European trust: the perfect storm
#rebuildingtrust
The Vienna Policy
Conference, October 29-30, 2015, will delve into one of the most important
trends driving change in European politics: the dramatic drop in public trust
in many political institutions. Policy researchers, activists, leading
European thinkers, and political figures will discuss new research and analysis
of the causes and consequences of the trust gap across the European
continent. Debating Europe and
openDemocracy will be covering the event and its follow-up, and we
continue the series with the perspective of Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, principal
investigator in a report on integrity and trust in Europe for the 2017 Dutch EU
presidency.
Boris Johnson and Roger Gifford launch Lord Mayor's Summer Cycle Challenge, 2013. Flickr/ MichaelBowles/Rex Features. Some rights reserved.Until the latest refugee crisis, the Eurobarometer
question on attitudes towards migration would have been discarded in any sociology
classroom, as it actually prompted respondents to concede that migration was
needed to cover the EU’s demographic deficit before measuring their genuine
opinion about it[i]. Only
in 2015, when things got out of control, did EU pollsters, famous for allowing commissioners
to write unprofessional questions, allow migration to be raised as the number
one concern in the regular Eurobarometer survey.
Moreover in 2015, corruption no longer featured among
the first ten concerns of Europeans, despite the fact that specially
commissioned expensive surveys by those responsible for the European
Anticorruption Report had found only 1-2 years before that three out of four
EU citizens thought that bribery and the use of connections are ‘often’ the
easiest way to obtain ‘certain’ public services in their country.(Had this been
the case, Europe would have fallen to the same levels of corruption as
sub-Saharan Africa.) Long before the current trust crisis, the EU seems to have
lost any objectivity in inquiring what people really think about our problems, let
alone the capacity to process their responses.
Since 2011, European citizens have been losing
faith with the European project. Citizens are split,
with around half feeling that their voice counts in the EU, and
half feeling the opposite. While trust is generally higher in newer member
states – such as Romania (62%), Ireland (57%), Lithuania (55%), Bulgaria (55%),
Poland (53%) – clear majorities of respondents in Mediterranean countries
(Cyprus, Greece, Spain and Portugal), have profoundly lost trust in both
European and national political institutions since 2007. EU institutions
themselves have lost on average more trust than national institutions, with sub-national governments the most trusted.
The literature also shows
that EU citizens are in fact more likely to show greater approval of the EU
when their trust in their own national institutions is low and vice versa,
since they perceive the two centres of authority as alternatives. If one’s
national government is incompetent or inefficient perhaps EU policies will be
able to issue some correctives from above – or so runs the argument. If,
however, national institutions appear to perform well, citizens may fear that
transferring sovereignty to the supranational authorities of the EU will result
in a compromise with less well-performing countries, bringing a subsequent loss
of both efficiency and integrity.
The EU is not a popular democracy – such was not,
after all, the intention of its founding fathers. Jean Monnet recounts in his
memoirs that the founding idea originated in the First World War and that the
goal was to pool resources to enable the repulse of an enemy under a unified
command – because coordination was failing to deliver under such conditions[ii].
It still fails. Ghita Ionescu, the founder of the London School of
Economics journal Government and
opposition wrote more than twenty years ago[iii]
that the democratic deficit
predated the European Union, caused by the specialization of knowledge and
increase in the power of experts on one hand, and on the other by the
transnationalization of what had previously been national matters.
Consequently, it became impossible for governments to act alone even after the
“fullest consultation of their peoples”.
In 2004, the number of Europeans who believed that their voice counted
in the EU was 39%. Ten years later, after the powers of the European Parliament
have greatly increased, that figure has dropped to 29% (those who feel
disempowered have increased from 52 to 66, an even greater difference). In
other words, a majority always knew that the EU was not a popular democracy
from the outset. Even in 2004, for every European who believed he had a voice
in the EU two believed that they had none (Eurobarometer 2013a).
Apart from Denmark, where an absolute majority believe that their voice
counts in the EU (57% vs. 41%), in 26 countries people believe they have no
influence in the EU in proportions that vary from 50% in Sweden and 51% in
Belgium, up to 86% in both Cyprus and Greece – for obvious reasons.
