The decline of political parties

The ‘golden age’

A structural feature of the politics of the 21^st century is the relative decline of political parties as we knew them in their golden age, in the half century between the 1940s and the 1990s.

This golden age can be associated with a ‘hegemonic’ role of the political parties within the political system, summarised in the Figure 1 below.

In the ‘golden age’ parties provided a political structure offering a single hierarchical order to organise from within the four spheres of activities of electioneering, corporate interest representation, executive-legislative relations, and policy making. On the one hand, the alignments that structured voting and the electoral process were reflected in the organisational principles of the legislative assemblies and in the legislative-executive relationships (party-government), enforced a degree of political discipline on interests groups activities and behaviours and providing general guidance of the policy making processes. On the other hand, the party internal hierarchical order and the patterns of inter-party competition provided also the mechanism for ironing out the conflicts and tensions that emerged in the relationships among these spheres.

1) parties balanced between the non-corporate interests’ aspirations of movements and public opinion moods and the regulative orders agreed upon by strong interests and state bureaucratic agencies.

2) parties guaranteed that adequate political representation could result into viable parliamentary life and executive support, preventing the ‘balkanisation’ of representation.

3) parties and party competition managed the tensions between executive responsibility to the electorate at large and the bureaucratic and technocratic role in the policy formation and implementation process (often ‘colonising’ bureaucracies and technical state bodies).

4) parties offered the possibility to overcome and reconcile the micro-interest flow of demands with broader policy guidance.

In short, in the golden age parties proved able to structure the electorate, to discipline the corporate interest, to give coherence to the legislative-executive relations and to guide the policy output. The high capacity to induce conformity of political behaviour combined with a high capacity to harmonise different inputs of the macro-constellation within the institutional processes of the political system was the key historical contribution of the political party to mass democratisation after the crisis of pre-mass liberal democracy. This hegemonic role was favoured by an international constellation in which trade-dependency and economic competition grew only slowly; regional competition was controlled politically; domestic factors were prevalent and standardising; the international order was frozen with marginal internal impact.

A 21st century new macro-constellation?

In the last decade of the 20th century, a cumulating of 'crisis symptoms' has been observed in several areas.

Representation and Channelling

The lowering of the levels of party identification and turnout by the mass electorate progressively modifies the type of prevailing relationship between the parties and the voters. Growing cognitive individualistic mobilisation and multi-culturalism tend to reduce national cultural homogeneity. The individualistic mobilisation affects deeply traditional collective identities linked to political parties (class and religion in the first place) and induces an accentuated process of privatisation of the context of life, including the context of political persuasion. Multi-culturalism reinforces latent or new cultural identities not historically linked to main political parties.

Interest groups political autonomy has increased further and the parties-interest groups linkages continue to decline both in terms of quantity, intensity and political significance. In the new constellation, the cross-linkage between corporate, electoral and cultural organisations is weak or

absent, and it is expressed in a demand group or ‘client’ stile and through contingent alliances based on interest proximity and goal similarity, but deprived of solid organisational, ideological and personnel interpenetration.

These two aspects are reflected in and result from changes in party organisations that mirror a significant shift in the allocation of parties’ resources, with a decline in membership’s role, grass­roots activities, and direct campaigning and propaganda in favour of voters’ predominance, candidates and leaders’ visibility, and media-intensive campaigning and propaganda.

These processes dilute group loyalties and political identities and affect the behavioural conformities they once entailed. The changes in individual communication and cognitive skills that relate to the overall ‘privatisation’ of the context of political preference makes less stable the party- voters relationship; provide for a lowering of the costs of alternative non-partisan forms of political participation and engagements (social movements; civic action, ‘mediated protest’, etc.); increase the autonomous stand of interests organisations and therefore create problems of representation for the parties.

At the same time, and consequently, institutional developments have reduced the capacity of the political parties to control the political agenda. The growth of institutions and mechanisms based on the formal principle of individual citizens empowerment (within parties, local government, national electoral institutions); the growing emphasis on referenda (sometimes fostered by the parties themselves to avoid risky and divisive issues); the procedure for direct leadership selection; the juridification and progressive regulation of growing sectors of the decision-making; the increasing public regulation of the internal life of the parties themselves, have reduced the capacity of intra­party and inter-party competition to channel demands with the adequate selective emphases, increasing their compatibility by reduction, combination and manipulation. Channelling problems are therefore a mirror image of the representation problems.

Procedural legitimacy

On the procedural level parties experience considerable legitimacy problems. Procedural legitimacy is based on the fairness and correctness of the mechanisms through which interests are represented and decisions are arrived at.¹ This is linked to legal elements, i.e. to the conformity/discrepancy between legal or moral standards and political standards. Within the wider public, the perception spreads of a discrepancy between party actions and the beliefs that sustain their historical functions in democracies.

