differs from them in combining its reform ambitions with an avoidance of suggestions that the EU as presently constituted serves as a vehicle for furthering the interests of any kind of international elite. As it puts it, with notable succinctness, ‘We love the EU—this doesn’t mean there is no room for improvement’ (https://www.volteuropa.org/policy-portfolio). This is a position that has, on at least one occasion, brought it into conflict with DiEM25. See its tweet of 2 January 2019 where it took issue with Yanis Varoufakis’ reference to ‘the EU establishment’ as a ‘regime’: https://twitter.com/volteuropa/status/108047357424532275 3?lang=en.

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based on Blokker (2021: 12), that the groups ‘articulate distinctive, alter-­ European visions, which nevertheless show important affinities with existing discourses’, such as federalism and cosmopolitanism. In terms of Blokker’s fourfold typology of positions on European integration, theirs belong to the radical imaginative category in that unlike prosaic and reformist positions—which take existing situations for granted and want to change them but not the entire institutional make-up—they do want to change the institutional constellation, and imagine a different situation (Table 6.2). This means that they go beyond wanting to ‘protect’ Europe (Scharenberg 2021: 61) against the attacks of nationalists on the right and Lexiteers on the left (many of whose criticisms of the EU, especially its neo-liberal profile, they would willingly accept) and, rather, want to change it. And therefore, they can be understood as being constituent elements of a transnational social movement embracing a range of civil-society organisations whose common elements are left-libertarian outlooks, a commitment to intersectionalism, ‘a common quest for agency beyond borders’ (Scharenberg 2021: 64) and organisational and ideological heritages deriving from the alter-globalisation movement and related actions.

Table 6.2  Blokker’s classification of European discourses

Prosaic

Reformist

Radical

Solving the current problems by promoting re-invigorated policies (such as a Green policy, Migration policy or a deepening of the single market)

Solving problems by proposing a different functioning or novel calibration of the institutions, or by instituting new institutions or policies (for instance, creating new institutions or policies, but within the existing technocratic mindset, such as a European fiscal union) Adopting a structurally novel approach to European integration, by significantly shifting power away from existing institutions towards citizens’ input (e.g. in proposals for a citizens’ constituent assembly)

Imaginative Re-designing policy making by allowing for significant citizen input/engagement (as in the Conference on the Future of Europe) Source: Blokker (2021: 14), Table 1.1

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The Tenets of Critical Europeanism Turning, then, to the assumptions on which the critical Europeanist case is built, one cannot help but notice an initial strong cultural contrast with the Lexit case—one that seems to be captured in many respects by the distinction between ‘pessimism’ and ‘optimism’. Lexiteers, that is, see threats to left-wing aspirations, especially globalisation’s threat to the sustainability of national welfare states, while critical Europeanists see opportunities, especially ones associated with enhanced cultural diversity and international understanding arising from globalisation. While both are critical of globalisation, Lexit tends to reject it, while critical Europeanism is oriented to the construction of an alternative, counter-hegemonic, globalisation. Another way of describing the contrast might be to say that the division between Lexit and critical Europeanism reflects two diverging cultural ‘dispositions’. One is the disposition to fear and anxiety—a disposition, or ‘cultural script’ (Furedi 2018: 18)10 whose existence is testified to by ‘[t]he growing usage of terms like the “politics of fear” or “culture of fear”’—indicating ‘that a significant section of the articulate public has become concerned about the impact of fear on their lives’ (Furedi 2018: 5). The fact that the term ‘project fear’ was used by the ‘Leave’ side in the 2016 Brexit referendum as a weapon of condemnation to indict the arguments of the ‘Remain’ side indicated that it spoke to a cultural sensibility that was widely felt and understood (besides being ironic: the narrative of immigration as a threat, central to the ‘Leave’ campaign, was a project fear of its own kind). The slogan, ‘Take back control!’, beneath which the ‘Leave’ campaign was conducted, was designed to resonate with feelings of powerlessness that are of the essence of what being afraid is all about. The slogan, and the Lexit case, was also able to draw sustenance from, of all things, anxieties surrounding climate change and the consequent increasing popularisation of terms such as ‘tipping point’—a term conveying foreboding about the future and meaning a place of no return; for, ‘Take back control!’ was, among other things, designed to remind those to whom it was directed 10  Furedi (2018: 18) explains that ‘[t]he concept of the cultural script was developed by sociologists to explain how individuals, institutions and communities use cultural resources to make sense of their experience. A cultural script provides guidance and meaning to people as they engage with the troubles of everyday life. … A cultural script is informed by the taken-for-granted cultural facts that are reproduced by common-sense narratives and are founded on traditions, custom and values.’

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that the EU too was headed towards a place of no return and that taking back control was necessary to avoid being taken up to and beyond the tipping point of EU integration. ‘Since the beginning of time, human fears have been formulated through the grammar of morality’ so that ‘fear and evil are closely linked with one another … what we fear is evil and what is evil we fear’ (Furedi 2018: 31–32). Consequently, from being a set of institutions with specific problems, the EU becomes, for Lexiteers, an existential threat so that, for the editors of The Labour Case for Brexit, the 2016 Brexit referendum ‘has at its core’ nothing less than the question: ‘do the British people want to be a self-governing nation in control of their own destiny or governed by a European superstate …?’ (Hickson and Miles 2016: vii). The second cultural script, the one reflected by the critical Europeanist perspective, is one built around the idea of progress: a combination of the spiritual, moral and material improvement of humankind. As Massimo Salvadori (2006) has argued, prior to the expansion of industrial society, ‘progress’ was conceived of as a possibility, one potentially available to humanity through the correct application of reason. With the advent of the nineteenth century, it came increasingly to be seen as necessary and inevitable, as something inherent in processes of economic, technological and social developments. The principal theoretical underpinnings of this conception of progress were given by the positivists on the one hand and by the communism of Marx and Engels on the other. Whereas for the former the motor of human perfectibility was given by a gradual process of evolution from one stage of development to another, for the latter it lay in a process of revolutionary rupture destined to usher in an era of universal peace and the self-government of society guided by the general benevolence of each towards all. Twentieth-century developments—two world wars, the experience of Bolshevism, neo-liberal globalisation and climate change—severely dented the second conception of progress. Arguably, however, the first conception remains intact; and, indeed, in the face of the demands of international capital whose relentless drive for profit has set in motion a seemingly inexorable march towards environmental devastation, faith in the possibility of progress must be rekindled in order to regain that control of processes of economic development that is necessary in order to avoid the threat to human survival. Consequently, while Lexiteers look to the future with foreboding, critical Europeanists, while not naively optimistic, insist, echoing the slogan of the World Social Forum, that ‘Another world is possible’. This means that whereas Lexiteers position themselves,

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in relation to the EU, as its objects—emphasising its negative effects and advocating withdrawal—critical Europeanists see themselves as its subjects. Rather than abandoning the project, they wish to improve it and have the confidence to believe that they can do it. Lexiteers, at bottom, see human improvement as involving a return to a golden past represented by post-war social democracy and les trente glorieuses: a throwing off of the constraints of EU membership and a reinstatement of nationally provided welfare, market regulation and Keynesian demand management. Critical Europeanists, at bottom, see human improvement, consistent with the idea of progress itself, as involving a march away from the past towards a better future. Thus, while European integration of the initial post-war years served the progressive purpose of facilitating peace and prosperity after the devastation of World War II, further integration is necessary as a means of extending principles of democratic control and accountability beyond national confines in order to get to grips with the climate change and other transnational problems of the twenty-first century. Against this background, the point of departure for critical Europeanism is, as Marsili and Milanesi (2018: 3) put it, ‘that the nation is no longer a sufficient vehicle for progressive civic engagement, and that a radical reinvention is required to redirect the course of global politics’. In other words, while ‘national levers of power [can] be used more or less progressively’ (2018: 82), the belief that the traditional social democratic ambition of making capitalism fit for society (Crouch 2013), of securing the primacy of politics over markets (Wolkenstein 2020: 1350), can be achieved simply by gaining control of these levers is profoundly mistaken. Critical Europeanists think that this is so for at least four reasons. First, thanks to economic globalisation there have emerged problems, like global warming and the international drugs trade, before which national governments are increasingly powerless and irrelevant. They are too small to deal with these problems, which require international cooperation. On the other hand they are too big to deal with problems in specific cities or regions—problems which have to be dealt with if they are successfully to attract foreign direct investment, for example. So the power and significance of national governments ‘is being eclipsed by bodies above it (the EU), below it (the Scottish Assembly) and alongside it (multinational corporations)’ (McGrew 2004: 130). Second, the basic political units of the global environment in which individual states exist and interact are not just other states but also international organisations of various kinds. These have ‘permeated the

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political and economic structures of their member states, locking them into sets of implicit or explicit principles, norms and rules, which have created formidable constraints on state action’ and made it ‘very difficult for the participating states to revert to courses of action harmful to the interests of other members’ (Ratti 2002: 5). Consequently, ‘the time when “foreign policy” concerned only foreign ministries has gone for good. Most state institutions now attempt to conduct an external policy of their own’ (Dehousse 1997: 40, quoted by Hague et  al. 1998: 41). Hence, ‘there is no straightforward or neat separation between what is the “national” state and what is the “international” set of authorities or governance’ (Marsili and Milanesi 2018: 82). Individual states might conceivably attempt to ‘renationalise various parts of the complex set of governing apparatuses to which [they are] subject’ (Marsili and Milanesi 2018: 82) by withdrawing from aspects of the international system, like the EU. However, such a course would not deliver control back into the hands of ordinary citizens as the state’s room for manoeuvre would remain constrained. Third, underlying this process of political globalisation, the period since the 1970s has witnessed the acceleration of a process of neo-liberal economic globalisation, suggesting that Brexit has represented the wrong answer to a, nevertheless, correctly identified problem. The increasing integration of the world’s economies, the development of global supply chains and the increased mobility of capital have allowed countries like China, India and Brazil to emerge and reduced inequality between countries. However, the very same developments have increased inequalities within countries. This has led to the emergence of a new divide between the ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ of globalisation. The better educated in salaried occupations have been relatively protected from the implications of the increasing mobility of capital, especially if they have been able to save and invest, since the possession of even modest share portfolios has made it possible to participate in the process of global capitalist expansion. The less well-educated in hourly paid employment have faced growing job insecurity and downward pressure on wages. At the same time, a complex, interdependent world is one in which there is diminished room for choice and greater pressure for adaptation to global forces that cannot be controlled. Consequently, there has been a growing perception ‘of the diminished capacity of national-level government in an era of complex interdependence to deliver public goods’ (Hay 2007: 56). Meanwhile, political elites have been driven to demand the depoliticisation of decision

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making, that is, taking it out of the hands of elected politicians and placing it in the hands of ‘independent [but not directly accountable] public bodies, such as operationally independent central banks’ (Hay 2007: 57). Against this background, Brexit, with its exhortation to ‘Take back control!’, was to be understood as a cri de Coeur on the part of globalisation’s losers. Having come to experience a growing sense of powerlessness, they came to be persuaded that their plight and their resentments against the fallouts from globalisation could be addressed by a robust reassertion of national sovereignty. Fourth, if the forces of globalisation cannot be restrained by a resurgent nationalism, then there is a sense in which they are two sides of the same coin. By ‘encouraging the hopeless dream of national liberation’ (Marsili and Milanesi 2018: 83) neo-liberal globalisation has created a chimera that is a crucial part of what keeps it alive. For instance, EU member states have for long sought to defend their own national interests in competition to lower business taxation and so attract transnational corporations to their own jurisdictions in preference to others. Inter-governmentalism in EU policy making therefore stands as a significant obstacle in the way of tax harmonisation while also serving ‘precisely to transform power into a ghost, seemingly absent and yet incredibly effective in reducing the political agency of organised citizenry’ (Marsili and Milanese 2018: 109). For, when decisions are made according to intergovernmental procedures, there is neither a clear enemy nor a clear interlocutor and it is not clear to whom European tax protestors should take their demands. Meanwhile, the chimera must be contested: We can only gain a measure of control over a world of increasing interdependence by growing identities, as well as institutions of democracy, and governance that can themselves reach beyond the nation state. This task is hard enough in itself; it becomes virtually impossible when large numbers of politicians, newspapers and intellectuals are telling people to do exactly the opposite and seal themselves behind national barriers, treating immigrants as a disease that pollutes their culture, relating to the rest of the world only through arm’s-length trade—and therefore leaving transnational corporations and deregulated financial markets beyond control. (Crouch 2018: 3)

Against this background, critical Europeanists see transnational democracy in Europe as essential because of the way in which its absence has fed the growth of nationalism, popular resentment and anti-EU sentiments,

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giving rise to a dangerous vicious circle. Recent years have seen hopes of overcoming democratic shortcomings disappointed on several occasions, most notably with the failure of the Convention on the Future of Europe, meaning that the Lisbon Treaty that followed it would inevitably be perceived as a ‘consolation prize’ for the failure of the Convention’s constitutional aspirations to make it across the ratification finishing line. If this reinforced perceptions of the EU as a set of institutions in which democratic reforms were bound to come to nothing, then it also reinforced pessimistic assumptions that reform, if and when it did come, would in all probability be the result of compromise and national obstructionism and therefore far less than what was needed. ‘In the meantime, for lack of ambitious European democracy, the forces of reaction and nationalism grow, so that, on the one hand, democratic reform becomes less likely, and, on the other, any such reform is less likely to be satisfactory or ambitious. A perfectly vicious circle’ (Marsili and Milanese 2018: 210). Moreover, critical Europeanists are aware that, historically, mainstream parties of the left in Europe have been unable to get past intergovernmentalism to come together to drive through a progressive agenda. Even when, at the beginning of the century, they staffed the majority of member-­ state governments, they sat in the Council of the European Union as the representatives of national interests; the European Parliament does not have the right of legislative initiative; the Party of European Socialists is little more than a federation of national parties with no real power to impose a unified view on its members. Therefore, because it allows the emergence and expression of a single will transcending national borders, transnational democracy is viewed by critical Europeanists as essential to the fulfilment of a progressive agenda which, they believe, can in turn help to turn the political tide in their favour by helping to stem the growth of populist nationalism. Critical Europeanists differ in terms of what they see the transnational democracy as looking like. Perhaps the most detailed account has been provided by Volt Europa. Its ‘EU Reform’ policy document goes beyond statements of general principles to describe in great detail the institutional geography of an imagined European polity, a number of whose political processes—for example, the electoral system; the federal arrangements; the provision for constructive votes of no confidence—bear more than a passing resemblance to those of the German polity. DiEM25, on the other hand, is essentially silent on the matter, where this would appear to be partly a consequence of the fact that since 2016 ‘it has put its main

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political energy in more reformist projects around a European New Deal focussed on economic change and a Green New Deal emphasizing sustainability’ (Blokker 2021: 8); partly a consequence of a recognition that the EU cannot be understood ‘as something that is “already there” and as something we “already know”’ (Biebuyck 2010: 173–176) (Blokker 2021: 5); partly a consequence of the conviction that the precise contours of a reformed democratic Europe will emerge from the process of political activism itself—that in acting transnationally, citizens will ‘actively transform the institutions of government as they do so’ (Marsili and Milanese 2018: 184). For transnational democracy to be a realistic prospect and not a daydream, critical Europeanists have to say how it can be achieved. In Europe, treaty changes require unanimity among the EU member states in the European Council. If we assume that each state pursues its own interests rather than the common interest, then in a very real sense transnational democracy is a problem that precludes its own solution. For this reason, critical Europeanists are disinclined to believe that much can be achieved by existing established actors. That is to say, while not going as far as to suggest that nothing can be achieved by constitutional means through existing institutions, they suggest that new actors and novel forms of action are required. Specifically, they argue that what is required is a new form of transnational political party that can realise a radical democratic vision of Europe ‘from below’. Such an entity, for critical Europeanists, is essential to the realisation of genuinely systemic alternatives and popular empowerment both because national democratic systems have lost their capacity to transform popular demands into real changes of policy (as power has slipped away from them), and because opportunities for the exercise of democratic rights beyond the confines of states are essentially non-existent, or at least extremely limited. As a party, as opposed to a social movement, the transnational entity that is envisaged would be more than an arena for debate and the reaching of consensus. As a transnational party, as opposed to a pressure group, it would seek not to defend the interests of a part, but to realise a vision of the whole—where the ‘whole’ in question would be European or global rather than national, and where the vision would be centred on the notion of recovering political agency at all levels. ‘Recuperating control over transnational politics implies at the very same time increasing the space for agency offered at regional, municipal or neighbourhood scales. For these are not separate, watertight

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containers, but different instances of a single movement: politics’ (Marsili and Milanese 2018: 188). Critical Europeanists understand the party they have in mind as being transnational in the twofold sense (1) that the focus of its ambitions, the arena of its concerns, goes above and beyond the national state, and (2) that it is more than a federation of national parties, being, rather, an entity empowered to take decisions binding on all of its constituent elements, even if the decisions concern purely local or national matters. DiEM25 is a transnational organisation in this sense as its ‘Organising Principles’ provide for membership rights to be reserved exclusively to individuals;11 consciously avoid federal structures, and stipulate that ‘[e]ven when a policy concerns a local or national issue, all members (across Europe) must approve it by means of an all-member vote’.12 Volt Europa is less obviously transnational in this sense as, besides individual members, it provides for membership of ‘member associations’: political parties in EU member states with the name ‘Volt’ followed by the name of the country in which the association is based. A transnational party, critical Europeanists believe, can help to reinvigorate processes of European integration, by contributing to the emergence of a European public sphere, thereby helping to overcome a well-known aspect of the EU’s democratic deficit, namely, the absence of a European demos. ‘If there is no European demos, according to that view, there can be no European democracy’ (Panayotu 2021: 124). The transnational party, for critical Europeanists, helps the creation of a European demos in two ways, first by helping to create European identities. These, critical Europeanists see as supplementing national identities rather than replacing them, as they start from the assumption that everyone has multiple identities; and they have a normative commitment to the principles of equality and diversity; consequently, they consider national and European identities as being a matter of ‘both … and’ rather than, as 11  If some of the European parties allow individual as well as institutional membership, then the limited rights attached to the former often deprive it of much meaning and significance. For example, while the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) has individual members, these have only one delegate to the Council (which prepares the political programme for European elections) whereas the party members have at least one delegate each. The Party of European Socialists (PES), meanwhile, has no provision for individual membership. 12   ‘DiEM25 Organising Principles—approved on 2016-09-13, last updated on 2020-06-10’, https://diem25.org /organising-principles/.

