 You're all very welcome. My name is Podig Murphy. We have the good fortune to have today speaking to us Dr. Rosa Balfour, who is a senior transatlantic fellow of the German Marshall Fund in Brussels. Dr. Balfour had the goodness to correct me when I said in my ignorance that Balfour was an English name. Balfour, of course, is a Scottish name. She's going to speak to us on a very important subject. Is Europe facing a democratic recession? A question of some interest to us all. She is going to say that there is a trend in the cycle of crisis in the EU. She does so from her background of research on the relationship between domestic politics and Europe's global role. She's also a senior advisor to the European Policy Centre in Brussels and an associate of the London School of Economics ideas think tank. She holds a degree from Cambridge University and from the London School of Economics. Is Europe facing a democratic recession? We were saying downstairs that it's a striking phrase. One of the things about it is, perhaps, that if you were to use the analogy of an economic recession, it might not entirely work because an economic recession is an event that one can find out of, one way or another, whereas a democratic recession can be very difficult to find one's way out of. So we're looking forward with great interest to your presentation, Dr Balfour, and the floor is yours. You want me to stand here? Whichever you'd like. Well, thank you very much for inviting me. It is wonderful to be in Dublin, although the weather hasn't been very nice to me. Right, I'll just try and summarize a little bit where I'd like to go today because I do want to link the democratic recession argument to prospects on the future of Europe. And I hope that in the Q&A session in the discussion session, we can actually explore some ideas because this is quite an interesting time for the EU. So my argument is that the multiple crises that Europe has been going through are actually the results of a democratic recession. This affects not just the EU, but its member states and the quality of democratic life in Europe. And what I'll put to you is an idea of how this recession takes place, which looks at the vertical dimension, the relationship between the EU national and local democracy, and a horizontal dimension, which looks at how policy has become transnational, which entails a dislocation of decision-making. Then I will try to look at the current political debates about the future of Europe following Brexit, maybe examine a few scenarios briefly, because I hope maybe we can talk about those in the discussion. These scenarios include political fragmentation, differentiation, the notion of bouncing back, which has just come up in one of the European Commission documents, or whether we can imagine some kind of renewal, a different bottom-up form of renewal. And then I'll try to tie together these ideas. One is about democracy, and the other is about the future of Europe. And I will argue that actually the debate on democracy is crucial for determining the future of the EU. And if the EU does actually want to move forward in whatever form and shape, it really needs to address the relationship between democracy and sovereignty. And perhaps it needs to address it differently. So most observers looking at what has been happening in Europe for the past decades, they identify two meta-narratives, which explain the crises. The first is globalization, its impact on inequality. And the second is the rise of identity, politics largely as a consequence of immigration, which of course is also an expression of globalization. I don't want to argue against these interpretations, but I think that going into a little bit of detail, one does not find that these interpretations are unique explanations for what is happening. And I think what really brings them together is that the problem is not just about the impact of the financial crisis on inequality, but it's on the legitimacy of the decisions that were made to address such impact. And similarly, the questions posed by the response to the refugee crisis were as much about the nature of the response and as about its legitimacy. So whether the issue is economic distribution or migration, the thread that runs through the problems is actually who decides and for the benefits of whom. Democracy has been performing badly in the Western world. If we look at it from the big picture point of view, of course, historically, democracy has been advancing with modernization. But from the 1910s onwards, if not even slightly earlier, the world is experiencing the most severe democratic setback, and I'm quoting Ronald Engelhardt here, since fascism. This democratic recession is taking place by deliberate design and through more systemic trends, including perhaps unforeseen consequences. And it has these two dimensions I was mentioning earlier, the vertical and the horizontal. But let's just look at the democratic recession by design very briefly. The ideology of neoliberalism has disempowered states in the management of globalization. The quality of democracy has declined in important states which set influential regional trends through bad governance, corruption, abuse of democratic institutions, this we are seeing in Europe. We're also seeing in Europe a rise of authoritarianism and a rise of majoritarian democracy. And these trends are in turn undermining the space for opposition. We're seeing across the board in many European states, not just those run by authoritarian governments, I might add, a clampdown on civil society and on media freedom. There are some structural challenges to