Democratisation through critique? The Euro Crisis and the prospects of the European Public Sphere

Abstract This paper suggests that the euro has crisis signalled a significant political moment in the European public sphere. Analysing the crisis as a conflict between the European decision-making elite and European civil society, I propose that the concentration of decision-making in the euro crisis at the European level, and the growing public critique aimed at the supranational centres of power, may lead to the politicisation of European integration and contribute to strengthening the European public sphere. Resumen Este artículo parte de la siguiente idea: la crisis del euro representa un momento político importante en la esfera pública europea. Si analizamos la crisis, entendida como un conflicto entre la elite y la sociedad civil europea, encontramos que por un lado se está centralizando la toma de decisiones a nivel europeo para la superación de la crisis del euro, hecho que, por otro lado, está provocando un aumento de la crítica pública dirigida hacia los centros supranacionales del poder. El presente texto explora si esta realidad en proceso puede favorecer una integración europea política y contribuir al fortalecimiento de la esfera pública europea. Keywords European public sphere, euro crisis, democracy, civil society, critique Palabras clave Esfera pública europea, crisis del euro, democracia, sociedad civil, crítica Summary 1. Introduction 2. The weak European public sphere 3. Elite decision-making and civil society critique in the euro crisis 4. Implications of the crisis for the European public sphere 5. Conclusion Sumario 1. Introducción 2. La débil esfera pública europea 3. Decisiones de la elite y la crítica de la sociedad civil en la crisis del euro 4. Implicaciones de la crisis para la esfera pública europea 5. Conclusión Democratisation through critique? The Euro Crisis and the prospects of the European Public Sphere ¿La crítica como medio para la democratización? La crisis del Euro y las perspectivas para la Esfera Pública Europea Markus Ojala (University of Helsinki) [mar[email protected]] E-ISSN:2173-1071 IC – Revista Científica de Información y Comunicación 2013, 10, pp. 75 - 98 Recibido: 01/06/2013 Aceptado: 08/10/2013 E-ISSN:2173-1071 IC – Revista Científica de Información y Comunicación 10 (2013) [pp. 75-98] 76 Markus Ojala 1. Introduction The public sphere serves an elementary role in the operation of democracy. In Enlightenment thought, the public sphere forms a social domain between the ruling authority and the civil society of private citizens. As a space for the formation of public opinion and collective will, the public sphere allows citizens to take part in the definition of social goals and enables them to control, or hold accountable, the decision-making elite. Conversely, political rule legitimises itself by responding to demands and critique formulated in the public sphere. In this way, the public sphere becomes essential for the democratic legitimacy of political authority in the European social imaginary (Habermas, 1989; Koselleck, 1988; Taylor, 2009). Although such debates on European culture and its central values, including democracy, have continued at least since the Enlightenment (Delanty and Rumford, 2005; Kaelble, 2002), the European Union (EU) as a political system has been built on an explicitly non-democratic basis (Hobsbawm, 1997, p. 268). Claims that the EU itself should be democratically governed have become more widespread only with the advancing political integration and accumulation of new competencies by EU institutions (Marks, 1997, pp. 31–3). Hagen Schulz-Forberg and Bo Stråth (2010) locate these claims in the particular political discourse that accompanied the new wave of European market integration in the 1980s (p. 4). Sketched by the Delors Committee in the late 1980s, and crystallised in the Maastricht Treaty, this project put forward a particular understanding of politics and democracy. According to its vision, a democratic EU would result from market integration: with the development of an internal market, the interests of European citizens would also automatically be channelled into decision-making. This is what Schulz-Forberg and Stråth (ibid.) critically label the hypocrisy of democracy-through-market. Observing the contemporary crisis in Europe from such a political historical perspective, we might argue that the market-driven project of European integration has not only run into an economic cul-de-sac but has also fuelled a deepening sense of illegitimacy of EU institutions. The decision-making practices during the present euro crisis have only strengthened the perception among European publics that, despite the rhetoric of the treaties, European economic and political integration has been taken forward without concurrent democratisation. The widespread critique voiced by civil