 I'm Salvatore Bobonis and today's lecture is liberal non-democracies, the European Union and United Nations. The European Union and to some extent the United Nations cherish democracy as a core value, but intergovernmental organizations like the EU and UN can suffer severe and fundamental democratic deficits. Many of their member states, in the case of the EU, all of them are democracies, but the organizations themselves are organizations of states, not of people. As a result, though they often espouse liberal democratic values, they do so through fundamentally non-democratic means. They are thus open to criticism and heavily criticized for their undemocratic decision-making structures and perceived hypocrisy in promoting liberal democratic ideals. The European Union is a treaty organization of 28 member states dedicated to, quote, respect for human dignity, liberty, democracy, equality, rule of law and human rights. At least their 28 states as of recording in April 2016, the United Kingdom will soon hold a referendum on whether or not to remain in the European Union. The European Union is an incredibly complex, state-like bureaucracy, governed by no less than seven major sovereign bodies. The European Union is state-like in the sense that it exercises many of the powers of a state, even if on a technical legal sense it is merely a treaty organization of 28 member states. Sociologically, the European Union, from the perspective of people who live in it, is in effect a state. The seven major bodies of the European Union are the European Parliament, European Council, Council of Ministers, European Commission, Court of Justice, Court of Auditors, and European Central Bank. I don't think anybody outside the European Union and a few academic specialists really understand what each of these seven organizations does, and even within the European Union only a minority of people probably understand the difference between the European Council and the Council of Ministers, for example, or between the Council of Ministers and the European Commission. These are incredibly complicated, highly overlapping organizations. For example, both the Council of Ministers and the European Commission are composed of 28 members appointed by member governments, I'm sorry, and the European Council. All three have 28 members representing the 28 European countries. The only part of the European Union bureaucracy that is directly accountable to the people of the European Union is the European Parliament. This is elected in a way similar to the way national parliaments are elected by single member districts, in which people represent the people of their district in Europe. But the European Parliament has relatively little power compared to the other big institutions of the European Union, and the reason for that is clear. The European Union started out and remains a treaty organization, which means that the heads of the countries that are members of the European Union want to maintain control over policy. They don't want to hand it off to a true democratic representative body like the European Parliament. But the result of the lack of popular input into these institutions generates a democratic deficit that leaves people feeling as if they don't have a say in their own governing, in the laws that fundamentally determine the ways they can live their own lives. The European Union is often perceived as telling European citizens what they have to do and what they have to think, despite the minimal popular mandate of the European Union to do so. For example, the European Central Bank imposed austerity programs on Greece and the countries of southern Europe in the wake of the 2009 Euro crisis. European directives on the privatization of rail operations sparked protests across Europe, portrayed here in this photo of Union members protesting against the privatization of railroads. The European refugee policy, especially the September 2015 refugee sharing plan in which the 28 countries of the European Union agreed quotas on how many refugees each country would take, are perceived as highly undemocratic as agreements over which the people have had very little input. And the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, a treaty with the United States similar to the Trans-Pacific Partnership that's currently up for ratification. The T-TIP has been incredibly controversial, and in fact, as of recording in April 2016, President Obama is meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel to discuss the T-TIP, to promote it in the European Union, against or despite the fact that an overwhelming majority of European Union citizens oppose the T-TIP treaty. In short, the European Union is a basically liberal organization without being a fundamentally democratic organization. The European Union supports individual freedoms in human rights at home and abroad, but those freedoms and rights are often construed as the freedoms and rights that are of interest to a narrow political class. Most Europeans themselves will never experience being a refugee or being persecuted on account of religion, that is, they will never personally benefit from the rights that are actively promoted by the European Union. As a result, the EU is often perceived as supporting such freedoms and rights for generalized others, not for the citizens themselves. Now, of course, in a political legal sense, in the approach taken by lawyers and political scientists, individual rights of freedom and human rights are universal and are applicable to everybody, and in theory, every citizen benefits. From a sociological perspective, in a sociological sense, such rights are much more important to disadvantaged minorities, to groups that are likely to be vilified by the majority than they are to most ordinary people. In short, in a Christian majority country like Hungary, you are much more likely to value the right to freedom of religion if you are a Muslim or a Hindu than if you are a Christian. Just as the same might be true in a Muslim majority country, you might value freedom of religion more if you were a Christian. So from a sociological standpoint, rights promoted by the European Union are perceived as being rights for generalized others, not as rights for us, the people, the in-groups that form the majorities in those societies. Perhaps