democracy in the 21st century. Technological changes are part of it, and we're probably just at the beginning of that. We still don't know what the impact of artificial intelligence will have on our societies and on our democracies. We have, of course, globalization. But what I'd like to focus on in the European context is Europeanization. More specifically, Europeanization has entailed a transfer of decision-making powers away from the national level. But democratic life still takes place mostly at the national level. Representative accountable and democratic decision-making at the supranational level is still wanting. There have been attempts to reform this, but the solutions have not been sufficient. They haven't been commensurate to the challenge. So when the European Union discusses the democratic deficit and expands the powers of parliament, but then citizens don't go to vote, it's clearly not an appropriate solution to the nature of the problem. So Europeanization does question the relationship between member states and, of course, the EU. And in addition to this, what we have been seeing at the EU level is that the permissive consensus, which has allowed integration for decades to take place in the continent, whereby national governments could decide together with minimal deliberation with their citizens, well, this permissive consensus has definitely come to an end during the past decade. At the national level, I would actually argue that this is where the most serious problems of democracy are taking place. National institutions have been hollowed out. In many countries, national parliaments are weak in scrutinizing EU legislation. I would add, they've become, in some countries, increasingly weak in scrutinizing national legislation. Rarely are public debates held on pan-European issues. European Parliament election campaigns have been run on domestic matters and not to elect representatives who are actually responsible for co-decision in the EU. Political parties are in steep decline. They are failing because the zone of engagement has been evacuated. I'm quoting Peter Mayer, who was actually an Irish political scientist, who argued that it's not just the citizens that have been withdrawing from politics, but it's also the elites that have been withdrawing. Political parties are no longer playing their vital role as vehicles for debate and representation between society and their institutions. In this context, the erosion of the legitimacy of the establishment has left a void. That's Peter Mayer's book, it's called Filling the Void. And that void is being filled by new actors, mostly outsiders to our traditional spectrum of politics. But many of these actors are actually not committed to democratic practices and procedures. And then there is an important level where also democracy is failing, and that is at the local level. Of course, as in the case of member states, this is not happening evenly across Europe. There are countries where democratic practices and procedures where trust in institutions remains high, and there are countries where it is painfully low. So there's a lot of diversity, and I do want to say that. It's uneven. But there have been attempts to address Europeanization compensate, shall we say, the process of transfer of powers towards a higher level by strengthening local powers through federal initiatives, strengthening decentralization, subsidiarity. That's the word that is used in the European Union jargon. And there are lots of interesting dynamics, especially with respect to the importance of cities and urban areas in managing their affairs, local community initiatives. But at the same time, local authorities have been very badly hit by austerity politics. They have been disempowered in their ability to deliver basic services to citizens, health, education, housing, green spaces. And therefore, at this level, it cannot be said that local democracy compensates, shall we say, for the transfer of power away from citizens. So what is important to understand is that it's not a question of EU member state X, where democratic processes or procedures are declining. The important point to realise that, we need to think about democracy in this vertical way, looking at the EU level, the national level, and the local level. There is, of course, an international level as well. I'm going to leave that out of this analysis. The EU European integration is the most advanced example of integration. And it is where these practices need to be addressed. And looking back to the EU and the current debates now, the risk is that if this question of the relationship between levels of democracy, if it's not addressed, the risk is that the debate on the future of Europe is stuck between nationalism and technocracy. And that's more or less where we are at this moment. There's another dimension I'd like to add, which is the horizontal dimension. The spaces for decision-making have been transformed by globalisation and Europeanisation. The impact of policy choices is not coternimous with the legitimate decision-making. Public goods cannot be confined to national spaces any longer. And decision-making over the use and the distribution of public goods is dislocated across several interconnected spaces. There are plenty of legitimate arguments for joined-up decision-making on transnational issues, which are of interest to us all across Europe. But these arguments and the attempts to address policy questions in more holistic ways are undermined by the inability of political organisations to adapt the democratic discussion to such multi-level governance. The fact that