society suggests that, not only the neoliberal integration project, but also the associated European vision of democracy-through-market, is in crisis. Who better to summarise this sense of a loss in legitimacy than Jürgen Habermas, who, in a 2011 interview, claimed that Europe is at a crossroads with regard to the future of democracy: Sometime after 2008, I understood that the process of expansion, integration and democratization doesn’t automatically move forward of its own accord, that it’s reversible, that for the IC – Revista Científica de Información y Comunicación 10 (2013) [pp. 75-98] E-ISSN:2173-1071 selecta 77 ThE EuRo CRISIS ANd ThE pRoSpECTS of ThE EuRopEAN publIC SphERE 1 In this paper, European civil society is understood as the assemblage of associations, organisations and movements that bring social problems into public discourse and address the general, as opposed to private, interest (see Habermas, 1996, p. 367; Kohler- Koch and Quittkat, 2009). first time in the history of the EU, we are actually experiencing a dismantling of democracy. I didn’t think this was possible. We’ve reached a crossroads. (Cited in Diez, 2011). Considering the blatant side-lining of democratic institutions and procedures in much of the decision-making during the euro crisis, and the erection of new disabling restrictions on the finance policy sovereignty of national governments, the perspectives for welfare and democracy in Europe are indeed grave. However, from the standpoint of European democratisation, this crisis may prove to be not just a negative event. The euro crisis can be viewed as a conflict between the European policy-making elite and European civil society,1 with the European news media forming the mediating element in the public sphere in which these contesting groups potentially meet and (re)negotiate the future of European integration. If strengthened, the European public sphere may bring forward this conflict between the European power centres and European citizens and help to solve it. It depends on whether the European elite, which hold key decision-making powers in the euro crisis, can be made accountable and whether European political institutions can channel the political demands emerging from civil society into the decision-making. This paper explores the prospects of the European public sphere in light of the recent developments in the euro crisis. I begin by reviewing some of the traditional problems cited when discussing the failures of the European public sphere in creating democratic legitimacy for European integration. The two subsequent sections outline some of the recent political developments in the ongoing euro crisis and reflect on their implications for the operation of European decision-making and its interaction with civil society critique. I suggest that we can interpret the euro crisis as an event in which both civil society and the European news media acknowledge the concentration of power at a European level, address the European decision-making elite and demand increasing public accountability of the European power centres. Together, the widespread anti-austerity protests, demands for expansionary economic policies and critique of EU’s democratic deficit amount to a growing questioning of the neoliberal integration project. In this context, I discuss the implications of the euro crisis for the strengthening of the European public sphere and whether the crisis could indicate a shift from the democracythrough-markets hypocrisy to a new phase of democratisation-through-critique. 2. The weak European public sphere Of course, the euro crisis does not mark the first time an event or controversy has brought the European institutional elite, the news media and their audiences together into a shared debate across the continent, thus making E-ISSN:2173-1071 IC – Revista Científica de Información y Comunicación 10 (2013) [pp. 75-98] 78 Markus Ojala Europe a public issue. In fact, the EU, especially the regular summits of European political leaders, has become part of the routine news agenda for quality European news media, even if it tends to spark little discussion among European citizens in normal circumstances. More substantial debates on European matters have been connected to events deemed historically significant, such as the introduction of the euro (de Vreese et al., 2001), or the (failed) ratification of the Constitutional Treaty (Fossum and Trenz, 2007; Oberhuber et al., 2005). Moreover, the EU institutions and politicians themselves have at times become the focus of simultaneous attention in all parts of Europe, particularly when a scandal has gained, or has been granted, a European dimension. For instance, the controversy over the EU’s sanctions on Austria after Jörg Haider’s election win in 2000 and the corruption scandals in the European Commission have triggered transnational debates on the significance and