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Eurosceptical nationalists tend to do, ‘either … or’. Critical Europeanists are aware that for most citizens of Europe, any European identity they have has little emotional charge; but they believe that this can be created by a populist style of political communication that posits a conflict between a ‘European people’, on the one hand, and, on the other, national and transnational elites (member-state governments committed to the politics of austerity; ‘the Brussels bureaucracy’; bankers and multinational corporations etc.) all of whom in various ways obstruct the project of European democracy and thereby damage the interests of the European people (or peoples). Second, a public sphere is an arena for the discussion of common political problems. If the Eurozone and refugee crises of the 2010s led to the Europeanisation of national public spheres, then critical Europeanists see their political activity through the transnational party as making it possible to draw on these issues to generate public contestation over alternative European-level policy options and over contrasting visions of Europe. They believe that ‘a genuine transnational party aiming to transform party competition on the EU level’ with the goal of inspiring other forces to develop similar formations, ‘could improve public contestation over alternative policies on the EU level’. This in turn would allow European citizens ‘to identify with pan-European opposing platforms facilitating in that way the emergence of pan-European, transnational collective identities’ (Panayotu 2021: 135). If this, as critical Europeanists believe, opens up possibilities for the democratic revitalisation of the EU, then, by the same token, it will help to stem the tide of Eurosceptical nationalism which has hitherto drawn sustenance from the absence, within the EU, of channels for the legitimate expression of opposition. This absence stems from the features of governance referred to in Chap. 4: the absence of officially sanctioned partisan activity in the Commission and the Council of the European Union, and the absence of party government in the European Parliament, which lacks the power of legislative initiative. Consequently, as Peter Mair predicted in 2007, the failure to allow for opposition within the EU polity has led to an opposition of principle against it (and to right-wing populist opposition at the national level as well, since the growing weight of the EU in policy making has increased democratic deficits also in domestic public spheres). The stance of critical Europeanism was therefore well summed up by the slogan adopted by Yanis Varoufakis in his speech at DiEM25’s launch event at Berlin’s Volksbühne Theatre in February 2016 (cited by

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Panayotu 2021: 128)—‘In the EU, against this EU’—articulating critical Europeanism’s embrace of Lexit’s hostility to existing EU governance structures, but its rejection of the conclusion Lexit draws from that. The critical Europeanist strategy was put to the electoral test at the European Parliament election of 2019 when DiEM25 took to the field with ‘European Spring’ (ES), a transnational alliance of party lists all committed to a common electoral programme, the ‘New Deal for Europe’13 (which sought to advance the European democratisation agenda by calling for, among other things, the strengthening of the European Parliament with the right to initiate legislation, and improvement of the European Citizen’s Initiative). ES thus contrasted sharply with other European parties which, while also having common electoral programmes, do not actually campaign on them, contesting the EP elections, rather, as second-order national elections (Reif and Schmitt 1980), and therefore, unlike ES, refraining from fielding candidates with nationalities different from those of the countries in which they compete. In the seven countries14 where it was able to field candidates, ES took 1,402,387 votes, representing 1.3% of the votes cast there. Volt Europa, meanwhile, took 479,363 votes in seven countries, representing 0.6%.15 The percentages reflected the two formidable structural obstacles critical Europeanism faced at this election: the fact that campaigns remained largely national, making it difficult for pan-Europeanism to get a hearing; the fact that its party representatives were too small to be eligible for official recognition as European parties and therefore for EU funding.16 Both involved them in a catch-22 situation whereby the obstacles to getting their message across made it difficult for them to get a hearing which in turn made it difficult for them to overcome the obstacles in the way of so doing. Both have gone on to win handfuls of seats, here and there, in national legislatures. We will consider the prospects for critical Europeanism in more detail in the following, concluding chapter. For now we move on to consider the strengths and weaknesses of the case it seeks to make.

13  Available at https://diem25.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/EuropeanSpring-­ Manifesto-­2019.ENG_.pdf. 14  Denmark, Poland, Germany, Greece, France, Spain and Portugal. 15  Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Spain, Luxembourg, Belgium and Bulgaria. 16  They would have had to have received at least 3% of the vote at the most recent EP election in each of one-quarter of the member states or have representation at EP, national or regional level in each of one-quarter of the member states.

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The Assessment Critical Europeanism, I want to argue, has two main strengths and two main problems. Its strengths are its faith in the idea of progress and its scepticism concerning the possibility of achieving progressive reform through national states in the absence of transnational action given the way in which states are locked into processes of international governance they cannot escape. The two main problems concern the cultural and material barriers in the way of effective transnational action, and the dangers of ‘Eurocentrism’. Among the strengths of critical Europeanism, then, is its faith in progress. While it is true that humanity faces global problems of immense proportions—war, climate change and human displacement, not to mention poverty, hunger and disease—attitudes of pessimism and fear, if given too much reign induce a fatalism and therefore passivity such that negative prophecies risk become self-fulfilling. The twenty-first-century culture of fear described by Furedi (2018) must be counterbalanced by due acknowledgement of the unprecedented progress that has been made in the lives of the overwhelming majority of the world’s population in recent decades (Norberg 2017). Furedi argues that there is a cultural propensity, in the early twenty-first century, to look to the future with foreboding, the ‘ticking time bomb’— concerning climate change, obesity, demography, mental health, antibiotics, computer security and many other things besides—being perhaps the most high profile of the metaphors, conveying as it does, the message of impending and inevitable catastrophe in the absence of drastic remedial action in the present. It is perhaps hardly surprising, then, that the authors of the report based on the Varkey Foundation’s twenty-country survey of young people born between 1995 and 2001 conclude that ‘Generation Z are pessimistic about the future—and overall seem unhappy with the state of the world that they have inherited’,17 finding that 37% think that the world is getting worse compared to 20% who think it is getting better (and 39% who think neither). Fear of the future has been a central feature of societies’ cultural scripts around fear for centuries (Furedi 2018: 96). What is new about the early twenty-first century is that earlier cultural 17  Varkey Foundation, ‘What the World’s Young People Think and Feel. Generation Z: Global Citizenship Survey’, January 2017, p.  19, https://www.varkeyfoundation.org/ media/4487/global-young-people-report-single-pages-new.pdf.

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resources used to manage such fear have lost their force without new ones having been found to replace them. In particular, there has been a loss of confidence in the authority of knowledge. From the Enlightenment, scientific and technological advances, in confirming humanity’s capacity to know and understand its condition, implied that the future, unknown as it was, was comprehensible and therefore not something to be feared. Since then, in recent decades, acceleration in the pace of scientific and technological advances has led to widespread perceptions that change has escaped human control and that humans by and large struggle to comprehend and keep up with scientific change. The advance of knowledge is perceived as promoting innovations (e.g. artificial intelligence) that cannot be known in advance, as making possible applications (e.g. vaccines) bringing risks of new hazards. Therefore, from having been the medium through which humanity could reduce uncertainty, the growth of knowledge has, paradoxically, come to be perceived as a generator of it: ‘the source of the intensification of the problem of uncertainty, rather than its solution’ (Furedi 2018: 88). Michael Gove’s celebrated Sky News interview18 in the run-up to the Brexit referendum, when he said that people had ‘had enough of experts’ spoke to this sensibility, as, from 2020, did the popularity in some quarters of conspiracy theories surrounding the anti-COVID vaccines. Critical Europeanism, in reflecting confidence in the possibility of a more positive European future, pushes back against the culture of fear; and, insofar as its case rests on faith in the possibility of human improvement through social and economic development—that is, through progress and the accumulation of knowledge—it in that respect at least rests on solid ground. As Johan Norberg (2017) argues (with considerable empirical support), in a wide range, if not most, areas of human existence—from food and sanitation to literacy and freedom—‘the great story of our era’ is that we are witnessing the greatest improvements ever to have taken place: Poverty, malnutrition, illiteracy, child labour and infant mortality are falling faster than at any other time in human history. Life expectancy at birth has increased more than twice as much in the last century as it did in the previous 200,000 years. The risk that any individual will be exposed to war, die in a natural disaster, or be subjected to dictatorship has become smaller than

 An excerpt from the interview is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGgiGtJk7MA.

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in any other epoch. A child born today is more likely to reach retirement age than his forebears were to live to their fifth birthday. (2017: 11)

In short, the empirical evidence suggests that by and large, notwithstanding humanity’s problems, life is better now than in the past and seems likely to be more so in the future. This is the opposite of the view on which the narratives of xenophobia and right-wing populism rest, that life was better in the past and is likely to be worse in the future: ‘Donald Trump’s presidential campaign slogan made the case that America had to become great again, like it was in the good old days’ (Norberg 2017: 8). For politicians urging people to vote for Britain to leave the EU in 2016, the UK’s future in Europe was as a ‘vassal state’ unless they acted there and then. In short, for nationalist and authoritarian politicians, the world is a dangerous place, spinning out of control, and it benefits them if people buy into the narrative. ‘Frightened people do not ask for opportunities, but for protection. They don’t vote for openness and freedom, but for the strongman who promises them security and provides easily identifiable scapegoats’ (Norberg 2017: 13). A second assumption of the critical Europeanist case that appears well-­ founded is that renationalisation cannot by itself solve the problem of the diminished capacity of national governments to deliver public goods and so deliver power back into the hands of citizens; for, renationalisation or not, states remain enmeshed in international governance systems and are unable to change this. The cultural drivers of Brexit, combined with the UK’s actual experience of leaving the EU, provide a dramatic illustration of the point. From a cultural perspective, the phenomenon of Brexit cannot, as Fintan O’Toole (2018) points out, be fully understood without appreciating ‘the strange sense of imaginary oppression’ that underlies it.19 This sense of oppression, O’Toole argues, is partly a reflection of two contradictory moods that came to predominate in the political culture of England in the years following World War II: a sense of superiority and a sense of abjection. If the first derived from the experience of empire and the status 19  The observation is as relevant to the UK’s Lexiteers specifically as it is to Brexit generally: ‘This mentality is by no means exclusive to the Right. There is a long leftist tradition of seeing continental slavishness as a threat to English liberty, and of imagining England as the only green and pleasant land in which the new Jerusalem could be built. A Roundhead distrust of the EU’s suspiciously Catholic roots and a fierce, defiant insularity have shaped attitudes in some parts of the Left since the 1950s’ (O’Toole 2018).

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of victor at the end of the war, the second derived from perceptions of post-war relative economic decline and of a diminished place in the world: two contradictory moods that could be reconciled only by the emotion of self-pity, or the feeling that, having won a great war but been denied the fruits of victory, one has deserved much but received little, or a high sense of superiority and a deep sense of grievance. Brexit had popular appeal precisely because it was driven by this element of the political culture: Crudely, passionate nationalism has taken two antagonistic forms. There is an imperial nationalism and an anti-imperial nationalism; one sets out to dominate the world, the other to throw off such dominance. The incoherence of the new English nationalism that lies behind Brexit is that it wants to be both simultaneously. On the one hand, Brexit is fuelled by fantasies of ‘Empire 2.0’, a reconstructed global mercantilist trading empire in which the old white colonies will be reconnected to the mother country. On the other, it is an insurgency and therefore needs to imagine that it is a revolt against intolerable oppression. It therefore requires both a sense of superiority and a sense of grievance. Self-pity is the only emotion that can bring them together. (O’Toole 2018)

It is for this reason that central to the Brexit narrative was the theme of the UK as a ‘colony’ of Brussels: the theme that EU membership was tantamount to subjection to the latest attempt, in the tradition of Napoleon and Hitler, to unify Europe—so that the EU itself ‘was a continuation in another, more insidious form, of previous attempts at domination from the continent’ (O’Toole 2018). However, if Brexit was in the popular imagination an assertion of national independence, an exercise in returning control to ordinary citizens, a throwing off of external constraints, then the actual experience of going through with it was eloquent about how elusive this goal was— about how little has changed and about how little was actually possible in this respect. It is sufficient in this connection to refer to the so-called Northern Ireland protocol and to the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement. With regard to the first of these two, a problem largely unforeseen or overlooked at the time of the referendum was that the UK’s departure from the EU single market and customs union posed a potential threat to the open border between the UK and the Republic of Ireland, and therefore to the so-called Good Friday Agreement of 1998. The latter had

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ended the conflict between unionists and nationalists by setting up devolved, power-sharing government in Northern Ireland as well as a number of institutions between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. These had made possible the development of common policies implemented separately in each jurisdiction as well as the development of policies implemented through shared all-Ireland institutions, making operation of the peace accord on the ground heavily dependent on the arrangements bound up with the single market. As Michael O’Neil pointed out, the agreement codified ‘areas of North South co-operation that [could not] plausibly continue with entirely alien economic and regulatory models on different parts of the island’ (Matthew O’Toole, ‘Belfast Agreement constitutionally binds the UK to Europe’, The Irish Times, 18 December 2017, quoted by O’Neil 2018: 13). Moreover, together with the open border, the Good Friday Agreement had brought massive increases in cross-border transactions ‘from business and trade flows to functional and civic co-operation’ so that, between 1998 and 2015, ‘intra-­ Irish trade almost doubled in value to some €2988.3m’ (O’Neil 2018: 10)—which in turn had helped to consolidate peace, much in the way that similar transnational processes had brought material progress and reshaped the politics of Europe after 1945. So the UK’s departure from the customs union and the single market threatened to undermine the workings of the Good Friday Agreement and so put peace in jeopardy. By ‘rescinding the primacy and direct effect of EU law’, it would release the Northern Ireland authorities from the legal framework and ‘the rules that facilitate[d] co-operation between the Republic and its agencies, and their counterparts in the North’ (O’Neil 2018: 13). By reinstating the border between North and South, it would reinstate a significant symbol of the division between formerly disconnected communities. And by blocking economic integration between the UK and Ireland, it would put at risk the commercial underpinnings of peaceful coexistence. None of the parties involved wanted any of this to happen—but in addition, the UK government did want to leave both the customs union and the single market (in order to be able to be seen as delivering on the referendum result); it also wanted ‘to rule out any special arrangements for Northern Ireland in relation to a customs union and single market’ (Farry and Eastwood 2018), since these, while they might prevent the reinstatement of a border between Northern Ireland and the Republic, would leave part of the UK subject to an EU legal framework that did not

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apply to the rest of the UK. So the UK government faced a trilemma in wanting three outcomes, ‘only two of which [could] be achieved at any one time’ (Farry and Eastwood 2018). In essence, through the Northern Ireland protocol, an agreement reached between the UK and the EU in October 2019, the UK government chose to manage the trilemma by forgoing its third preferred outcome, accepting the continued applicability of EU legislation in a number of areas to Northern Ireland and thereby creating a de facto customs border between Northern Ireland and the island of Great Britain. The EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA), a free-trade agreement signed on 30 December 2020, was required by the need to minimise the disruptive implications of Brexit for the conduct of business and trade between the UK and the EU, and to agree on trading arrangements to replace those which Brexit would bring to an end. Particularly noteworthy for present purposes are the governance arrangements the TCA puts in place. This is because the drafting of an agreement, no matter how detailed, by itself provides no guarantees that the parties to it will agree on how it is to be implemented, on the situations in which it applies or on how it is to be interpreted. Within states, courts and legal systems provide the means by which conflicts of view concerning agreements can be resolved. Agreements between states frequently require the parties to establish ad hoc institutions that can serve these purposes. And agreements broad in scope will increase the number of points at which disagreements can arise. From this perspective, it is significant that the TCA is a long and complex document: it runs to 1246 pages and to mention only the provisions concerning trade in goods, it covers everything from the fees customs may charge to cooperation in research linked to vehicle safety standards and so on. Perhaps not surprisingly, therefore, the governance arrangements are also complex. There is a Partnership Council (PC) co-­ chaired by a representative of the EU and a representative of the UK government at ministerial level to which each party to the agreement can refer any issue relating to the implementation, application and interpretation of the TCA. The PC meets at the request of either party and at least once per year, and during the first five years has the power to amend parts of the TCA (itself subject to quinquennial review) ‘provided that such amendments are necessary to correct errors, or to address omissions or other

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deficiencies’.20 It has rules of procedure, a secretariat to take care of its administrative tasks and sixteen specialist committees (and four working groups) to which it can delegate certain of its powers. Decisions of the PC are made by mutual agreement and are binding. Since even these institutions and procedures provide no ultimate guarantees against the ­emergence of disagreements, Title 1 of Part Six of the TCA sets out a series of complex rules and procedures to be followed in the event of agreement through the Partnership Council being impossible, where these rules and procedures include provisions enabling the parties, where necessary, to establish arbitration tribunals and seek temporary remedies by suspending obligations under the TCA. Finally, the TCA also provides for the establishment of a Parliamentary Partnership Assembly consisting of representatives of the UK Parliament and the European Parliament to provide a forum for exchanges of views on the partnership, and a Civil Society Forum, consisting of independent civil society organisations, to conduct a dialogue on implementation of Part Two of the TCA (covering ‘Trade, Transport, Fisheries and Other Arrangements’). The rules, procedures and institutions established by the TCA suggested, then, that ‘the EU-UK [were] going into a continuous negotiation mode’,21 which in turn suggested two points strongly supportive of the critical Europeanist case. In the first place, continuous negotiation and the frameworks for it illustrated precisely the point made above, namely, that states cannot avoid being enmeshed in institutions of multi-level governance limiting their sovereignty, so that in that sense, the promise of Brexit to restore a sovereignty that had supposedly been lost was always illusory. Admittedly, the institutions of the TCA were not supranational in that the Agreement explicitly denied private individuals or organisations a right to invoke it in the domestic legal systems of the parties; but it illustrated that the international environment in which states operate, far from being one of anarchy, is a rules-based order significantly limiting their scope for autonomous action. If, before Brexit, the sovereignty of the UK parliament was limited by the need for legislation to be consistent with the country’s international obligations, then Brexit has not and could not change anything in 20  Article Inst.1 paragraph 4(d), ‘Trade and Cooperation Agreement between the European Union and the European Atomic Energy Community, of the one part, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, of the other part’, p.  11, https://ec. europa.eu/info/sites/default/files/draft_eu-uk_trade_and_cooperation _agreement.pdf. 21  M.T. Carrasco Benitez ‘EU-UK institutional framework’, 1 January 2021, http://dragoman.org/eu-uk-if.pdf.

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this respect. Action must always be consistent with international law unless states are willing to bear the more or less significant costs of failures to comply, and this is true regardless of the absence in international arenas of overarching authorities with power to enforce compliance. GRECO, or the Group of States against Corruption, provides an excellent illustration of the point (though numerous others would have served as well). Established in 1999 by the Council of Europe, GRECO monitors the compliance of member states with Council of Europe anti-corruption standards by a continuous process of evaluation of the robustness of members’ anti-corruption arrangements and of their compliance with GRECO recommendations. GRECO reports are public documents and it is clear that despite lacking enforcement powers, its action ‘works’, thanks to peer pressure and soft power. States known not to be compliant are, it is reasonable to suppose, likely to risk numerous difficulties, not least those associated with attracting foreign direct investment. So it was legitimate to ask about the extent to which, from the perspective of sovereignty, Brexit was ever able to make a real, practical, difference. The suggestion that it looked likely to have given rise to a process of continuous negotiation between the UK and the EU was telling. It was difficult to see how it could be otherwise and difficult to see in what respects such continuous negotiations would differ from those that had by definition always been a routine feature of the intergovernmental negotiations to which the UK had been party through the Council of the European Union when it had been a member state. It was paradoxical that while Brexit and the narrative around sovereignty implicitly attacked the EU’s legitimacy, the TCA, in acknowledging the EU’s legal capacity to act as co-signatory, promptly reinforced it. In June 2017, former Europe minister, Dennis McShane, published a book entitled, Brexit, No Exit: Why (in the End) Britain Won’t Leave Europe, in which he argued that the UK could not divorce itself from the continent of Europe and that the European question would remain the defining political issue of the early twentieth century in the UK. In light of subsequent developments, McShane’s argument seems to have been prescient. The second point strongly supportive of the critical Europeanist case, then, is that Brexit has turned out to be a process, not an event, and as such offers reasons for optimism concerning the future prospects of the critical Europeanist project, at least as far as its UK proponents are concerned. First, from the end of the Brexit transition period on 31 December 2020, disputes between the UK government and the EU on a range of

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issues from the working of the Northern Ireland protocol to the anti-­ COVID vaccines and fishing rights, as well as the various practical fallouts of Brexit referred to in the last chapter, suggested that far from being a political issue that had been ‘resolved’, Brexit was likely to remain on the agenda of public discussion for the foreseeable future. Second, therefore, it was likely to persist as a significant social and political cleavage in the popular imagination. Early in 2019, Andrew Gamble argued that a transformation of the Conservatives into a hard Brexit party seemed inevitable with a purge of pro-Europeans likely to begin in earnest, and this was a prediction that came to pass with Boris Johnson’s assumption on the party leadership in June and the general election in December of the same year. At that election, Brexit was, as mentioned in Chap. 1, the most important issue for most voters when it came to deciding how to vote,22 with 77% of those who had voted ‘Leave’ in 2016 choosing the Conservatives or the Brexit party, 80% of those who had voted ‘Remain’ choosing a party other than the Conservatives.23 Meanwhile, other research suggested that voters had come to identify more strongly as ‘Leavers’ or ‘Remainers’ than they identified with the political parties.24 Research since then has confirmed the finding (e.g. Hobolt et al. 2021) and suggested that while voters still see politics as structured by such traditional divides as left versus right and class, the new, ‘leave versus remain’, divide is also important (Surridge 2021). This in turn suggested that fatalism on the part of defeated ‘Remainers’ and therefore on the part of proponents of critical Europeanism was inappropriate; for it suggested the persistence of Brexit and Brexit-­ related issues as ones with the capacity to mobilise voters. In this context, it is worth mentioning ‘Best for Britain’, ‘Open Britain’ and ‘European Movement UK’ as advocacy groups that campaign to keep the UK open to EU membership. Alongside them, a new political party, Rejoin EU, has begun to field candidates, encouraged by the director of the Federal Trust 22  A survey on election day by Lord Ashcroft of over 13,000 people who had already cast their vote asked them which were the most important issues when it came to deciding how to vote. A larger proportion (57%) mentioned Brexit (either ‘getting Brexit done’ or ‘stopping Brexit’) than mentioned any other issue. https://lordashcroftpolls.com/2019/12/ how-britain-voted-and-why-my-2019-general-election-post-vote-poll/#more-16379. 23  https://lordashcroftpolls.com/2019/12/how-britain-voted-and-why-my-2019general-election-post-vote-poll/#more-16379. 24  See, for example, Curtice (2018) and the results of the November 2019 YouGov poll reported by The New European at https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/top-stories/ yougov-poll-party-allegiance-vs-brexit-1-6376478.

