October 2014, Volume 25, Number 4 $13.

00
Indias Watershed Vote
Eswaran Sridharan Ashutosh Varshney Rajiv Kumar Sumit Ganguly
External Inuence and Democratization
Jakob Tolstrup Ghia Nodia Steven Levitsky & Lucan Way
Indonesias 2014 Elections
Edward Aspinall Marcus Mietzner
Euroskepticism Arrives
Liubomir Topaloff Jo~ao Carlos Espada
Richard Joseph on the Nigerian Paradox
Javier Corrales & Michael Penfold on Term Limits in Latin America
Marc F. Plattner on The Confidence Trap
From Politics to Protest
Ivan Krastev
THE MISSING DEBATE
Jo~ao Carlos Espada
Jo~ ao Carlos Espada is the founder and director of the Institute for
Political Studies at the Catholic University of Portugal. From 2011 to
2013, he held the European Parliament/Bronisaw Geremek European
Civilisation Chair at the College of Europe, Natolin (Warsaw).
Almost a quarter-century ago, shortly after jubilant Germans tore down
the Berlin Wall, the late Ralf Dahrendorf wrote one of the first books
to be published about that great event. Reflections on the Revolution in
Europe was a book of joy about the fall of communism. Yet as its deli-
berately Burkean title suggests, it was also a book of caution, in this case
about the difficulties of transitions to democracy.
1
Within the short com-
pass of this brief tome, one can detect the profound wisdom of someone
who had a distinguished career as a scholar and politician not only in his
native Germany but also in Britain (not to mention Dahrendorfs service
on the European Commission).
The immediate afterglow of communisms fall is long past, but
Dahrendorfs insights remain compelling. They can help to show a
troubled and puzzled Europe how to come to grips with more recent
challenges. I have in mind especially those raised by the widely noted
success of Euroskeptic (and in some cases quite extreme) parties in the
European Parliament (EP) elections of May 2014. Some of these par-
ties are far to the left, others are far to the right, and a number traf-
fic in a rhetoric of class or racial struggle that is problematic at best
and reprehensible at worst. But the reason for their success lies less in
any underlying radicalization of European voters than in what all these
parties have in common: They are all voicing a claim that mainstream
liberal-democratic parties have been ignoring. This claim amounts to an
appeal to decentralize more powers to the local (that is to say, in the
EU context, the national) level, and to put more control back into the
hands of elected national parliaments.
Dahrendorf is relevant here, for the beginning of wisdom about this
Journal of Democracy Volume 25, Number 4 October 2014
2014 National Endowment for Democracy and Johns Hopkins University Press
Euroskepticism Arrives
89 Jo~ao Carlos Espada
claim is to recognize that, whether one agrees with it or not, it is a le-
gitimate matter of political debate and deserves a place within the ambit
of what he called normal politics. Dahrendorf explained his notion of
normal politics in the course of distinguishing it from what he called
constitutional politics. The latter, he said,
is about the framework of the social order, the social contract, as it were,
and its institutional forms; normal politics is about the directions dictated
by interests and other preferences within this framework. Having free and
fair elections is a matter of constitutional politics; campaigning for the
privatisation of the steel industry is a matter of normal politics. The dis-
tinction is not always clear. . . . In matters of constitutional politics there
are no two ways, or rather there are only two ways, the closed society or
the open society, whereas in normal politics a hundred options may be on
offer, and three or four usually are.
2

Writing just after the Walls destruction, Dahrendorf was warning
against the mistake of trying to replace one closed system (communism)
with another (democratic capitalism imprudently interpreted in an over-
ly closed way). Following his intellectual hero, the philosopher of
science Karl Popper (190294), Dahrendorf insisted that one of the main
purposes of a free constitution is to allow an ongoing conversation and
competition between rival views regarding public policysome views
may incline toward free markets, for example, while others may favor
state intervention. This is the realm of normal politics, where we of-
ten face electorally successful causes with which we disagree. I find it
easy, Dahrendorf added, to tolerate those who advocate a major role
for the state in economic policy-making, or a massive transfer of re-
sources for social objectives, although I may be opposed to their views.
And he warned that whatever is raised to [the constitutional] plane is
thereby removed from the day-to-day struggles of normal politics, until
in the end a total constitution emerges in which there is nothing left to
disagree about, a total society, another totalitarianism.