legitimacy of the EU as a political entity and on the meaning of European values (Schmidt-Gernig, 2002, p. 70; van de Steeg, 2006). These shared news events have been of interest in a number of crossnational comparative analyses on European political communication and the public sphere (see Machill et al., 2006; Peters et al., 2005). Many of these studies have indeed indicated a certain “Europeanisation” of public spheres, referring to a phenomenon in which European issues increasingly become discussed in the national media and within national political debates (e.g. Brüggemann and Kleinen-von Königslöw, 2009; della Porta, 2003; Erbe, 2005; Kevin, 2003). In addition to providing common international topics of discussion, European news events often involve more substantial dimensions of concurrence: shared discourses, frames, values, and constructions of European history and identity (Díez Medrano, 2003; Eide et al., 2008; Olausson, 2010; Pfetsch et al., 2004; Trenz, 2007; Triandafyllidou, 2009; Triandafyllidou et al., 2009). Not only do news media share a similar international news agenda, but they also often tend to look at European issues from much the same angles. However, given the primacy of the national media systems in Europe, the most widely shared perspective is, somewhat paradoxically, the one that adopts a national framework to coverage of European issues (Heikkilä and Kunelius, 2008; Preston, 2009). The most notable feature of the European public sphere is its fragmentation into a multitude of local, regional, national and transnational publics. This fragmentation is reflected in the plurality of media outlets each gathering their own audiences, thus creating rather exclusive, specialised and limited spaces of public communication on European matters (Kevin, 2003; Corcoran and Fahy, 2009). The news media operate according to their own logic, remain rather separate from each other, and largely fail to mediate the debates between the European elite, national elite and civil society publics. In other words, the media are not capable of bringing together the transnational and national political elites and European civil society into a common European discussion (Eriksen, 2007; Schulz-Forberg and Stråth, 2010). Indeed, European public communication has IC – Revista Científica de Información y Comunicación 10 (2013) [pp. 75-98] E-ISSN:2173-1071 selecta 79 ThE EuRo CRISIS ANd ThE pRoSpECTS of ThE EuRopEAN publIC SphERE remained so fragmented that, for many critical observers, it does not even make sense to speak of a European public sphere. For instance, Erik Eriksen (2005) has instead preferred to discuss specialised elite transnational networks and the communicative spaces they create as part of European policy-coordination and decision-making practices. The failure of the mainstream media to integrate European publics in a common Europe-wide debate can partly be explained by their dependence on public authorities and decision-makers as their primary news sources. This news media elite bias has been indicated in many studies on political communication and media-state relations (e.g. Bennett, 1990; Robinson, 2001), as well as in studies on European political communication (e.g. Koopmans, 2004; Statham, 2007). However, in the case of the European public sphere, a better term for the phenomenon might be a double elite bias. This is created when the news media primarily follow the European authorities’ agenda in the coverage of European matters, while balancing this focus with another elite bias, namely, by giving voice to the national elite’s views on the issues. In this way, the mainstream news media tend to adopt elite discourses and definitions of European political questions and their solutions while largely excluding civil society voices and the alternative definitions emerging from social movements and voluntary associations. The double elite bias in the mainstream news media coverage of European issues threatens to narrow down publicly available political discourses. On the one side are the European decision-making elite, who are in charge of the EU’s policy formation, while on the other are the national political elite, which typically play into populist anti-EU sentiments and present the union as a threat to sovereignty, democracy, national economy and social welfare. While partly understandable, the habitual concentration on this clearcut conflict between the EU and the national institutions by the mainstream media results in a simplistic representation of the European political division as being one between the pro-European internationalists and the anti-European nationalists (cf. Linden-Retek, 2012). With the exclusion of European civil society voices from political debates, the news media effectively limit the discourse on Europe and frame it within the lines of more integration versus disintegration, without giving space to