🇪🇺 Post-American Europe, Part II: Nomocracy and the European Model of Democratic Power
How the EU’s rule-based governance offers a viable blueprint for global cooperation in an age of authoritarian resurgence
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Note - this is part two in a three-part series. If you missed part one, click here:
🇪🇺Post-American Europe, Part I: The Deep Historical Logic of European Unity
From medieval rivalry to the Pax Democratica: why Europe’s unique political ecology was always destined for integration, and why it must now defend that legacy alone
International liaison and democracy
There are more than one hundred sovereign countries in the world, where problems of international governance are becoming increasingly pressing every day. Nuclear proliferation, climate change, and the management of international trade are just a few of the myriad international problems that range from critical to existential.
Autocracies do not have organic mechanisms for international liaison. No Chinese official would ever consider a good career move to be a position in any Russian bureaucracy; cross-investments between China and Russia are tiny and managed in a bureaucratic manner.
Additionally, absolute power implies absolute powerlessness for commitment. The Russian and Chinese emperors (as Hitler and Stalin in the 1940s) cannot trust any mutual treaty because neither a legal nor an oligarchic system of checks and balances can guarantee any deal; dictators are trapped in the same logic of distrust towards their subordinates, the public, and other autocrats.
Conversely, the 80 years of American Hegemony and the existence of the EU have shown us that democratic international cooperation is real and organic, and in fact, only autocratic involution threatens it. The European ecosystem of competing jurisdictions, now complemented by a confederal structure, offers less efficient but more robust governance than the large superstates' competing Hegemony.
Nomocratic Europe
In its current form, European governance does not have many supporters: the Europeanists are typically for federalism, and they often ignore that even long-established multi-lingual republics (Switzerland) are always consociational and that their executive is intrinsically lethargic. The nationalists, by comparison, are simply advocating for greater national sovereignty for medium to micro-states in an Era of aggressive super-states competing for global dominion.
On the other hand, for me, the EU is the best political system in the World. The EU is primarily a harmonizing and coordinating structure. Its "government," the European Commission, is a consociational executive where the two major European leagues of parties are represented.
All legal resolutions must be approved by a super-majority of European governments in the EU Council, a lengthy process with multiple veto points. This structure, while slow and annoying, has been enormously useful, creating an internal market, a common currency, and national political elites used to international liaison.
A significant consequence of its confederal structure is that the EU and its member states are now in a regime of Legislative dominance.
Historically, both the Executive and the Judicial branches of the government oversee the application of Law, but European legislation is enacted by a distant legislature with scarce sway over the national executives. Consequently, the institutional coherence of European governance depends on two mechanisms: on one hand, European legislation is often technical and consensual (by surviving a lengthy consociational process of approval). On the other hand, Europe needs strong independent judiciaries that enforce “foreign” legislation even when the national executive is reluctant.
Our confederacy, by its distributed nature and intrinsic weak executive, is a nomocracy, a state where the typical rules vs discretion trade-off is deeply tilted towards rules. In economic governance, this was a main determinant of the “Battle of Ideas” that was bitterly fought around the Euro crisis: France often asked for highly political action that the EU could only carry out by supermajority, and simultaneously was reluctant to cede sovereignty to the EU institutions, while Germany was extremely reluctant to bold action beyond the institutional framework in place, even if obviously necessary.
Of course, Europe, as a confederacy, can only exist in a normative straitjacket. It is also true that “a great power comes with a great responsibility”, and by giving most power to rules, the need for well-designed rules becomes existential.
To be sustainable, rules shall be context-sensitive and dynamically consistent. Each correction of the fiscal and economic European compacts since the introduction of the Euro has moved in that direction, but more often after a crisis than due to a forward-looking design.
Institutional Strengthening
In the even more critical realm of political governance, the high quality of European constitutional arrangements (typically based on parliamentarianism and proportional representation) is behind the continent's resilience in the age of populism.
Nationalist forces are often represented and sometimes integrated into governments, but they must partner with moderate parties to allow for an orderly incorporation of populist-nationalist viewpoints, rather than a sudden takeover. Unfortunately, however, parliamentarianism is not universal in the EU. France, now the indispensable and leading liberal nation in Europe, has a dangerous presidentialist system.
The long history of Latin American presidentialism, as well as the recent debacles in South Korea and the United States, fully vindicates the arguments of Juan Linz and suggests the need for electoral and constitutional reform in France to move towards the parliamentarian and proportional standard of the rest of the continent.
The institutional crisis is also apparent in the Judicial branch, where “lawfare” accusations are now universal in almost any democracy. Collegiality and sortition were the guardians of the rule of Law in the ancient republics (see Aristotle’s “Constitution of the Athenians”), and they are becoming more necessary by the day in all democracies: sortition among a subset of eligible judges is the best mechanism for the election of the members of High Court that can legitimately uphold the rules of the political game with a maximum of legitimacy and a minimum risk of capture.
Finally, regarding military and foreign policy issues, Europe is not a nation, and the EU institutions are ill-equipped to handle the fast-paced, high-stakes political decisions required during security crises.
France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Poland, and Sweden have the capability and responsibility to take independent military initiatives. They do not need to wait for EU consensus to deploy troops, transfer weapons, invest in their military, or expand their intelligence services. The infrastructure for Russia's containment may (or may not) be designed and implemented in Brussels, but concrete actions, which carry enormous political responsibility and require direct democratic legitimacy must depend on the major European countries.
The emerging security framework must blend the old traditional European practice of military coalition building and diplomacy with the new institutional instruments of the European Union.
Arturo Macías is an Economist at the Spanish Central Bank. He has made several academic contributions on voting mechanisms, natural resource economics, and the mind-body problem, and regularly writes on the Effective Altruism Forum. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily coincide with those of Banco de España or the Eurosystem.
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Thanks for the second text as well. Exciting topics and insights as regarding governance concerning global and regional development.
My experience among world federalists, as in Democracy Without Borders, is that the EU is seen as an inspiration and model for uniting and governing the planet as a whole. Do you have a similar experience and thoughts?
The three articles of "Post American Europe" are now available:
In the first article, I examine the historical roots of the European Union (EU): Europe was an ecology of competing, often warring jurisdictions that, after the Second World War, were integrated into the American Pax Democratica. Our generational challenge is to maintain the greatest American legacy: the EU.
https://www.frenchdispatch.eu/p/post-american-europe-historical-roots-eu-integration?r=biy76&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
In the second article, the complex governance of the EU is characterised as a nomocracy, a harmonising and consociational confederacy which is less efficient but more robust than the other large international actors. Minimalistic institutional reform is proposed to strengthen European democracies in the age of populism.
https://www.frenchdispatch.eu/p/post-american-europe-eu-rule-based-democracy-authoritarianism?r=biy76&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
The final instalment proposes policies to address technological dependency and the foreign policy stance of the post-American Europe: technological sovereignty, competition reform, and a renewed liberal order in Europe's near abroad:
https://www.frenchdispatch.eu/p/post-american-europe-eu-technological-sovereignty-liberal-order?r=biy76&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false