The European Union stands at a crossroads. What sounds like a cliché, however, applies to the EU again at present, as multiple challenges in recent years raise anew the relevance of European integration, but also its democratization as well as with a view to the EU path of development. The early “Framers” of the European Communities never opted for a United States of Europe. The failure of the Constitutional Treaty two decades ago reconfirmed the rejection of a quasi-federal union, at least in formal constitutional terms. Yet, while the EU remains a sui generis or one-of-a-kind polity, the parallels that have emerged between the system of government and federalism in the U.S. and the EU in its multi-level system are even more striking.
The EU government – and we should indeed refer to this set of institutions, also given their far-reaching scope of authority, as a ‘government’ – demonstrates a high institutional affinity to, or similarity with, the presidential form of government, as I have argued about a decade ago. While the EU lacks a popularly elected chief executive, there is strong separation of powers among the governing bodies, with mutual institutional independence, as well as a lack of a ‘confidence relationship’ or ‘government vs. opposition’ between Commission, Parliament and Council. This similarity is not only structural. It is also found in patterns of politics. They include flexible or varying coalitions among institutions and parties in different policy areas to reach consensus in such a complex division-of-powers system, both at EU level and in its multilevel dimension.
Moreover, the similarities are not limited to institutional characteristics at the (supra)national level. They are also evident in the historical development of each community. Parallels can be identified in the evolution of democracy and federalism, for instance with regard to (supra)national integration as intensively connected with market integration, or the role of judicial review by the respective highest courts in shaping constitutional and treaty interpretation and even the wider development of the systems, as Marcus Höreth analyzes in a comparison of the EU Court of Justice and the US Supreme Court. The current state of integration in the EU is reminiscent of the federal structure of the United States in that, for a long time, into the present day, it has been characterized by polycentricity and multilevel governance. Furthermore, in both cases, the ‘nature of the Union’ touches upon highly politicized and recurrently contentious issues revolving around competing notions of state versus popular sovereignty. Reflecting the decentralized characters further, the party and electoral systems both in the U.S and EU political systems remain predominantly the responsibility of the (member) states to this day. This has certainly contributed to the limited organizational consolidation of American parties as well as European parties, which at EU level remain rather loosely federated groups or ‘families’ of member-state ones. However, this alone does not explain the behavior of political parties in government practice.
The lack of ‘government versus opposition’ competition both in the EU and the U.S. can instead be attributed to the presidential type of government: that is, an institutional separation of powers, coupled with the legislature’s lack of ‘confidence relationship’ and thus of political responsibility for supporting the executive branch. Yet, unlike the EU, the political parties in the U.S. managed to consolidate around national platforms in the last decades, nevertheless. This evolution could hardly be squared with the U.S. Framers’ intentions, who were unequivocally skeptical of ‘factions’, and in any case drafted a constitution before modern political parties even existed – and incidentally there are good reasons to be critical of the Framers’ views both on federalism and democracy and of further lessons to learn from U.S. federalism, as Eva Hausteiner discusses elsewhere in this series. Still, at bottom line, the popular election of the chief executive in a presidential system may provide ‘the missing link’ to explain this development, i.e. the ‘pull effect’ that the election of the president had over time in the consolidation of the two-party system across branches and levels of government in the U.S. case, as I have argued in my book on Tensions of American Federal Democracy (pp. 148-151).
Of course, caution is warranted regarding lessons or pitfalls to learn from the U.S. case. This applies already on account of issues of institutional transferability to different contexts. Moreover, the U.S. case may seem even less worthy of emulation given its own state of the union and the polarization of both American federalism and democracy, exacerbated not least by the radicalization of the Republican Party, not to mention the trends of democratic backsliding under both Trump Administrations. At the same time, both the theories and debates of Federalists and Antifederalists remain limited to their late 18th century institutional and ideational contexts. Nevertheless, they are insightful and allow for drawing different implications of how an EU federal democracy should be designed. Moreover, it is still worthwhile to juxtapose the EU and US cases, not only for comparative analytical purposes, but also for drawing lessons for democratization of a federal system.
Upon closer inspection, parallels in the development of the U.S. federal republic and the EU political system are hardly coincidental. The historical paths leading to representative democracy on the European and the American continents share several fundamental common features. One foundation – in addition to the process of modern state building in general – comprises the development of constitutionalism, rule of law, and parliamentarism in the broader sense. The latter does not necessarily equate to modern parliamentary democracy, but rather the empowerment of a parliament – later elected by the people following expansions in suffrage and further democratization – to serve as a co-legislator with, and have oversight over, the executive branch, as well as a legislative ‘power of the purse’ in budgetary matters. The emergence of a presidential system of government in the late 18th century in the newly independent United States did not unfold in complete detachment from parliamentarism at that time. It was, however, yet to develop further in Europe, especially in Great Britain, several decades later.