The seemingly increasing violations of these legal and moral standards by parties and by individual party personnel and the increasing frequency with which parties and political elites are associated with corruption, opacity, unfairness, and abuse are causally linked to the fore mentioned difficulty to control the environment with traditional means. The weakness of the internal party hierarchy in the social groups and institutional sub-systems fosters a negotiation style in which parties have to exchange public goods and offices to obtain the behavioural conformity and acquiescence that was once guaranteed by more symbolic and ideological means. ²

Overall parties weaken their social roots and civic society representational functions and strengthen their institutional role and state resource dependency. It has been argued that parties are progressively transforming themselves into state agencies, whose scope of activities tend to be restricted to the steering of the top political institutions, and whose main resources tend to be drown from within such institutions (Katz and Mair). Their retrenchment toward an institutional (or state) role is associated with their extensive use of state patronage to sustain their organisation in financial terms and in incentive distribution.

The representation of citizens, to the extent that it still occurs, is expressed through interest groups, social movements, advocacy coalition s, lobbies, the media, sometimes directly via governmental and regulatory bureaucracies; that is, it is disconnected from the parties and party system.

Representation and channelling problems are affecting European parties since already quite long time. Many observers have regarded this transformation as an adaptation to the new conditions of the fully enfranchised, highly cognitively mobilised, and highly interest articulated mass politics.

It could be argued that the parties declined control of individual and groups political behaviours affects their capacity of political integration in a phase in which this is presumably no longer so essential as when the incorporation of new actors into the political system was the dominant issue. Their retrenchment into the institutions is then interpreted as a symptom of the fact that political integration is currently performed through institutional action and state agencies.

Yet the idea that the parties retrenchment is merely a further prove of their remarkable adaptation capacity is not totally convincing, as it is accompanied by other changes that affect also their output role. Beyond the representation and channelling ‘failures’ political parties also face growing problems of resource control and institutional steering.

The lowering of international tensions and the decline of the military and ‘high politics’ significance of inter-state borders and the increasing world wide trade competition in world economy have brought about an increasing openness of state economic boundaries and a deceleration of state intervention/growth for its costs and bureaucratic counter-effects on productive efficiency. Advanced regional integration projects -like the EU- with the decoupling of the territorial borders from the systemic regulative boundaries, have further reduced the scope of ‘national’ socio-economic policy differentiation. Regional convergence pushes become powerful drives, as national legislators and executives have less possibility to transfer to the local consumers the costs of divergent policies. Consumers and productive factors can escape more easily the burdens of national regulations, while higher socio-economic regulative costs jeopardise the economic performance of national economies.

The historical deceleration of the state growth is accompanied by a further complexification of the types of administrative structures and by new problems for their co-ordination. The proliferation of national and European agencies that are responsible in specific fields of policymaking, policy implementation, control, etc. and the growth of the involvement of big interest organisations in policymaking means that the legislative governmental institutions are no longer be regarded as the top of an authoritative power hierarchy. They are often only a 'bargaining partner', together with the multiplicity of other public, semi-public and private actors. In the new constellation there is no longer any 'centre' capable of coordinating and guiding, because it has insufficient resources for ultimately authoritative decisions in case bargaining fails. ³

Party reactions

Almost all parties in Europe have gained access to executive power and a broad range of coalition alternatives has been tested. Therefore, almost all parties have experienced policy failures due to the low and declining control they have on the economic environment. A large sector of the political elite nowadays has a strong sense of the feasibility problem in politics and of the external constraints that may make their governmental output to deflect even dramatically from their electoral promises. Unintended effects, responsibility for long-term consequences, and external constraints dominate the professional life of politicians. Parties have reacted to these resource control and steering problems by displacing certain policy issues and by accentuating forms of institutional collusion and competition avoidance.

Displacement of politics

Issues and policies have been transferred to domains where legitimation principles other than political ones exist. Issues may be pre-defined and left to the decisions of bodies where competence is the key resource: defending the value of the currency can be defined as an institutional goal and thus made the preserve of central bank authorities; controlling the political fairness of the mass media can be devolved to bodies and authorities on the basis of the same principle. Administrative regulation, that is economic and social regulation organised through agencies hat operate outside the line of hierarchical control and oversight of the central administration, has recently grown. ⁴ Even more radical is the displacement strategy, when issues and policies are not only pre-defined but also pre-decided by internationally accepted or imposed priorities and goals (EEC decisions; IMF requirements, WTO agreements, etc.) which may be used by political parties as a defence against taking clear political stands on and sustaining direct responsibility for controversial questions. Whether the principle invoked for these displacements of political issues is efficiency, competence, or resource control, the actual result is that parties get rid of non-solvable problems for them at the price an important muting of party differentials in key domains.

