Second Scholarly Panel : The New EU: Implications for Political Theory
Chair : Dr. Maiken Umbach

Scaling Europe : European Democracy and Tension Between Function and Participation
Dr. John Crowley, Executive Director and Wren Nasr, Executive Assistant,
The Interdisciplinary Centre for Comparative Research in the Social Sciences (CIR-Paris), Paris, France

The ideas of subsidiarity and governance lie at the heart of current debates about the future of democracy in the European Union, and, specifically, the potential for a form of democracy peculiar to the European level of political activity. Subsidiarity has been defined (in the preamble to the EU Treaty) as the principle that power should be exercised “as close as possible to citizens”. Specifically, it is the principle whereby the EU does not take action (other than in areas over which it exercises exclusive competence) unless it is deemed more effective than action taken at national, regional or local levels. In the 2001 White Paper, governance is defined as the “rules, processes and behaviour that affect the way in which powers are exercised at the European level, particularly as regards openness, participation, accountability, effectiveness and coherence”. Via these ideas, especially that of subsidiarity, a conceptual precedent has been set for contemporary European governance within member states of the European Union, as is evidenced by the movement towards decentralisation and restructuring of national political landscapes (“ scaling ”) that has followed in the wake of European construction. Through an examination of these terms and their dependence on an unproblematised concept of efficiency, we wish to suggest that there are tensions at work between the functional dynamics of contemporary governance and its participatory logic. This discussion leads us to an examination of the purposive (or objective-oriented) nature of European governance and its broader implications for democratic institutions.
This tension at work in the political decentralisation and reorganisation currently underway in Europe is perfectly illustrated at the local level. The relative absence of the concept of subsidiarity in member states' ongoing efforts to recalibrate and decentralise political power points to the difficulty of the current definitions of subsidiarity and governance in accommodating democratic requirements such as citizen participation. The French example of municipal agglomerations ( l'intercommunalité ) is illustrative of this tension and the democratic distortions that it entails. Here, we examine the interactions between (1) functional pressures , which push for each problem to find its most effective level of intervention and at the same time for stable administrative structures that may detract from ideal patterns of sectoral efficiency; and (2) participatory pressures , which combine substantive questions of interest representation, symbolic questions of inclusiveness, technical constraints of asymmetrical information, and background issues of systemic legitimacy. Finally, as we shall show, the very idea of the “local” is far less clear than it appears at first sight, and the difficulties in local scaling – in what we would call for these purposes “locating the local” – have parallels at all levels of policy and democratic government, including the European.

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External Cures, Internal Ills: a Federalist Critique of a Committee of the Parliaments
Joelle Schmitz
Fulbright Scholar, McGill University, Montreal, Canada

Sir Leon Brittan's famous Committee of Parliaments proposal provides an instructive analysis for European Union governance. While meritorious with regard to its substance (all that he once proposed – now increasingly revisited as a redress to the democratic deficit - should, definitively, be incorporated at the supranational level), it does not present the most effective structure for its achievement. In fact, it may be argued that the resurrection of his ideas is more accurately conceptualized as an attempt to increase the powers of the Commission which would, ironically, only exacerbate the democratic deficit, if implemented. An alternative proposal would, however, suggest that these powers (subsidiarity and legal review, especially of legislation that brings the EU “into new territory” and/or that moving from intergovernmentalism to centralized decisionmaking) be accorded the European Parliament, as the only democratically elected institution responsible to the peoples of the European Union and not its Member States. This, at base, would provide the most realistically substantive platform for truly federalist ideals.

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From Dialectics to Political Theology: Rethinking Complexity in Federalism
Isabel David
Assistant Professor, Instituto Superior de Ciências Sociais e Políticas - Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal

“All prolific concepts of modern theory of the State are secularised theological concepts.”

The federal polity is systematically described for the first time in the Bible in political and religious terms as a covenant between God and men for the joint preservation of the common good, in which the Former surrenders part of His omnipotent power in favour of the latter, as free partners. From this original compact, a number of subsidiary covenants, or “public law partnerships”, between equals can be deduced, based on mutual obligation and responsibility, integrity and equality of the parties, and consent, culminating in a world confederation.
The biblical idea that power comes from God to the people influenced both Protestant theologians of the 16 th and 17 th centuries, Huguenots, Scottish Covenanters, Puritans, and philosophers (Locke, Montesquieu, Kant, Buber, Proudhon) alike, who secularised and transformed it into a political concept. In a similar way, the Israelite (to which the Bible refers originally) and the American experiences, from the authors of The Federalist to Woodrow Wilson, are amply permeated by these views, the two being considered by Ivo Duchacek “ethno-ideological states”, that is, states which “developed on unsettled, or more accurately, undersettled territories by emigrants who were, at least originally, from the same or similar ethnic stock in the ‘old world' and who settled in the new in pursuit of the same or similar visions or goals. There they amalgamated into new peoples on the basis of those visions and goals”.
The modern understanding of federalism was, in effect, born in the United States . Along with the tripartition of powers and the system of checks and balances, emerges the reconciliation of the above-mentioned biblical principles with nascent individualism, creating a union whose subject is the people, simultaneously member of the local and the national communities - dual federalism -, each of which possessing an exclusive jurisdiction, neither of which subordinate to or liable to be deprived of its authority by the other. Therein lies precisely the essence of federalist thinking.

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Subsidiarity in the Light of European Model of Federalism
Ivana Simikova
Technical University in Liberec, Czech Republic and University of Pittsburgh, United States

Subsidiarity has been declared in the Maastricht Treaty, Article 3b) for the first time as the basic principle of the European Community performance, resp. of the European Union. Subsidiarity explicitly guarantees the prior right to act to the lower government levels (it is strong decentralization instrument) but it implicitly determinates a space for the activity and expansion of the EC competencies (it is the instrument of centralization). There is a dichotomy in the principle of subsidiarity. The purpose of this paper is to analyze subsidiarity from different federal model point of vies. The first of my paper is devoted to the genesis of different systems of federalism, to reasons and motives, which led to their establishment; the European federation model is analyzed as well. The second part of the paper analyzes European model of federalism, subsidiarity, according the three characteristics” constitutional or conventional basement of federation (1), position of the central government and the governments of member states (national governments) and their lower governmental levels (2), allocation of the fiscal instruments and competencies and methods of their redistribution (3). The last part of paper deals with the future development of subsidiarity regarding the Union Enlargement and Constitution adoption.

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