Jan Blommaert
In the “agreement” concluded between the informal EU-summit and Greece on 13-07-2015, a remarkable statement was made, one that formally puts an end to two centuries of democracy-as-we-know-it. Here it is.
“The government needs to consult and agree with the Institutions on all draft legislation in relevant areas with adequate time before submitting it for public consultation or to Parliament.”
“The Institutions” is shorthand here for what is more widely known as “the Troika”, the technocratic body composed of members of the IMF, the European Commission and the ECB and deployed in debt-ridden countries such as Greece. This body has no formal status and has, needless to say, no democratic statute. That means, concretely, that it is in no way publicly accountable for its decisions and actions, and that it cannot be in any way sanctioned by those affected by its decisions and actions. But this is unremarkable: the so-called “EU-summit” that acts as author of this clause is in itself an informal construction: it is not the EU Council, nor the Commission, let alone the Parliament acting here, but an ad-hoc “upgrade” of this other informal EU-construction, the so-called “Eurogroup”. Meetings of such bodies are in camera and not minuted. Formal control and democratic response are, thus, excluded.
Observe that the presence of the Troika as the all-powerful agent in determining the course of austerity policies in Greece – and the lack of democratic sovereignty following from that – was one of the key themes that propelled Alexis Tsipras’s Syriza party to a landslide electoral victory in January 2015. The acceptance of the Troika as an even more powerful actor is probably Tsirpas’s greatest defeat in the negotiations with the Eurogroup.
So let us return to the main point here. In the clause quoted above, the EU summit defines legislative work: it starts from the government, passes on to the Troika, and then ends in Parliament for “public consultation”.
Since Montesquieu defined the “trias politica” as the cornerstone of the modern democratic institutional architecture, the government is the “executive” branch, the elected parliament the “legislative” (the third, “judicial” branch is less relevant here). Put simply: laws are made in and by Parliament and then handed to the government for implementation. What the exhausted, frustrated and impatient political leaders present at the EU-summit (who in their own country undoubtedly would see the separation of powers through the “trias” as a sacrosanct item) have now written down, black on white, is the exact reversal: laws are drafted by the government, which thus becomes the “legislative” power as well as the “executive” one, while the elected Parliament is now openly reduced to “public consultation”, not decision. For in between both, now, stands a third party: the unelected (and, in effect, foreign) technocrats of the Troika, accountable to exactly no one, who act as ursurpers of both the executive and legislative powers in – what we still encouraged to call – a “democratic EU member state”. Observe that the possibility of legislative initiatives emerging from the parliamentary floor is not even entertained in the text of the agreement.
In a crisp but perplexing phrase, then, all of this is presented as the way “to fully normalize working methods with the Institutions“. This, in the eyes of its eminent authors, is normal “democratic” (or whatever) procedure. While it would be a violation of the Constitution in every EU member state, and remains the criterion defining the difference between a “parliamentary democracy” and, say, a dictatorship or a totalitarian system..
Not some obscure bunch of antipolitical technocrats has come up with this termination of the “trias”; but democratically elected political leaders meeting in an informal, but consequential, setting. These elected leaders will now have to defend this in their respective national parliaments. It would be good if democratic parliamentarians would raise this redefinition of the fundamental democratic institutional architecture, and ask them explicitly whether they really mean what they wrote down. I am sure that some strange responses will be forthcoming.
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