Political legitimacy and European monetary union: contracts, constitutionalism and the normative logic of two-level games

Abstract

The crisis of the euro area has severely tested the political authority of the European Union (EU). The crisis raises questions of normative legitimacy both because the EU is a normative order and because the construction of economic and monetary union (EMU) rested upon a theory that stressed the normative value of the depoliticization of money. However, this theory neglected the normative logic of the two-level game implicit in EMU. It also neglected the need for an impartial and publically acceptable constitutional order to acknowledge reasonable disagreements. By contrast, we contend that any reconstruction of the EU's economic constitution has to pay attention to reconciling a European monetary order with the legitimacy of member state governance. The EU requires a two-level contract to meet this standard. Member states must treat each other as equals and be representative of and accountable to their citizens on an equitable basis. These criteria entail that the EU's political legitimacy requires a form of demoicracy that we call ‘republican intergovernmentalism’. Only rules that could be acceptable as the product of a political constitution among the peoples of Europe can ultimately meet the required standards of political legitimacy. Such a political constitution could be brought about through empowering national parliaments in EU decision-making.

EU Legitimacy in a Realist Key

“…The Eurozone crisis has once more given salience to the EU's democratic deficit (e.g. Bellamy 2013;Bellamy & Weale 2015;Nicolaïdis 2013). From our realist perspective, the EU's democratic deficit is not merely a question of supranational institutions lacking a convincing story about representing a European demos-the renowned no-demos thesis.…”

The EU’s democratic deficit in a realist key: multilateral governance, popular sovereignty and critical responsiveness

“…German governments have at times challenged the famously independent German Central Bank, the Bundesbank. 64 Therefore, accountability remains possible by the democratic order. Delegation thus does not constitute a problem at first glance.…”

Beyond a constraining dissensus: The role of national parliaments in domesticating and normalising the politicization of European integration

“…A demoi-cratic approach requires that governments act with the active rather than the passive consent of their respective peoples, responding to the commonly avowed interests of all their citizens rather than the particular interests of certain well-organised groups. On this account, agreements between member states at the EU level must follow the normative logic of a two-level game (Putnam 1988;Bellamy and Weale 2015): they must both be equally acceptable to the governments that negotiate them and to the citizens that each of these governments represents. The legitimacy of EU level decisions, therefore, depends on them meeting a dual standard.…”

“…On this account, the legitimacy of EU level decisions rests on their satisfying the normative logic of a two-level game (Bellamy and Weale 2015;Putnam 1988, Savage andWeale 2009), whereby they must be acceptable not just to the contracting national executives but also to the respective demoi they claim to represent. From this perspective, negotiators must treat each other with mutual respect as representatives of their citizens; appreciating that the legitimacy of their decisions depends on their retaining the on-going, democratic support of all their different peoples.…”

“…By contrast, we characterise our approach as 'republican intergovernmentalism' (Bellamy 2013), seeing the role of NPs as a way of ensuring that the decisions of governments at the EU level operate under the equal influence and control of their peoples, whilst recognising the obligation of all other member states to operate similarly. The demoicratic logic of this two level game entails that European integration needs to show equal concern and respect for the capacity for communal self-rule of its constituent parts (Bellamy and Weale 2015), supporting and sustaining and where necessary supplementing that capacity rather than substituting for it. Yet, these requirements need not be regarded as constraining any further European integration or even as rolling it back -rather they enable its shaping by the citizens of the European states -a point we underline through a proposal for a positive measure, the Parliamentary Legislative Initiative.…”