The Legitimacy of European Institutions and U.S. Leadership

The Bedrock of Democratic Legitimacy
First, Lenin long ago predicted the abolition of the nation-state. Today, others following in his footsteps regard it as too small to be competitive or too large and remote from its own centers of vitality; or they think it institutionalizes xenophobia; or that it is ill-adapted to deal with the problems of world interdependence. But I am happy to report that nation-states are alive and well. They will, I suspect, remain the basic unit of the international order because they represent the largest communities to which people can have an emotional attachment—a sense of common history and common traditions, language, and culture. But while men and women in the modern world still feel a primary attachment and loyalty to the nation-state and its institutions, they accept the need for nations to pool their sovereignty to deal with problems that extend well beyond national boundaries.

The European Union is the most advanced and successful experiment of its kind. The problem, of course, is how to control and legitimize the structures created to manage transnational issues. The European Union may sometimes be admired, not least by those who see how it has helped to create and sustain order, stability, and prosperity in the western half of Europe and now offers the same prospects in the post-Cold War world to the whole of the continent. Admired, perhaps, but hardly loved. The Union cannot “live in the hearts of men” as nations do. How do we tackle this issue? How do we tackle what in institutional terms threatens to become a lack of legitimacy?

It is important to recognize that this isn’t just a problem for Europe. It’s a problem for the whole international order, for what is called rather grandly if sometimes emptily, “global governance.” We need a World Trade Organization to establish the international trade framework and to ensure fair play. We need an International Monetary Fund, a World Bank, a United Nations, and a thousand other bodies to manage our interdependence. Who knows, perhaps we need Davos. But from where do all these international bodies derive their legitimacy? What of the host of non-governmental organizations, which are so often in the van of attacks on that legitimacy? Where is the legitimacy of NGOs? They tend to be private; they tend to be undemocratic; they tend to be unaccountable. I am against reducing democracy to majoritarianism, but don’t NGOs tend to reduce democracy too often too minoritarianism? How can they too achieve greater legitimacy? These are the very question that have been posed to us by Joseph Nye. I look forward to hearing your conclusions because the European Union is also grappling with exactly these issues.

One of the questions that Joseph Nye asks is whether the European Parliament offers a useful paradigm for other international institutions as a way of overcoming what has been called the “democratic deficit.” Sadly, my own conclusion is that it doesn’t, at least in its present form. The European Parliament is engaged in highly technical legislation and it does that work with increasing professionalism, but in the absence of a single demos in Europe—a population that feels itself to be one—the European Parliament has difficulty in establishing itself as a wholly credible and wholly sufficient democratic sounding board for political action at the European level. My own hunch is that building up the role of the European Parliament, however worthwhile in its own right, is unlikely to resolve the legitimacy problem. Rather, we need to find better ways of connecting the European supranational institutions to the real bedrock of democratic legitimacy in Europe—the national parliaments and indeed sub-national ones, such as in the German Länder. These assemblies need to take more responsibility for European decisions taken by Ministers in the Council instead of sniping from the sidelines, portraying Brussels as some Frankenstein monster beyond their control, blundering around with a bolt through its neck trampling down the ancient democratic rights of the citizenry.

American Unilateralism Will Erode and the Legitimacy of U.S. Leadership
This brings me to the second point I want to raise. If we have such difficulty democratizing the organizations that administer and implement the pooling of sovereignty, is the answer to draw back, refusing to submit domestic policies to international agreements or to the arbitration of supranational institutions? This is perhaps the main challenge on the international stage facing the United States in the next few years and therefore the main challenge for all of us in dealing with Washington. It concerns the role the United States sees for itself in the world system, in working with and through global and regional institutions. There is clearly a strong political argument to define America’s first duty as looking after its own people and limiting its responsibility to that function. In the words of a newly appointed member of the new administration, “This question of the threats to America’s untrammeled sovereignty posed by global governance is the decisive issue [his emphasis] facing the United States internationally.”

I understand the case that is being put forward and maybe I wouldn’t worry so much if it was put forward by a politician in my own country, even if I didn’t agree with it. But it worries me because the United States is not a typical country. As the overwhelmingly pre-eminent world power, the United States can admittedly afford to stand aloof from international undertakings, to resist the Lilliputian efforts of the international community to restrict Gulliver’s freedom of movement, to exercise its power unencumbered by institutional entanglements. Not only can the U.S. afford to stand aloof, but there is a pervasive, perhaps dominant, school of thought that argues that it should. Unilateralism in this view is not just a reflection of U.S. power, but a positive virtue: America’s hegemony is benevolent and such is the primacy of American values and institutions that it is no bad thing that others must adapt themselves to U.S. preferences. Forgive us, please, if in Europe and perhaps in East Asia, too, we shift a little uneasily in our seats.

This is my greatest concern about missile defense. I hope that missile defense does not destabilize relations with Russia and China. I am sure that it won’t produce a major transatlantic bust up. We can arrive at a sensible accommodation on this question, especially if we in Europe don’t give the impression that we can only feel secure if America feels insecure. My main worry is that this strategy is symptomatic of a tendency in the United States to believe that it is an island secure unto itself, fenced off from the world by advanced technological barriers, inviolate and invincible. Why does this worry me above all? Because it relates to the question of the democratic underpinnings of the international system: U.S. unilateralism would erode the legitimacy of America’s global leadership.

I have another equally strong concern. The world as I said earlier is struggling to deal with the dark side of globalisation—drug trafficking, now a bigger export than iron and steel or cars; environmental degradation; and its implications for poverty and insecurity; illegal migration; and the failure of international trade to bridge the divide between the billions who benefit and those who are marooned in squalor and in misery. These are not issues that can be ignored or left to resolve themselves. Increasingly, they force themselves the issues that uncomfortably crowd onto the agenda at international meetings. Individual countries, even countries as large as the United States, cannot tackle such problems on their own, nor can they always be addressed by the more traditional mechanisms of classic international cooperation. The European Union finds itself, perhaps by accident as much as by design, with the authority and legal competencies to tackle some of these cross-cutting issues in its inevitably inadequate way. Fifteen member states, soon to be twenty-five or more, share their powers in areas that touch on the tangled network of global problems, from blood diamonds and drug trafficking to climate change and its impact on security. These are the problems of conflict prevention that crowd in on us, problems that we don’t believe can be resolved by a technical fix. Our own institutional development and experience in Europe disposes us even more to commit ourselves to multilateralism.

My concern then is that the United States, whose instinct for multilateral commitment—look at NATO and the United Nations—shaped the world in the second half of the last century, whose values are the same as my values, who has done so much good in the world, may be tempted to pull back, to insist on unrestrained independence of action, to insist, for example, that its domestic energy or environment policy is its own business and that the world should keep its nose out. And if it does pull back it will be egged on by some of the “Stars and Strife” school of commentators in the media and politics in this country.

I understand why there might be a waning commitment in America to international engagement. It is, after all, the duty of every government to look after the national interest. But America’s national interest is in the strengthening of those institutions that provide a structure for the civilized resolution of global disputes. If such problems can’t be resolved they will quickly become serious threats to security. I have little doubt that the new administration, like most of its recent predecessors, will ignore the voices from the think tanks and from Capitol Hill and will recognize its interest as well as its responsibility to engage. But it will come under pressure to take another route. It’s in all our interests that it does not do so.