Politicizing Europe: The Challenge of Executive Discretion

Abstract

Modern political authority tends to be considered legitimate to the extent it can be openly and consequentially disputed. This is one reason why the prospects for the organised contestation of decision-making have been a recurrent theme of scholarship on the European Union (EU). Insofar as these prospects are weak, as much work on the ‘democratic deficit’ suggests, the EU seems anomalous, at least by the measure of our political ideals. As today’s Union undergoes rapid reshaping, it is worth asking how far the outlook is changing. Are we seeing the emergence of new channels of opposition that could strengthen the contestation of EU decision-making – the emergence of a more ‘politicized’ order, as it is sometimes called? Or are the obstacles to such opposition proliferating, such that politicizing Europe, rather than a process in train, becomes an increasingly demanding challenge? In this chapter I show how the irregular forms of decision-making the Euro crisis has occasioned are posing new questions of the temporal framework by which decisions in a democracy are contested. Modern democratic politics has typically been a politics of rhythm. As political improvisation comes to the fore, so the rhythms of democratic politics are put under strain. How political contestation might be achieved under these conditions will be one of our guiding questions.