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for Education and Research, Brendan Donnelly, who, as I mentioned at the beginning of this book, has argued that ‘Remainers’ should seek to take advantage of the power the single-member simple plurality electoral system potentially confers on small parties to influence policy by taking votes from the leading candidates and so determining election outcomes— as was revealed in dramatic fashion in 2015. That was the election at which David Cameron promised a referendum on EU membership: a promise made with a view to dishing UKIP and laying to rest internal Conservative divisions in the knowledge that it might never have to be honoured: few anticipated that the Conservatives would win the general election in 2015. Ironically, by making inroads into Labour support, UKIP helped to bring about precisely this outcome, ensuring that the referendum was politically unavoidable. In the May 2021 London Assembly elections, Rejoin EU, supported by the UK branch of Volt Europa, took 1.9% of the vote at its first electoral outing. The following month, the Chesham and Amersham by-election, which saw the Conservatives lose the seat for the first time in almost fifty years, led some to argue that Brexit remained a significant ‘underlying’ issue for voters, so presenting its opponents with the opportunity to exploit the electoral system in a different way, namely, through tactical voting and the construction of anti-Conservative electoral coalitions (Toynbee 2021). In summary, then, critical Europeanism’s strengths are its well-founded faith in progress, together with its emphasis on the need to acknowledge the significance of institutions of governance beyond nation states—with Brexit providing a vivid illustration of the limitations of what is possible in terms of ‘national sovereignty’ and confirmation that this issue is likely to be ongoing. However, critical Europeanism also has weaknesses. First, no assessment of its robustness can dispense with an assessment of the efficacy of the vehicles available for helping to advance its cause. In this context, the potential for transnational organisation and activism faces a significant linguistic barrier. If organisations such as DiEM25 and Volt Europa use English as their working language (and, indeed, Volt Europa wants it as Europe’s sole working language25), then they automatically exclude those who do not have the language—paradoxically so, given that 25  ‘In order to facilitate the Union’s policy work, Volt supports the adoption of English as the single working language for European institutions—this is irrespective of the languages spoken by the Member States and relates to our principle of Efficiency’: ‘Challenge 5+1— EU Reform’, p. 13, https://www.volteuropa.org/policy-portfolio.

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they are driven by ideals that seek to combat exclusion. On a practical level, linguistic barriers limit the extent to which the organisations can grow and become large entities with an appeal beyond the ranks of the very small number of individuals for whom transnational democracy is a salient issue and who have the linguistic skills to take the consequent action. The alternative—translation—requires more or less significant resources. Either way, the ability to engage in transnational cooperation is restricted. Reflecting the fact that the cultural and material resources required to coordinate transnational action are considerable when compared with those required for national action, the problem leads Císař and Weisskircher (2021: 53) to conclude that ‘the development of something like a European democratic transnational citizenship … cannot be expected in the foreseeable future’. Perhaps they are being unduly pessimistic. As of 2012, 51% of EU citizens spoke English as a first or second language. Applying the data to the EU’s new population following Brexit, the proportion only fell to 44% and is probably closer to 50% ‘given that levels of English proficiency have risen rapidly across the continent among young people since [2012]’ (Keating 2020). Between 2011 and 2021, the number of English speakers in the world increased by over 23% (Tirosh 2021) and we know, too, that younger people tend to report greater foreign language skills than older people.26 Consequently, the linguistic difficulties of transnational organisation seem likely to diminish more or less rapidly in the coming years. Meanwhile, we know, too, that attitudes and laws on social issues have changed at an extraordinarily rapid pace in recent decades. Today’s teenagers and young adults ‘have grown up with the limitless opportunities provided by the power of computing and networking. They are more likely to have travelled across borders, have friends who are on the other side of the world, and know people from another religion or culture than that of their parents and grandparents.’27 If the results of the Varkey Foundation’s 2017 survey are to be believed, then young people worldwide are more likely than not ‘to be supporters of diversity, equality and liberal values across the world—even when those values run contrary to the laws of their country’.28 So not only may the obstacles in the way of 26  ‘Foreign language skills statistics’, Eurostat statistics explained, https://ec.europa.eu/ eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Foreign_language_skills_statistics. 27  Op. cit.: 13. 28  Ibid.: 18.

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transnational activism decline with the passage of time, but the audience for it may increase. In short, the context is fluid. The present is an unreliable guide to ‘the foreseeable future’. A second problem is what might be described as the risk of Eurocentrism. In other words, it is not clear how critical Europeanism, in rejecting nation states but seeking to democratise the EU, by creating an enhanced European legal framework and an enhanced European citizenship, avoids recreating at the continental level, those same national elements that it attacks at the member-state level. If a democratic Europe means a European polity with political institutions claiming sovereignty over a given geographical area, then it risks merely recreating all of the problems arising from borders, othering and the question of who is and is not a citizen, entitled, or not entitled, to the corresponding rights, at a higher level of generality. This can hardly be regarded as an attractive proposition, especially if one bears in mind that from a global and historical perspective, a European identity is inextricably bound up with the experience of colonialism and the construction of overseas empires, atrocities such as the transatlantic slave trade and so on—not to mention continuing controversial actions such as border externalisation (the transfer of border management to third countries) of the kind involved in the notorious 2016 EU-Turkey migration agreement or the 2017 Italy-Libya agreement, with all the human rights abuses to which they have given rise.29 Such agreements, coming hard on the heels of the 2015 refugee crisis and the high-profile intra-­ European disputes to which the crisis gave rise, raised a question about whether European unity was being bought at the expense of the welfare of migrants and therefore a more general question about whether, and if so the conditions under which, it is possible to practice solidarity while avoiding exclusion as a necessary counterpart. Most importantly, the problem also risks blurring distinctions between left and right on Europe. After all, there do exist far-right groups which also assert visions of a common/ united Europe—except that their visions provide the basis for a pan-­ European nativism that is highly exclusionary and Islamophobic among other things (Císař and Weisskircher 2021: 37).

29  Human rights groups consider that the agreements enable the EU and its member states to evade their international humanitarian obligations, as well as making them complicit in the abuse of migrants in other countries (Terry 2021).

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Some critical Europeanists appear to be very well aware of the problem. Marsili and Milanese (2018), for example, begin their book, Citizens of Nowhere, by pointing out that the word ‘Europe’ originates from the Greek myth of the abduction by Zeus of the goddess Europa, who is ultimately never re-found after her abduction. Therefore, they argue, Europe is not primarily a geographical space: it is a process and a pursuit. Europa does not really exist: she is movement itself. As the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano describes it: ‘Utopia is on the horizon. I move two steps closer, it moves two steps further away. I walk another ten steps and the horizon runs ten steps further away. As much as I may walk, I’ll never reach it. So what’s the point of utopia? The point is this: to keep walking.’ (2018: 7)

One cannot help feeling that this suggestion is closer to being an avoidance of the problem than an answer to it. If democratic Europe is a utopia never reached, then one still needs to have some conception of it in order to know that one is moving towards it in the first place, no matter how elusive it may be. At a slightly earlier point in the book, the authors give the impression that their European ideal is one of a community ‘defined in civic terms rather than based on ethnicity, family ties, religion or territory’ (2018: 5). This might point in the direction of a European polity defined by a commitment to liberal values (freedom, tolerance, equality and individual rights) and therefore open to anyone, regardless of culture or ethnicity, willing to uphold such values. If this in turn might point in the direction of the democratic European project being a brand of civic nationalism, then as such it would almost certainly be more acceptable to those locating themselves on the left of the political spectrum than would ethnic nationalism with which it is usually contrasted; but then one has to come to terms with the fact that the distinction between civic and ethnic nationalism is difficult to sustain in practice in that ‘even civic nations that place universal political principles at their core carry a cultural inheritance born in the period of nation building’ (Tamir 2019)—meaning that civic and ethnic nationalism, far from being opposites or antithetical phenomena, are two aspects of a single phenomenon. Thus, the problem of exclusion and othering remains: ‘even the most liberal forms of nationalism go beyond civic friendship. They rely on a collective identity that cherishes some cultural, linguistic, and symbolic features that mark the border between insiders and outsiders, us and them’ (Tamir 2019).

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Conclusion Like Lexit, critical Europeanism gains its impetus from perceptions of a democratic deficit in the EU’s functioning: perceptions that negative integration combined with shortcomings in terms of accountability have provided inroads for the undue influence of multinational corporations and the powerful in EU policy making such that it is inevitably driven by big business and its interests against those of ordinary people. Basic drivers in the cases of both Lexit and critical Europeanism have been the relative weakness of channels for the legitimate expression of opposition together with the legitimacy crisis this created when the 2008 financial meltdown brought austerity, and the migrant crisis brought a failure of the EU to live up to its own founding principles of solidarity. However, whereas Lexit responded with an opposition of principle, demanding disengagement from processes of integration, critical Europeanism attempted a more positive response, aware that opposition to the established European authorities, if it took the form of demands for the democratisation of EU institutions, could, paradoxically, reinvigorate the integration project, saving it from the onslaughts of xenophobic nationalism and thereby saving Europe from itself. At the same time, it would get to grips with the ‘“divorce between power and politics”’, that is to say that (real) power is located in the global level while politics remains national and local’ (Bauman and Bordoni 2014: 12; cited by Panayotu 2021: 140). The main problem with critical Europeanism is that it is not clear where it ends up. In principle, a project of European democratisation is not incompatible with the politics of bordering which it condemns at the national level.30 Nonetheless, as a project of popular empowerment seeking to create solidarity beyond borders, critical Europeanism is naturally driven to oppose exclusion and the idea that effective citizenship, understood as political agency, can be had only through existing nation states. Therefore, challenging principles of national sovereignty and ‘the proliferation of border fences’ (Marsili and Milanese 2018: 6), it tends to embrace principles of inclusion, and the transformation of citizenship rights into universal rights. 30  As Jones and Smith (2001: 103) noted, ‘the emergence of a supranational entity like the European Community builds upon rather than discards existing national loyalties (Hutchinson 1994: 114–118; 160). Ironically, a first product of even this partial transcendence of specific European nationalisms is the creation of yet another boundary of inclusion and exclusion, that between Europeans and the rest of the world.’

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As a form of transnational activism, the appeal of critical Europeanism is limited, not least because, if it has emerged as a project of democratisation in competition with right- and left-wing sovereigntist projects, then ‘by aspiring to mobilise popular sovereignty against the “established power structure”’ (Canovan 1999: 3), these projects too draw ‘intensely on a democratic discourse’ (Möller 2021: 271). And since the people to whom these projects seek to restore sovereignty are defined in national terms, they have much greater emotional resonance; for national identities are ascriptive as well as achieved statuses, ones rooted in linguistic and cultural elements transcending the individual and functioning as social facts in Durkheim’s sense. Nonetheless, if a ‘world consisting of distinctive cultural nations … challenges the idea of a single humanity and of a united world community’ (Jones and Smith 2001: 106), then global challenges including climate change, mass migration and disease increase popular receptiveness to it. Therefore, it cannot be assumed that the audience for critical Europeanism will forever remain limited. In the following chapter, we shall consider its prospects in some detail, seeking to make the case that it is central both to what it means to be on the left in the early twenty-first century and to reversing the declining fortunes of the mainstream left which we discussed in Chap. 3.

CHAPTER 7

Conclusion: What’s Left of the European Left?

the Communist Manifesto has been replaced by the Ventotene Manifesto. —(Pasquino and Valbruzzi 2021: 57)

Introduction So far in this book we have explored the relationship between European integration and the crisis of social democracy by arguing that the involvement of the social democratic parties in the European integration project from the 1950s led them to a position where, by the 1990s they were finding it increasingly difficult to differentiate themselves from parties on the right. Moreover, European governance structures created significant obstacles in the way of attempts to recreate at European level the social democratic project of using the levers of public policy to make capitalism ‘fit for society’ (Crouch 2013) since officially sanctioned partisan activity is absent in the Commission and Council of the European Union while in the Parliament, the main divide is between pro- and anti-integration forces, meaning that the social democrats and the large centre-right European People’s Party (EPP) tend to collaborate (Ladrech 2000). The absence of channels for the legitimate expression of opposition, led popular discontent arising from financial and migration crises in the 2010s to be expressed as an opposition of principle spearheaded by sovereigntist parties of the right. These were successful in winning the votes of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. L. Newell, European Integration and the Crisis of Social Democracy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08822-3_7

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significant numbers of the social democrats’ traditional supporters who in the meantime had become ‘losers of globalisation’ increasingly unable to discern in the social democrats’ policy offerings responses to their concerns that distinguished such offerings in any clear way from those of their conservative rivals. By the time of the 2019 European Parliament election, two broad responses to the social democrats’ plight were apparent: an attempt to address traditional supporters’ concerns through a project of disengagement from European integration similar to that of the sovereigntists, that is, a leftist exit from the EU called ‘Lexit’; an opposing response called ‘critical Europeanism’, which sought to reinvigorate integration through a project of European democratisation. In this chapter we seek to complete the story by considering how critical Europeanism can be pressed into the service of social democratic revival, by addressing three main questions: (1) what it means to be on the left in the early twenty-first century; (2) the place of critical Europeanism in such understanding; (3) the future prospects for critical Europeanism and the left. The remainder of the chapter is therefore structured as follows. In the next section we ask, what is ‘the left’? If one of its two main variants, social democracy, is in retreat, then the second—Marxism-­ Leninism—has been fatally wounded by the collapse of communism. If, therefore, the utility of the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ have come under repeated attack since the end of the Cold War, then considering what being on the left means is a necessary prelude to considering how its fortunes can be revived. The section that follows asks how critical Europeanism as a project of European democratisation bears on left-wing concerns arguing that as a project of empowerment it is both a part of what it means to be on the left in the early twenty-first century and an important vehicle for the achievement of left-wing objectives. The penultimate section follows directly on from this point by arguing that the prospects for critical Europeanism and therefore for the left depend on three factors: the prospects for democratic reform of European institutions; popular support for European integration; the prospects for European integration itself. The final section concludes.

The Concept of ‘the Left’ The term ‘left’ is inextricably linked with the term ‘right’ in the sense that the meaning of neither term can be understood without understanding the meaning of the other. Second, the terms are mutually exclusive in the

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sense that it is not possible, at one and the same time, to be both of the left and of the right. Consequently, left-right thinking denies the existence of a genuine centre in politics; for it sees the world in mutually exclusive, bi-polar, terms. Of course it is possible to view the world of politics as tri-­ polar, involving a left, a centre and a right. But in that case, ‘the centre’ gets its meaning from the meaning of the two other terms. Third, ‘left’ and ‘right’ are antithetical, meaning that they are mutually incompatible, rather than complementary. Consequently, any third entity, one that is neither of the left or the right, comes about as a result of a dialectical synthesis of the two rather than through composition, where its raison d’être is either to exclude the left and the right (such would be the case of the Democrazia Cristiana (Christian Democrats, DC) in First Republic Italy) or else to ‘go beyond’ the two (which would be the case of the populist Movimento Cinque Stelle (Five-star Movement, M5s) whose adherents have—at least until recently—argued that the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ are redundant in the sense that they do not help us to make sense of politics which should, rather, be oriented to the resolution of ‘problems’). In fact, the M5s can be regarded as a party of the radical centre bearing in mind that it emerged in opposition to both left and right in Italy at a time when both were undergoing deep crises (with the inability of either to provide stable party government being formally ratified by the installation, in 2011, of the Monti technocratic government). Some parties, such as the Greens, appear to draw on themes traditionally associated with both the right (conservation) and the left (innovation). It is not surprising, then, given that some parties are difficult to locate in left-right terms, that the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ themselves have been attacked as useful ones for understanding politics. Nor is it surprising that the attacks have been especially vociferous in the period since the end of the Cold War. Indeed, it was understandable that, in the Cold War’s immediate aftermath, the terms would fall out of fashion; for it seemed that the world had in fact ceased to be divided into two mutually incompatible parts. This, after all, was a world in which liberal democracy, a rules-based international order and capitalism, appeared to be the only games in town. More recently, these three elements have themselves come under pressure: the first from populism, the second from nationalism and the third—arguably—from climate change among others. Consequently, reflecting the end of the naiveté with which the post-Cold War world was initially perceived, the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ have come back into fashion— though even at the height of attacks against them, when Francis Fukuyama

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(1992) was proclaiming ‘the End of History’, they hung on more successfully in some places than in others. Italy would be a good example of a polity in which they hung on rather well: Norberto Bobbio (1994) points to the irony of a context in which just when the terms were being subjected to their greatest intellectual challenges, the country was preparing to vote in the 1993 referendum on the electoral law whose widely touted outcome would be Westminster-style democracy based on a clearly bipolar, left-right, party system. They hung on rather less well in the UK where, at the same time, Anthony Giddens and Tony Blair were seeking to go beyond left and right with their own particular brand of ‘third-way’ politics (perhaps forgetting that the Fascists too had conceived of their project as representing a ‘third way’ between a command economy and free-market capitalism). Notwithstanding the questions raised about their legitimacy, the fact that the two terms continue routinely to be used to understand political life indicates that they have meaning. And the fact that they are meaningful terms actors routinely use, means that political life is in fact a contest between left and right. First, the fact that people are much more likely to switch their votes between parties adjacent on the left-right spectrum than between parties further apart is evidence that they do think and act in left-­ right terms. Second, the Partito Democratico (Democratic Party, PD) on the left opposes Forza Italia (FI), Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy, FdI) and the Lega (League) on the right. The M5s opposes both sides and has found itself constrained to govern with both; within the Movement there are adherents oriented to the left and to the right: its supporters are willing, when asked, to locate themselves in left-right terms, with approximately one-quarter respectively locating themselves on the left or the right, the remaining 50% in the centre (De Sio and Angelucci 2019). Left and right, therefore, define a horizontal axis: a spatial metaphor originating with the French Revolution; and there exist other such metaphors one of which is the vertical metaphor of the populists, pitting ‘the people’ against ‘the elites’. The populist project is essentially one that seeks to make headway by having the vertical supplant the horizontal dimension as the most significant axis of division in politics—as Dominic Cummings (2018) revealed when he sought to explain why ‘Vote Leave’ won the UK Brexit referendum of 2016: “If”, he said, one thinks “about the basic structure of our message,

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an important aspect of it is that you can’t define it as left or right … if you talk to the average swing voter they are both more left wing and more right wing than most people in politics understand. So they would say simultaneously, ‘Confiscate property from people: put more money into the NHS’, and have the kind of anti-terrorism, and anti-crime policies that the vast majority of MPs in the Conservative Party would not support. But the message we constructed was done in such a way as to avoid this left-right thing. And therefore we had people from lots of different political parties and lots of different political beliefs able to unite behind this.”

