European Governance and the Democratic Deficit:

Where does Power Lie in the EU?

The European Union is one of the most important political structures in the world today and also one of the most complex. With no government and so many sources of influence and control, where does power really lie in the EU? Michelle Cini investigates.

or all students of politics, power is the core concept, the number one tool of the trade. At its most basic level, power is the ability to control ones environment, and within that environment to shape the conduct of others. Back in 1974, Steven Lukes identied power as having three dimensions: the rst relates to observable behaviour in decision-making, x getting y to do something they would not otherwise do; a second, the capacity to stop things from happening, which includes so-called non-decisions and can be more covert; and the third, control over the political agenda. With such denitions to hand, applying the concept of power to the European Union should be relatively straightforward. Indeed, if we are unable to talk about where power lies in the Union, we should probably not be talking about EU politics at all. But while our understanding of power, whether implicitly or explicitly, underpins all informed debates about what the European project is and how it might evolve, the extremely diffuse and complex nature of the EU makes this a more challenging task than one might at rst imagine.

Power in the EU
There are, inevitably, numerous ways in which to think about power in the EU. Two closely interrelated characteristics of the European Union direct us along one particular line of inquiry. The rst follows from a fairly innocuous observation about the EUs complexity, that is, that the EU is polycentric. In other words, there exist many potential centres of power in the Union. We know this because we know that the EU comprises 27 member states, with 27 national governments, and hundreds of regional and local authorities. It also comprises institutions and agencies, and involves myriad political, economic and societal actors, all of whom have some stake in or who seek to inuence European politics. Thus, we might expect, at the outset, power to be distributed, albeit unequally, across a range of those

actors and institutions. Whether it is or not, then, is an empirical question. The ip side to the EUs polycentric character is that it lacks a government. Even so, the EU is heavily engaged in governing through its component parts: through the European Council, which comprises, collectively, the heads of government and state, and which determines the strategic direction of the Union and provides leadership across a wide range of politically salient policies; through the EU Council, which serves as a forum for negotiation and which takes decisions in specic issue areas; through the European Commission, which sets annual and multi-annual political agendas and manages EU programmes and the Budget; through the European Parliament, which shares decision-taking responsibility with the Council; through individual, bilateral or multilateral groups of national governments providing leadership, often outside the formal framework of the Unions institutions; through proactive agenda-setting and, on occasion if this is not a contradiction in terms by foot-dragging and resisting change; and, nally, through a host of interests, NGOs and lobbyists, which in a different way are involved in the governing of the EU.

The flip side of the EUs polycentric character is that it lacks a single government

Governance but no Sign of a Government

An alternative starting point for identifying where power lies in the EU is simply to look at the different member states, or rather their national governments. A credible assumption might be that those governments whose countries enjoy the largest and the strongest economies, and which have the largest populations and territories, will be able to exercise power most effectively. Germany inevitably comes top of the list of powerful EU member states, while acknowledging other big beasts of Europe: the UK, France and perhaps Italy and Spain. Some commentators have even begun to see Poland as a contender for membership of this bloc. Dominant theoApril 2011 13

retical accounts of the European integration process support the view of the EU as, in essence, an intergovernmental organisation, even where they also recognise the distinctiveness of the institutional (and highly institutionalised) environment in which national governments are now forced to relate to each other. And even for non-adherents of these theories, it would be hard to contest the centrality of the (larger) member states in wielding power in the EU. Yet, we cannot ignore the power wielded by the European Unions institutions, particularly those sometimes referred to as its supranational institutions: the European Commission, European Parliament and the (European) Court of Justice. Leaving aside the often intricate theoretical battles in which scholars of the EU frequently engage, the eld of dispute tends to come down to whether one believes, or can nd evidence to support the view, that the EU institutions do more than just reect and represent the views of the (dominant) member states; that they are able to exercise power in their own right, autonomously and beyond what might be deemed peripheral decisiontaking. These days there are perhaps only a few students of the EU who would claim that these institutions are the central repositories of EU power. The claims attached to the European institutions tend now to be subtler than this, as they seek to contest the face-value assumptions, often adhered to by policy-makers themselves, that the only actors that really matter in international politics are states. Those who in the past might have been labelled supranationalists are today often attracted to an alternative way of understanding the EU. For this, we return to the earlier observation about the EUs inherent polycentrism: while there is no one government in or of the EU, there is governance. At a supercial level, governance can be a bit of a slippery concept, hard to pin down. It implies a rather uid, non-hierarchical and less institutionalised process of governing than is normally entailed by the idea of government, one that allows for but does not necessarily assume the involvement of a range of actors and organisations that have the capacity, indeed the power, to shape EU action. To talk of governance, then, is to speak of the transformation of contemporary political and administrative life, in which the traditional all-encompassing central state is gradually being hollowed out by devolution and decentralisation in a downwards direction, and Europeanisation and globalisation looking upwards. In such a scenario, the implications for our
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understanding of power are clear: power is wielded collectively, and this collectivity is composed of different congurations of actors and institutions in different policy or issue areas. This makes broad generalisations about EU power difcult to sustain. The danger is that now, when asked where power lies in the EU, we might end up rather unhelpfully answering that it depends.

What about the People?

