I was recently sent an article written by Vaira Vike-Freiberga, former candidate for President of the European Council, which includes a couple of interesting comments on the vexed topic of Europe’s leadership – or lack thereof. Among these are the views that, first, the current crop of European leaders are little if at all worse than those of preceding generations, and second, that the purpose of the European Union ought to be to make the need for such ‘transformative leaders’ redundant, by replacing the rule of whim with the rule of law.
Such remarks are a breath of fresh air for those who have been inhaling (or in my case, exhaling) daily invectives against Europe’s supposed ‘leadership deficit’. For what, let us consider, would correcting such a deficit really require? Leadership requires that some degree of decision-making capacity be concentrated in the hands of a single individual, which is obviously not true of the European Union at present, with its two ‘presidents’ and all-powerful Council. Yet such a derogation would only be justified if we believed that there were certain individuals endowed with sufficient insight and knowledge to know better than a group of their peers; and that political institutions might exist which reliably place such individuals in power. Presidential democracies are based precisely on such a faith. That faith is routinely betrayed, as incumbents inevitably reveal their human flaws and weaknesses.
In a well-ordered polity, it is not individuals, but rules, and organisations, which must govern. Rules, because in the absence of a beneficent leader whose informed whims prove consistently correct, it is upon tested principles that we must rely; and organisations, because a collective of individuals, serving in committee, is more consistently just than any single individual proves likely to be.
Yet this is oddly close to post-Lisbon Europe as it stands. Like the Swiss Federal Council, the European Council functions as an executive committee, to which the most important decisions must be referred, while the European Union’s routine decisional powers are intentionally split across specialised agencies, such as the European Central Bank or the European Court of Justice, whose judgements concerning human rights or monetary policy will not be improved by political interference. We have created strong institutions, so individuals need not be.
I know that some are finding this form of governance frustrating, and I share their frustration. It is slow moving, not particularly transparent, and the heroes and villains are impossible to identify; in short, it does not make for good news copy. But, in this regard the European Union is hardly alone in the world. Who, for example, can say much about the ‘leadership’ of China, Japan, or Singapore? They are no less opaque, consensual, or gradualist in style. Yet in these polities, it is fair to say that ruling committees, civil servants, and special agencies are perhaps able to develop more intelligent policies than a single ‘leader’, elected or otherwise, would have been likely to accomplish. Indeed, within living memory the Chinese and Japanese have learnt that lesson well.
More generally, we must be careful not to fetishise ‘leadership’, for the degree to which individual initiative is replaced by specialisation and the separation of functions is often a mark of the maturity of a polity. In well-functioning parliamentary systems, such as Sweden or the Netherlands, leadership is largely aesthetic, epiphenomenal, an after-effect. Prime ministers do not decide policy proposals, but receive these from think-tanks and advisers; they do not draft their own speeches, but have writers for this; they do not formulate policy implementation or the negotiating position of their country at international meetings, for these civil servants are tasked. Prime ministers act more as a chief spokesperson or press officer than a ‘leader’ as such, just as the monarch forms a symbolic figurehead for the nation as a whole. Such is the mark of a high quality of government, upon which the inhabitants of a France or Italy, for example, might regard with envy.
Meanwhile, where institutions give the possibility for real leadership, they typically lead to systemic policy failures. I do not wish to dwell excessively upon the problems of the United States, not least of all as in many respects the political system there does exhibit many positive attributes of specialisation and delegation – for example in the way the Federal Reserve is granted relative autonomy from executive or Congressional influence in order to execute its mandate. And yet, many areas, and notably foreign policy, remain the prerogative of the executive and his clique, and thus are subject to repeated diversion and error. This is not a coincidence, but an outcome of any political system where the objective of political participation is to elect a king, rather than assist in forming a government.