The Framers of the U.S. Constitution did not take a revolutionary ‘leap’ in the path of developing modern democratic government, and they certainly did not conceive the new Union government as ‘presidential’. Instead, while path-breaking, their critical juncture and the route they took constituted more ‘a fork in the road’. They broke away from the evolution of parliamentarism within the British Westminster system when it was already shifting from the constitutional monarchy toward a system of parliamentary government, as Samuel Huntington argued in the 1960s, in Political Order in Changing Societies, among other works. The U.S. Constitution thus retained and democratized the then-established dualism between a legislature, embodied in an assembly with two distinct chambers, and a unitary executive branch, a branch that had previously been embodied in the monarch and the head of government acting on its behalf – a constellation that the former colonies were well familiar with in their own systems of government too. The Declaration of Independence even addressed the monarch, not the parliament. The U.S. Constitution is thus not only an intellectual outcome of the Framers and the Federalists, or their interpretation of thinkers like Montesquieu and Locke. It was a continuation of the separation of powers that had evolved in Britain and British North America by that time, but in republican form. Its democratization followed – like in many other countries – in successive decades, but unlike in Europe, within the parameters of a strict separation between executive and legislative branches.
Turning again to the European Union, its political system in general and its form of government in particular have taken on many features of parliamentarism since its early stages. For instance, multiple treaty revisions have expanded the powers of the European Parliament, a great deal of European legislation and other acts are contingent upon its approval, in other cases consultation, and EP direct elections have been in place for almost fifty years. On the other hand, the relations between the EU governing institutions, including among the European Commission and Parliament, have not become parliamentary in the sense of a parliamentary government, and certainly not parliamentary democracy. In the course of the European integration project, the EU can be said to be both the product and the producer of post-parliamentary developmental trends and governance practices. Its system of government, though, remains in a pre-parliamentary stage – i.e., it has not shifted toward a confidence relationship between executive and parliamentary majority. Nevertheless, the EU exhibits core elements of constitutionalism and the rule of law, such as the primacy of EU law (its “legal acts”), respect for and protection of human and civil rights, separation of powers, judicial review, and the guarantee of Union citizens’ rights, including democratic participation – albeit Union citizenship remains derivative of member state ones. While still mired in its democratic dilemma, the EU – at latest following the Treaty of Lisbon (2009) – encompasses a wide range of mechanisms for democratic and federal participation, including representative, civil society, subsidiarity, and even plebiscitary elements. It is also against this backdrop, not just in the wake of various crises, that the EU stands at a crossroads, one that may head toward further democratization of a de-facto federal union, but which may take various directions.
The EU member states are not presidential systems, but rather parliamentary systems of government, though a dozen have separately elected heads of state or presidents (the only presidential case is Cyprus). This stands in fundamental contrast to the EU-level system of government, which thus far has developed a presidential, not a parliamentary-democratic, type arrangement. While others continue to dispute the feasibility of supranational democratization (as Dirk Jörke does in this series), the possibility and desirability of a further democratization path should not be precluded. Because EU governance has long become federal in practice, the question arises at this crossroads on how to organize a commensurate democratic anchorage (as Christian Lammert and Dale Mineshima-Lowe point out in this series). A parliamentarization – e.g. by making the EP responsible for electing the Commission by its own majority, and rendering the latter dependent on the EP’s confidence to govern and stay in office, etc. – would bring the EU government closer in composition and function to the parliamentary democracies at member-state level. However, it would require altering how governance works at EU-level as well, which does not follow ‘government-vs.-opposition’ dynamics.
The presidential system, which was first implemented in the United States, fused the head of state to the position and role of head of government—an arrangement, albeit monarchic, that was already common at the time of the system’s inception. However, there is no functional necessity to combine these offices. Their merger stems from historical development and the constitutionalization of a large-scale republic to its presidential form. What appears to be ‘American’ about the EU-government lies not only in federalism parallels, but in the development of the division-of-powers system at EU level. A democratization process along these lines would be compatible with the EU’s institutional system. Granted, as Juan Linz analyzed in a classic 1990 essay, there are “perils of presidentialism” long identified in several countries that took authoritarian turns, dangers the Federalists were also cautious of vis-à-vis the presidency and certainly exhibited by the current Trump Administration. But parliamentary systems can likewise be susceptible to democratic backsliding, as several EU member states demonstrated in recent years.
A popular election of a chief executive such as the Commission President or the President of the European Council need not lead to excessive personalism or executive aggrandizement. In any case, the comparison with the U.S. polity proves insightful, also for the purpose of identifying what kind of government the EU has and commensurate paths of democratization. Striking balances between intergovernmentalism and supranationalism are sure to remain necessities in this complex multilevel system, irrespective of which direction the EU takes at its democratic-federal crossroads. A popularly elected executive, however, may contribute significantly to Europeanizing EU elections, as the U.S. case also demonstrates, where parties could consolidate around polity-wide platforms despite the highly decentralized, state-based electoral and party systems. Accordingly, the EU could reinforce democratic anchorage and its character not only as a union of states but also citizens.
