At a time when democracy is in decline in many parts of the world, the European Union should stand out as a beacon of hope.  Whatever its flaws, it is a regional system in which democracy is ostentatiously embraced and constitutionally enshrined as a core EU value since 2010.  Indeed, as democracy fares badly in many parts of the world, the EU seems to be affirming its commitment. It has recently adopted a raft of measures to protect and bolster various dimensions of democratic practice.  This array, which includes regulation of challenges such as strategic lawsuits against public policy (SLAPPs), rule-of-law backsliding, restrictions on media freedom, digital disinformation, misleading political advertising, and problematic foreign funding, suggests that the EU is taking democracy seriously.

And yet in crucial respects, the EU remains ambivalent about its relationship to democracy, and particularly about the legitimacy of its role in enhancing and protecting democracy.  The recent legislative initiatives are important steps, but they are fragmented and limited in significant ways, tied to market-regulation rationales, and more often focused on threats from outside the EU than on problems within.

What accounts for this equivocation?  Some part of the EU’s hesitance in relation to its democracy-promoting role is a product of its origins.  As Jan-Werner Müller and Joseph Weiler have pointed out, the European project was silent on democracy at the outset, understanding itself in the postwar period as a kind of militant democratic system that sought to protect national democracies against the worst excesses of popular sovereignty through the creation of functional supranational institutions that were designed not to be responsive to popular will.

That relative silence continued for several decades after the creation of the European Communities in the 1950s.  The so-called ‘Copenhagen criteria’ for accession (the requirement that candidates for EU membership must demonstrate respect for democracy, the rule of law, and human rights) were only formalized in the 1990s, some forty years later.  And despite the creation of the so-called Article 7 sanction mechanism (to be used against Member States which are considered to be seriously and persistently violating democratic requirements), the functioning and quality of national democracy has until recently been considered to be a matter for the Member States, and not the EU.

Further, although the EU institutions gradually enhanced their own democratic elements, through the institution of direct elections to the European Parliament and closer links between the outcome of European Parliament elections and the composition of the European Commission, as well as improved transparency, criticisms of the EU’s democratic deficit have been persistent.   The early democratic deficit critique focused on the EU’s own institutions and their composition and functioning, as well as their lack of responsiveness to European citizens.           Subsequently, as the EU’s powers grew and particularly during periods of crisis such as the Eurocrisis and Covid, the democracy critique began to focus on the executive dominance of EU policymaking, and its adverse effects on Member State democracy.  In more recent years, concerns about democracy in the EU have expanded beyond the democratic deficiencies of EU institutions, or the impact of EU policymaking on national democratic processes, and have focused on the rise of authoritarianism and democratic erosion within EU member states.

Given these three dimensions of the EU’s democracy deficit, and the assertion in Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union that the EU is founded on the value of democracy, what explains the continuing ambivalence about addressing all aspects of democracy within the EU? There seem to be two main impediments, which combine legal and political dimensions.  A first is the so-called ‘competence’ problem.  The EU – which is limited to the legal powers which have been conferred on it under its governing treaties - has not been given direct legal competence to take action to protect or strengthen democracy.  For this reason, it has been adopting much of the legislation mentioned above under the rubric of market-regulation or budgetary measures, with the consequence that these are artificially constrained and limited in their scope.  A second is an apparently continuing political reluctance to have the EU examining and addressing the functioning of democracy at the national level.  Many of the recent measures take aim at threats to democracy coming from outside the EU, rather than from within, even though many of the causes of democratic erosion in the EU are as much internal as external.

Much of the recent debate about the future of Europe has focused on the need for the EU to finally develop a proper defence policy and capacity.  A good deal of this is driven by external factors such as the threat from Russia and the increasing unreliability of the American alliance. External pressures can be valuable, but the democracy agenda, far from being reinforced by such external developments, is being challenged from many different directions. Yet a convincing security response cannot co-exist with a weak position on the core values that are supposed to unite the bloc. It is therefore essential that the EU and its member states move beyond their historic ambivalence, and empower the EU to adopt robust and comprehensive action to strengthen and reinforce democracy in all its dimensions.