3

Dahrendorf sympathized with the understandable enthusiasm of post-
communist societiesWhat a time to be alive, he wrotebut he also
worried about the prospect that a misleading image of noncommunist so-
cieties might emerge out of that enthusiasm. People who were unfamiliar
with Western liberal democracy might be tempted to think about non-
communist societies with a mindset shaped by communist ideology, now
turned into anticommunist ideology. They might imagine noncommunist
societies as if these too should aim fixedly at some rigid end state to be
achieved: a pure capitalist system, as it were. But this would be a great
misunderstading, for what sets democratic capitalism apart is its openness
to different choices. Some are played out in the market and civil society,
while others receive expression via free elections, public debates, parlia-
mentary controversies, and the like.
90 Journal of Democracy
There was a more profound reason for Dahrendorfs concern. Born in
Germany in 1929, he had studied carefully the difficulties that German
political culture had experienced in accepting the untidy pluralism that
goes with Western liberty. In his influential book Society and Democ-
racy in Germany, Dahrendorf criticized those unfortunate dichotomies
in which German thought is rich, and of which the contrast between a
higher literary culture and a lowly technical civilisation is but one
example.
4

These unfortunate dichotomies sprang from and encouraged a view
of society as monist and unitary rather than pluralist. Because a modern
societyand indeed any society much beyond the level of a tribecan-
not really be monist, an ethos of monism is apt to breed a futile clash for
supremacy between rival monist views. As Popper argued, these monist
views characteristically aim at arresting social change and social con-
flict in order to impose some scheme of perfection, to borrow An-
thony Quinton and Michael Oakeshotts phrase. Neither the attempted
arrest nor the imposed perfectionist scheme will work, but much damage
will be done in the course of making that clear for the world to see. This
is what Dahrendorf had in mind when he wrote of unfortunate dichoto-
mies and their illiberal implications.
Debates about whether power should be centralized or decentralized
are routine in liberal democracies. Such disagreements can be taken in
stride as part of normal political life and should not be raised to a
constitutional level. For down that path lies the uncompromising clash
of fundamentally different worldviews that liberal democracy alone
avoids and indeed is designed to avoid.
In order to avoid these unfortunate dichotomies and to restore nor-
mal politics, the European Union should take inspiration from James
Madison. In Federalist 10, he sets forth his conception of the extent
and proper structure of the [American] Uniona large republic
which, thanks to its extensive size and great internal variety, can control
the ills associated with faction and thereby provide a republican rem-
edy for the diseases most incident to republican government.
Transforming the Debate Within the EU
In the spirit of Madison and Dahrendorf, the EU should make three
changes. First, it should deconstitutionalize the centralization issue and
make it part of normal political contention. Second, and in order for the
first change to endure, the debate about the EUs future should like-
wise be deconstitutionalized and made part of normal politics, which is
where it belongs. Third, the key decisions about the EUs future should
not be made at the supranational level alone, even if by majority rule.
Instead, a gentle constitutional adjustment should allow different coun-
tries or groups of countries to adopt varying degrees of integration and
91 Jo~ao Carlos Espada
to proceed by trial and error. Britains desire for a renegotiation of its
status within the EU, for instance, should be treated as an opportunity to
put greater flexibility into EU political life. Germany, acting in its own
enlightened self-interest, should be the first country to grasp and carry
forward this opportunity.
There are certainly many ways of explaining the results of the May
2014 European elections. One factor, however, has been curiously
overlooked. It has seldom been observed that the mainstream parties
have simply abandoned the decentralization issue to extremist parties.
Liberal-democratic politics works by means of controlled rivalries: Any
liberal-democratic system requires at least two main rival parties that
disagree on policies even as they agree on basic constitutional rules,
pursuing competition within a framework of cooperation. Parties are
mainstream if they subscribe to the constitutional rules of the democra-
tic game. But within those rules they commonly disagree on specific
policies: fiscal discipline versus public spending; reliance on market
forces versus state intervention; diffusion of power versus its centraliza-
tion. We usually refer to such views as being either right or left of
center, respectively, but the labels matter little. What does matter is the
competition between views.
When it comes to the question of decentralizing versus centralizing
power, however, competition among the EPs main political families has
been lacking. The Christian Democratic (EPP), the Socialist (S&D), and
the Liberal (ALDE) party groups in the EP all favor the more Europe
option of an ever closer union. The lack of mainstream-party voices
defending decentralization and more local power has created a vacuum
that extremists have exploited. They have mixed their extreme views with
support for decentralizing power away from Brussels and back into the
hands of national elected institutions. The effect of this mixture is toxic,
allowing what should be a reasonable appeal for decentralization to be
combined with the language of class struggle, aggressive nationalism, and
even crude racism.
There is nothing new about such language, sadly. The extremist parties
have trafficked in it for a long time. What is new is that they are now able
to mobilize significant numbers of voters. In my view, this testifies less
to any underlying growth of extremist sentiment than to the skill with
which extremists have capitalized on the opportunity that the mainstream
parties have handed them by brushing aside legitimate concerns about
overcentralization and treating this controversy as a constitutional ra-
ther than a normal matter. This is not only unfortunate, it is dangerous.
