October 8th, 2019 
Artemis Photiadou 
The more the EU seems to resemble a state rather than an international organisation, writes Pippa Catterall, the more it becomes judged by the normative expectations of how democratic states are. But it is as an international organisation that it should be judged.
No international organisation is ‘democratic’. Indeed, there is only one international organisation which even tries to be democratic, the one called the European Union. All international organisations increasingly have impacts behind borders, particularly those which – like the EU – deal primarily with trade, because of the way international trade has come to be dominated by regulations and standards. Only the EU has sought to give voice to those affected by such developments, in the form of a directly-elected parliament representative of the peoples it encompasses, rather than simply being beholden to its Member States. Yet this most democratic of international organisations is also the one which is most often traduced as ‘undemocratic’. Why?
The most obvious explanation is that it is not widely grasped that the EU is much more democratic than its analogues among international organisations. For instance, the irony of Leave voters calling the EU ‘undemocratic’ while wanting to operate under WTO rules instead, seems to be lost on them. The global protests which followed the founding of the WTO, not least in Seattle in 1999, demonstrated an appreciation then, among other things, of how deeply undemocratic the WTO was. It still is. Like virtually all international organisations, the WTO’s membership consists of legal persons, called states, rather than natural ones, actual human beings. The same holds true for those international consortia of trading states – such as Mercosur, ASEAN, the Cairns Group, and so on – which increasingly have become significant players in the diplomacy of world trade. The states which are members of these bodies may be mandated by their domestic parliaments on how they handle issues at the WTO and similar organisations, and they may be scrutinised on what they have agreed in those parliaments. However, if this is democracy it is an attenuated form.
The same observation could hold for all the other international organisations Leave voters seem quite happy for Britain to remain in. The UN, NATO, the Commonwealth, together with a host of other less well-known bodies, are all organisations which – at best – only allow states rather than peoples directly, to participate in their decision-making processes. To all of these bodies as well, Britain is a net contributor. That is not to say that there are not benefits to the UK from its membership of, for instance, the International Whaling Commission. However, neither the benefits nor the effects of British membership of the IWC will be apparent to the average Briton, if they are aware of it at all. They rightly do not perceive any discernible impacts on their lives of such membership, whereas they do think they are affected by Britain’s membership of the EU. So the second reason for the complaint that the EU is ‘undemocratic’ is the perception that it has imposed on people decisions that affect them and to which they have not consented.
To a large extent this perception reflects the peculiarities of an international organisation which tries to be democratic. Representation at the EU is both popular (through the parliament) and international (through the Member States). For the latter, there is a perennial incentive to blame the EU as an institution for decisions to which they have been party and usually supported, but which may be unpopular with sections of their domestic electorates. Britain is by no means the only Member State whose politicians have acted in this way. The democratisation of the EU through the gradual extension of the powers of the parliament has not prevented this behaviour by Member States. Indeed, as the intrusiveness of international trade and relations has required growing competences on the part of international bodies like the EU, so the incentives for Member States to play to the gallery of their national audiences has similarly increased.
In the process of acquiring these growing competences, the EU has come to acquire some, though only some, of the appurtenances of a state. This has become more apparent since the introduction of the Single Market, of which the Thatcher government were among the chief progenitors. The attempt to harmonise trade and related activities across all Member States involves the creation of top-level rules which apply as evenly as possible throughout. Such developments make the impact of the EU on citizens more apparent than with other international organisations. Yet, because it remains fundamentally an international organisation, it does not have a ‘government’ which can be voted out by the disgruntled. Its parliament makes laws and holds confirmation hearings on appointees, but those appointees are placed there by horse-trading between the Member States, rather than directly.
In that sense, the EU’s organisation falls someway between that of an international organisation (which few people expect to be democratic), and that of a state. However, the more the EU seems to resemble a state rather than an international organisation, the more it has become judged by the normative expectations of how democratic the former rather than the latter are. For those who see states as bodies where democratic accountability involves throwing out governments (something that cannot directly happen at EU level), the absence of such mechanisms can easily seem to be a democratic deficit.
Yet the EU is not a state, nor is it likely to be in the foreseeable future. Nor does it have the operational functionality of a state, which within the EU is delivered through its contracting parties, the Member States. The temptation to measure its democratic procedures by the standards according to which its Member States are judged – even though not all of them would pass – is understandable but misconceived. In origins and still in most of its characteristics, the EU is an international organisation. As such it provides benefits for those who live in its Member States through harmonising trade and exchange across their territories. Uniquely for an international organisation, it has a directly-elected parliament in which the rules governing those processes can be proposed, scrutinised and amended. Among the gallery of its peers – that is, other international organisations – it is a singular example of an attempt to democratise the processes which shape our globalised world. It is, of course, not without its flaws. But it is as an international organisation, rather than as a state, that those flaws should be judged. However, that will not stop its detractors misleadingly claiming that it is ‘undemocratic’.
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Pippa Catterall is Professor of History and Policy at the University of Westminster.
All articles posted on this blog give the views of the author(s), and not the position of LSE British Politics and Policy, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Featured image credit: Pixabay (Public Domain).
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An asset to Boris Johnson: ideology in Brexit Britain
In the aftermath of the success of the Leave campaign in the 2016 referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU, and the ascendency of Donald Trump to the US presidency, there was an enormous amount of debate, discussion, and contemplation of what drove those outcomes. Was it economics? Or culture? Or, more likely, some combination of the two? There is now widespread agreement that a component of the explanation is the renewed prominence of a familiar but sometimes overlooked ideology: populism. In general, populism has been defined as a reduction of the world into an opposition between elites and masses, but this applies to varieties on both the left and right. Given political events, we were interested in the particular variety of that ideology that seemed to have played a part in driving them: authoritarian populism. In particular, we were interested in what beliefs constitute that ideology, and who the people who hold them are.