Against this background, debates about whether a party (such as the PD) is ‘really’ a party of the left cannot be resolved merely by reference to its name (which does not reflect socialist, social democratic or other European left-wing traditions) or to the substance of its pronouncements. Parties’ names can be completely misleading as guides to their location on the left or the right: the Portuguese Social Democratic Party is a case in point. The substance of what parties say changes with the passage of time: on many issues the British Conservative party has much more ‘progressive’ stances than it did in the past, but it remains a party of the right. The fact that the meanings actors attach to the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ change over time suggests that the terms are likely to be of ambiguous meaning at any given time, a quality which also arises from the fact that besides being descriptive in nature they are also evaluative so that the ways actors describe them when asked are likely to depend on whether they see themselves as of the left or the right. Thus, ‘equality’ for one on the left, is likely, for one on the right, to be understood as ‘levelling down’; ‘inequality’ for one on the left, to be understood, by one on the right, as a reflection of ‘the established order’ (Bobbio 1994:  43)—and so on. It is precisely for this reason that left and right are in a state of perpetual conflict one with the other: they represent different ways of judging the world so that disputes between them are not the sort of disputes that can be resolved by appeal to empirical evidence. One either sees the world that way or one does not. But ambiguity is not so great that ‘left’ and ‘right’ can mean, at one and the same time, both one thing and its opposite. If this were the case then people could not use the terms to communicate. Obviously, some of the most important ideologies traditionally associated with them have been deeply wounded—Fascism in the 1940s; Marxism-Leninism since 1989— perhaps fatally so; and yet the terms persist as guides to action, suggesting that during the 200 years since their emergence there have remained,

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beneath the flux of ideological conflict, some conceptual common denominators that have made their persistent use possible over time. Bobbio (1994) suggests that these common denominators are best captured by the couplet ‘equality’-‘inequality’. To this one might add several others, thanks to the dyadic nature of political conflict, which ultimately turns on whether to remain with the status quo or to move away from it—suggesting the couplet, ‘persistence’ and ‘change’ (though these terms are too general to capture the left-right distinction since change can be ‘reactionary’ as well as ‘progressive’ in nature). Other candidates might be ‘tradition’-‘innovation’; ‘restraint’-‘liberation’ and so on. The advantage of the ‘equality’-‘inequality’ couplet is that it is sufficiently concrete to capture the actual substance of left-right conflict over the past 200 years, while sufficiently abstract to capture change in that substance—a necessary criterion bearing in mind that ‘left’ and ‘right’ are relative, not absolute terms: what is ‘left’ at any one time depends on what ‘right’ is and vice versa. Over the last 200 years left-right conflict has revolved around struggles over first civil, then political and most recently, economic and social (in)equality. As political concepts, ‘equality’ and ‘inequality’ are closely linked to the concepts of ‘rights’ and ‘obligations’ on the one hand, and ‘justice’ and ‘injustice’ on the other. It is by asserting rights and by creating the corresponding obligations that, in politics, the ultimate goal of equality is pursued. For example, underlying the conflict resolved with passage of the 1978 law in Italy establishing women’s right to abortion was a struggle over gender equality: the struggle to extend to women, the right already enjoyed by men, to control their own bodies. And conflicts over rights are conducted by reference to the principle of justice: to treat the same things in the same way and different things differently. Hence, the arguments leading up to passage of the Cirinnà law in 2016, giving LGBT+ people some of the partnership rights already enjoyed by heterosexual couples (Ozzano 2020), revolved around the question of whether sexuality was a relevant criterion of difference in the conferral of partnership rights: for the Catholic Church it was; for the LGBT+ community it was not. Finally, conflicts over (in)equality bear on questions of power—on whether it is being employed justly or unjustly—and therefore go to the heart of what politics is about: who gets what, when and how. And since the rights and obligations governing who gets what, when and how are, once

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established, usually permanent (though, obviously, not always) so the struggle over (in)equality is permanent and is, ultimately, a struggle for hegemony. It might be said, then, that the touchstone for the left is the phrase which opens the second paragraph of the United States Declaration of Independence in 1776: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men [sic] are created equal’—with the implication that inequality among them is a product of social rather than natural arrangements; is therefore amenable to change, and that the ‘burden of proof’ lies with those who would resist change. (And of course those on the right start from precisely the opposite assumptions: that inequality is the natural state; that equality is therefore an artificial and so potentially deleterious creation, and hence that the ‘burden of proof’ lies with those who would pursue it). Historically, the pursuit of equality has, for parties of the left, been about seeking to make up in numbers what they lacked in material resources; and therefore, as we saw in Chap. 3, it has also been about international solidarity. COVID-19 has revealed that equality and international solidarity are inseparable because no one can be completely safe until and unless everyone is safe—revealing that there is no equality without international solidarity; there is no international solidarity without equality. Internationalism, like equality, is essential to what it means to be on the left in the early twenty-first century because globalisation creates common interests extending across, and so challenging, national borders, and because the neglect of internationalism, by acknowledging national borders, reinforces them. Thereby, ‘it starts to lead to the path of the xenophobic right’ (Crouch 2018:  6), as we argued in some detail in Chap. 4. Countering attitudes of xenophobia and intolerance would therefore seem to require not ‘better’ or even more humane policies restricting population movements, but rather ideological and cultural battles of a kind which much of the left appears largely to have given up on in recent years—forgetting that racism and xenophobia have emerged recently not because of migrant crises and the rise of right-wing populism, but, rather, because they predated them, being bound up with European nation states, their imperialist histories and the controls on population movements they exert by means of the passport system. Passports were originally documents that served to protect travellers from danger by certifying, to potential assailants, that their bearers were under the protection of powerful

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rulers. In the nineteenth century, passport-free travel was for some countries a constitutional right. It was only with the arrival of the twentieth century and the 1920 League of Nations’ Paris Conference on Passports and Customs Formalities and Through Tickets that passports came to be used, universally, as a means of controlling the movement of people across borders. ‘[I]t is only because the world is organized into sovereign states that international migration becomes an issue that needs to be governed’ (Lavenex 2018:  1). With globalisation, there is an opportunity to turn what are currently citizenship rights into universal rights.1 If to be on the left means to adhere to principles of equality and international solidarity, then historically, there have been those who have sought to pursue the principles through constitutional means only, and those who have been willing to embrace unconstitutional, revolutionary means. Aside from this distinction, though it is common also to distinguish mainstream social democratic parties from radical left parties and both from populist left-wing parties such as Podemos and Syriza, it is possible to argue that their similarities are now more significant than their differences—as Patricia Chiantera-Stutte suggests: ‘apart from rare cases, as March observes in his research, “the main raison d’être of the radical left parties is no longer revolution, but the preservation and enhancement of the traditional social democratic welfare consensus, albeit with a more environmental, feminist, Eurosceptic and extra-parliamentary slant”’ (March 2008:  18). Meanwhile, ‘the distinction—and traditional conflict—between [mainstream socialist or social-democratic parties] and the populist socialist ones seem to blur, as their respective political style and strategies become increasingly similar: the use of populist language and the appeal to a generic “people” in contrast with the elites is sometimes shared by both (Agustín 2020)’ (Chiantera-Stutte 2021: 153), while the experience of being in government, with responsibility for making resource-allocation decisions as opposed to protesting, has acted as an additional source of growing similarity between them. Moreover, if the parties have been electoral competitors, then this has tended to be a case of competition, not between parties claiming ownership of different issues, but rather between ones engaging in a tussle for ownership of the same issues: ‘Far left parties make increasingly direct and blatant attempts to appeal to disaffected social democrats and colonise the ground abandoned by them’ (March 2008: 10). 1  Nira Yuval-Davis, interviewed by Laurie Taylor for the BBC Radio 4 programme, ‘Thinking Allowed’, 22 January 2020, https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000dgyp.

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Critical Europeanism as a Left-Wing Project Leaving aside the ‘unconstitutional’ (or what is sometimes referred to as the ‘extreme’, ‘revolutionary’ or ‘anti-system’) left and the parties explicitly rejecting European integration, the remaining parties of the left have in common the fact that to one degree or another they interpret the commitment to equality as a commitment to individual freedom on the one hand and ‘social justice’ on the other. On the one hand, therefore, they are strongly influenced by classic liberal ideology which sees human beings as rational creatures of equal moral worth capable of making their own moral decisions; which is therefore committed to limited government by consent and to toleration of moral, cultural and political diversity. On the other hand, they embrace a positive rather than a negative conception of freedom: the idea that freedom does not just mean being left alone, but is, rather, linked to the ability of the individual to achieve self-realisation (Heywood 2007: 47–48), thus requiring state intervention. Consequently, they perceive freedom and ‘social justice’ as being inextricably linked, in the sense that it is not possible to achieve the one without the other, while they see the road to their realisation as lying through the abolition of all authoritarian institutions (whether political, economic or social) that enable one person to wield illegitimate coercive power over another. Consequently, though they no longer espouse the coercive expropriation of private property or the abolition of capitalism in the manner of the Bolsheviks, they are opposed to unregulated capitalism, and suspicious of the claims of private enterprise, given their capacity to damage or undermine principles of equality; and because freedom and social justice are ideals that entail empowering people, they emphasise the virtues of decentralised, deliberative and participatory forms of democracy as vehicles for the more effective inclusion of the rights of the excluded and the marginalised within the political system. Ultimately, therefore, their political project is one of empowerment, and this is the first sense in which critical Europeanism is central to what it means to be on the left in the early twenty-first century. Another arises from the nature of capitalist markets, as follows. Capitalism is a system of commodity production in which, in virtue of principles of freedom of contract and economic exchange and of the legal equality of the contracting parties, any particular pattern of domination and subordination or distribution of power and privilege thus emerging is sanctioned as legitimate precisely because it is the outcome of the

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operation of these principles and not tied to a particular pattern of rights and obligations. In other words, While it is a power structure, the market is not a normatively defined system of authority in which the distribution of power is, as such, sanctioned as legitimate. The rights of property, and of the sale of labour, are rights of the alienation or disposal of goods (‘commodities’ in the Marxian sense), which underpin the system of power, not in spite of, but because of the fact that they are specified in terms of freedom of economic exchange. (Giddens 1973: 102)

Consequently, the beneficiaries of market-based inequalities usually2 require little more than negative European integration, or the elimination of barriers that restrict the movement of goods, services and factors of production, for the maintenance of their advantages. Those who would aim to reduce such inequalities usually3 require positive integration or the adoption of regulations that in some way limit the potential for the accumulation of power through market mechanisms. However, in the absence of acceptably democratic EU governance arrangements, the potential for positive integration is more or less severely limited by the problem of legitimacy that is associated with it. The distinction between positive and negative integration is that the former confers rights—such as the right to an education—requiring interventions that involve more or less significant costs, whereas the latter creates obligations—such as the obligation to provide equal pay for men and women—to refrain from action harmful to others, and is less costly. So the legitimacy problem associated with positive integration is that its costs fall on the citizens of the member states affected by it ‘without [it] having been authorized through the normal democratic process’ (Majone 2005: 157). Since the EU lacks the capacity 2  Though not always: ‘Multinationals and other export-oriented firms tend to prefer European to national regulations not only to avoid the costs of meeting different, and often inconsistent, national rules but also to avoid the risk of progressively more stringent regulations in some of the member states. A similar development has been observed in the United States, where, for example, the car industry decided to support federal regulation of air ­pollution because of the threat posed by different and inconsistent air-pollution standards, and also because it feared the possibility that one state legislature after another, in a kind of political domino effect, would set more and more stringent emission standards’ (Majone 2005: 146). 3  Again, not always. Sometimes, negative integration can be about fighting discrimination on grounds of gender, nationality, age and so on (Majone 2005: 155).

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directly to tax its citizens, the costs of any measures of positive intervention have to be borne by member-state governments. And since EU legislators are not fully accountable to European citizens, they remain relatively free of the political and other costs associated with implementing such measures. Meanwhile, the limited degree to which European citizens can hold EU legislators to account through elections has two further negative consequences. First, since policy making takes place through the representation of interests—with each of the three main institutions involved (the Commission, the Council and the Parliament) seeing itself as the bearer of a specific interest, national or supranational—rather than through elections and the formation of legislative majorities, political conflict revolves more around the prerogatives of the institutions than it does around competing policy programmes and their implementation. Second, if elections normally force legislators to take public positions on policies for which voters can hold them accountable, then the weakness of such controls in the EU means that ‘suboptimal policies can persist, unscrutinized and unchallenged, for decades’ (Majone 2005: 148). Finally, if elections and the winning of legislative majorities provide a legitimate—and arguably relatively straightforward—way of winning positive rights for the enhancement of equality, then the means for their achievement through the EU’s current governance structures remain less straightforward and of uncertain efficacy. Demands for legislation can come either from civil-society organisations lobbying for the introduction of legislation or from member-state governments. In either case, success requires both building a winning coalition within the Council (and therefore depends on the congruence of the proposal with significant national interests) and convincing the Commission (and therefore depends also on the congruence of the proposal with its objectives as well). Moreover, the absence of democracy weakens the structures of EU governance as vehicles for equality-enhancing measures in two ways. First, the persistence of intergovernmentalism has hitherto prevented legislators from acquiring the tax-raising powers that would make possible policies requiring the significant direct expenditure of public funds. The EU budget remains small, the amount that legislators can do is limited. Forced, then, to rely on regulatory policies, whose costs, as mentioned, are borne by member-state governments, EU legislators, lacking democratic legitimacy, find their regulatory activities constantly challenged by nationalists who accuse them of indulging in over-regulation and illegitimate attacks on member-state sovereignty.

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In short, to the extent that a left-wing, equality-enhancing political project at the European level requires further integration, it requires measures of democratisation as necessary concomitants: ‘It was generally accepted that … it would not be possible to confer new competences to the Community unless Europe’s citizens regarded it as the expression of their own political will’ (Balosin 2014: 31). So a third sense in which critical Europeanism is central to what it means to be on the left is that it is necessary in order to ensure the sustainability, in terms of legitimacy, of the left-wing project itself. Political programmes implemented as the result of their having been publicly presented and popularly endorsed through elections have a degree of political authority that is lacking otherwise. Conversely, unpopular programmes implemented in the absence of democratic controls weaken the regime itself since opposition can be expressed only as opposition to the system. It is for this reason that democratic regimes tend to be more resilient than authoritarian ones, forced, as the latter are, to rely on performance legitimacy for their continued hold on power while being vulnerable to overthrow in the event of social and economic malaise. In democratic regimes, where political conflict has been by definition institutionalised, malaise is much less likely to result in system overthrow as it can be expressed by replacing the party in power. Fourth, the history of Western Europe suggests that the late-­ nineteenth/early twentieth-century franchise extensions, while institutionalising class conflict and dampening social unrest, also genuinely empowered citizens, thereby helping to expand the rights of citizenship to include those of the modern welfare state relating to the right to protection against the risk of poverty arising from unemployment, ill-health, old age and so on. On the one hand, the extended franchise, by empowering the working class and its parties, enabled them to exert heightened pressure on the state. On the other hand, by obliging parties of the right to appeal beyond the ranks of the privileged to the population as a whole, it forced them to adopt a ‘one nation’ rhetoric, a central plank of which was a strategy to reduce the significance of socio-economic divisions by adding to citizenship entitlements with regard to the state and so compensating for the inequalities between people engendered by the market. In short, there has been a clear historical connection between democratisation on the one hand, and an expansion in the state’s fiscal take and in the range of social activities on which it has come to have a bearing, on the other— all of which has, broadly speaking, worked to the advantage of the weakest in society. It does not seem unreasonable to conclude that similar processes would follow from efforts to democratise Europe.

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The Future Prospects for Critical Europeanism and the Left Against this background, the future prospects for critical Europeanism and the left are likely to depend on developments in three areas: the prospects for democratic reform of the EU’s governance structures and policy making processes; the extent of popular support for European integration in the first place and the prospects for further transfers of sovereignty from the member states to the European institutions. ‘European democracy can only be possible if real political players emerge on a European level’ (Verger 2018: 8) and if voters have at least a rudimentary understanding of how their votes shape EU policy outputs. Since EP elections are currently second-order national elections (Reif and Schmitt 1980), it is safe to assume that most voters have little if any such understanding. Therefore, a first issue bearing on the prospects for European democracy and the left is the question of the creation of transnational lists for EP elections since the driving force behind it is the conviction that such lists would generate campaign debate on genuine Europe-wide issues and oblige European parties, currently little more than federations of national parties, to assume more genuinely transnational organisational profiles. A second issue bearing on the matter is the Spitzenkandidaten process whereby, in advance of EP elections, European parties ‘appoint lead candidates for the role of Commission President, with the presidency of the Commission then going to the candidate of the political party capable of marshalling sufficient parliamentary support’ (Tilindyte 2019: 1). The driving force has been rather similar to that of the first question in that advocates of the process argued that by establishing a link between voting and the head of the EU executive, the bearing of participation in EP elections on EU policy outputs would be clearer. Voters would be able to remove from office Commission presidents standing for re-election if they were dissatisfied with performance, and turnout at EP elections would be further encouraged by the element of ‘personalisation’ the Spitzenkandidaten would lend to campaigning. Raising levels of turnout at EP elections has long been recognised as crucial to attempts at EU democratisation as without it, no decision to enhance Parliament’s powers can be effective in raising the EU’s democratic legitimacy. The first issue, concerning transnational lists, goes at least as far back as the EP’s 1998 Anastassopoulos Report. This proposed that ‘[t]en per cent of the total number of seats within the European Parliament … be filled

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by means of list-based proportional representation relating to a single constituency comprising the territory of the European Union Member States with effect from the European elections to be held in 2009’.4 However, for lack of support in the Council, the proposal made no further progress until it was revived (in a revised format) in the EP’s 2011 Duff Report— but this (as Duff himself feared that it would fail to gain a majority) was referred back to the Constitutional Affairs Committee for further consideration by the plenary before a revised proposal, in 2012, was kept off the plenary agenda by the Conference of Presidents, the political body in Parliament responsible for the organisation of Parliament’s business and legislative planning (Donatelli 2015:  31). The question came onto the EP’s agenda for a third time in the subsequent legislature in 2015 and gained momentum when Brexit raised the question of what to do about the 73 seats that would remain vacant as a consequence of the UK’s departure. Consequently, the Constitutional Affairs Committee suggested in a report of 26 January 2018 on the composition of the EP that a ‘significant number’ of these seats be allocated to ‘a joint constituency in which lists are headed by each political family’s candidate for the post of President of the Commission’,5 but the suggestion was rejected in the plenary of 7 February. A review of the reasons for the failure of the various attempts is eloquent about the considerable difficulties achieving reform involves. These can best be described as a series of barriers that must be overcome as a policy proposal seeks to get past actors with the power, individually or collectively, to veto it at the various stages of its consideration. In the first place, the legal changes required to bring about the creation of transnational lists are demanding,6 meaning that an initial disincentive to movement away from the status quo is policy makers’ awareness of limited chances of success. This seems to have been at least one of the obstacles in 4  European Parliament Committee on Institutional Affairs, ‘Report on a proposal for an electoral procedure incorporating common principles for the election of Members of the European Parliament’, 2 June 1998, https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/ document/A-4-1998-0212_EN.html. 5  European Parliament Committee on Constitutional Affairs, ‘Report on the composition of the European Parliament’, 26 January 2018, https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/ document/A-8-2018-0007_EN.html. 6  As they involve the modification of several EU secondary acts as well as ratification by all member states in accordance with their respective constitutional requirements. For the details, see Crego (2021).

