The EU’s future expansion to the east offers an unmissable opportunity to profoundly reform itself by putting its people in the driving seat.
After seventy years of unprecedented socioeconomic integration, the EU continues to evolve through processes that largely neglect people’s input. It remains virtually impossible for an EU citizen or resident—not to mention those living in candidate countries or other regions impacted by the EU—to express their desire for change in the union’s direction and to hold its institutions accountable. Yet as the big crises of the last decade have shown, from the sovereign-debt crisis to the COVID-19 pandemic to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to the violence in Israel and Gaza, EU action and inaction directly affect people’s lives across Europe and beyond. If the EU reacted in unprecedented ways to these crises—from the establishment of union-wide taxes for pandemic relief to the creation of joint-procurement agreements for vaccines and now for weapons to the activation of a common temporary protection mechanism for those fleeing Ukraine—its emergency responses took place with little or no democratic control.
This is far from new. The EU has always struggled with standard representative democracy, due to a combination of institutional design and history. As a technocratic project driven by member states, it drew its political legitimacy from the democratic credentials of the delegating countries. The EU found its way through a tacit and permissive consensus. Owing to its genetic code, it has been historically suspicious of any expression of popular sovereignty. If EU citizens have voted for their representatives in the European Parliament since 1979, even today they do so on different dates, according to different electoral laws, for candidates selected by national—rather than European—political parties and on the basis of domestic agendas. As a result, the EU lacks not only genuine EU-wide political parties competing into a transnational electoral contest, but also a pan-EU political space in which citizens can participate in decision-making that affects their common interests as Europeans. When it comes to political representation, unless a clear link between the vote cast by citizens and the formation of the next European Commission is established, it remains difficult to explain to voters what the purpose of them going to the European Parliament ballot is. This appears even more so as no motion of censure exists, so no one can realistically push the “European government” out of power and hold a political party, leader, or institution properly to account.
To many, it might appear unrealistic to transform a union of demographically and economically heterogeneous states into a fully fledged parliamentary democracy in which a transnational parliament matters as much as the states. Yet, one of the major lessons of the last decade of EU integration is that those who make decisions having a transnational impact must emerge from a transnational electoral process too. In other words, in a union made up of states and citizens, decision-makers must represent both.
Despite the EU’s multiple internal and external challenges, its leaders have thus far resisted calls for any significant institutional reform. Yet an opportunity to tackle its democratic conundrum may now be on offer. As Jan Zielonka presciently predicted a few years ago, “unless there are some powerful external shocks forcing dramatic changes, a spectacle of false pretentions can continue for a long time.” Those shocks are now in full swing.
As it contemplates a new expansion to the east, which is made inescapable by the new geopolitical imperatives, the EU is once again set to reform internally to be able to expand externally. This offers a unique chance to acknowledge the limitations of a system and structures created regardless of the people, and eventually to put addressing the legitimacy deficiency in EU integration front and centre.
Absence of popular input has been the case not only for citizens of member states but also for those from candidate countries. The last big accession waves of 2004 and 2007 fully revealed the original, unresolved “democratic sin” of EU integration.
By not foreseeing that citizens from candidate countries may have a say on the prospect of joining the union, the EU has deprived itself from earning a crucial legitimating opportunity. A look at “illiberal” Hungary suffices to gauge the costs of that omission. As shown by Ivan Krastev and Steven Holmes, behind today’s Central and East European illiberal revolution, there is a cultural, political, and democratic rejection of a top-down model imposed under a logic of imitation on countries emerging from communism.
In sum, due to its historical neglect of any expression of popular sovereignty, at accession and in membership, the EU has given up on the most powerful legitimating source at its disposal. Seen from this perspective, the Brexit referendum may be read as a revenge story (“take back control”) against the EU’s atavistic scepticism toward every expression of popular input.
The next enlargement will offer a unique opportunity not only to remedy that original sin but also to replace it with a “European democratic dividend.” By that I refer to the benefits, advantages, and positive outcomes that may result from a people-led choice for—and control of—European integration in each individual country.
Hence the need to radically rethink not only the EU accession process by giving voice to the candidate countries’ citizens, but also the very membership status.
To be part of the EU can no longer be all-or-nothing affair. To restore its credibility at home and abroad, the EU must move away from the dominant yet illusory paradigm of a monolithic membership imposed from above to a more diversified approach in which each country decides to commit, from the bottom up, to a menu of possible manifestations and spaces of EU integration. Under this new heterogenous, multispeed, and citizen-led construct, some countries would be free to integrate more deeply in certain areas without being prevented by others from doing so, or without feeling pressured to do so.
By eventually surrendering some political autonomy to citizens, this new collective understanding of accession and membership would entail a reset of the EU project. Candidate countries would be able to choose the degree of integration best suited to their needs and political realities while existing member states would be asked to reconsider their degree of engagement with the EU—and to do that based on their respective citizens’ wishes. One may consider, along the lines of the recent proposal by the Group of Twelve, a Franco-German expert initiative, four tiers of “membership,” the last two falling outside the EU altogether, could coexist. These “concentric circles” would include an inner circle whose members could have even closer ties than those that bind the EU already, the EU as we know it, associate membership (that is, of the internal market only), and the looser, less demanding new European Political Community.
This multispeed construct would however not create different levels of worth or standing among countries. Instead, it would unleash an alternative geopolitical imagination capable of accommodating different levels of commitment toward EU integration that for the first time would be driven by popular choice.
While new and existing members would be free to choose which circle to join, respect for the rule of law and commitment to human rights should remain non-negotiable. As a result, the exclusion of noncompliant members from any given circle could, unlike now, be foreseen and be accepted as legitimate, since under the proposed model all members would have their relationships with the EU determined by the participation of citizens.
This fresh and pragmatic approach to EU democratic expansion appears more attuned to today’s political realities than the original EU formula that still applies.
Under this regenerative dynamic, it would be a self-aware citizenry, not the individual states nor the EU institutions, to choose whether and the extent to which their country should engage in supranational decision-making and under what rules.
Jan Zielonka, Is the EU doomed?, Polity Press, 2014, chapter 1.
Ivan Krastev and Steven Holmes, The Light that Failed, Pegasus, 2020.
Report of the Franco-German Working Group on EU Institutional Reform, Sailing on High Seas: Reforming and Enlarging the EU for the 21st Century, September 18, 2023, https://www.politico.eu/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/19/Paper-EU-reform.pdf
Alberto Alemanno is Jean Monnet Professor of European Law at HEC Paris and a Europe’s Futures Fellow at IWM (2023–2024).
