Anti-Climacus

LIBERALISM AS REALISM: Henry Farrell has an excellent post on Andy Moravcsik's bizarre position on European integration: I read the article of Moravcsik's Farrell links to, and if I didn't know better, I'd think he'd been drinking the neorealist kool-aid (with a slight internationalist twist): he seems to be saying that the EU is good because it broadly protects national interests, and that there's no reason to bring in the opinions of the people on some of the more complicated topics involved because, well:

"Enthusiasts for deliberative democracy fail to appreciate that institutional reform can never generate an engaged public, because the average citizen responds only to highly salient ideals and issues. European ideals remain weak, while the bread-and-butter issues citizens care about most remain largely national. Forcing democratic debate about an institution that handles telecommunications standardisation, the composition of the Bosnia stabilisation force or the privatisation of electricity production produces the lowest common denominator of modern European politics: dissatisfaction with political elites, anger against foreigners and the symbolic dichotomy between Eurofederalists and Eurosceptics."

I'm just a little shocked to read that, because even I think that any such changes as may happen to Europe (I tend to look at it, in the main, as more of a national unification project than an international one) really do need to go through the people--or at least happen in ways that are clear to people--because it's not clear to me that it's the ignorance of the general public that makes them skeptical of advancements or changes to the system. The causal chain needs to go at least one step further back: it might well be that the lack of transparency in the system removes the opportunity for people to feel at all involved which leads to both the general disenchanment with further change and the reification of arguments divorced from reality (I'm borrowing heavily here from Tocqueville in the Ancien Regime, where he argues that it's the removal of political power from the French people that leads to their general discontent with politics, and not the other way around).

Farrell does make a point I'm not entirely willing to follow him on:

"Indeed, you could turn Moravcsik’s argument on its head – a fair amount of the animus that led to the “No” votes was less specifically directed at the constitutional text, or even at the EU, than at the general feeling that economic decision making is slipping away from democratic control, and that the EU is one manifestation of this. Indeed, I suspect (and hope) that the ‘No’ votes are the beginning of a wider challenge to the notion that vast areas of economic decision making should not be subject to political control."

I think there's a simpler explanation than this, which is to say that it's not the loss of control in economic decision-making that's troublesome, it's the loss of decision-making in general. One of the things that seems entirely baffling to me is that there are states in the EU which didn't turn over the decision on the constitution to their people (but, you say, isn't that analogous to state legislatures deciding to adopt the U.S. consitution? Yes, but, the U.S. constitution being an easier document to understand, it was presumably easier to have an open and vigorous debate over whether or not to accept the various previsions of it).

Anyway, the Moravcsik article makes for a truly bizarre read. I highly recommend it for that reason.