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the way of the Duff proposals, for example, even if not the most significant one (Donatelli 2015: 32). Second, electoral systems produce ‘“expected” outputs’7 (Rahat and Hazan 2011: 482; cited by Donatelli 2015: 22) and thereby create vested interests; so an additional disincentive to movement away from the status quo is legislators’ perceptions that they personally or those whose support they rely on may suffer material loss (perhaps— e.g.—because it is not easy to foresee the outcome, in terms of winners and losers, of the proposed reform etc.). Consequently, a further reason for the failure of the Duff proposal was division within the main political groupings arising from perceptions that it would strengthen the representation of the larger at the expense of smaller countries (thereby revealing that, notwithstanding the major reform included in the Lisbon Treaty,8 MEPs continued to see themselves as representatives of their national electors rather than of EU citizens as a whole (Donatelli 2015:  37–38)). Finally, in addition to all of the above, legislators may be dissuaded from supporting a proposal for reasons of principle, and this appears to have played a not insignificant part in the failure of both the second and third attempts to achieve transnational lists as some MEPs (most of the British, some in the EPP, the sovereigntists) simply did not want a Europeanisation of EP election campaigns. As for the Spitzenkandidaten process, the link between the EP and nomination of the Commission president evolved over time (see Tilindyte 2019) until the 2007 Lisbon Treaty stipulated that the Commission president was to be nominated by the European Council taking account of the EP elections and then elected by the Parliament by a majority of its component members. The word ‘elected’ was significant. Prior to Lisbon, the Treaty of Amsterdam (1997) had specified that the Council’s nominee was to be ‘approved’ by Parliament. MEPs argued that ‘elected’ implied a choice rather than mere ratification, and therefore a plurality of candidates so that ahead of the 2014 elections five European parties nominated candidates for the Commission presidency while the EP expressed the expectation that the candidate of the party winning the most seats in the election would be the first to be considered by the Council. In the elections, the EPP emerged as the largest party; the European Council duly nominated 7  In the UK case, for example, that Labour and the Conservatives will share the vast majority of seats, with other parties winning very few. 8  Providing that the EP was ‘composed of representatives of the Union’s citizens’ rather than of ‘representatives of the peoples of the States brought together in the Community’.

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its candidate, Jean-Claude Juncker, as Commission president and he was then elected by the Parliament. The process was only partially successful in achieving the objective of Europeanising elections (though it may have helped stem the long-term decline in turnout at EP elections: Tilindyte 2019) and this was partly because the objective was consciously obstructed by some of the actors involved. In the UK, for example, the Conservatives had withdrawn from the EPP, which hence did not feature in the campaign in the UK, while Labour decided against inviting PES candidate, Martin Schultz, to Britain thinking it would not go down well with a Eurosceptical public. Once again, therefore, the parties failed to Europeanise EP elections, keeping UK voters apart and refusing to engage with attempts to create a genuine demos for Europe. Moreover, the process has not been institutionalised. In the run-up to the 2019 EP elections, a clear difference of view emerged between the EP—which asserted that a failure by the European Council to abide by the process would mean the risk of it nominating a candidate that failed to win a parliamentary majority—and Council President Donald Tusk, who sought to defend the Council’s autonomy by rejecting suggestions that it would guarantee in advance to nominate one of the lead candidates. Thus it was that in the aftermath of 2019, the European Council chose none of the Spitzenkandidaten, preferring former German defence minister, Ursula von der Lyen, who as a consequence was endorsed by the EP by just nine votes. That the EP was unable to impose a candidate on the Council was due to the fact that it was unable to unite behind a single candidate (in which case the Council would have found it politically difficult to override Parliament despite having the legal authority to do so). The fact that the Council nominated von der Lyen was due to the role of qualified majority voting, touched on in Chap. 4, in leading participants to reach consensus. In essence, the Visegrad countries were concerned above all to avoid the nomination of the EPP’s lead candidate, Manfred Weber, and the PES’ lead candidate, Frans Timmermans (over rule-of-law issues), but were aware that they lacked a blocking minority. They were persuaded to accept von der Lyen in order to avoid being placed in a minority in a vote on either Weber or Timmermans. In return, other Council members were persuaded to avoid placing the Visegrad countries in a minority in order to avoid the risk of their political retaliation at some later stage. That von der Lyen was in the end supported by an (albeit very small) majority of MEPs

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was because, if some among the three large mainstream groupings—the EPP, the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats and the Renew Europe group—refused to support her on the grounds that her nomination represented a blow to the Spitzenkandidaten process (Keating 2019), others went along with their groups’ decisions, ultimately, to support her thanks to a series of promises she made in an effort to secure enough votes, together with awareness that a refusal to support her would have plunged the EU into a crisis given that there was no obvious alternative candidate able to secure a majority of MEPs (Hennessy 2019). It remains to be seen what will transpire in the future concerning transnational lists and the Spitzenkandidaten process. The fact that neither have become consolidated features of EU governance does not mean that they are dead. On the contrary it means that a public debate has been initiated about the link between voting in EP elections, on the one hand, and political accountability and policy responsiveness, on the other. Von der Leyen’s appointment may not represent a defeat for progressives, but the reverse. Among the promises she made to secure her election was support for legislation to enforce a minimum wage in member states and for the right of the EP to initiate legislation. Public debate concerning the EU’s legitimacy problem and of the role of democratic reform in addressing it is long standing; so the problem for reformers is to manoeuvre EU decision-­makers into a position (as happened with Next Generation EU: see below) where a winning majority of them conclude that they have more to gain (or less to lose) by embracing reform than by resisting it. The decision of the Commission towards the end of 2019 to launch a Conference on the Future of Europe—first mentioned in the document von der Lyen presented to support her candidacy for the Commission presidency,9 and whose remit would include the issues of Spitzenkandidaten and transnational lists—was confirmation both of the public pressure that had by then accumulated around the question of Union democracy and of the Commission’s awareness of the need to respond to it. When the Conference began work in June 2021, it did so as a joint initiative of the Commission, the Council and the EP. As such, it was placed under the authority of the three institutions acting as a Joint Presidency. It was to be governed by an Executive Board consisting of 9  ‘A Union that strives for more: My agenda for Europe. Political Guidelines for the Next European Commission 2019–2024’, https://www.europarl.europa.eu/resources/library/ media/20190716RES57231/20190716RES57231.pdf.

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representatives of the three institutions and whose responsibilities would include presenting the conclusions of the conference in a report to the Joint Presidency. It was designed to show that the EU ‘can provide answers to citizens’ concerns and ambitions’. It was therefore to be open to the participation of ‘European citizens from all walks of life and corners of the Union’, who would thereby be given a ‘role in shaping the Union’s future policies and ambitions’10 through four main pillars: a digital platform, to enable citizens to share and discuss ideas; four European citizens’ panels consisting of 800 citizens selected randomly to take part in deliberation on the conference themes;11 ‘online, in-person and hybrid events held by people and organisations as well as national, regional and local authorities across Europe’;12 conference plenary sessions.13 The latter were to debate the recommendations of the European citizens’ panels and those generated through the other two pillars, with the Executive Board drawing conclusions from the debates and using them as the basis for the report it would present to the Joint Presidency. In the spring of 2022, it was unclear whether the conference would deliver significant change. On the one hand, it was possible to see it as a novel experiment designed to bring Europe closer to ordinary citizens by involving them in policy making through practices of participatory and deliberative democracy. On the other hand, in and of itself, it provided little more than a discussion forum of which there were many already, so it was not surprising that some observers (e.g. Baneth 2021; Taylor 2021) were cynical. The ‘Joint Declaration’ launching the conference had stipulated that in response to the final report to the Joint Presidency, the EP, 10  ‘Joint declaration on the conference on the future of Europe’, https://data.consilium. europa.eu/doc/document /ST-6796-2021-INIT/en/pdf. 11  That is, ‘Stronger economy, social justice, jobs/education, youth, culture, sport/digital transformation’; ‘European democracy/values and rights, rule of law, security’; ‘Climate change, environment/health’; ‘EU in the world/migration’. 12  Conference on the Future of Europe website: https://futureu.europa.eu/pages/about. 13  ‘The Conference Plenary is composed of 108 representatives from the European Parliament, 54 from the Council, 3 from the European Commission, 108 from national Parliaments on an equal footing, and 108 citizens: 80 representatives from the European Citizens’ Panels, 27 from national Citizens’ Panels or Conference events (one per Member State), as well as the President of the European Youth Forum. 18 representatives from the Committee of the Regions and 18 from the Economic and Social Committee, 6 elected representatives from regional authorities and 6 elected representatives from local authorities, 12 representatives from the social partners and 8 from civil society also take part’ (Conference on the Future of Europe website: https://futureu.europa.eu/pages/plenary).

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the Council and the Commission would ‘examine swiftly how to follow up effectively to this report, each within their own sphere of competences and in accordance with the Treaties’14 On the one hand, therefore, this did not augur well: the conference would do nothing to bind the three institutions in any way, several member states having explicitly insisted that it ‘should not create legal obligations, nor should it duplicate or unduly interfere with the established legislative processes’.15 On the other hand, the three EU institutions’ representatives were clearly aware that launching ‘grandiloquent initiatives that fail to deliver meaningful and tangible change’ (Boucher et al. 2019: 1) was in no one’s interests least of all their own. And the argument that ‘[i]f enough European citizens [got] involved [in the conference] and demand[ed] change, it [would] be hard for national leaders and the European authorities to ignore their voices’ (Taylor 2021), was a difficult one to resist. From one perspective, this pressure seemed entirely absent, not least because of the extremely poor media coverage of the Conference: as of 4 May 2021, ‘just 7184 of the EU’s 450 million citizens had participated, and 1420 ideas had been posted on the platform’ (Taylor 2021); as of 24 April 2022, the figures had risen to just 52,459 platform participants, 654,119 event participants and 17,780 ideas. On the other hand, the conference had clearly attracted the attention of transnational pressure groups, such as Citizens Take over Europe (CTOE),16 ‘one of the most important coalitions at European level trying to have some impact on the conference’.17 Their activities, and those of groups like them, could not be dismissed as of no account as they gave expression to a conception of democracy ‘as a force for monitoring from the outside by society on what institutions do’—an important activity ‘because otherwise the European institutions shut themselves up, they do not do things in a transparent and participatory way’.18 14  ‘Joint declaration on the conference on the future of Europe’, https://data.consilium. europa.eu/doc/document /ST-6796-2021-INIT/en/pdf. 15  ‘Conference on the Future of Europe: Common approach amongst Austria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, the Netherlands, Slovakia and Sweden’, https://www.movimentoeuropeo.it/images/Documenti/Non-­ paper-­de-12-etats-membres-conference-futur-de-leurope.pdf?msclkid=dd75f2f3c3f611ec aa11dd49f416c483. 16  https://citizenstakeover.eu/. 17  Paul Blokker, interviewed by Osservatorio balcani e caucaso, 5 April 2022, https://www. balcanicaucaso.org/eng/Areas/Italy/Imagining-Europe-216148. 18  Blokker: see note 17.

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Not surprisingly, the conference has spawned a large number of reflections on a democratic future for Europe, and while some of them appear to be based on little more than wishful thinking,19 others are more clearly rooted in current realities and pay greater attention to the process of transitioning from the present, to where their authors would like to be. One such contribution concerns the ‘Six Ideas for Rejuvenating European Democracy’ by Boucher et al. (2019): crafting a more compelling narrative against the rise in illiberal values; selecting EU leaders more democratically through a revised Spitzenkandidaten procedure; fostering the Europeanisation of party politics through transnational lists; improving consultations with EU citizens through consultative assemblies and the like; strengthening digital democracy by including online crowdsourcing in decision-making; revitalising the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI). As a programme for democratic reform, these ‘Ideas’ would seem to have a number of advantages. First, even the most radical of them are based on proposals that are already on the public agenda and already enjoy some support among EU decision-makers, so they can draw on the positive momentum that is already present. Second, insofar as they are targeted at specific, widely recognised problems,20 they seem more likely, than projects for wholesale reinvention of the EU, to pass the ‘feasibility test’ and therefore to attract the support of winning coalitions. Third, they are designed to be mutually reinforcing. Thus, a revised Spitzenkandidaten 19  For example, ‘The Progressive Manifesto For a European Democracy’ (available at https://brussels.fes.de/events/sign-progressive-manifesto) describes in some detail the kind of democratic Europe it would like to see but it reads more like the description of an ideal society than a genuine attempt to get to grips with the concrete issues related to the question of how to get there. 20  The second idea, for example, amounts to an appeal to revive the Spitzenkandidaten process as a means of resolving the controversy that surrounded the manner of von der Lyen’s selection. The controversy was the reflection of what was, in essence, a constitutional, or at least a major institutional, conflict between the EP and the Council arising from the fact that the two share responsibility for finding the Commission president. MEPs felt that the Council had ridden roughshod over a procedure designed to increase democratic accountability, whereas the Council argued that the procedure had no legal basis in the Treaties. The danger is that if the controversy resurfaces in 2024, it may undermine the EU’s legitimacy still further. The idea is therefore to lay down some legally binding ground rules for managing the joint responsibility, rules that would give Parliament a specified amount of time, following EP elections, to find a majority willing to support one of the Spitzenkandidaten. This candidate would then automatically become the Commission president, and in the event that no parliamentary majority could be found within the specified time period, the Council would then be free to put forward its own candidate.

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procedure (note 20) for selecting Commission presidents, together with transnational lists as means of Europeanising EP elections, might be expected, if successful in raising levels of citizens’ interest, to enhance the engagement of citizens with consultative assemblies, digital participation and ECIs; and to the extent that they do so, the European institutions might be expected to take the Spitzenkandidaten, transnational lists and ECIs more seriously (Boucher et al. 2019: 15–16). Finally, if with the passage of time, the reforms were successful in Europeanising campaigning and enhancing citizen engagement, then they might be expected to generate pressure for further democratic reform. This throws a spotlight on developments in the second area significant for the prospects for critical Europeanism and the left, namely, the extent of popular support for European integration in the first place; for, by responding to the demand for democratic participation, the above-­ mentioned reforms might be expected, were they to be implemented, to shift public attitudes in a direction more favourable to European integration; and yet if these attitudes are negative—if they are such as to favour Lexit or sovereigntist positions of the right—then no project for a progressive, more integrated and democratic, Europe can be expected to get off the ground to begin with. Moreover, it seems likely that attitudes to European integration, favourable or unfavourable as they may be, will have a larger impact on the project than would have been the case prior to the EU’s recent crises; for, as Carrieri’s (2020) work suggests, the crises have heightened the politicisation of European integration so that the impact of party-EU voter proximity has increased as a determinant of electoral preferences—implying that as an issue, the EU is more salient for voters now than it was before the crises. Public attitudes depend on factors that can be placed in two categories: those directly under the control of the critical Europeanists and those not directly under their control, having to do with such things as the features of the media landscape, economic developments and so forth. With regard to this latter category, there is some evidence that, thanks to COVID-19 and related developments, attitudes towards the EU have become more favourable of late. According to Alcaro and Tocci (2021: 6), ‘the severity of the economic crisis brought about by Covid-related restrictions on productive activities profoundly reshaped the preferences of large swathes of the European public and consequently EU leaders along more integrationist lines’. Public attitudes and integration have been reciprocally related. On the one hand, the pandemic created a demand among

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European policy makers and publics for an economic rebound through greater fiscal solidarity in the form of Next Generation EU. On the other hand, greater fiscal solidarity—an issue on which the interests of member states had once been on opposing sides but were now, thanks to the pandemic, on the same side—helped weaken support for nationalist, anti-EU agendas in European politics. Meanwhile, Sara Hobolt et al. (2021) have argued that the fallout from the 2016 referendum in the UK has had a positive impact on support for EU membership among the publics of the 27 member states the UK left behind: though their perceptions of Brexit can change, currently most people are pessimistic about the prospects for Britain outside the EU and this is associated with higher support for membership, with the link between Brexit expectations and EU support being especially strong for people living in countries more exposed to the economic consequences of Brexit. In addition, challenger, Eurosceptic parties seem to have adjusted their positions in the light of Brexit, with fewer now than before the 2016 referendum advocating outright withdrawal for their countries, and shifting instead to ‘soft Eurosceptical’ positions of reform within the EU. Concerning the first of the above-mentioned two categories, public attitudes depend partly on the narratives to which citizens are exposed. A narrative is a story which—by telling people who they are, where they are, how they came to be where they are and where they are going—creates common values, reinforces identity (against the ‘other’), lays out objectives and identifies end states (Laity 2018). Narratives are important because they move people in a way that merely technocratic discourses, based on empirical evidence and rational argument alone, do not and cannot. People believe narratives to be true because they want them to be true; for without narratives—involving emotional resonance and moral authority as well as rational persuasion—they find it difficult to make sense of the world and their places in it. Arguably, therefore, at least part of the explanation for the electoral difficulties of the mainstream left discussed in Chap. 3 has to do with the way in which the end of the Keynesian consensus, the collapse of the Berlin wall, the rise of neo-liberalism and the ‘end of ideology’ deprived it of its traditional narratives so that it was left with little to offer that could distinguish it from its mainstream opponents on the right. Consequently, with the EU’s legitimacy crisis and related developments, it lost support to forces of the populist right and sovereigntism, as these, in many instances, had the more effective narratives. In the case of Brexit, for example, the suggestion that the ‘Leave’ side won at least in

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part because it had a much more effective narrative seems difficult to contest (Newell 2019e; Shipman 2017).21 Consequently, if critical Europeanists and pro-Europeans on the left wish to take advantage of the more favourable climate of opinion on Europe described above, and prevent a resurgence of forces with nationalist, anti-EU agendas, then they will have to learn to develop more convincing narratives, ones that are more effective in helping citizens to embrace progressive values. For example, framing theory highlights the way in which the language chosen for political debate influences citizens’ understandings of what count as problems, while drawing their attention to some possible solutions and away from others. The expression, ‘immigration problem’, for instance, points to a range of possible solutions and a role in providing those solutions for a range of actors that is completely different from the range of solutions and the range of relevant actors that is suggested by a ‘globalisation problem’ or a ‘humanitarian crisis’ (Lakoff and Ferguson 2006). So among other things, pro-Europeans of the left will need to adopt narratives that enable them to avoid unwittingly reinforcing the framing devices used by their opponents, as they tend to do when they challenge their opponents on factual grounds while declining or forgetting to challenge the terms they use. The Brexit campaign is again 21  As Mark Laity (2018) has pointed out, a narrative, in order to work, has to have three elements: argument (or rational persuasion), passion (or emotional resonance) and credibility (or moral authority), the most important of which are passion and credibility because they have to do with the citizen’s willingness to hear somebody and believe that they have something to say that s/he wants to hear. In all three respects, the ‘Leave’ campaign had significant advantages. With regard to the first, it claimed that the EU’s free movement provisions had led to a level of immigration that was threatening and out of control. The ‘Remain’ campaign countered with the argument that most immigration was from outside the EU and would therefore not go down as a consequence of Brexit, but by failing to challenge the core idea that immigration was a threat it in effect reinforced it. The ‘Leave’ campaign was able, in a way that the ‘Remainers’ were not, to encapsulate their narrative in a brilliant, single, phrase: ‘Take back control’: a phrase that was emotionally resonant precisely because of its imprecision (it could be made to mean any number of things) and because it reflected something that large swathes of the population were feeling, that is, resentful and without control of their destiny. Third, if ‘Remainers’ emphasised the negative economic consequences of a Leave vote, seeking to lend credibility to their case by citing the opinions of experts, then the Leave side had some success in undermining their credibility. People were aware that experts’ predictions (e.g. in economic forecasting) are often wrong; and thus it was possible for ‘Leavers’ to suggest, as they did, that their claims were part of a cynical attempt, on the part of wealthy, unaccountable elites—with their own vested interests in the referendum outcome—to frighten people, and therefore that their claims were not to be believed.