most policies now have a transnational dimension, which actually goes beyond the EU itself, is quite obvious in some policy areas, migration, climate change. And just to give an example, housing policy, which tends to be dealt with at the local level, is importantly affected by immigration and by new people coming in, by urbanisation. But migration policy at the moment is stuck, blocked at the European level. The only area in which migration policy is actually moving is in foreign policy. So we have foreign ministers or even institutions deciding on migration policy, which has consequence on housing policy in a small town in southern France. There's no democratic accountability. There's no procedure and process whereby one can have debates, discussions, input into these policies that are far more transnational. So the question really is, who decides and who is legitimated to decide? Who is accountable? Who can one blame for things going wrong? So decision shaping and implementation is becoming much more complex, but the systems of democratic decision-making have not been updated to reflect such complexity. So we need to really work on both this vertical dimension, bringing together the different levels, but also in this horizontal dimension, which is where policy is much more involved. And I'll come back to this at the end. Because now I'd like to look at the debate on the future of Europe, and I hope that all my arguments will come together in a coherent framework. As I said, there are several scenarios and probably the next few years will be a period in which one scenario might become more real than another. Today it's very difficult to know where things are going to go. Brexit, of course, signals the end of a very important principle concept, constituent concept in the EU, and that is the ever closer union. The whole history and progress of European integration has been premised on the assumption that integration would inevitably move forward. It was progress. We know the bicycle metaphor. You can stop the bicycle by putting your foot down, but you don't have a reverse gear. It's also in the treaties. This notion that progress and further integration is inevitable. It could be that Brexit will happen and that this notion will end. It could also be that it starts disintegration, but it could also not be the case. There's no theory of disintegration. There was quite an interesting article in the Berlin policy journal by Jan Zilanka, which I read this morning, where he's arguing we have no theory of disintegration so we can just be very imaginative because there's no narrative and there's no theory. I personally think we can turn to Edward Gibbon on the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, but also the look at the Soviet Union and the former Yugoslav Republic, empires dissolve from their center, not from their periphery. And if we consider the UK periphery, if we consider Hungary, and you'll understand why later, periphery then the EU doesn't look like it's about to disintegrate. But, and also following the Brexit vote at least for the moment, many of those political parties advocating to leave the EU have actually changed their minds and they're now arguing that we should stay the EU and change it from within. But it doesn't mean that the EU is not challenged. The EU is challenged in several and very important ways. And I think political fragmentation is a very likely scenario at the moment. So what could happen and I'm thinking of this following Brexit, although of course we still don't know whether and what shape Brexit is going to take place. But let's assume it does. Then we then the EU will have a very important northern member which will be disintegrating, which will be bitterly split between leaders and remainders, the cities and the countryside, and the UK might disintegrate. So there'll be a challenge on the borders very close. And of course let's not forget that around the southern and eastern borders there also is armed conflict. Then we have a union of 27 member states. Where the Franco-German alliance remains in necessary condition, but alone is insufficient to ensure the health of the EU. It no longer has the same traction power that it used to have. And in any case at the moment, the Franco-German alliance is drifting quite importantly. Aside from the Franco-German duo, we have Spain which is consumed by its constitutional crisis. It will continue to be consumed by it. Even if it has, well it hasn't actually prevented the rise of the far right, but there is possibly a majority which will address that. Italy is governed by a coalition of radical populist parties and is moving very quickly away from the old European mainstream. Poland, which is the sixth largest member state. Actually I think that might have been including the UK, I think it will be the fifth largest member state, has become an outlier under the law and justice government. So there is a problem, a lack of large member states leading forward, driving some kind of change and preventing political fragmentation. Indeed, they are moving further away from each other. Then there is the idea that Europe is bouncing back. That's the commission document. They released a document the other day, yes. I think many of us respond to that document in a similar way, smiling shall we say. But tomorrow there is the Sebel Summit. Michel Barnier who's been leading the Brexit negotiations has said that the EU can find a new unity around 27, just as it found unity around the Brexit talks. The idea behind this type of approach is that the unity can be found around policy. So the ambition is to come