And Dahrendorf has told us why.
Unfortunate dichotomies are now drawing closer to the center of Eu-
ropean politics. Extremist parties really do constitute a threat to liberal-
democratic constitutional principles (such as equality before the law and
minority rights, for example). Handing such parties a powerful issue by
92 Journal of Democracy
treating more Europe as a sacrosanct principle is a multiple mistake: It
makes these parties stronger; it sows confusion by allowing normal pre-
ferences for decentralization to become identified with an illberal agenda;
and it exposes anyone who expresses even slight leanings toward decen-
tralization to suspicions of extremism.
If the EU acts in accord with Dahrendorfs wisdom, it will decons-
titutionalize the issue of central versus local power by abandoning the
dogma of more Europe. In fact, it must normalize the unfortunate di-
chotomy between more and less Europe. It must recognize that this
is a normal subject of discord, and that equally committed Europeanists
may disagree on this issue. As a result, mainstream parties in Europe must
be willing to host and give voice to views that favor decentralization,
instead of simply rejecting them as anti-European. In other words, the
opposition to more Europe should not be equated with Euroskepti-
cism (understood as outright opposition to the EU or a demand for ones
country to withdraw from it).
5
That is, it needs to be possible to advocate
fewer powers for Brussels without thereby having to become anti-EU.
This will, of course, require a major conceptual transformation of the
debate within the EU. It will demand the abandonment of the needlessly
dogmatic and indeed misleading debate about the future role of Europes
nation-states versus that of the supranational European state. Nobody
knows what the future of the nation-state in Europe (or elsewhere) will
be. As Karl Popper repeatedly argued, the future is open and there is no
iron law of history that predetermines how our societies will evolve.
6

For this reason, those who claim that the nation-state can never be su-
perseded are making a prophecy that cannot be empirically tested. The
same is true of those who claim that the age of the nation-state, at least
in Europe, is now gone for good.
The truth is that we simply do not know, and cannot know, what
the future of the nation-state will be. The future is open, and its course
cannot be determined by a single political decision. Just as the present
is and the past always has been, the future will be shaped by an ongoing
process of interaction among a congeries of often conflicting views and
choices. These views and choices are so numerous, and their effects
upon one another are so manifold, complex, subtle, and often hidden
that no single human mind or collective entity can hope to comprehend
themcertainly not in real time, at the very moment when key but
perhaps unrecognized events are taking place. For the same reason, the
future aggregate result of the interaction between these views and choi-
ces cannot be known before they emerge. In other words, the future is
like a complex ecosystem that evolves, and not like a simple artifact
that is hewn out and carries the makers mark of some single decision,
political or otherwise.
7
We cannot know the future of the nation-state. What we can know is
that people in Europe disagree about the relative merits of the nation-state
93 Jo~ao Carlos Espada
versus the supranational state. And we also know how liberal democracies
deal with disagreement. Instead of trying to abolish or outlaw it, liberal
democracies live with and by disagreement. They do not banish disagre-
ement; they tame it and civilize it. This is why liberal democracies must
fear the clash of opposing fundamentalist views and should embrace the
wisdom of keeping conflict as much as possible on a normal level. One
of the most powerful liberal-democratic tactics for controlling conflict is
to allow room for gradual change, gradual adjustment, and gradual lear-
ning through trial and error.
The EUs Window of Opportunity
There is now a rare opportunity to avoid unfortunate dichotomies
in the political life of the EU. It can be described as the unintended
consequence of an electoral maneuver by British prime minister David
Cameron. In January 2013, Cameron committed himself to holding
a referendum in which the voters of the United Kingdom can decide
whether their country will stay in the EUif and when he and his Con-
servative Party win an outright majority in the parliamentary elections
that are scheduled to be held by May 2015. Before this referendum,
he added, his government would renegotiate the United Kingdoms
status within the EU, seeking to win back some powers from Brussels.
In the event of success, he added, he would proudly campaign in the
referendum (likely to be held in 2017) to keep the United Kingdom in
the EU under the new terms.
One can certainly be critical of this decision and call it a ploy to
guard Camerons right flank against the electoral threat of the U.K. In-
dependence Party, which was founded by Tory critics of the EU and has
considerable appeal to a sizeable portion of the British Conservative
Partys voter base. However that may be, the fact remains that a path
to renegotiation between London and Brussels is now open, from the
London end at least. The promise of a referendum, moreover, responds
to serious popular demand. In surveys, British public opinion has con-
sistently been in favor of a referendumso much so that whoever wins
the next election will almost certainly have to hold one. Moreover, a sig-
nificant share of U.K. survey respondents (around 45 percent in recent
polls) expresses a desire to leave the EUat least if the present balance
of power goes unadjusted.