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instructive. The failure to challenge ‘Leavers’ framing of immigration as a ‘problem’ meant that their claims could only be challenged on empirical grounds. But arguing that leaving the EU would have little or no effect on immigration gave the voter with a negative attitude to it no reason to vote remain and no reason not to vote leave; for when placed alongside the ‘Leavers’ argument, it left the voter with this choice: (1) vote remain and immigration will continue (both sides in effect agreed on that); or (2) vote leave, and immigration may continue, but equally it may come down. So the rational voter, hostile to immigration, would inevitably decide to vote leave. So what ‘Remainers’ should have done is to attack the ‘Leavers’ head-on by saying that immigration was a good thing and was to be encouraged. But given that both major parties, the Conservatives and Labour, had for so long campaigned against immigration and for so long failed to speak up for immigration’s benefits, this was something difficult for ‘Remainers’ to do without appearing to contradict their own past pronouncements. And given that these pronouncements had ensured that anti-immigration sentiment was, by the time the referendum came round, the norm, it was not very surprising that the campaign based on fear of the other was able to attract more votes than the one that only very timidly embraced inclusivity. Finally, the prospects for critical Europeanism and the left depend on the prospects for further European integration because by definition, further transfers of sovereignty to the EU from the member states increase the power of the levers potentially available to the left for the adoption and implementation, across Europe, of measures aimed at enhancing equality and other left-wing objectives. A first point to note is that COVID-19 seems to have enhanced the prospects for integration, by leading the EU to embrace a degree of member-­state solidarity that had been the crucial missing element when Europe had to confront its two earlier crises, the Eurozone and the refugee crises. In particular, after it became clear that their initial closures threatened to inflict further damage by attacking the integrity of the single market, member states subsequently came together to agree a series of measures to deal with the economic fallout from the pandemic, the highlight of which was the €750 billion Next Generation EU (NGEU) fund. This favoured grants over loans and, by allowing the Commission, for the first time, to borrow from the market, introduced the principle of mutualisation of member states’ debts into EU policy making. It also, as Alcaro and Tocci (2021) have pointed out, had two further very significant effects.

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First, it put financial flesh on the bones of two of the three priorities von der Lyen had set out for the Commission when she had taken office at the end of 2019: tackling climate change through the so-called European Green Deal and its target of reaching carbon neutrality by 2050; digitalisation and the development of digital infrastructures. Thus the Commission stipulated that at least 37% of the NGEU funding claimed by member states through their National Recovery and Resilience Plans (NRRPs) had to be spent on projects aimed at contributing to the climate change objectives, 20% on projects designed to deliver the digitalisation objectives. Then, as part of efforts to secure the agreement of the so-called frugal four countries (the Netherlands, Austria, Denmark and Sweden)—which had until the last resisted debt mutualisation and were suspicious of the capacities for effective spending of the southern European countries worst hit by the pandemic—the European Council agreed strict conditions for disbursement of the funds. Member states were to submit their NRRPs, including milestones and targets, by 30 April 2021. The plans were then to be assessed by the Commission and approved by the Council deciding by QMV. The funds would be distributed in a series of instalments conditional upon a Commission assessment of satisfactory fulfilment of milestones and targets with provision for an ‘emergency brake’ facility, which made it possible for a member state to insist that the assessment be discussed by the Council. Second—and this is the really crucial consideration—‘Next Generation EU and the other measures adopted by the Commission and the ECB are meant to reverse the socio-economic divergences between member states that threatened to tear the Eurozone apart. If the outcome of the Union’s pandemic response points towards intra-European convergence, it is not unreasonable to assume that politics will follow’ (Alcaro and Tocci 2021: 6). Moreover, the recovery and resilience plan also required the EU to consider how it would repay the sums it planned to borrow, thus forcing ‘a rethink of the powers to tax and spend conferred on the EU’ (Fabbrini 2020:  93). Consequently, the plan may, as Fabbrini (2020:  94) argues, create pressure for integrating constitutional change; for, if the EU increases its powers in the fiscal domain, the exclusion of the EP— which is only consulted by the Council in its decisions on the adoption of harmonized taxes, and on the EU’s own resources—can no longer be justified, given the principle of ‘no taxation without representation’. On the

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other hand, if the EU needs to raise an increasing amount of resources, it is clear that the unanimity requirements for Council votes under Articles 113 and 311 TFEU is no longer sustainable—with the consequence that more expedited steps need to be taken towards a more democratic and effective system of decision-making in tax matters based on qualified majority voting.

And if it is true that treaty changes face formidable obstacles in the rules on EU treaty amendment—above all those associated with the unanimity requirement and the requirement for national ratification22—then it is also true that these obstacles can, in principal at least, be circumvented by resorting to separate international treaties outside the EU legal order (as happened, e.g., in the case of the Fiscal Compact introduced in response to the Eurozone crisis). On the other hand, if the pandemic created pressures for convergence between member states, then geopolitical considerations have potentially created pressures of the opposite kind. In essence, there are two perspectives concerning the EU’s presence on the world stage. One is expressed by von der Lyen’s call for ‘A stronger Europe in the World’23 and demands an assertive Europe, a Europe that acquires a more autonomous and sovereign role on the world stage, essentially because of what it sees as the risk of a decline in the strength of the rules-based international order. In particular, with growing tensions between the US and China, and as long as Donald Trump was US president, there was a belief that the world beyond Europe was likely to become increasingly hostile, as well as a source of potential tensions with the US. Therefore, the EU needed to do more by way of developing the supranational institutions required to enable it to pursue something closer to a single foreign policy alongside its single commercial and trade policy. The other perspective is one that insists that any strategic autonomy project must be subordinated to an overriding concern to maintain the transatlantic alliance, thanks to US security guarantees, and therefore that Europe and its member states must align with US foreign policy. It seems possible, if not likely, that the war in Ukraine will heighten the tensions between these two outlooks, thus reducing the prospects for EU member-state convergence. By late April 2022, it had become apparent 22  In which courts and referenda have, alongside legislatures, recently become additional veto points (Fabbrini 2020: 99). 23  ‘A Union that strives for more’ cit.

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that the conflict had become a proxy war between Russia and the US, with the latter, through the ever-increasing supply of weaponry to the Ukraine government, planning for a lengthy conflict with the aim of weakening Russia on a permanent basis. Therefore, it was not at all clear that US and European interests coincided in Ukraine given that the costs of a lengthy conflict would fall much more heavily on Europe than on America; and yet at the same time, given Europe’s limited capacity to act independently of the US, it was not at all clear what, if anything, Europe could do to develop an alternative approach to the conflict. Although debate regarding the EU’s so-called strategic autonomy had been going on for very many years (Zachariades 2022), the prevailing outlook had always been the alternative one (with its insistence that ‘the benefits of followership, namely territorial protection through US security guarantees and the enabling of European international influence through the US commitment to the multilateral order, outweigh its costs’: Alcaro and Tocci 2021: 12). The war raised at least the possibility that these assumptions would come increasingly to be questioned within the EU with the resulting disagreements short-circuiting integration efforts. On the other hand, it was possible at least to envisage the opposite scenario developing; for if, like COVID, the war gave rise to pressures for further economic integration, then this might conceivably aid the cultivation of a common foreign and security policy and the dominance of the strategic autonomy paradigm as its consequence.

Conclusion It is apparent, then, that ‘Europe and the world is currently amid a violent interregnum, to use the concept of Antonio Gramsci. In these occurrences, Gramsci reminds us that elements of the old order coexist with elements of the coming order. In his words, “the old is dying, but the new cannot be born”’ (Zachariades 2022). It is possible, then, to imagine two alternative futures. One involves a resurgence of populist nationalism driven by a combination of the economic fallout from the war and uncritical EU support for US action tending to prolong rather than resolve the conflict. The other sees the combination of the economic challenges of the war and US action giving rise to a ‘virtuous circle’ whereby greater fiscal solidarity and EU strategic autonomy both enhance, and rely upon, a reshaping of public preferences along more integrationist lines. This second future is one in which the left might at times find that it has some

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strange bedfellows. For example, towards the end of April 2022, European politicians of both the right and the left were stressing the importance of the EU’s strategic autonomy vis-à-vis the US.24 Three things seem certain looking to the future, the first being that another Europe is possible. Since Brexit and the EU’s other crises of the 2010s, populist nationalism has to some extent at least been placed on the back foot as European publics have begun to perceive the EU as offering solutions to the things that concern them rather than perceiving it as the source of their concerns. It is possible that this tendency will grow. Second, parties of the left, if they wish to reverse their long-term decline will need to become more robustly transnational in both their organisation and outlook as the state is too small to provide the public goods—a stable climate, economic prosperity, health and managed migration—on which the future of humanity depends. Finally, developing solutions and projects for greater equality across national borders will need to go hand in hand with projects for growing transnational democracy, as it is only in that way that the solutions will have the necessary underpinning in terms of popular legitimacy, only in that way that greater equality, understood as popular empowerment, will ultimately be achieved.

24  As reported by Libero (https://www.liberoquotidiano.it/news/politica/31394252/ giorgia-meloni-contro-joe-biden-europa-difesa-usa-non-sara-gratis.html) and DiRE (https://www.dire.it/30-04-2022/728251-ucraina-smeriglio-evitare-il-rischio-che-la-­ nato-e-lue-diventino-sinonimi/) these politicians included, among others, both Giorgia Meloni, leader of the far-right Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy, FdI), and the Partito Democratico (Democratic Party, PD) MEP, Massimiliano Smeriglio.

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Index1

A Absolute monarchy, 48 Act of Settlement, 6 Acts of Union, 6 Aegean, 76 Afghanistan, 75 Agreement on a Unified Patent Court, 67n8 Agustín, 166 Alcaro, Riccardo, 179, 182, 183, 185 ALDE, 140n11 Alexandria, 106n21 Alter-globalisation movement, 132 Alternative für Deutschland, 39 Amazon, 111 America, 24, 46, 145, 185 American foreign-policy interests, 27 American independence, 25 Amsterdam Treaty, 33n9, 33n10, 112 Angelucci, Davide, 162 Another Europe is Possible, 11, 16, 84, 128, 129

Anti-COVID vaccines, 144 Anti-European sovereigntist parties, 14 Anti-Nazi Resistance, 22 Apple, 111, 111n26 Arendt, Hannah, 125 Article 50, 2 Articolo Uno—Movimento Democratico e Progressista, 129 Artificial intelligence, 144 Ash, Garton, 11, 12 Athens, 76n18 Austria, 40, 52, 53, 78, 177n15, 183 Authority, 48, 48n13, 57, 60, 62, 67, 68, 79, 80, 86, 109n23, 125, 144, 168, 170, 174, 175, 180, 181n21 Azar, Leila Faghfouri, 125 B Baczynska, Gabriela, 80n28 Baker, Dean, 103n17

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

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. L. Newell, European Integration and the Crisis of Social Democracy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08822-3

205

206 

INDEX

Balanced budget rule, 95 Balkans, 78 Balosin, 170 Baneth, 176 Banks, Arron, 98 Barbieri, 38 Barroso, José Manuel, 103 Bauman, Z., 156 Beichelt, T., 21 Belgian parties, 25 Belgian socialists, 25 Belgium, 40, 52, 53, 142n15 Bell, Mark, 107 Benelux, 77 Benn, Tony, 24 Berlin Wall, 13 Berlin, 13, 141, 180 Beveridge, William, 47, 48n11 Biden, Joe, 109n23 Biebuyck, W., 139 Bini Smaghi, Lorenzo, 71n15 Biondi, A., 110, 111 Bitumi, Alessandra, 30 Black, Andrew, 117, 118 Blair, Tony, 11, 66n6, 112, 162 Blokker, Paul, 132, 139, 177n17, 177n18 Bobbio, Norberto, 162–164 Boeselager, Damian, 131 Bogdanor, Vernon, 22, 24, 50, 50n14, 67, 68, 73 Bollyky, Thomas J., 103n17 Bolsheviks, 167 Bolshevism, 134 Bordoni, P., 156 Boucher, Stephen, 177–179 Bradford, Anu, 103n17 Brazil, 136 Bretton Woods agreement, 70 Brexit, 1–15, 42n4, 59, 66n7, 67, 68, 75, 80, 81, 84, 89, 97–101, 108, 110, 114, 115, 117–119,

119n35, 121, 121n38, 123n1, 126, 127, 131, 133, 136, 144–146, 145n19, 148–150, 151n22, 152, 153, 162, 172, 180, 181, 181n21, 186 ‘project fear,’ 97, 133 ‘Take back control!,’ 133, 137 Brexit referendum, 1, 3, 4, 42n4, 66n7, 67, 68, 80, 81, 85, 97, 98, 110, 127, 133, 134, 144, 162 Brexit transition period, 150 labour shortages, 119 rules on cabotage, 119 self-pity, 146 supply-chain disruptions, 118 Brexit party, 5, 75, 151 Brexiteer, 11 Britain, 6, 11, 24, 30, 42n4, 100, 102, 127n2, 145, 150, 151, 174, 180 British identity, 8 British political system, 12 British politics, 5, 30 Brothers of Italy, see Fratelli d'Italia Bruges, 30 Brussels, 29, 73, 105, 128, 141, 146 Budge, 8, 56 Budgetary policy, 72, 82 Bugaric, 90n1, 92, 112, 113 Bulgaria, 76, 142n15 Burris, Scott, 75n17 C Callaghan, James, 30, 31n8 Callinicos, Alex, 92 Cameron, David, 13, 152 Canovan, M., 157 Capital, 16, 28, 44, 55, 70, 71n13, 91, 92, 92n3, 94, 100, 102, 107, 113, 116n31, 136

 INDEX 

Capitalism, 30, 36, 41, 46, 66, 73, 90, 97, 135, 159, 161, 167 Caribbean, 117n33 Carlotti, Benedetta, 21 Carrasco Benitez, M.T., 149n21 Carrieri, Luca, 179 Cartel parties, 18, 55 Casale, Roger, 128 Castelli Gattinara, Pietro, 82 Catch-all parties, 54 Catholic Church, 22, 164 Caucus party, 53 CDU/CSU, 39 Chartists, 48 Chesham and Amersham by-election, 152 Chiantera-Stutte, Patricia, 166 Chiaramonte, Alessandro, 51 Chilton, Brendan, 98 China, 136, 184 Christian democracy, 22, 129 Christian Democrats, 22, 161 Chu, Ben, 102n15 Cirinnà law, 164 Císař, Ondrej, 153, 154 Citizens Take over Europe, 177 Citizenship rights, 156, 166 Class, 18, 24, 43–46, 45n8, 48–51, 50n14, 54n18, 57, 99, 124, 127, 151, 170 Climate change, 13, 16, 133, 134, 143, 157, 161, 183 Cold War, 23, 33, 160, 161 Colonialism, 154 Commission, 28, 29, 33n10, 61, 67n9, 73, 74, 78, 79, 93, 95, 98, 103, 103n18, 104n19, 105, 110, 111n26, 112, 141, 159, 169, 171–173, 175, 175n9, 176n13, 177, 178n20, 179, 182, 183 Common Agricultural Policy, 26, 70 Common European Asylum System, 79

207

Commons, 2, 3 Communism, 23, 25, 47, 134, 160 Communist left, 13 Comparative advantage, 27, 114, 117 Confederation of the Socialist Parties of the EC, 26 Conference on the Future of Europe, 175 Congress of Vienna, 25 Conservative Party, 3, 81, 163 Conservatives, 4, 5, 8, 39n2, 45n8, 47, 48, 54n18, 99, 113, 151, 173n7, 174, 182 Conspiracy theories, 144 Constitutional crisis, 13 Constitutional treaties, 7, 66, 66n6 Constraining dissensus, 65 Consultation procedure, 61 Convergence criteria, 71 Corbyn, Jeremy, 5 Coronavirus, 16, 109 Corporate Europe Observatory, 103n18 Cosmopolitanism, 47, 126, 132 Costa versus ENEL case, 19, 93 Council of Europe, 25, 150 Council of Ministers, 61, 74 Council, 25, 28, 33n10, 61, 71, 73, 74, 79, 79n26, 93, 95, 103, 112, 138, 140n11, 141, 148, 150, 159, 169, 172–175, 176n13, 177, 178n20, 183 Courage Party, see Partei Mut Court of Justice of the European Coal and Steel Communities, 92 COVID 19, 144, 151, 165, 179, 182, 185 Crego, Maria Diaz, 172n6 Crespy, A., 21 Critical Europeanism, 14, 121, 123, 123n1, 124, 133–143, 151, 152, 154, 156, 157, 160, 167, 170–185

208 

INDEX

Critical Europeanists, 58, 124–135, 137–141, 155, 179, 181 Croatia, 78 Crouch, Colin, 17, 30, 90, 135, 137, 159, 165 Cultural script, 133, 133n10, 134 Cummings, Dominic, 162 Cundari, F., 82 Curtice, John, 151n24 Customs union, 6, 10, 26, 62, 93, 100, 115, 146, 147 Czech Republic, 79, 177n15 D Dalton, Russell J., 64 Danish social democrats, 26 De Cleen, Benjamin, 131 De Gasperi, Alcide, 24 De Rosa, Rosanna, 74, 75 De Ruyter, Alex, 109n23 De Sio, Lorenzo, 45n8, 162 Dearden, Nick, 105, 109n23 Dearlove, Sir Richard, 78 Decline in party membership, 51 Decline in turnout, 51, 174 Dehousse, R., 136 Deliberation, 2, 176 Della Porta, Donatella, 123n1 Della Sala, Vincent, 85 Delors, Jacques, 28–31, 70, 84, 112 Democracy, 25, 36, 37, 47n10, 53, 55, 56, 61, 68, 90, 106, 128–130, 137–140, 161, 167, 169, 171, 175, 176, 176n11, 178 Democracy in Europe Movement 2025, 127 Democracy in Motion, see Demokratie in Bewegung Democratic deficit, 33, 65, 67, 73, 91, 100, 103, 140, 156 Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), 9

