Democratization

This book is the fourth in a five-volume series examining the cultural, economic, political, and social changes that have transformed Southern Europe (Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain) in the final three decades of the 20th century. Like the preceding three volumes, it examines the impact of three powerful transformative forces that, in general, have eroded away the “exceptional” status of these countries and moved them toward the mainstream of Western industrialized societies: democratization, socioeconomic modernization, and Europeanization. Four public policy sectors (taxation, environmental protection, social welfare programs, and aggregate levels of social spending) and three institutional arenas of the state itself (the judiciary, public administration, and relationships among the national, subnational, and supranational levels of government) serve as the analytical foci of these studies. In contrast with the rapid, “leapfrogging” processes of political change identified in the first two volumes (especially with regard to democratic consolidation and the emergence of “modern” political parties and patterns of electoral behavior), transformations of the state and public policies in these four countries have entailed considerable time-lags, persisting rigidities in some sectors, and striking divergences in the evolution of state structures. At the same time, there have been substantial cross-national differences and divergences among policy sectors (with taxation, aggregate levels of social spending, and, in Spain, political decentralization evolving rapidly, while other policy domains and state institutions have resisted change). The book concludes that these three broad social forces alone cannot account for these patterns. It concludes that they can only be accounted for by political processes, involving the extent to which institutions or policy subsectors had been closely linked to or autonomous from the former, pre-democratic regime, as well as the resources available to defenders of the status quo.

The widening and deepening of the European Union have brought to the fore the question of democracy at the European level. The system of domination already in place at the European level requires and aspires to direct legitimation—from the citizens themselves and not merely indirectly, from the member nation-states. Such can only be achieved by making the EU into a democratic polity. But can democracy be disassociated from its putative nation-state foundation? This book develops a revised concept of democratic legitimacy based on discourse theory. It is argued that post-national democracy requires a constitution but not necessarily a state. The Union amounts to less than a state but more than an international organization and a system of transnational governance. In the political theory of the multi-level constellation that makes up the EU, it is conceived of as a regional subset of an emerging cosmopolitan order. The EU is a state-less government. As it is not premised on group identity, it is able to accommodate a high measure of variance with regard to territory and function. The book analyses the reforms undertaken to bring the EU ‘closer to the citizens’. It documents elements of democratization and the reduction of arbitrary power. However, democracy requires that the citizens can approve or reject the laws they are subjected to. Since the institutional and civic conditions under which a public justification process would be deemed legitimate are not in place, European post-national democracy remains an unaccomplished mission.