Depoliticisation and membership fatalism: A genealogy of EU democracy protection

Abstract

Speaker: Tom Theuns, University of Leiden Discussant: Christopher Bickerton This paper reflects on ‘missed opportunities’ in EU democracy protection stemming from around the turn of the century. To this end, the paper presents a genealogy of EU democracy protection since the early 1990s. This paper proposes that there are two key flaws in the EU’s handling of the democracy and rule of law crisis from 2010 onwards. The first flaw is the depoliticisation of responses: the idea that the primary arena for responding to regressions on liberal democratic norms is the judicial one, and that unanimity is a political prerequisite for robust action. The second flaw is membership fatalism: the idea that member states have total and final sovereignty over their membership of the European Union in spite of governance failures and fundamental rights violations. This paper examines how these flaws emerged. The historical context for why democratic backsliding in the EU came to be seen through a largely depoliticised and fatalistic lens is complex. Neither the methodology the speaker uses here, nor the purpose of their analysis are appropriate for trying to parse this history into necessary and sufficient causes. Instead, he proposes to evaluate recent developments in European integration that help us understand how these flaws emerged. Specifically, this paper argues that, first, the emergence of sanctions mechanisms to respond to violations of democratic norms and fundamental rights in the 1990s and, second, the early response to the rise of right-wing populism and Euroscepticism in the early 2000s, shed light on why, over the course of the past 15 years or so, EU responses to democratic and rule of law backsliding have been weak.