Democratisation, 17, 34, 90, 123, 156, 157, 170, 171 Demokratie in Bewegung, 130 Dendias, Nikos, 76n18 Denmark, 26, 39, 40, 52, 53, 66n7, 78, 142n14, 177n15, 183 Denver, David, 45n8 Deregulation, 28, 30, 44, 64, 66 Despots, 1 Devaluation, 34 Dictatorship, 144 Die Linke, 39 DiEM25, 16, 127, 130, 131, 131n9, 138, 140–142, 140n12, 152 ‘European Spring,’ 142 ‘Organising Principles,’ 140 Dinan, Desmond, 31, 33, 64 DiRE, 186n24 Dobson, L., 68 Donatelli, Lorenzo, 172, 173 Donnelly, Brendan, 11, 12, 13n14, 152 Donovan, Nick, 110, 110n25 Dublin System (DS), 40, 77, 78 Duff, 172, 173 Dunphy, Richard, 17 Dunt, Ian, 110 Durkheim, Émile, 157 social facts, 157 E Early Parliamentary General Election Bill, 3n1 Easton, David, 60 Eaton, George, 37–39 Eberhardt, Pia, 106n21 Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), 31, 64, 67n8, 70–72, 72n16, 91, 94–96, 95n8, 95n10, 95n11, 111, 120 Economic cooperation, 26

 INDEX 

Economic growth, 29, 31 Economies of scope, 44 The Economist, 38 EEA, 100, 115, 116n31 EEC, 19, 24, 25 EFTA, 116n31 Egypt, 44, 106n21 Eichenberg, Richard C., 64 Elizabeth I, 5–6 Emanuele, Vincenzo, 51 Embery, Paul, 101 Employment Chapter, 33n9 Engels, Friedrich, 47, 134 England, 5–7, 6n5, 114, 115, 145, 145n19 Enlightenment, 48, 144 Environmentalism, 85, 129, 130 EPP, 74, 173, 174 Equality, 13, 29, 31, 37, 41, 49, 50, 113, 124, 125, 128, 130, 131n8, 140, 153, 155, 163–167, 169, 170, 182, 186 Erfurt Programme, 42n5 Eritrea, 75 Estonia, 107, 177n15 EU membership, 5, 67, 80, 85, 99, 100, 109, 111, 113, 135, 146, 151, 180 Euro, 66n6, 70, 71n15, 72, 89, 91, 94n7, 95 Eurocentrism, 143, 154 Eurodac, 77n22, 78 Europa, 130, 131, 152, 155 Europe, 1, 7, 8, 11, 13, 14, 16–18, 16n1, 21–25, 23n6, 27–30, 33, 35, 37–68, 73, 75, 79, 83–85, 89–121, 94n6, 103n18, 126–129, 131n8, 132, 137–142, 140n11, 145–147, 150, 152, 154–156, 170, 171, 174–176, 175n9, 176n10, 176n12, 176n13, 177n14, 177n15,

209

177n17, 178, 178n19, 179, 181, 182, 184–186 European democracy, 141, 171 European demos, 62, 90, 140 European identities, 140 European people, 141 European public sphere, 18, 62, 140 European Alternatives, 128, 131, 131n9 European Central Bank (ECB), 34, 67n9, 183 European Citizen’s Initiative, 62, 112n27, 142, 178 European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), 17n2, 21 European Commission (EC), 28, 29, 75, 78n23, 95, 104n19, 107, 119n35 European Council, 3, 31, 32, 34, 62, 78, 80, 139, 173, 174, 183 European Council on Refugees and Exiles, 78 European Court of Justice (ECJ), 19, 62, 92–94, 94n5, 96, 107, 108, 111, 111n26, 113, 120 Dassonville case, 94n5 Van Gend & Loos case, 93 Viking and Laval cases, 103, 107, 108 Viking case, 107 European Defence Community, 65 European democratisation, 13, 142, 156, 160 European Elections Survey, 121n38 European Employment Pact, 33n9 European Federalist Movement, 22 European Federalists, 123 European Green Deal, 183 European institutions, 14, 16, 16n1, 17, 19, 23, 24, 26, 32, 62, 63, 65, 86, 89, 94, 127, 152n25, 160, 171, 177, 179

210 

INDEX

European integration, 13, 14, 16, 17, 20, 21, 23–25, 28, 36, 58, 63, 65, 86, 96, 97, 126, 159, 160, 179 Europeanisation, 57, 123n1, 141, 173, 178 European law, 19, 77, 93 European Monetary System, 26, 30 European Movement, 11, 21, 22, 151 European Parliament (EP), 27, 32, 33n10, 34, 38, 39, 42n4, 62, 63, 67, 74, 84, 85, 93, 104n19, 124, 126, 128, 142, 142n16, 149, 160, 171, 172n4, 172n5, 173–176, 173n8, 178n20, 179, 183 Anastassopoulos Report, 171 Committee on Constitutional Affairs, 172n5 Committee on Institutional Affairs, 172n4 Conference of Presidents, 172 Constitutional Affairs Committee, 172 Duff Report, 172 Greens-European Free Alliance, 131 International Trade Committee, 104n19 MEPs, 105, 173–175, 178n20 European parties, 23, 32, 171 European People’s Party, 84, 159 European Social Space, 29 European Union (EU), 1, 5, 7–10, 12–15, 18, 21, 27, 32–36, 33n10, 40, 42n4, 57, 57n20, 59–87, 64n2, 65n3, 66n5, 67n8, 67n9, 68n10, 77n20, 78n24, 80n28, 89–100, 93n4, 102–104, 102n15, 104n19, 105n20, 107–121, 107n22, 111n26, 114n29, 116n30, 116n31, 117n33, 119n35, 121n38, 123,

126–128, 131n9, 132, 134–142, 145–148, 145n19, 149n20, 149n21, 150, 152n25, 153, 154, 154n29, 156, 159, 160, 168, 169, 171–173, 172n6, 175–186, 176n11, 178n20, 181n21 competition rules, 100, 110 Convention on the Future of Europe, 138 direct application of EU law, 93 directives, 79, 94, 103 EU citizens, 93, 118, 121n38, 153, 173, 178 EU law, 62, 77, 92–94, 93n4, 107, 147 European Constitutional Convention, 112 European Financial Stability Facility, 94n7 European Ombudsman, 105, 105n20 European Semester, 94n7 European Stability Mechanism, 94n7 Euro-Plus Pact, 94n7 excessive deficit procedure, 95 Fiscal Compact, 95, 109, 109n24, 184 fiscal solidarity, 180, 185 harmonisation, 93, 137 migrant crisis, 156 negative integration, 113, 168 passporting rules, 117 positive integration, 113, 168 primacy of EU law, 93 secondary law, 93 Six-Pack, 94n7 state-aid rules, 100, 110 TTIP, 103–109, 103n16, 103n18, 120 Euroscepticism, 15, 18, 21, 65, 84, 87, 128

 INDEX 

Eurosceptics, 5, 21, 58 Eurozone, 14, 16, 34, 36, 69–74, 82, 86, 91, 94, 96, 97, 141, 182–184 Eurozone and refugee crises, 14, 141 Eurozone crisis, 16, 69–74, 82, 91, 94, 96, 97, 184 Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM), 71 Experts, 55, 144, 181n21 External constraint, see Vincolo esterno F Fabbrini, Federico, 124, 183, 184n22 Farage, Nigel, 98–99 Farlie, D.J., 56 Farmers, 26, 27, 91 Fascism, 111 Fascists, 162 Fassina, Stefano, 86, 86n33, 126 FdI, 82, 162, 186n24 Featherstone, Kevin, 22, 23, 26, 27, 31 Federalism, 92, 130, 132 Federal Reserve, 69 Federal Trust, 11, 151 Felbermayr, Gabriel, 78 Ferguson, Sam, 181 Feudalism, 48 Field, Frank, 101 Finland, 39, 40, 52, 53, 107, 177n15 Fiscal Compact, 95 Fiscal Stability Treaty, 67n8 Five-star Movement, see M5s Fixed Term Parliaments Act, 3n1 Flaminio Costa, 19, 20n3 Flemish socialist party, 40 Fordism, 43, 44 Fordist manufacturing, 30, 43 Forza Italia (FI), 162 Foundation for European Progressive Studies, 16 Franc, 30

211

France Insoumise, 39 France, 7, 24, 38–40, 52, 53, 64n1, 77, 78, 106n21, 121, 129–130, 142n14 Fratelli d’Italia, 82, 162, 186n24 Free movement, 28, 71, 71n13, 102, 108, 118, 120, 181n21 Free trade, 24, 27, 92, 93, 100, 114–116, 148 Freedom, 24, 30, 49, 76, 78, 81, 85, 92n3, 99, 105, 108, 113, 116n31, 144, 145, 155, 167, 168 French National Assembly, 65 French revolution, 25, 162 French socialist party, 29, 30, 40 French socialists, 27, 33n10 Front National, 121 Fukuyama, F., 161 Fundamental rights, 107n22, 108 Furedi, Frank, 133, 133n10, 143 G G8, 103 Galeano, Eduardo, 155 Galloway, George, 102 Gamble, Andrew, 151 Garton Ash, Timothy, 11 GB, 40, 52 GDP, 71, 72, 95, 95n9, 103n17 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, 30n7, 44 General Court, 92, 93n4, 111n26 Generation Z, 143, 143n17 Génération.s, 130 Geneva Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, 75n17 German Social Democratic Party, 42n5 Germany, 24, 38–40, 52, 53, 77–79, 129–130, 142n14, 142n15 Länder, 96 Giddens, Anthony, 162, 168

212 

INDEX

Ginsborg, Paul, 24 Giolitti, Antonio, 17n2 Globalisation, 14, 16–18, 30, 31, 35, 46, 49, 57, 91, 96, 124, 126, 132–137, 160, 165, 166, 181 Global supply chains, 30, 44, 136 Global warming, 135 Glorious Revolution, 13 Golden Dawn, 76n18 Goldirova, Renata, 78 González, Felipe, 31 Good Friday Agreement, 9, 10, 146, 147 Goodman, Simon, 82 Gove, Michael, 144 Gramsci, Antonio, 185 Great Britain, 6, 148, 149n20 Great Recession, 18, 34, 37, 38, 96, 98 GRECO, 150 Greece, 16, 26, 34, 37, 38, 72, 72n16, 76, 77, 79, 80n27, 142n14 Greek sovereign debt crisis, 34 Green New Deal, 139 Green parties, 4, 38, 84 Greens, 4, 32, 131, 161 Greenspan, Alan, 69 Group of States against Corruption, 150 Guardian, 11 Guth, L., 22 H Haas, Ernst, 20n4, 70 Hague, Rod, 136 Hall, Stuart, 29 Hamon, Benoît, 37 Hanley, David, 32 Hard Brexit, 12 Havel, Vaclav, 14

Hay, Colin, 55, 55n19, 136 Hayek, F.A., 92, 92n3, 112 Hazan, Reuven Y., 173 Hearne, David, 109n23 Henley, Jon, 38, 40 Hennessy, Alexandra, 175 Hickie, Desmond, 44–46 Hickson, Kevin, 99, 134 Hilary, John, 103, 107 Hilpert, Ulrich, 44–46 Hitler, Adolf, 22, 146 Hobolt, Sara B., 121n38, 151, 180 Hochschild, Arlie Russell, 50n14 Hollande, François, 37 Holmes, Michael, 14, 30, 32, 96 Hooghe, Liesbet, 27, 57n20, 64–66, 66n6, 68 House of Commons, 2, 8n7 Human Rights Watch, 76n18, 76n19 Human rights, 76, 78, 80, 80n28, 125, 128 Hungary, 68n10, 78, 79 Hutchinson, J., 156n30 Hutter, Swen, 131n6 I Iceland, 37, 77n20 IDEA, 53 Identity politics, 49 Ideology, 8, 18, 33n10, 91, 167, 180 Ignazi, Piero, 18, 52, 56 Illiteracy, 144 IMF, 34, 67n9, 70 Immigration, 17, 75n17, 80–82, 81n29, 85, 99, 102n15, 119, 133, 181, 181n21 Impossible trinity, 70 Independence Referendum, 9 India, 117n33, 136 Individualism, 30, 45 Industrial revolution, 48

 INDEX 

Inequality, 42, 48, 126, 136, 163–165 Infant mortality, 144 Ingleby Committee, 6n5 Inglehart, Ronald, 49 Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, 53 Institute for Government, 11n11, 117n33 Institutional determinism, 113, 120 Integration trap, 14, 32, 96, 120 Integration, 6, 7, 10, 13–36, 20n4, 57, 57n20, 59, 62–66, 66n6, 70–72, 70n12, 74, 83–87, 89, 90n1, 93, 94n6, 96–98, 101, 112, 113, 115, 120, 121, 123, 126, 127, 132, 134–136, 140, 147, 156, 159, 160, 167, 168, 168n3, 170, 171, 179, 182, 185 Interest rates, 34, 35, 69, 71n13, 71n15, 72 Intergovernmentalism, 35, 67, 138, 169 International capital, 16, 39, 91, 134 International drugs trade, 135 Internationalism, 17, 23, 35, 58, 85, 86, 165 International organisations, 112, 126, 135 International socialism, 22 International Socialist Congress, 47 International solidarity, 13, 22, 46, 47, 165, 166 Internet, 44, 45n7 Ipsos MORI, 45n8, 114n28 Iraq, 75 Ireland, 6–10, 26, 37, 40, 52, 53, 72, 77, 111, 111n26, 146, 147, 149n20, 151, 177n15 Irish independence, 6 The Irish Times, 147 ISIL, 76

213

Italian Communist Party (PCI), 16n1, 17n2, 23n6, 24, 27, 40 Italian Constitution, 2, 19 Italy, 7, 16, 17n2, 20n3, 23, 24, 38, 40, 52, 53, 72, 76, 77, 79, 82, 85, 121, 126, 129–130, 154, 161, 162, 164, 177n17, 186n24 J Japan, 28 Johnson, Boris, 3, 9n10, 151 Jones, F.L., 156n30, 157 Jones, Owen, 84, 90, 91, 96 Juncker, Jean-Claude, 80, 174 K Katz, R. S., 18, 55 Keating, Michael, 38, 153, 175 Keynesian demand management, 23, 41, 43, 135 Kilbrandon Committee, 6n5 King James VI, 5 Kirkhheimer, Otto, 54 Kitschelt, H., 131 Kobanî, 76 Kopecký, P., 21 Korea, 24 Kriesi, H.E., 18, 50 L Labour, 2–4, 7, 8n6, 27, 29–31, 31n8, 37, 39, 39n2, 41–44, 45n8, 48n11, 54n18, 81, 81n30, 84, 85, 91, 92, 92n3, 98–102, 102n15, 110, 112, 114, 118, 119, 126, 128, 129, 134, 144, 152, 168, 173n7, 174, 182 Ladrech, Robert, 32, 33n10, 73, 159

214 

INDEX

Laforgia, Francesco, 126 Laity, Mark, 180, 181n21 Lakoff, George, 181 L’Altra Liguria, 129 Lane, Philip R., 109, 109n24 Lapovitsas, Costas, 90–92 Latvia, 177n15 Laval, 103, 107, 108, 120 Lavenex, S., 166 League, see Lega League of Nations, 166 League of Nations’ Paris Conference on Passports and Customs Formalities and Through Tickets, 166 Leave, 1, 2, 5, 9, 66n7, 80, 81, 84, 91, 98, 99, 133, 150, 151, 162, 180, 181n21 ‘Leave’ campaign, 1, 133, 181n21 ‘Leave’ campaigners, 1, 80, 81 Leavers, 4, 127, 151, 181n21, 182 Leave voters, 2, 5 Left behind, 50, 124, 126 Left Unity, 129 Left, 1, 5, 8, 10, 13–18, 16n1, 20–59, 39n2, 45n8, 54n18, 66, 73, 76, 81–86, 89, 91, 92, 96, 99, 105, 111–113, 115, 118, 120, 123, 123n1, 124, 126, 128–131, 131n8, 133, 151, 154, 155, 157, 159–186 Left-right conflict, 164 Left-right spectrum, 162 Lega, 82, 121, 162 Legislation, 2, 6, 11, 29, 41, 61, 79, 93, 96, 106, 106n21, 109n23, 112, 116n31, 142, 148, 149, 169, 175 Legislative initiative, 138, 141 Legitimacy crisis, 14, 15, 57, 59, 62, 68–83, 86, 126, 156, 180

Legitimacy, 6, 14, 15, 34, 57, 59–87, 126, 150, 156, 162, 168–171, 175, 178n20, 180, 186 Lenz, Tobias, 60, 61 Les trente glorieuses, 135 Lexit, 14, 15, 18, 90, 91, 94, 97, 99–121, 102n13, 123–127, 131, 133, 142, 156, 160, 179 Liberal Democrats, 4, 126 Liberalism, 41, 129 Liberalization, 94 Libero, 186n24 Libya, 82, 154 Life expectancy, 144 Lilico, Andrew, 100 Limitation of working hours, 92n3 Lindberg, L., 27, 57n20, 64, 70 Lisbon Treaty, 34, 61, 107n22, 112, 112n27, 138, 173 Lithuania, 177n15 Liverpool, 108 Lodz, 108 London Court of International Arbitration, 106 London School of Economics, 121n38 London, 103n18, 106, 107, 121n38, 152 Lone Pine, 106n21 Longo, Michael, 69, 80 Lord Ashcroft, 151n22 Losers of globalisation, 14, 18, 50, 160 Loth, W., 25 Luxembourg, 25, 111, 142n15 M M5s, 161, 162 Maastricht, 16, 29, 31–33, 62, 64–66, 71, 83, 86, 91, 95 Maastricht Treaty, 16, 29, 31–33, 62, 64, 65, 71, 83, 86, 91

 INDEX 

Maggiorani, Mauro, 23n6 Mainstream left, 14, 86, 124, 157 Mainstream parties of the left, 13, 19, 27, 74, 138 Mainstream parties, 51, 56, 74, 81 Mainstream party decline, 51 Mair, Peter, 18, 52, 54, 55, 141 Majone, Giandomenico, 168, 168n2, 168n3, 169 Major, John, 65n4 Malmö, 112 Malnutrition, 144 Malta, 177n15 Manchester, 108 Manifesto of the Communist Party, 46 Manin, Bernard, 18, 55 March, Luke, 2, 17, 32, 33n9, 44, 45n8, 80, 109n24, 119, 128, 166 Marketization of higher education, 2 Marks, Gary, 27, 57n20, 64–66, 66n6, 68 Marshall Plan, 23 Marsili, Lorenzo, 135–140, 155, 156 Marx, Karl, 134 Marxism, 46, 160, 163 Marxism-Leninism, 160, 163 Mason, Rowena, 99 Mass migration, 18, 157 Mass parties, 52, 53 May, Theresa, 2, 3 McMillan, Alistair, 6–8 McNamara, Kathleen R, 63 McShane, Dennis, 150 Mediatisation, 18, 56 Mediterranean, 76, 82 Medium Term Social Action Programme, 29 Meloni, Giorgia, 82, 186n24 Middle East, 75 Migrants, 74, 75n17, 76n18, 77, 79, 81, 82, 101, 113, 154, 154n29