back from Sebel with 10 policy commitments. Now I have to say that we've seen this before. Two or three years ago there was the Bratislava agenda where there was the idea of building on three policy areas. And indeed in principle some decisions were made although the impact of them is not particularly evident. So I think the problem with this approach of focusing on policy and focusing on delivery which is very much the institutional approach that the EU adopts. The problem is that the what the member states can agree upon is not very clear. The deliverables are not very clear. So you have on the one hand a problem of who moves forward the European engine, the member states. And on the other hand you have the problem of what should we move forward on. On all the policy issues that you look at there are important disagreements among the member states. Hence the differentiation idea. And this is very much coming from France is pushed very much by France, President Macron who argues that differentiations, the vanguards, the heart of Europe should be embraced, should not be feared. He recognizes that the project of European integration has been carried forward shielded so far by the security umbrella offered by the US which is no longer can no longer be counted upon. And also has been shielded from the interference of domestic politics. And this is no longer the case. But what Macron argues and I quote here at every key moment in its history, Europe will move forward first of all through the determination of a few. This ambition is never a source of exclusion. It is the seed of European unity and sovereignty. This is quite a controversial idea. I mean it does go back to who would be in this group and on what. And I was quite struck by the fact this question was posed to the Spitz in Candidatin the other day in Florence and I was there. So and of all the Spitz in Candidatin there were the four main political parties were mentioned. Only the Liberals for Austat are actually in favor of possible differentiation. Again, they argue it shouldn't exclude anyone but that there should be an avant-garde of countries that can move forward. All the others were far more skeptical of that possibility. I would say that this differentiation scenario is a possible scenario but there is one big elephant in the room, Poland. If Poland were to change government in October when there will be national elections then it is possible that the differentiation idea with a large group of member states can be moved forward. But otherwise in order to proceed on further integration you need to make a big bargain over what the EU can decide and what is decided at the member state level. And that is where the democracy question comes in again. But before I get into that, let me just point out it's not very developed but there are alternative views of Europe which are quite different from the traditional ways of thinking about European integration, Euro, intergovernmentalism, federalism, et cetera. And that is the Europe of nations and peoples. So until recently most of these political parties that embrace Europe of nations or embrace nationalism and have been anti-EU until recently they have been wanting to leave the EU and had committed in their manifestos to hold referendums just like UKIP in the UK. Since the British vote, they have changed their position somewhat. I don't know how long that will last. I think most of them have a very deep anti-EU sentiment but they are seeing the opportunity of building relationships with sister parties in the European Parliament, across Europe. The transnationalization of relations between these populist far-right anti-EU parties has increased quite rapidly. And they are just about beginning to elaborate the contours of what that EU might look like. We don't really know the policy detail that's still quite poor on that and really it's only Viktor Orban who has discussed a little bit more in more elaborate terms what he's thinking. But an FT Financial Times journalist, I think used a rather apt description, they are remain Eurosceptics. They like, they love the single market in fact. They like structural funds. And the plan is to stay in the EU and undermine the EU at its core beyond anything beyond a single market and structural funds. So they are ambitious and we need to take them seriously and we need to try and understand what their view of the EU is because there are quite a number of political leaders who are coalescing in this. Le Pen, Salvini, Kaczynski possibly, Strahe, Orban. And of course Orban's view is one that is rooted in his notion of a liberal democracy from 2014. So given that we have European Parliament elections, this is just to quote him, the opportunity is here. Next May we can wave goodbye, not only to liberal democracy and the liberal undemocratic system that has been built on its foundations but also to the entire elite of 1968. So I think there's some idea of where he wants to go. It's where they would like to go. And I think this vision is quite attractive to those who are protesting against technocracy, against the globalized elite, et cetera. So having outlined these visions of Europe, I'd like to go back to my argument about the democratic recession. The recession being the cause of Europe's problems but also of the EU's problems. But if that is the cause of the troubles, it's perhaps also where we need to look at to find solutions. The Eurozone crisis and the political crisis following the refugee influx illustrated quite clearly that the debate was not just about policy solutions, not just about output, which is how the EU institutions like