The capital of the democratic deficit

Having just returned from a few days in Brussels, there are two pieces of news to report. First, Belgium has beat out Iraq in the infamous record of the longest time without a government. And second, European leaders managed to produce a stale declaration on the events in Libya while individual states (i.e. France) went their own way and recognized the Libyan opposition’s Interim Governing Council.

On the surface, these are completely unrelated. One is about long-running and festering domestic issues about linguistic groups, economic redistribution and the f-word (“fairness”). The other is about coordinating foreign policy in difficult circumstances and with an increasingly disparate group of states.

But what they have in common is that they both happened in Brussels and behind the closed doors of the city’s infamous grey buildings. In their own way, and by contrast to what is going on in the streets of Benghazi, they are symptoms of bureaucratic decision-making and an electorate that seems largely absent.

Belgium’s democracy
News reports of the day when Belgium overtook Iraq’s record focused on the tongue-in-cheek celebrations that were staged across the country. While certainly amusing, it is also alarming. Belgians express concern about the possible division of their country, but also describe it as an inexorable process that is out of their hands.

The Guardian quoted one person as saying: “Everything goes on in the same old way. It's better not having a government. Besides the trouble with democracy is it is so slow. If we want to build a new road, it takes us 20 years to decide. The Chinese dictatorship does it the next day."

It’s also indicative, as this person points out, that you really wouldn’t notice that there hasn’t been a government in nine months. The city keeps running just as its most famous native, Jacques Brel, described it: trams crisscross the city, the beer flows generously and the clouds fly overhead. People go about their business, removed from the ongoing discussions among politicians. This is what a democratic deficit look like.

The European Union’s democracy
And it’s the same democratic deficit that the European institutions have. It’s worth rewinding to the soul-searching discussions that followed the French and Dutch rejection of a proposed Constitution, which, incidentally, was supposed to help address this problem, as well as streamline decision-making. At the time, there was much talk of instituting meaningful “civil dialogue” while “participatory democracy” became a buzzword. So what happened next?

In effect, European leaders created a committee of “wise men”. These included two out of the three leaders of the Convention project; the majority of the others had held positions within the European institutions. They effectively re-wrote a Convention-lite and sidestepped the embarrassment of referenda by having parliaments ratify the treaty. (They also re-submitted the referendum to Irish voters after they first rejected the treaty.)

This is not to question the merits of the Treaty of Lisbon, and I’ve certainly simplified the process in my description, but it is worth noting that voter turnout for the European Parliament’s elections have consistently been declining (with the exception of countries like Belgium where voting is mandatory) and the institutions seems to go on, fed by their own momentum.

Capital of what?
Brussels prides itself as being the “capital city of Europe” and Belgium had been used in comparative politics classes as a case study for the relative merits of parliamentary systems based on proportional representation for democracy. It makes it all the more ironic that Belgium, and specifically the capital city of Europe, has now become a case study for democratic deficits.