Thammasat University students interested in political science, history, human rights, development studies, economics, sociology, and related subjects may find it useful to participate in a free 24 September Zoom webinar on Strengthening democracy in Europe: what can be done?
The event, on Tuesday, 24 September 2024 at 7pm Bangkok time, is presented by Cardiff University, a public research university in Cardiff, Wales.
Students are invited to register at this link:
https://cardiff.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_lHOQZVATRWuFmshx2S6Pyg#/registration
The TU Library collection includes several books about different aspects of democracy in Europe.
The event website explains:
2024 is the Year of Democracy, when more than 2 billion people go to the polls.
Every European has a deep stake in the policies that shape our lives, from tackling global crises like climate change, to local issues like the state of our schools and hospitals. Yet, many citizens feel disillusioned and disengaged from politics; some vote for populist parties and many do not bother to vote at all.
What are the main challenges facing democracy in Europe, and what can be done? What impact will new digital technologies like social media and AI have on the future evolution and health of democratic systems?
How can we promote the public sphere and public participation in our democracies? What is the state of the relationship between experts, policymakers and the public, and how can we strengthen this nexus?
Join us for this timely debate, which is free and open to all.
Our panellists
Barbara Prainsack MAE, Professor for Comparative Policy Analysis, University of Vienna and Chair of the European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies
Nils-Eric Sahlin MAE, Professor and Chair of Medical Ethics, Lund University and Vice-Chair of the European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies
Cathrine Holst, Professor in Philosophy of Science and Democracy, University of Oslo
Dr. Mario Scharfbillig, Unit for Science for Democracy and Evidence-Informed Policymaking, Joint Research Centre, European Commission
The webinar will be chaired by Professor Ole Petersen MAE, Academic Director of the Academia Europaea Cardiff Knowledge Hub.
In July 2024, on the website of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a nonpartisan international affairs think tank headquartered in Washington, D.C., with operations in Europe, South and East Asia, and the Middle East, an article observed:
The political debate in Europe is increasingly focused on whether to engage or isolate radical-right parties. A European democracy pact could help the EU mitigate the growing risk to liberal pluralism.
The dominant, epoch-making European storyline is now clear: the rise of the far right threatens the EU’s future and democracy. This standard view is expressed in countless opinion pieces and political speeches and is now reshaping both national and EU-level politics. Even if the far right did not surge quite as dramatically as widely predicted in either the European Parliament or the French parliamentary elections, its growing popularity clearly represents a pressing challenge both at the EU level and in national politics.
However, the continent’s predicament might be more accurately described as a more subtle and complex conundrum: in the immediate short term, what is good for the EU integration project might not be good for democracy, and vice versa. The EU and national governments have been struggling with this democracy catch-22 for several years now, and the election results make it an even sharper challenge.
The postelection context has been dominated by the debate over whether to engage or isolate the far right—a debate that has been exhaustively covered and unfolding for many years. Yet, the empirical record suggests that neither engaging with the far right nor ostracizing it has worked especially well. Instead, a third approach might help map a way out of the democracy catch-22: a European democracy pact.
Repeat Strategies
In the EU’s fraught postelection maneuvering, many mainstream parties are set largely to follow a familiar script of banding together to contain the new far-right surge. The standard op-eds, articles, and political speeches now advocate more stringent isolation of the far right. This was of course the dominant debate around France’s snap parliamentary election. And at the EU level, despite shifts in public voting patterns and in the European Parliament arithmetic, a familiar coalition of the main center-right, center-left, and centrist parties will continue. Politicians’ priority in ensuring this continuity is to safeguard key areas of cooperation against more EU-critical positions.
Seeking to protect important EU policy initiatives in this way may be a justified imperative, but the implications for democratic pluralism are not entirely benign. The strategy doubles down on long-standing coalition building aimed at minimizing the influence of EU-critical parties. The risk is that this approach constricts ideological debate and does little to address the underlying reasons why far-right parties are gaining support. Indeed, it is a strategy that almost willfully eschews any fundamental rethink by mainstream pro-EU parties.
At the same time, the opposing stance has also gained pertinence. Some parts of the center right have raised the prospect of at least ad hoc cooperation with some parts of the far right. This strategy involves the European polity showing a greater degree of democratic adaptation, probably to the detriment of EU cooperation. Some back this strategy with a claim that the closer the far right gets to having to find practical policy solutions, the more its allure will fade. Yet, the “let them govern” line underplays how much damage the far right might do to both democracy and the EU before its appeal begins to wane—if, indeed, it does.
A more indirect version of this line focuses not so much on engaging far-right parties but on finding ways to include more citizen participation in EU policies. This stance holds that the engage-versus-isolate binary can be softened by more inclusive forms of citizen engagement. The logic runs that allowing citizens to deliberate and feel they have influence will take away their incentive to vote far right—eventually dissolving the tension between deeper democracy and deeper EU integration. This is an intuitive and convincing approach, but at best it can work over the very long term. The desired results for now look quite uncertain: many countries have tried innovative forms of democratic deliberation, yet their far-right parties have continued to surge.
Hence the democracy catch-22 facing European governments: either show democratic responsiveness and risk short-term damage to the EU or double down on political orthodoxy and risk dampening pluralism. On one side is the danger of incremental de-democratization; on the other is the specter of managerial executive aggrandizement. Bend one way and the EU risks normalizing far-right positions; bend the other way and it frames everything as a battle against the far right in a way that saps democracy’s open-ended pluralism. […]
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)