inevitably, given the fact that countries have vetoes over all sorts of policies in the European Union, the EU seems to promote negative freedoms much more aggressively than it promotes positive freedoms. Once again, from a sociological standpoint, this reduces the value of the freedoms guaranteed by the European Union. If the European Union guarantees freedom from persecution, well, the only people who value it are the people who are likely to be persecuted. On the other hand, if the European Union were promoting the freedom to enjoy a secure livelihood or the freedom to go to a university of choice for free, that kind of freedom would be more valued by the majority of citizens. Of course, those kind of positive freedoms are not the kinds of freedoms that a treaty organization like the European Union can provide. Those are the kinds of freedoms that only national governments can assure for their citizens. As a result of all this, the European Union appears to be, and in many respects actually is, primarily a neoliberal institution. It promotes negative neoliberal freedoms at the expense of positive freedoms that would provide greater social welfare for its citizens. If the European Union is a liberal organization with a democratic deficit, the United Nations is much more so, and is often also accused of a neoliberal bias. All of the kinds of shortcomings that I've just discussed that plague the European Union plague the United Nations even more. It is a distant, poorly understood bureaucracy in which people have no direct say via direct voting and in which they are represented by their national governments with the added problem that at least half of the governments in the United Nations are not themselves democratically elected governments. While the EU and the UN may seem distant and even irrelevant to many people in high income countries, in fact, they wield great influence in other, poorer parts of the world. The European Union plays a major role in the politics of the countries of the former Soviet Union, the Middle East, Africa, and even to a lesser extent in Latin America. One only has to look at the current Ukraine crisis or the recent conflicts in the former Yugoslavia involving Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and the secession of Kosovo from Serbia to understand that the European Union has enormous reach within the region or, for that matter, just look at the Syrian refugee crisis and the importance of the European Union in that. The European Union has influence because neighboring countries desire to join the European Union. Thus, Serbia, which just had elections in April 2016, voted for a pro-European integration political party that is a political party that promises to attempt to join the European Union. The European Union has influence because countries desire to trade with the European Union. The fall of the Viktor Yanukovych government in Ukraine that sparked the entire Ukraine crisis in 2014 was prompted by disagreements over a trade pact between Ukraine and the European Union. The European Union has influence because individuals in neighboring countries desire to travel to the European Union. So, right now, there is an agreement between the European Union and Turkey to give Turkish citizens in the future visa-free travel to the European Union as a reward for Turkey's cooperation in keeping other people, Syrian refugees among them, out of the European Union. And finally, there's a desire to emigrate to the European Union. Many people in poor and middle-income countries want their countries to remain on good terms with the European Union so that they themselves may be able to travel to the European Union. And this has been especially important in the countries of Eastern Europe, bordering the existing Eastern European EU member states, and in Latin America because several European countries, in particular Italy, Spain, and Portugal, have very liberal policies for people of dissent, people of Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian dissent, whose families emigrated to Latin America in centuries past who now want to claim European Union citizenship. So, for many reasons, both ordinary people and elites in countries across this wide part of the world, the neighborhood of the European Union, have a strong stake in European Union policies and pay very careful attention to them in a way that people living in the United States, Australia, or Japan might not. Similarly, the United Nations, while being largely irrelevant in the lives of people in most rich countries, is virtually an occupying power in many of the poor countries, especially of Western and Central Africa. They're United Nations peacekeeping missions in Africa. The International Criminal Court has indicted the leaders of African countries and the leaders of rebellions against African countries. And all sorts of UN organizations are very instrumental in helping to set the economic and health policies of countries, of poor countries all around the world. The recent Ebola outbreak in West Africa was primarily attributed to poor world health organization support for West African countries. Now, most of us would not look to the world health organization to help our countries deal with a disease outbreak. But in many of the poorer countries of the world, of Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia, the United Nations and its organizations like the World Health Organization are seen as important parts of the governing structures, the governing bureaucracies of those countries. Key takeaways. The European Union is an emphatically liberal organization that nonetheless suffers from what we call a democratic deficit. Built-in veto structures help the European Union and the United States, I'm sorry, built-in veto structures help give the European Union and the United Nations built in biases towards negative freedoms over positive freedoms, thus leading them towards neoliberal policy stances. And finally, the European Union and United Nations wield great influence in mainly poor parts of the world that have little representation in the decision-making of these bodies. I'm Salvatore Babonis. You can find out more about me at SalvatoreBabonis.com, where you can also sign up for my monthly newsletter on global affairs. Thank you for listening.