Using previous research on the beliefs of authoritarian populists as our starting point, we measured eight different beliefs: support for patriotism, support for a ‘strong and tough’ foreign policy, disapproval of the EU, distrust in EU institutions, scepticism regarding the need to protect human rights, a negative view of immigration, opposition to immigration from outside the EU and self-reported left-right political placement. To find out how widespread these beliefs are amongst the British public, we asked a representative sample of 14,923 adults from YouGov’s panel of respondents for their views. Our survey was fielded at various points from 30 May 2017 to 2 March 2018, and thus encompassed a range of political events including the 2017 general election. The resulting sample gave us an excellent opportunity to paint a picture of the ideological landscape in Brexit Britain.
Our first finding was that we live in a country of authoritarian populists. More than half of the public fall into an ideological group with notable authoritarian populist views. Overall, using a process in which we test which beliefs cluster together, we found five ideological groups in the population: mainstream populists (17%), centrist weak populists (20%), moderates (31%), left-wing progressives (18%), and right-wing populists (14%). Both of the first two groups are centrist in terms of left and right and display similarly strong levels of authoritarian populist beliefs. They differ only in the sense that centrist weak populists are less supportive of strong and tough foreign policy, and much less negative about immigration. Moderates are true to their name; centrist in left-right position, with minimal support for authoritarian populist beliefs except that, like the vast majority of the population, they are supportive of patriotism. Indeed, the only group that is notably less supportive of patriotism is the left-wing progressives (though they are not roundly opposed), and this group constitutes the most clear opponent of the authoritarian populist ideology overall.
Standing in stark opposition is the right-wing populists who, as the name suggests are firmly on the right of the left-right spectrum and strongly supportive of all the authoritarian beliefs that we asked about. Overall, then, the picture is one of widespread sympathy for many of the elements of authoritarian populist ideology, with only two of five ideological groups displaying marked opposition: moderates and left-wing populists (albeit, they constitute almost half of the population between them).
But what do these groups look like in terms of demographics? Well, right-wing populists are the only group that is a majority male (58%), whilst also having the oldest average age (56) in contrast to the much younger moderates (average: 44) and left-wing progressives (42). In terms of social grade, the only group that draws a majority from the lower categories (C2, D, and E) is mainstream populists, whilst moderates and left-wing progressives are marked by being majority higher social grade (A, B, and C1): 61% and 68% respectively.
This divide is also reflected in the educational qualifications of the groups: the two groups with the highest proportion of university educated people are moderates (42%) and left-wing progressives (58%). This all fits with the common observation that the adherents of the ideology that supported Brexit tend towards being older, male, from lower social grades, and with lower levels of education. However, it must be stressed that these are only tendencies: there are significant minorities of women, younger, higher social grade, and university educated people amongst right-wing populists, mainstream populists, and centrist weak populists. Indeed, this is why it is important to measure ideology in its own right: we cannot rely on demographics alone to understand why people behave the way they do in relation to politics.
One of the most important political behaviours is voting, and there was an important and dramatic realignment in party support amongst the ideological groups between the 2015 and 2017 general elections. Figures 1 and 2 show the proportions of each ideological group who cast their votes for each party in 2015 and 2017. In line with the tendency for the two largest parties to cannibalise the votes of smaller parties in 2017 (combined, they gained 82.4% of the votes cast) we observed a shift towards Labour and especially the Conservatives amongst mainstream populists and centrist weak populists. More dramatically, the already healthy 2015 levels of support for Labour (58%) amongst left-wing progressives grew to three quarters (76%) in 2017, whilst the two-thirds (67%) of right-wing populists who support the Conservatives in 2015 grew to nine in ten (91%) in 2017. We know the reason for these realignments: 2017 constituted ‘the Brexit general election,’ with voters largely moving to the party that advocated their preferred, or at least a tolerable, position on the UK’s exit from the EU.
But, dominant though it is, Brexit is only one manifestation of the underlying ideological cleavage with which we are concerned. It is important because it provides a ready shortcut for the population to understand the positions of politicians, and it has been exploited by politicians to activate and sustain this ideological divide. A key actor in that process of activation and sustenance has been Boris Johnson. In the days and weeks since ascending to the position of prime minister he has dedicated much time to deploying rhetoric and questionable constitutional manoeuvres designed to remind the swathe of the population with at least some authoritarian populist leanings that he is on their side. He no longer needs to worry about UKIP and has, to a significant extent, disarmed the threat from the Brexit Party, a trend that is likely to be magnified when voters decide where to place their cross on the ballot paper.
Given the UK’s electoral system, the newly salient divide between the Liberal Democrats and Labour over Brexit, and the apparent failure of Jeremy Corbyn’s attempts to re-activate left-right considerations amongst a large enough section of the electorate, Mr Johnson can afford to be cautiously optimistic the coming general election. If those conditions remain and he keeps banging the Brexit drum, there is a majority of the electorate with staunch or partial authoritarian populist beliefs who are likely to support him. Indeed, in addition to their genuine and heartfelt ideological positions and policy concerns, this might be part of the reason that many MPs have so far been disinclined to support holding another general election.
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Note: the above draws on the authors’ chapter in a new edited volume in honour of Professor Anthony King, available here.
About the Authors
All articles posted on this blog give the views of the author(s), and not the position of LSE British Politics and Policy, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.