discussions on what kind of integration. Consequently, news journalism is in danger of promoting an image of the EU as an intergovernmental body, instead of a polity with internal ideological struggles over its political direction. Of course, the news media are not the only institutions to blame for the problems in the European public sphere. Many other factors in the political system can explain why public communication on European matters has not resulted in a more coherent Europe-wide political debate or in the formation of a European public opinion in any meaningful sense. Scholars of European E-ISSN:2173-1071 IC – Revista Científica de Información y Comunicación 10 (2013) [pp. 75-98] 80 Markus Ojala politics often make general acknowledgements regarding the non-existence of a shared European identity, a European polity, a European public opinion, or, indeed, a European democracy (Mörä, 2009). Thus, the European public sphere cannot be analysed by examining the European media alone, but must be assessed against its political and institutional background. The capacity of the European public sphere to strengthen the democratic processes on the European level depends not only on the news media, but also on the capacity of the European political system to integrate into its decision-making critiques and demands formulated in civil society. A major impediment to a functioning European public sphere is the EU itself as a political system. Relationships of accountability, representativeness and responsibility are vague in EU’s political system that occupies a place somewhere between a federal state and a federation of independent states. Moreover, the uneven integration process has led to a union that has a high concentration of power in some areas (as in monetary policy), but almost no power in others (as in fiscal policy). In the absence of a truly political union, as called for by Habermas (2001), the EU is in many ways ill-equipped to respond to public critique and to channel political demands emanating from civil society (Kohler-Koch, 2009). Unable to operate either democratically or effectively, the EU suffers from the lack of both input-oriented and output-oriented legitimacy (Scharpf, 2011): on the one hand, the decisions made on the European level do not result from democratic deliberation among citizens and the channelling of their demands through the European political system, and, on the other, the EU seems increasingly unable to provide the citizens with solutions to the problems the polity is facing. Therefore, from the perspective of the public sphere the institutional problem in Europe is not so much the lack of Europe-wide media or platforms of debate. The more acute problem is the absence of political institutions that could be referred to by European civil society. There is no political centre for the European public sphere with which citizens and their critique can be connected, and the decision-making elite public and the counter-public of civil society have remained separated. As a consequence, the European public sphere remains decidedly weak (Eriksen, 2007; Fraser, 2007): the public protests and critique are lost in the fragmented public sphere, and there are no real ways of channelling them into institutional political processes. Of course, the weakness of the public sphere only adds to the legitimacy problem of the EU and contributes to the rise of anti-systemic, or anti-European, political forces (cf. Karppinen, 2009). The ascent of nationalist populism in Europe, and particularly the rise of Golden Dawn in Greece, may partly be seen as an alarming indication of how the current management of the euro crisis is further increasing the sense of illegitimacy of European decision-making (van Gent et al., 2013). IC – Revista Científica de Información y Comunicación 10 (2013) [pp. 75-98] E-ISSN:2173-1071 selecta 81 ThE EuRo CRISIS ANd ThE pRoSpECTS of ThE EuRopEAN publIC SphERE 3. Elite decision-making and civil society critique in the euro crisis Overall, the potential for the European public sphere to function as a platform for democratic deliberation and civil society supervision over political decision-making is severely hampered by its structural fragmentation, elite-driven information flows and the lack of clear institutional relationships of responsibility and accountability in the EU. As Aeron Davis (2010) has pointed out, a possible consequence of the inability of the public sphere to connect citizens with decisionmaking processes is the isolation and insulation of the specialist elite public from wider social and political debates in society (pp. 132–4). In light of the discussion above, it is not difficult to find arguments for an existence of this kind of disconnect between the decision-making elite and civil society in Europe. Since the spring of 2010, European authorities have designed and implemented a wide range of