215

The Migration Observatory, 81n29, 102n15 Milanese, Niccolò, 128, 135–140, 155, 156 Miles, Jasper, 99 Mills, John, 98 Milward, Alan S., 25 Minority government, 2 Mitterrand, François, 30, 31 Möller, K., 157 Monbiot, George, 91 Monetary policy, 70, 72, 82 Monetary union, 6 Monnet, Jean, 21, 22 Monti, Mario, 161 Moody, Glyn, 105 Moore, Suzanne, 91 Moravcsik, Andrew, 20n4, 22, 67 Morris, Chris, 99, 103n16, 106n21 Movement party, 128 Movimento Cinque Stelle, see M5s MPs, 2, 3, 10, 84, 105, 163 Labour MPs, 3, 84 Liberal Democrat MPs, 3 SNP MPs, 3 Mudde, C., 21 Multiculturalism, 47 Multilateralism, 126 Murray, Philomena, 69, 80 Mussolini, Benito, 24 N Napoleon, Bonaparte, 146 Narrative, 19, 133, 145, 146, 150, 178, 180, 181n21 Nation state, 13, 17, 86, 90, 90n1, 91, 100, 101, 120, 123, 137 National health service, 24 National identities, 7, 8, 65, 66n6, 101, 140, 157 Nationalisation, 19, 30, 83, 110

216 

INDEX

Nationalism, 99, 131n8, 137, 138, 141, 146, 155, 156, 161, 185, 186 Nationalists, 8, 9 Nationalist-Unionist divide, 8 National Keynesianism, 13, 14, 30, 31, 96, 120 National Socialism, 25 Nazism, 24 Nebehay, Stephanie, 80n28 Negative freedom, 48n12 Nelsen, Brent F., 22 Neo-liberal consensus, 18 Neo-liberalism, 41, 44, 91, 180 Neo-liberal policies, 91 The Netherlands, 33n10, 37–40, 52, 53, 111, 142n15, 177n15, 183 New Deal, 23, 130, 139, 142 The New European, 4n3, 151n24 New Europeans, 128 New Statesman, 11 Newell, James L., 2, 18, 21, 29, 39n2, 51, 56, 70n12, 71n15, 82–84, 181 Next Generation EU, 109, 175, 180, 182 National Recovery and Resilience Plans (NRRPs), 183 Nigeria, 75 Non-tariff barriers, 28, 94n5, 104 Norberg, Johan, 143–145 Nordic Council, 26 North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), 23, 24 Northern Ireland, 6, 8, 10, 147 Northern Ireland Act 1998, 10 Northern Ireland protocol, 10, 146, 148, 151 Norway, 40, 52, 53, 77n20, 78 Nouvelle donne, 130 Novak, Stéphanie, 79n26

O Obligations, 20, 48, 61, 73, 75n17, 99, 116, 125, 149, 154n29, 164, 168, 177 O’Carroll, Lisa, 117 Office for Budget Responsibility Economic and Fiscal Outlook, 119 O’Neil, Michael, 147 Open access rules, 111 Open Britain, 151 Operation Xenios Zeus, 76, 76n18, 155 Opinion polls, 2, 12 Orbán, Viktor, 68 Ordinary legislative procedure, 61 Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC), 44 Organized labour, 91 O’Rourke, Kevin, 98 Ornstein, Daniel, 108 Osservatorio balcani e caucaso, 177n17 O’Toole, Fintan, 145–147, 145n19 Outsider parties, 18, 56 Outsourcing, 41, 44 Ozzano, Luca, 164 P Palladino, Nicola, 55 Panayotu, Panos, 131, 140–142, 156 Parliament, 2, 3n1, 6, 7, 9, 23, 26, 27, 38, 48n11, 54n18, 61, 67, 84, 85, 101, 104, 123n1, 124, 138, 141, 142, 149, 159, 169, 171, 172n4, 172n5, 173, 174, 176n13, 178n20 Partei Mut, 130 Partido Popular (PP), 38, 39, 39n3 Parties, 3, 4, 7, 9, 10, 12–14, 16, 18–21, 23, 25–28, 30, 32, 33n10, 35, 37–43, 45, 47, 49,

 INDEX 

51, 51n17, 53–57, 54n18, 59, 62, 63, 66, 66n6, 73, 74, 81–86, 91, 106, 113, 121, 124, 127, 128, 131n6, 138, 140, 140n11, 142, 147–149, 152, 159, 161–163, 165–167, 170, 171, 173, 173n7, 174, 180, 182, 186 nationalist parties, 8, 38, 84 protest parties, 64 Parties of the left, 14, 16, 23, 28, 83, 86, 167 Partito Democratico (PD), 40, 45n8, 82, 86, 162, 163, 186n24 Party of European Socialists (PES), 32, 33n9, 74, 138, 140n11, 174 Party systems, 7, 51n17 Party-system de-institutionalisation, 51 Pasok, 37, 38 Pasokification, 38–41, 38n1, 43 Passports, 165, 166 Pastorino, Luca, 126 Patria e Costituzione, 86 PDS, 40 Peaceful coexistence, 27, 147 Pensions, 1, 42 Permissive consensus, 27, 57, 64, 65 Personalisation, 18, 171 Personal parties, 56 Pierson, Paul, 20n4 Pirone, Maurilio, 123n1 Plaid Cymru, 4, 8, 8n7 Plebiscites, 1 Podemos, 38, 39, 166 Poguntke, Thomas, 55 Poland, 63, 108, 142n14 Political culture, 8, 145 Political entrepreneurs, 18, 73 Political parties, 4, 15, 18, 43, 57, 66n6, 127, 128, 140, 151, 163 Politics of England, 8 Popular Unionism, 7

217

Populism, 15, 49, 50, 73, 86, 131, 145, 161, 165 Populist parties, 16, 18, 38, 50, 74 Populist right, 14, 17, 101, 180 Populists, 13, 16, 50, 83, 162 Portugal, 26, 39, 40, 52, 53, 72, 114, 115, 142n14 Portuguese Social Democratic Party, 163 Portuguese socialists, 25 Position issues, 54 Positive freedom, 48 Positivists, 134 Possibile, 129 Post-war consensus, 31 Poverty, 41, 47, 76n18, 101, 143, 144, 170 Power, 7, 17, 29, 30, 34, 44, 46, 48, 48n13, 51, 52, 54, 57, 59–61, 63, 66n7, 68, 72, 74, 76, 90, 91, 93, 95, 104, 105, 109n23, 132, 135, 137–139, 141, 145, 147, 148, 150, 152, 153, 156, 157, 164, 167, 168, 170, 172, 182 Privatisation, 30, 41 Progress, 29, 104n19, 112, 134, 143, 144, 147, 152, 172 Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats, 84, 175 Progressive reform, 143 Protestants, 6, 22 PSI, 40 Public debt, 16, 71, 72 Public goods, 55, 136, 145, 186 Public policy, 18, 55n19, 78, 105, 110n25, 159 Public sector, 91 Q Qualified majority voting (QMV), 28, 29, 64, 79n26, 95, 174, 184

218 

INDEX

R Racism, 47, 76n18, 101, 126, 127, 165 Radical left, 15, 17, 32, 87, 126, 166 Rahat, Gideon, 173 Rajoy, Mariano, 38 Ratification crises, 65 Ratification, 2, 3, 32, 33, 64, 65n4, 66, 67, 67n8, 83, 93, 138, 172n6, 173, 184 Ratti, Luca, 136 Reason, 11, 21, 22, 27, 45, 48, 99, 134, 139, 146, 163, 170, 173, 182 Referenda, 2, 33, 66–68, 66n6, 67n8, 184n22 Danish referenda, 2 Reformation, 22 1951 Refugee Convention, 76 Refugee crisis, 69, 74–83, 154 Refugees, 67n9, 75, 77–79, 80n27, 81, 125 Reif, Karlheinz, 32, 63, 84, 142 Rejoiners, 12 Rejoin EU, 151 Remain, 2, 4, 8n7, 9, 81, 84, 97, 98, 128, 129, 133, 151, 181n21 remainers, 1, 4, 12, 127, 151, 152, 181n21, 182 Renaissance, 48 Renationalisation, 145 Renew Europe group, 175 Republic of Ireland, 147 The resistance continues, 11, 13n14 Reus-Smit, Christian, 61 Rhodes, Martin, 42 Ricardo, David, 114 Rights, 1, 5, 8, 9n8, 12–18, 20, 24, 28, 29, 38, 39, 39n3, 41, 47, 49, 50, 54, 55, 57, 60–63, 66, 68, 71, 73, 80n28, 82, 83, 86, 87, 93, 96, 99, 101, 102, 106–108,

107n22, 112, 112n27, 113, 117, 120, 123–126, 131n8, 132, 138–142, 140n11, 145, 149, 151, 154, 154n29, 155, 157, 159–165, 167–170, 175, 176n11, 179, 180, 186, 186n24 Road Haulage Association, 119 Roder, Knut, 14, 30, 32, 96 Rokkan, S., 5 Romania, 79 Rome Treaty, 70, 93 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 23 Rosakou, Katerina, 76n18 Rosling, Hans, 75n17 Rothstein, Bo, 47 Royal Economic Society, 114n28 Rule of law, 80, 106, 125, 176n11 Rules of origin, 116 Russia, 185 Russo, Luana, 127 S Salvadori, Massimo, 134 Salvini, Matteo, 82 Sassoon, Donald, 41, 42 Scharenberg, Antje, 132 Scharpf, Fritz, 92, 93, 96, 113 Scheingold, S., 27, 57n20, 64, 70 Schengen, 77n21 Borders Code, 77n21, 78, 78n23 Schengen Convention, 77n21 Schengen Information System, 77n22 Schengen Agreement, 77 Schengen Area, 77, 77n20, 77n22 Schengen rules, 77, 77n20 Schildberg, Cäcilie, 18 Schmidt, Vivien A., 59 Schmitt, Hermann, 32, 63, 84, 142, 171 Schmitter, Philippe C., 60, 70

 INDEX 

Schultz, Martin, 174 Schumacher, Kurt, 25 Schuman, Robert, 21, 25 Schuman Declaration, 21 Schuman plan, 25 Schweiger, Christian, 126 Scientific management, 43 Scotland, 5–8, 6n5, 9n9, 38 Scotland Act, 9 Scottish First Minister, 9, 9n10 Scottish Government, 9, 9n9 Scottish National Party (SNP), 3, 4, 7, 8n6 Scottish Parliament, 8 Scottish politics, 7 Second International, 47 Second referendum, 2, 3, 5, 65n4, 85 Second-order national elections, 32, 63, 84, 142, 171 Senior Nello, Susan, 29, 70 Serbia, 78 Al-Serraj, Fayez, 82 Shabi, Rachel, 81 Shaw, Eric, 85 Shipman, Tim, 99, 181 Silent revolution, 49 Single currency, 16, 64, 65n4 Single European Act (SEA), 26, 28, 31, 64, 70, 83, 95, 96 Single market, 8–10, 28, 64, 71, 100, 110, 115, 116n31, 117, 118, 146, 147, 182 Single-issue parties, 41 Single-market programme, 28 Skrzypek, Ania, 18 Sky News, 144 Slovakia, 79, 177n15 Slovenia, 78 Smeriglio, Massimiliano, 186n24 Smith, Helena, 76n19 Smith, Herbert, 108 Smith, Philip, 156n30, 157

219

Social Charter, 29, 83 Social cleavages, 18, 55 Social democracy, 13, 18, 31, 36–58, 125, 129, 135, 159, 160 Social Democratic Alliance, 37 Social democratic parties, 18, 29–32, 39–42, 47, 59, 82, 83, 90n1, 96, 111–113, 159 Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), 25, 37, 39 Social democrats, 15, 18, 26, 27, 31, 32, 35–36, 39–42, 45–47, 49–51, 56, 57, 96, 112, 120, 121, 125, 126, 159, 166 Social dumping, 29, 96 Social Europe, 16 Social Insurance and Allied Services, 48n11 Social justice, 128, 130, 167, 176n11 Social Protocol, 29, 83 Social solidarity, 29 Social welfare, 48n11 Social-democratic decline, 43, 51 Socialism, 24, 52, 54n18, 129, 130 Socialist International, 26 Socialist parties, 26, 39 Society of Business Economists, 114n28 Soft Brexit, 12 Sovereigntism, 74, 180 Sovereigntist populism, 74 Sovereigntists, 83, 160, 173 Sovereignty, 7, 17, 19, 63, 65, 66n6, 71, 71n13, 85, 90, 94n6, 100, 116n31, 123, 125, 137, 149, 152, 154, 156, 157, 169, 171, 182 Soviet Communist Party, 24 Soviet Union, 27 Spaak, Paul-Henri, 25 Spain, 26, 38–40, 52, 53, 72, 79, 142n14, 142n15

220 

INDEX

Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), 38, 39, 39n3 Spillover, 28, 70, 70n12 Spin doctors, 55 Spinelli, Altiero, 22 Spitzenkandidaten, 62, 171, 173–175, 178, 178n20 Stability and Growth Pact (SGP), 71, 71n15, 72n16, 73, 94 Stagflation, 44 Starbucks, 111 State-sponsored tax evasion, 111 Steinmo, Sven, 47 Sturgeon, Nicola, 9, 9n10 Subprime mortgage crisis, 69 Subsidiarity, 62, 96 Support, 2, 3, 9–11, 16, 17, 27, 33n10, 35, 37, 38, 39n3, 42, 43, 45, 45n8, 50, 51, 53, 54, 57n20, 60, 64, 74, 75, 77, 82, 83, 85, 92n3, 99, 100, 102n15, 110n25, 120, 121, 144, 152, 160, 163, 168n2, 171–173, 175, 178–180, 178n20, 185 Supra-nationalism, 20, 35, 67, 85, 96 Surridge, Paula, 151 Sweden, 40, 52, 53, 78, 107, 142n15, 177n15, 183 Switzerland, 7, 77n20 Syria, 44 Syrian refugees, 76 Syriza, 36, 38, 76, 166 T Tamir, Yael, 155 Tariffs, 28, 44, 104, 111, 116, 116n30 Tarrant, A., 110, 111 Taylor, Laurie, 166n1 Taylor, Paul, 176 Terry, Kyilah, 154n29 Thatcher, Margaret, 28–31

Tilindyte, Laura, 171, 173, 174 Timmermans, Frans, 174 Tirosh, Ofer, 153 Tocci, Nathalie, 179, 182, 183, 185 Todd, Ron, 29 Togliatti, Palmiro, 16n1, 23n6 Tories, 29 Toynbee, Polly, 152 Trade barriers, 23, 28, 116, 117, 119n37, 120 Trade liberalisation, 30, 66 Trade policy, 62, 99, 184 Trade Union Congress, 29 Trade Unions, 29, 42, 43, 46, 101, 107 Finnish Seamen’s Union (FSU), 107 International Transport Workers’ Federation, 107 Tramontana, Fabio, 97, 98 Transatlantic slave trade, 154 Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), 91, 103 ‘precautionary principle,’ 104 ‘science-based approach,’ 104 investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS), 106, 107 Transnational action, 143, 153 Transnational democracy, 14, 137–139, 153, 186 Transnationalism, 32 Transnational lists, 171, 172, 175, 178, 179 Transnational organisation, 140, 152, 153 Transnational party, 139–141 Transport and General Workers Union, 29 Traynor, Ian, 79 Treaty of Amsterdam, 77, 112, 112n27, 173 Treaty of Lisbon, 67n8 Treaty of Paris, 22

 INDEX 

Treaty of Rome, 19, 26, 28 Trump, Donald, 50n14, 102, 103, 145, 184 TUC, 30, 84 Turkey, 76, 80, 80n28, 82, 116n31, 154 Tusk, Donald, 80, 174 Twin Towers attack, 69 U UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA), 116, 117, 121, 148, 149 Civil Society Forum, 149 Parliamentary Partnership Assembly, 149 Partnership Council (PC), 148, 149 Ukraine-European Union Association Agreement, 67n8 Ulster, 6, 8 Unanimity, 26, 61, 126, 139, 184 Unemployment insurance, 92n3 UNHCR, 82n31 Union state, 5, 7, 9, 85 Unionism, 8 Unite, 29, 46 United Kingdom (UK), 4–8, 10, 13, 15, 26, 31, 33n10, 38, 39, 41, 45n8, 53, 64n1, 65n4, 66n6, 71, 77, 80, 81, 81n29, 84, 85, 90, 91, 97, 99, 100, 108, 109n23, 112–119, 114n29, 116n30, 117n33, 119n35, 121, 121n38, 126, 127, 129–130, 145–150, 145n19, 149n20, 149n21, 162, 172, 173n7, 174, 180 Office for Budget Responsibility, 119, 119n36 United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), 12, 42n4, 75, 98, 152

221

United States (US), 23, 24, 28, 50n14, 59, 69, 70, 85, 103, 104, 108, 109n23, 165, 168n2, 184, 185 Congress, 23n6, 25, 109n23 TPA, 109n23 Trade Act 1974, 109n23 United States Declaration of Independence, 165 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 125 Universal rights, 125, 156, 166 University and College Union, 1 University of Oxford, 102n15 University of Salford, 2 Urwin, D., 5 V Vaccines, 144, 151 Valbruzzi, Marco, 127 Valence issues, 54 Valentini, Carlo, 126 Varkey Foundation, 143, 143n17, 153 Varoufakis, Yanis, 127, 131n9, 141 Vasilopoulou, S., 21 Vassal state, 12, 145 Ventotene manifesto, 22, 159 Veolia, 106n21 Verger, Christine, 171 Verschueren, N., 21 Vertical disintegration, 44 Vincolo esterno, 85 Viola, Lora Anne, 60, 61 Visegrad countries, 174 Volksbühne Theatre, 141 Volt Europa, 131, 138, 140, 142, 152 Von der Lyen, Ursula, 14, 174, 175, 178n20, 183, 184 Vote Leave, 98, 99

222 

INDEX

Voters, 2, 3, 9, 18, 34, 36, 39, 50, 51, 53, 54, 56, 57, 63, 65, 65n4, 66n6, 66n7, 73, 81, 82, 84, 85, 97, 99, 101, 104, 126, 127, 151, 169, 171, 174, 179 Vox, 39n3 W Wainwright, Hillary, 18 Wales, 5, 6, 6n5, 8 War on Want, 103 War, 11, 19, 22–24, 26, 30, 31, 43, 45n8, 49, 75, 126, 135, 143, 144, 146, 184, 185 Ward, Tom, 67, 68 Weale, A., 68 Wealth tax, 30 Webb, Dominic, 105, 107 Webb, Paul, 55 Weber, Manfred, 174 Weber, Max, 48n13, 90 ‘Politics as a Vocation,’ 90 The Week, 100 Weisskircher, Manès, 153, 154 Welfare chauvinism, 101, 125 Welfare state, 23, 41, 42, 86, 90n1, 101, 170 Welsh Assembly, 8 Westminster, 6, 8, 9, 162 Whyman, Philip, 15, 99, 100, 115 ‘Winners’ and ‘losers’ of globalisation, 136 Winners of globalisation, 50, 126 Withdrawal Agreement, 2, 3, 85 Wolkenstein, Fabio, 90, 135 Wood, Matt, 63

Workers, 26, 29, 41, 43, 45, 45n8, 46, 49, 57, 99, 107, 112n27, 113, 119 Working class, 43, 45, 45n8, 52, 54n18, 170 World Bank, 106 International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes, 106 World Inequality Report, 42n6 World Social Forum ‘Another world is possible,’ 134 World Trade Organisation (WTO), 100, 115, 116n30, 116n32 ‘most-favoured-nation’ rules, 116n30 ‘Technical Information on Rules of Origin,’ 116n32 World War I, 47 World War II, 135, 145 X Xenophobia, 47, 76n18, 101, 124, 126, 145, 165 Y Years of Hope, 24 Yom Kippur war, 44 YouGov, 4n3, 127n2, 151n24 Yuval-Davis, Nira, 166n1 Z Zachariades, Alexandros, 185 Zingaretti, Nicola, 82