Is there a difference between transnational, national and local democracy? If so, does this difference hold across the world, or are there regional variations? How can transnational politics such as pan-European politics be more democratic? The third segment of the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy’s interview with Pierre Rosanvallon, now available with English subtitles, discusses the links between local and transnational governance, and democracy. Two members of our team, AHCD Senior Researcher and Executive Director Christine Lutringer and Research Fellow Yanina Welp, have shared their thoughts on his analysis.

AHCD will release the fourth segment of the interview, which looks at gender and political representation, along with more commentary from its research team next week.

Commentary by Christine Lutringer

Can European democracy truly be transnational? The role of democratic legitimacy and social welfare

Democratic politics are constructed both within and outside state institutions. In a context where voters are increasingly disengaged from conventional politics and detached from mainstream political parties, other forms of democracy (encompassed in the concept of “counter-democracy”) are all the more important. Pierre Rosanvallon’s message is timely and useful, not least to help make sense of the frameworks for renewed governance generated by the pandemic. I would like to focus on two points made during his interview and reflect on how they may apply to discussions on European or pan-European democracy: on the one hand, the concept of democratic legitimacy; and, on the other hand, solidarity and social welfare as essential constituents of democracy.

Democratic legitimacy is a multi-faceted and dynamic concept. Rosanvallon seeks to develop an unconventional and deeper understanding of the legitimacy of democratic institutions. He argues that the sources of democratic legitimacy have shifted and multiplied over the past thirty years and that we need to take stock of these new sources of legitimacy in order to counter the lure of the “unpolitical” and of populist strategies. His concept of the legitimacy of proximity emphasizes the social expectations about the behaviour of governing officials to recognize and respond to the real situations of individuals.

However, concentrating only on local democracy is not the remedy: as suggested by Rosanvallon in the interview, “democratic action must move beyond nation-state in a world where decisions concerning the life of communities are no longer exclusively made at the level of the nation-state”. His suggestion to think of Europe as an “experimental space” is very timely. The EU comprises multiple levels of engagement in democratic governance. It projects its responsibility onto common (or common good) challenges, both in the long term and in relation to specific crises.

Has the current emergency of the pandemic been a catalyst for transnational action? The question of how Covid-19 and the responses to it have contributed to the politicization of the European integration process remains open. Along similar lines to the analysis by Kriesi and Grande (2014) in the context of the Eurozone crisis [1], emerging evidence would rather suggest a parallelization of national public spheres, whereby different national publics are debating the same issues, at the same time, and in essentially similar ways. This connects to my second point on solidarity and social welfare as essential constituents of democracy. As highlighted by several scholars, there are at least two dimensions of inclusive democracy: inclusiveness of participation and inclusiveness of policies. For Rosanvallon, whose earlier works explored changes in solidarity institutions and in the ideas of social justice that underpin them, “democracy describes a space of shared solidarity”. Even at the supranational level, “citizenship means that we form a community. And community one way or another means some kind of solidarity”. The idea and the practice of European solidarity has been tested repeatedly in the last few years through the various crises – economic, social, human, political – that Europe has faced.

For European democracy to be transnational, it needs to be social. This seems even clearer when gauging the inclusiveness – or lack thereof – across the dimensions of both participation and policies in past European crises, and when examining its effects on democracy. What is social welfare at the European level? Which tools does the EU have to promote welfare policies? The main social welfare instruments are the structural funds: these are used for the European Cohesion Policy, which aims to reduce social inequalities and differences both between and within countries. These funds, like other similar funds across the globe, are a medium through which institutions and social actors define social vulnerability and, more generally, welfare. What the emerging findings from my research project with Deval Desai and Shalini Randeria on the politics of social welfare funds [2] seem to point at, is that their emergency mobilization as part of the response to the pandemic has a range of political and institutional effects [3]. The EU has provided executive flexibility at the national level for the distribution of these funds. This current shift of the institutional balance from EU institutions towards member states further signals that welfare policies remain essentially a national issue. Coming back to Rosanvallon’s argument, this example points to the need to politicize the EU supra-national sphere, including through counter-democracy practices: the exercise of oversight, prevention and a pressure to correct, all contribute to the everyday (re)construction of democratic politics.