policies to specifically address the euro crisis. The crisis itself has primarily been presented in terms of market turmoil, particularly as one that is hampering the operation of banks and their lending practices by diminishing trust in the financial markets. This dominant elite interpretation of the nature of the euro crisis can be evinced in the way that many European bureaucrats and decision-makers, including Olli Rehn, Commissioner for Economic and Monetary Affairs, have habitually justified the policy measures with the stated intention of calming and stabilising the markets and restoring financial market confidence in the overall economy (e.g. Rehn, 2012, 2013b). Some of the policy measures have directly addressed the perceived liquidity crisis in the banks of the eurozone. Thus the European Central Bank (ECB) has not only lowered interest rates, but has also engaged in non-standard monetary policy responses and injected new money into the banking system in order to encourage banks to increase their lending to businesses and consumers and to kick-start growth again (Traynor, 2012; Cour-Thimann and Winkler, 2013). Other measures have been more indirect in nature. Building confidence among banks in the soundness of the overall financial system has been the primary motive behind the 2010 and 2011 stress tests of the eurozone banks, conducted by the European Banking Authority, and behind the agreement on the Single Supervisory Mechanism (EBA, 2011a, 2011b; ECB, 2013). Similarly, the famous public pledge by ECB President Mario Draghi to do “whatever it takes” to secure the stability of the financial markets and to prevent the break-up of the eurozone was made with the aim of convincing banks of positive future prospects and persuading them to increase credit flows to the real economy (Draghi, 2012a, 2012b). Another primary interpretation of the euro crisis has been one of a sovereign debt crisis, referring to the rapid acceleration of interest rates on government debt to unsustainable levels in some of the eurozone countries. Of course, the interest rate hikes are directly linked to the broader financial market E-ISSN:2173-1071 IC – Revista Científica de Información y Comunicación 10 (2013) [pp. 75-98] 82 Markus Ojala turmoil, and are simply one of its manifestations: lenders have become to feel insecure about the capability of governments to pay back their accumulated debt, which has led to the rise of the interest rates on new credit (Patomäki, 2013, pp. 75–76; Wray, 2012, p. 182). One part of the policy response to these fears have been the so-called bail-out loans to Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Cyprus, as well as the creation of the European Financial Stability Facility, the European Financial Stabilisation Mechanism and the European Stability Mechanism to handle these bail-outs (CESifo, 2012; EEAG, 2012). In the meantime, the ECB has engaged in operations to purchase bonds issued by troubled governments from secondary markets in order to bring down the interest rates and thus alleviate the perceived risk of the break-up of the eurozone (Cœuré, 2013). The other part of the policy response has consisted of imposing strict austerity programs to reduce public spending, as well as reaching eurozone-wide agreements on the Fiscal Compact, and on the so-called six-pack and two-pack regulatory reforms. They have purportedly been designed to improve market confidence in the longer-term growth prospects and competitiveness of eurozone economies (Rehn, 2013a). Regardless of the success of these various policy measures and the soundness of the economic rationales behind them, this brief and incomplete account serves to illustrate how active the European policy elite have been during the euro crisis. A great deal of the essential decision-making in the crisis has been taken at the supranational level in key EU institutions, and the crisis has intensified policy formulation by, and coordination between, the European Council, the Euro Group of finance ministers, the Commission and the ECB. The execution of monetary operations, creation of finance mechanisms, imposition of economic policies and structural reforms on debtor governments, as well as the formulation of new eurozone-wide regulatory measures, are, in turn, decisions that greatly affect and delimit parliamentary policy-making independence at the national level (Patomäki, 2013, pp. 94–95). The euro crisis has also witnessed the formation of new transnational coordinative and decision-making cliques, such as the Troika, which has organised the bail-out loans and overseen the accompanying structural reforms in debtor countries, and the Frankfurt Group, consisting of the leaders of Germany and France, as well as the heads of the Euro Group, the ECB, the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund. These unelected bodies have used considerable power over national parliaments