Why should Europe ever have sought to emulate the imperial presidency, for example by having a ‘presidential’ leader of the Council, when there are better models to be found in other parts of the world, not least within our own continent? And yet the charge is repeated, and repeated again, that Europe lacks leadership, and needs a stronger hand to guide it through. It is time to leave such delusions by the wayside. Politics, as Max Weber famously wrote, is a ‘slow boring of hard boards’. This may not be to the aesthetic taste of many, and it may not sell newspapers or inspire the imagination. Yet in the long run, it is, sadly, the only system we know that really works.
#1 by Betterworld Now on October 31, 2010 - 1:57 am
Oh come come, we can do better that this. Much better.
Communist centralist secrecy cannot be the standard against which we measure ourselves, however effective. What of the emergence of participative democracies in Latin America where a vibrant grassroots politics is delivering a level of community empowerment that would be the envy of European citizens, if they ever got to learn about it (a free press would be a good idea too).
I find it hard to take seriously a US based academic pontificating on the stability of undemocratic EU institutions and praising them for being somewhat more benign than those of an ossified communist remanent of the cold war. You can cling to your elitist excuse for a democracy in the USA if you want to; the people of Europe are not going to be so easily satisfied.
It is not leadership that Europe lacks, it is a leadership with democratic legitimacy. We have to tackle the democratic deficit at the heart of Europe. We overthrew our monarchies in favour of republics, why should we now be satisfied with quazi-monarchical institutions at EU level? How, for example, do we, the people, replace Barosso?
No: we can do better.
We must do better.
We will do better.
#2 by DCM on October 31, 2010 - 7:55 am
What is the purpose of leadership? Perhaps you are right that it is largely aesthetic, but, sometimes aesthetics is exactly what is needed (as with the current EU where there is simply nothing we can identify with). There is no drama in Brussels and that is precisely a problem! Perhaps it is an immature demand, but sometimes we need politics to be personal and dramatic, as in America it surely is. And perhaps it would mean a lot of bad decisions to do things that way. But then wasn’t it Nietsche who said, that life could only be justified as an aesthetic phenomenon.
#3 by french derek on November 1, 2010 - 6:28 pm
@ Betterworld Now: The “participative democracies” of Latin America live in single countries, speak the same language and have a single, national government. Here in the EU we live in 27 countries, speak many languages, have our separate national governments with, in addition, a layer of inter-national law-makers, etc (the EU). Not all share the same currency even. Most countries (other than Italy) have a press free from governmental interference, even if control may be in the hands of people we mistrust (or suspect as having governmental links).
Also, rather than your plea to “replace Barosso” I would ask why we need him or his job at all? Maybe we need a ‘Chairman of Commissioners’, or some such, but not yet another ‘President’ (who feels he has to show “leadership”).
However, I do agree with you that we have a democratic deficit in the EU.
The main stumbling blocks to achieving that are the Heads of national governments, individually and collectively. Whilst the EU Parliament and Commission are daily focussed on EU-wide matters and EU-wide implications, these “leaders” rarely retain such a focus for long. They are too concerned with their own national agenda and their own electorate.
The EU “dream” – of ‘ever closer union’ – died with expansion.
#4 by jocelyn braddell on November 5, 2010 - 1:05 pm
The “national agenda” and concern with electorate vote is the bane of social progress. It is just fatuous to accuse Roberto Foa of “communism” when in fact the political mindset of so many EU countries and governments has been laid in by Communism. We have the problem of leadership and Government corruption that affects elections, whether real or suspected, it causes aggressive disputes and as we know, violence. Ministers think only to install their political party and themselves in the history books and politicians have adopted a class status here in Ireland specifically on instructions from the EU.
Politicians in the past, especially as this is a small country, were expected to be responsible to their community of origin, and a big mistake we made then was to allow political “families” to be established and the status of “class” began to appear, to eradicate the good that could be done here . Ireland has crashed, perhaps irredemiably because of Government, and the crash was not manufactured by the Banks entirely. Presently the Government here boast of reduction in unemployed – but fail to admit that it is only because of emigration. The Health Service is now about to unload more thousands on the unemployed statistics – and students have been felled in the streets herded by Guards on horses and robot Guards with batons – a phenomenon that is completely un-necessary here, as public violence is rare in the Irish psyche, although private violence is encountered as we now see in the news columns daily.