Should we accept this account of the EU, we might also feel inclined to put a positive spin on what the diffuseness of power implies for European-level democracy, the assumption here being that the question of power and the always topical issue of democratic decit are inextricably linked. Thus, we might welcome the involvement of a broader range of players within the policy process, exercising a more variable and dispersed form of power, as a kind of neopluralist heaven which increasingly moves governing out of the hands of a narrow and exclusive set of governmental elites. But this interpretation would be overly optimistic. If power is indeed wielded through so many networks, communities and coalitions of actors and institutions, which vary in their composition from case to case, how can we know whom to hold accountable for EU actions? And in a practical sense, accountability is surely a prerequisite for democracy in Europe, as elsewhere. It is worth noting that governance is itself often associated with the kind of problemsolving managerialism in which rational decision-making seeks to shunt both ideology and interests out of the policy process. This implies the victory of a technocratic or bureaucratic logic over a political one, which may be intended to improve policy effectiveness but can also serve to reinforce long-standing and often ingrained prejudices about the nature of the EU. Seeing the European Union as a governance system may simply conrm the Union to observers as elitist, insular and undemocratic. How then might such negative perceptions be addressed? One idea could be to encourage new ways for citizens to engage in and with European Union politics. There are various means by which citizens might, themselves, wield more power within the EU. Indeed those concerned about the Unions image have been greatly preoccupied over the past couple of decades with how the EU might appeal more to ordinary citizens and involve them more directly. Since the early 1990s, there have

been many new initiatives to bring Europe closer to the people, encouraging citizen participation through the use of referendums, NGO activism, external expert involvement in policy-making and even direct access to EU elites via the internet. It would be rather lame to say, after almost 20 years, that the jury was still out on these initiatives; and it would be more honest to report that while the experiments have been interesting and have changed the way that the EU does business in certain areas, the results, in terms of public perception, have been disappointing.

European Citizens Initiative

The European Citizens Initiative was an innovation included in the Treaty of Lisbon, with the aim of enhancing participation in the EU. The Citizens Initiative, the practical arrangements for which were set out in a regulation agreed in December 2010, enables one million citizens who are nationals of at least a quarter of member states to call directly on the European Commission to bring forward an initiative of interest to them in an area of EU competence. The first petitions to get up and running were initiated by Greenpeace, against the authorisation of genetically modified crops in Europe, and by German MEP Martin Kastler, seeking to ban shops from opening on Sundays.

Institutional Solutions
The alternative to the participatory path to EU democracy has led to more obvious institutional solutions to the democratic decit. This has meant enhancing the power of the European Parliament (and to a lesser degree improving the input of national parliaments) in EU policy-making. But even though Parliaments co-legislative role (working together with the EU Council) has increased substantially so much so that some academics now claim that the EU is no less democratic than any other socalled democratic polity the perception that the EUs democratic decit persists has proved remarkably resilient and therefore difcult to change. Participation aside, the increased powers of the European Parliament, along with its willingness to stick its neck out in battles with other EU institutions, certainly provides an institutional channel that allows EU actors and institutions to be held to account for the decisions they take. Yet, the European Parliaments scrutiny role

 European Union, 2011

European Commission chief Jos Manuel Barroso is one of the EUs most powerful political actors

of any aspiring democratic polity. Yet, in recent years there has been less interest in the how of EU politics as the EU, and the Commission especially, has sought to recalibrate itself towards a more outputorientated focus on what the Union does, what it can do and what it should be doing. Whether in terms of responses to the economic crisis and its aftermath or in the elds of foreign and defence policy and climate change, there are many big political, economic and social issues to which the EU might contribute. Increasingly, attempts to make the EU appear more legitimate in the eyes of its citizens are focusing less on improving processes of democratisation, but rather on Europes actions, policy and, ultimately, its Conclusion contribution to addressing and, hopefully, In all this talk of governance, power and resolving Europes and in some cases the the democratic decit, it is important to re- worlds problems. This shift away from what member what this is all for. Improving the from the outside looks like an obsession with quality of inputs into the decision-making institutional change as an end in itself is to be system and investigating the process by welcomed, but it should not be assumed that which decisions are made are vital parts the EU can now put to rest its earlier conhas its limits. National governments are often reluctant to justify themselves before a supranational assembly, which makes scrutinising the EU Council fraught with difculty. Furthermore, the formal mechanisms of accountability, associated with the representative model of democracy, prove inadequate in our new era of EU governance and may even be exacerbated by efforts to expand further the actors participating in EU policy-making. As Mark Bovens argued, new forms of accountability are needed in the EU, not to replace but to supplement the more traditional accountability mechanisms already in existence.

cerns about the democratic decit. Citizens in democratic polities are unlikely to buy into the idea that power and democratic accountability can rest solely at the national level, and that policy outputs sufce to legitimise supranational or international governance systems, even if this does seem to underpin much of the current European Commissions thinking on the matter.

References
Bovens, M. (2007) New Forms of Accountability and EU-Governance, Comparative European Politics, 5 (1), 10420. Moravcsik, A. (2002) In Defence of the Democratic Decit: Reassessing Legitimacy in the European Union, Journal of Common Market Studies, 40 (4), 60324.

Michelle Cini is Professor of European Politics at the University of Bristol. She is currently co-editor of JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies. April 2011 15

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