during the crisis (Scharpf, 2011; The Economist, 2011). At the same time, the six-pack and twopack regulatory reforms to the Stability and Growth Pact have bestowed new supervisory and regulatory powers on the EU Commission and Parliament (EC, 2013; Lemangnen, 2013). The assumption of new responsibilities by the European institutions and the increased execution of power at the supranational level have not gone unnoticed by European civil society. As a response to the eurozone elite’s crisis policies, popular resistance has carried a substantial European dimension. Civil IC – Revista Científica de Información y Comunicación 10 (2013) [pp. 75-98] E-ISSN:2173-1071 selecta 83 ThE EuRo CRISIS ANd ThE pRoSpECTS of ThE EuRopEAN publIC SphERE society organisations (CSOs), political movements and public demonstrators across the eurozone, particularly in the worst-hit countries, have held the supranational bodies responsible for the social and economic crises and the crippling policies imposed on the public and private sectors (e.g. Kington et al., 2012; Phillips, 2011; Teevs, 2013; van Gent et al., 2013). Not only have there been many expressions of transnational solidarity among protesters in different eurozone countries, but demonstrators have also posited themselves directly against the European power elite (e.g. Durkin, 2013; McMahon, 2012; RT, 2013). In the public mobilisation sparked by the euro crisis, the constructed political divides have partly run along national lines. This can be observed, for instance, in the anti-German demonstrations in Greece and Cyprus and in the way ethnocentric discourses about the profligate southern Europeans have been mobilised with considerable success in some of the creditor countries (e.g. Kollewe, 2012; Pop and Kidner, 2012; Savaricas, 2013). The tendency of the mainstream media to nationalise issues has undoubtedly contributed to such discourses and to a focus on national politics in much of the euro crisis debate. However, despite these limitations posed by the media systems and journalistic practices, the public debate has also witnessed an unmistakably European frame, which has been evident in the critiques against austerity measures, European bank bailouts and other official crisis responses, as well as against the economic policy orthodoxy underlying these decisions. In this opposition directed at the European power centres, street protesters, social movements and CSOs have received public support from economists and political analysts who have grown increasingly disillusioned with the economic policy doctrines established by the eurozone elite and with their impact on the European economy. With highly visible interventions by influential economists, such as Paul Krugman and Paul de Grauwe, the questioning of the dominant crisis policy has entered the mainstream news agenda, and even in such elite media platforms as the Financial Times explicit denouncements have been repeatedly aimed at the eurozone decision-makers by prominent opinion leaders (e.g. Krugman, 2012; Münchau, 2013; Pérez, 2011; Wolf, 2011, 2013). These developments point to a growing concentration of the public debate and political action on the European level, something that Habermas (2001) expected would follow from the gradual shift of power from national to European institutions (p. 17). It is now not only lobbyists and business organisations in Brussels that are involved in European politics, but also, increasingly, political parties, labour unions, CSOs, social movements and street demonstrators. As a consequence, the economic crisis in the eurozone has become deeply politicised; that is, it has been translated into an issue of political and social controversy all over Europe. The clearest indication of this politicisation is the way the EU has become a hot topic in a number of national elections since 2010 (Chryssogelos, 2013). One of the earliest member states to witness the political impact of the E-ISSN:2173-1071 IC – Revista Científica de Información y Comunicación 10 (2013) [pp. 75-98] 90 Markus Ojala moment, a turning point – or, in Habermas’ words, a crossroads – in which the future direction is still unclear. Some involved in the euro crisis debate doubt that Europe could work as a democratic political entity and argue that the sovereign nation-states are the only spaces in which democracy can realistically be expected to function. We might ask, however, whether turning back the integration process and a return towards the rule of sovereign nationstates are viable alternatives. Are national institutions capable of dealing with global problems, or do we need supranational forms of governance? If the answer is that transnational institutions of decision-making are in the European public interest, then the issue of the democratic legitimacy of such powers will not go away. 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