References:

[1] Kriesi, Hanspeter, and Grande, Edgar (2014). “The Europeanization of the National Political Debate”. In Cramme, Olaf and Hobolt, Sara B. (eds), Democratic Politics in a European Union Under Stress (pp. 67-86) Oxford : Oxford University Press.

[2] Swiss National Science Foundation Spark grant, “The Puzzle of Unspent Funds: The Institutional Architecture of Unaccountable Governance” no. 190372.

[3] Desai, Desai, Randeria, Shalini, and Lutringer, Christine (2020). Redefining Vulnerability and State – Society Relationships during the COVID-19 Crisis: The Politics of Social Welfare Funds in India and Italy. In Maduro, Miguel and Kahn, Paul (eds.), Democracy in Times of Pandemic: Different Futures Imagined (pp. 182-195). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781108955690.014

Commentary by Yanina Welp

The case for differences between democracy at local and national levels: A comment on Rosanvallon’s distinction

Is there a difference between national and local democracy? For Pierre Rosanvallon the difference is a matter of the focus and intensity of the political conflict. In his words, “local democracy is more precisely defined by the organization of practical community life, everyday community life. So, whereas national democracy will focus primarily on a broad range of actions, or a broad range of areas in the sovereign sphere, the organization of a country as a nation-state, local democracy will be defined by the organization and improvement of everyday life”. How specific is such an understanding for the French context? Would one not need to define democratic politics differently in federal countries such as Switzerland or the United States as well as in countries where the effectiveness and recognition of the state apparatus is weak, even if it is considered to be democratic?

In a federal country such as the US, where states, provinces or cantons are allowed to decide on major political issues such as climate change, abortion or the death penalty, the subnational level is not confined to less politicized issues. Besides, in areas of the world where sharp conflicts accompany the very establishment of the nation-state, the sovereign is on focus on the local level as well. O’Donnell’s question on the strength of the state and its consequences are relevant in this context: “What happens when the effectiveness of the law extends very irregularly (if does not disappear altogether) across the territory and the functional relations (including class, ethnic, and gender relations) it supposedly regulates? What kind of state (and society) is this? What influences may this have on what kind of democracy may emerge?

If for Rosanvallon “national democracy is about making choices and taking positions between visions that may be contradictory, or in any case different”, in many regions of the world such as Latin America this is equally true for local communities. For instance, this is the case in Colombia in 2017 and 2018 for popular consultations with local communities, which are opposed to mining and other investments with high negative environmental impact. Many similar examples can be cited for not only other countries in Latin American but also from other regions of the world where local democracy addresses issues related to both “everyday community life” as well as challenging the very definition of national sovereignty especially over natural resources at the local level.

In Europe, local democracy, and more specifically the experiences of citizen participation at the local level, have a better press because these are primarily seen as ‘simply’ giving a voice to citizens in managing local affairs but are not seen as demands to re-distribute power or a challenge to national level institutions. Typical experiences of local democracy such as participatory budgeting do not challenge governmental or institutional decision-making while a referendum has such a potential. But again, in federal countries, this happens at both levels, local and national, as we see in Switzerland and the US. O’Donnell identifies three dimensions with respect to a crisis of the state: “of the state as a set of bureaucracies capable of discharging their duties with reasonable efficacy; of the effectiveness of its law; and of the plausibility of the claim that the state agencies normally orient their decisions in terms of some conception of the public good”. All three would be key to understand environmental struggles that local communities are engaged in across the global South. And would thus run counter to Rosanvallon’s argument on the restricted scope of local practices of democracy as against national politics.

The role of the multinational governance is especially interesting in contexts where local democratic practices are contested by the nation-state trying to impose its decisions and conceptions of a good life on local communities. The experience of Zapatismo in Mexico is well known. Activists and defenders of human rights around the world know that a key strategy to protect their physical integrity, their rights and their claims to some degree of autonomy, is to get recognition for these by international organizations.

Reference:

O’Donnell, Guillermo (1993) “On the state, democratization and some conceptual problems” (A Latin American View with Glances at Some Post-Communist Countries). Working Paper #192 - April 1993. Kellogg Institute

Follow the webinar series co-hosted by Yanina Welp on Latin American politics in the COVID-19 pandemic.