There are many practical grounds on which the EU should wish to
avoid a British exit. But there is another reason to welcome the prospect
of these proposed negotiations. They represent a rare opportunity to in-
ject a much-needed degree of added flexibility into EU political life.
The EUs own enlightened self-interest, in other words, indicates that a
relaxed and open attitude toward the United Kingdom and its issues
is the best course.
94 Journal of Democracy
No country is in a better position to grasp this than Germany. For
if unfortunate dichotomies reemerge and crystalize in European po-
litics, the main target will be Germany. As the core EU country that
has the Unions largest population
and strongest economy, and as the
creditor nation that holds so much
of the peripheral countries debt,
Germany is a natural target for re-
sentment. Illiberal populists and na-
tionalists know this well, and play
on it ruthlessly. Even politicians
who are neither populists nor illi-
beral nationalists find it hard, when
election times approach, to refrain
from blaming Germany for whate-
ver difficulties their own countries
may be facing. Vulgar slogans de-
nouncing greedy Germans are
especially popular among extremist
parties.
The way to avoid or at least minimize this anti-German radicalization
is the one that liberal democracies have always used to avoid unfortu-
nate dichotomies: Offer more choices, not fewer. In present circums-
tances, that means allowing different countries or groups of countries to
adopt different degrees of integration, according to their national pre-
ferences democratically expressed at the national level. This is already
happening as regards both the single currency and the Schengen agree-
ments regarding movement across intra-EU borders, from which some
member states have opted out. There is no reason why this principle of
variable geometry or Europe ` a la carte cannot be extended to other
areas of politics and legislation.
The European Councils recent election of Polish prime minister Don-
ald Tusk as its new president (the European Council is the body of EU
heads of state or government that acts, in effect, as the Unions collective
presidency) may be a hopeful sign that the path of more flexibility is being
considered. Poland is at once a proud member of the EU and a proud
independent nation. It still uses its own currency, the zoty, not the euro.
No country is in a stronger position than Poland to lead a gradual process
of adjustment that will allow more flexibility within the EU. The fact that
Tusks candidacy received supported from both Germany and Britain is a
further promising indication that this adjustment is still possible.
Two years ago, I argued in these pages that the euro, and indeed the
whole European project, have been remarkable successes so far, but they
have been and will be successful only on a voluntary basis.
8
This volun-
tary nature of the European Union should now be reinforced so that the
The recent European
Parliament elections have
shown that the bad old
European habit of rivalry
among nations is again a
serious source of concern.
But there remain immense
liberal-democratic energies
within the EU that can,
if unleashed, tame the
worrying elements of
extremism.
95 Jo~ao Carlos Espada
EU structure becomes even more supple and open to different choices by
national parliaments. As Timothy Garton Ash remarked the better part of
two decades ago, A process that aims at getting rid of the bad old Euro-
pean habit of competing among nation-states runs the risk of speeding up
the return of those bad old habits. Press the fast-forward button and the
result could be fast-rewind.
9

The recent European Parliament elections have shown that the bad
old European habit of rivalry among nations is again a serious source of
concern. But there remain immense liberal-democratic energies within
the EU that can, if unleashed, tame the worrying elements of extremism.
Liberal-democratic forces should be wary of any impulse to press the
fast-forward button, however. They should instead mobilize good
old liberal-democratic traditions in order to avoid unfortunate dicho-
tomies and to allow more room, not less, for normal, gentle, peaceful
political conflict.
NOTES
1. Ralf Dahrendorf, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: In a Letter Intended to
Have Been Sent to a Gentleman in Warsaw (New York: Random House, 1990).
2. Dahrendorf, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, 3435.
3. Dahrendorf, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, 36.
4. Ralf Dahrendorf, Society and Democracy in Germany (New York: W.W. Norton,
1967), 120.
5. Dahrendorf was given to calling himself a skeptical Europeanistnot a Euroskep-
tic, but not a Euroenthusiast either.
6. Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957).
7. For an excellent analysis of gradual evolution through interaction, see Poppers
Towards a Rational Theory of Tradition in his Conjectures and Refutations (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963).
8. Jo~ ao Carlos Espada, European Disintegration? The Sources of Extremism, Jour-
nal of Democracy 23 (October 2012): 20. Emphasis in original.
9. Timothy Garton Ash, Catching the Wrong Bus? in Peter Gowan and Perry Ander-
son, eds., The Question of Europe (London: Verso, 1997), 124.