But there is nothing new here, except, of course, the terrible
constraints that the euro crisis has imposed on Greece, Cyprus and other
countries, a tragedy caused by the complexity of an interdependent world which
makes people less and less able to decide their own fate. In such complex
situations, it is only the populists who offer simple solutions for how to
empower voters.
We do know what has caused
the loss of trust: over two generations a significant question mark has arisen
over whether the EU is the best vehicle to maximize social welfare for its various
peoples. On one hand, there is the EU’s economic performance since the advent
of the economic and growth crisis. On the other, there is loss of trust in
European elites, perceived as demanding austerity from the people only to live
a life of privilege themselves where taxes are concerned. Between 30 % and 40 %
of Europeans complain about favouritism (special advantages) in service
provision.
The perception that special
advantages are often given to certain individuals or groups is particularly
widespread in assessments of public healthcare systems. The sizeable
percentages even in northern and western Europe of 28 % and 36 % respectively
perhaps indicate the difficulty of public healthcare provision in times of
budgetary austerity. As to southern and central and eastern Europe, figures there suggest the presence of policy
failure, with 42 % and 49 % of respondents complaining of favouritism.
With a European average of
41 % for healthcare systems this already stands as a warning that any decrease
in the quality of governance subverts trust. In new member countries, a
majority exists that believes that favoritism is the rule of the game in their
societies. Furthermore, trust in the EU is significantly associated in our
statistical models by the subjective assessment of how governments deal with this
corruption. But neither problem is easy to tackle.
Undoubtedly,
since the beginning of the economic crisis, Europe has lost a significant
amount of the confidence of its citizens, and at first sight it is tempting to
argue that a reflection of that can be seen in the gradual decrease in turnout
at European elections, or in the increase in votes polled by populists, (although
the
evidence shows that populists are better explained by the national failures
of some traditional parties than any pan-European explanation).
The
erosion of trust and reduction in participation and mainstream preferences seems
to threaten the imminent ruin of European democracy and legitimacy; it might
even put a stop to the European project itself. But the solutions to this as currently debated
seem to derive from some public relations (PR) menu for democracy, in which we
need to entrust an increasingly sceptical public with more and more veto powers
at the very moment when the already existing veto powers threaten the EU project. Somehow this does not seem
right.
Of course, there is no PR
substitute for solving the problems. Some may argue that fixing Europe is about
performance, not democracy: people will like European elites again when they
prove to them that they can handle the euro and the migration caused by the failure
of democratization in the Arab countries, two problems that western leaders
made worse, if they did not altogether create them in the first place.
Fix them, and we shall be
safe – this was not a union for better as well as for worse. But as we might
not be able to fix them, we might as well apply ourselves to addressing the
other problem. The current crisis in trust was to a certain extent brought
about by the contrast between the demands of austerity as laid upon the
shoulders of EU citizens and the self-serving behavior and flouting of rules
engaged in by politicians.
Some people will argue that
times of austerity require elites – especially politicians – of austerity. But
a change of image among EU politicians, to be more like those in countries
where trust is high, who fly economy class and cycle to the office, might do much
to restore trust. Hard times are easier to bear when governments make a shift
to share the burdens that weigh upon the governed. These, and other
suggestions will be aired at the Conference ‘Rebuilding
Trust in Europe’ organized by
the Open Society Foundations and ERSTE Stiftung on 29-30 October in Vienna.
[i] Standard
Eurobarometer 71, Spring 2009; the exact wording of this question is “When
thinking about the demographic challenges ahead (e.g. ageing population) and
the need for filling in labour shortages in certain sectors of EU economy (e.g.
healthcare, new technologies), some people
think that the EU should encourage labour migration from non-EU countries.
Would you say you…?”
[ii] Monnet, Jean
(1978) “Memoirs. The architect and master builder of the European Economic
Community”, Garden City, New York: Double Day.
[iii] Ionescu, G. (1989) “Political under Comprehension, or
the Overload of Political Cognition”, Government
and Opposition, 24(4): 413–26.