to frame things. But it's about who can legitimately decide on how to solve the problem. The legitimacy of the EU institutions was taken into question, first by national politics in Greece in 2015, continuously in Italy. And of course, the immigration question was contested by the Visigrad four countries, not merely because they didn't want to take in 140 refugees, but because they questioned the authority of the European Commission in telling them that that's what they had to do. Okay, and during these crises, we have seen what Eric Jones has called an evaporation of solidarity. I think it's a nice metaphor among the member states which disables the EU to rethink itself, including on the basis of the policy projects, which is what it is trying to do. Without input legitimacy coming from the people, it is impossible to produce output legitimacy through policy. So we need to look for something else. And looking forward, in my view, the biggest challenge really seems to be in the relationship between the EU and national legitimacy. We need the EU for policy solutions because of the transnationalization of issues, because member states cannot address them alone. But the member states continue to be where that legitimacy takes shape and where democratic practices are supposed to survive through continuous iteration between institutions and society. In my view, the rule of law question with respect to Poland and Hungary is the issue, that is the issue where there is a big battle now, but it's soon going to broaden to far more policy spheres. If you again look at the Pispits and Kandidaten debates, half of them and many of the questions coming from citizens are about rule of law, values and democracy. So the risk is that if we don't address the democratic question, the risk is, and as I mentioned before, that the debate revolves around technocracy and nationalism. So what can be done? And I like to call this the game changers. Who are the game changers? The democratic recession has indeed created space for undemocratic or liberal actors to have a lot of space. Very noisy, very loud, but at the same time we have also seen other instances, mobilization of community initiatives, citizens, NGOs, and they too have been very influential. The empirical evidence we can look at, I think there are several pretty good examples, they come from transnational policies and that's another element that is important. The first of course is climate change and what led to the Paris Agreement. One decade of a broad global alliance between NGOs, community initiatives, local governments, national governments, international institutions to change the way in which certain decisions needed to be made. In 2005, the EU went to Copenhagen proposing to be the leader. It didn't work. When you had this global network at multilevel involving broad alliances of citizens and institutions and governments, that worked. So that is one key example and it's transnational policy. Migration policy, the outcomes today may not be to our liking but let's not forget that in order to address the influx of refugees in 2015 and 2016 there was huge mobilization of NGOs, of citizens. They still are working. In fact, in Italy now there is quite a big confrontation between NGOs and the government. But it's not just NGOs, it's also cities and towns. Look at Mediterranean cities, Barcelona and other cities in Europe. They are really changing their policies to address a large, big transnational issue. Outside, because my background is in foreign policy, outside, I've been looking at how the EU supports civil society outside its boundaries. And there's some fascinating examples of great resilience of civil society in the face of huge threats. Think of Eastern Ukraine, which is still holding despite Russian military interference. And maybe the referendum here in Ireland is also an example in which things can be done differently. Debates can be conducted in a different way. From these examples, which admittedly are anecdotal, I think there are a few things that I'd like to highlight. The first, network capacity. It's transnational, it's diversified. The second is alliance capacity. The ability to work not just with peers but also with governments and with institutions to follow a key policy objective. Ideational capacity. The ability to produce ideas that are persuasive and the power of attraction, of course, to multiply those networks. Anne-Marie Slaughter has written about network theory. She calls it the new power. It needs to be open, participatory, peer driven, where leadership is not hierarchical, but it's about relationship and persuasion. So what does this mean for renewing European integration project and European democracy? It means working on transnational networks that perhaps are more focused on policy rather than democratic representation per se, to try and shape different ways of decision shaping, policy influencing and decision making, which are more inclusive, more bottom up. And I would also argue that the EU is particularly well-adapt to welcome this kind of initiative, which is much more bottom up than member states, because in the big picture, the retrograde element in, as far as democratic representation is concerned, is actually the nation state. So I don't have answers to our democratic recession problem, but I do think that by shaking the system, we can perhaps produce something different. And I do think that the crises we are going through is ethical enough to warrant trying to find new processes and methods and not just new policy ideas or a new political party. So these would be my opening remarks. Thank you.