#5 by Duo on November 6, 2010 - 12:47 pm
Dear Roberto,
I enjoy immensely your contributions and tend to agree with most of your points. Even if it at times I may think differently I quite like your intellectual provocations as it stimulates one’s critical thinking. It’s amazing that you are only two years older than myself but have such a large intellectual baggage. I look forward to reading more of your articles, perhaps it would be useful if you would also post a link of where you contribute mostly. I think other readers of your blog would also be glad to read more from you in the future.
#6 by David G on November 6, 2010 - 12:48 pm
Whilst accepting the overall theme of Mr. Poa’s piece I can’t help but see a failure to capture the rights based responsibilities of true leadership. The Rights of the disabled, of the LGBT and so on were not the outcome of leaderless campaigns and committees … rather they were the outcome of spirited leadership, the type of insightful and personal passion you get from an activist whose voice can shift the winds of change and challenge outdated conceptions.
The rule of law and laws themselves protect the people but one must never forget the lawmakers. As long as these lawmakers in Europe are unaccountable their laws will be too and what hope for equality in the future.
As another Irish reader of your Blog I can’t help but think of the right denied to people to truly know who they choose to govern them. Mr. Poa is right though in his assertion of the horrors of a faltering or even corrupt leader but surely knowing is half the battle … what is true is that we will never know the true corruption that can go on behind closed doors!
#7 by Freeborn John on November 9, 2010 - 2:21 pm
Roberto’s argument is flawed for two reasons.
1. It tries to apply an argument for delegated authority to the general matters of politics where it is no longer applicable.
2. It assumes that the goals of politics are agreed by all men, such that everyone will agree that there is one correct policy for any given issue which anyone (eurocrat, computer program) can calculate just as well as an elected representative. However this is very rarely the case. The norm is that men value different political ends (liberty, equality, etc.) differently such that only a plural political system can ever accommodate the conflicting interests that arise.
The old argument that Roberto is repeating here is one for delegated authority, which is well past its sell-by date when it comes to the EU. It is true that we sometimes chose to reinforce a particular widely-agreed policy outcome by delegating responsibility for achieving it to deliberately remote political institutions that are beyond the electorate to influence. For example an independent central banker known to value one policy outcome (lower long-term inflation) more highly than members of parliament seeking re-election will be more likely to achieve monetary stability which is known to be in the public interest. The original European Community could similarly be viewed as a delegated authority reinforcing the common market from protectionist pressures that have been known since Adam Smith’s day to economically self-defeating in the long-run. But we do only do this in limited cases. Even if the EEC could be justified on such grounds when it was more or less a free trade area, it is impossible to argue this way for an undemocratic technocratic EU with the enormous range of powers conferred on it by Lisbon.
Political plurism is the only system flexible enough to cater for the different interests that exist within a society and accommodate the changing priority of these different interests over time. The rigid model of technocratic delegated authority is a niche tool only suited to special cases like central banks. If this rigid system is applied too widely (as it is under the Lisbon Treaty) it not only replaces the pluralism of democratic politics with an undemocratic technocracy but leads to bad policy outcomes too. This is because the remote institutions begin to use their discretion to achieve policy outcomes that are in their own institutional self-interest rather than than of the parliaments or peoples who originally delegated them power. In this case remoteness of the delegated authority becomes the chief barrier to correcting the problem, which lies more and more within the institutional framework of a delegated authority itself.
The difficulty of reforming any self-interested quango is especially problematic at international level where the agreement of many national parliaments is needed to correct the errant authority. This is the position that the EU institutions have reached today. The problem will only be fixed by returning powers inappropriate for any delegated authority back from Brussels to the plurism of the nation-state and its demos.