Competition avoidance

In this situation, tacit forms of collusion have also developed among politicians of different parties not to boast those preferences that can be more difficult to satisfy, given the constraints. This collusion often takes the form of co-operation in 'persuasion'. The convergence on policy proposal is often accompanied by competition on the more valence issue of who is to be regarded as more competent to achieve the constrained goal. Elites may legitimately deviate from electoral promises if they manage to demonstrate that they do so under strong resistance or pressure from above or below, or if they present their changes as an honest acceptance of new and more convincing arguments or more complete data and information provided during the process of policy deliberation and implementation.

However, the blurring, removal and displacement of certain issues has a number of consequences for competition itself. As much as political competition may reinforce political identities, it can undermine them. Narrowing the political agenda may trivialise public life. To remove issues and refer them to individual consciousness, courts, regulatory bodies, international organisms, etc. may make public life useless. If divisive issues are either voided or expelled from competitive politics, then the group attachment related to these issues will no longer be able to provide the basis for politically salient solidarity. Such issues may become the reserve of new social movements or new issue-parties but in both cases they are no longer the focus for core-parties political identity.

In this way, the reactions of the political parties to their output failures exacerbates their representation failures as it fuels the same process of political de-alignment. Representation and output failures reinforces each other in what looks like a vicious circle. The politics of personal 'animosity' that often accompanies current political fights, does not seem able to fill the gap.

Scattered elements of new ideological divide

While parties have de-emphasizing their partisan profile new issues and problems emerged which could not be framed easily within the classic cleavage and divides of the left-right underlining dimension.

The elements of the new ideological divides are many and often disparate but they have a common underlining dimension. The new and more open international economic and political order generates new sources of political polarisation among the Europe’s natives concerning the costs and benefits and eventually the desirability of such openness or of renewed closure. The many manifestations of this new ideological divide are rooted materially in the life chances and opportunities of actors with respect to ‘globalisation’ and widening European integration. They are rooted culturally in values and beliefs about normative visions of the self, the good life, and justice and equity.

In Figure 2, I propose a scheme to sum up quickly the new ideological orientations. Without entering a detailed discussion of the options resulting from the crossing of the two main dimensions of ‘boundary control versus boundary transcendence’ and ‘independence’ versus ‘integration’, let me discuss the key implications.

A) The left-right dimension of alignment and competition prevalent at the national level (and at the EP level) is not sufficient to reproduce the set of orientations and alignments that prevail when integration/ independence issues are at stake.

B) The meaning of the independence/integration dimension is bifurcated. More integration may mean more market competition and openness, economic liberalisation, decentralising bargaining and dismantling neo-corporatist structures, but it may also mean a greater European-level control of the market itself, of immigration fluxes, and of the exit options of globalised capital, that is more control over macro-economic policies which is lost within the national context. More integration may be seen as a way to defend ‘European’ cultural traditions and diversity from globalising multiculturalism, but more independence can similarly be argued as a way to defend national cultural distinctiveness. More independence may mean more protectionism and less international competition, but it can also mean escaping the growing bureaucratic control emanating from Brussels and its regulatory encroachment on globalised markets. More independence can be advocated to defend the achievements of national welfare and democracy, but more integration can be advocated with similar goals, arguing that European welfare states and democracy can only be defended at the broader European level.

C) This complex bifurcation of attitudes can be captured by adding the second axe of ‘boundary control versus boundary transcendence’. This second dimension does not correlate any better with the left-right dimension than the integration/independence dimension does.

D) On both dimensions of Figure 2, there is a low coincidence of the cultural and economic fronts. ‘Economic protectionists’ are not necessarily also ‘cultural nationalists’. Those who support economic integration as a step towards global market openness (‘neo-liberal Europeanists’) are not necessarily also ‘cultural globalists’. Global markets can be supported together with national culture. Those supporting more integration in order to control the market may be more positively oriented toward multiculturalism. The list of these inconsistencies can be extended, but the essential point is that market orientation and cultural orientation in the integration process may diverge sharply and that those who are bedfellows on the economic front are not necessarily bedfellows on the cultural front.

For social and sector interest groups, the material basis of the integration cleavage can be conceptualised as a functional/economic divide between groups whose economic interests and 'market' capacities are threatened or fostered by integration. Class coalitions are definitely weakened by sector differentiation. The creation of the European market and administrative regimes produce a within-group differentiation of interests based on a perception of the opportunities and the costs that these new exit/entry options may offer. Two key historical actors as capital and labour are divided internally, with sectors that divorce in the face of integration. ⁵

Even if individuals are less dependent on passports, visas, and residential and labour permissions, most people remain 'nationalized'; they see their life chances as depending on the territorialized systems of social sharing, identity, and political participation rights and on the monopolistic production of related public goods by national and local authorities. However, the assets valued by the new opportunities for exit/entry are linked to languages that give access to other cultures and to special skills and professional credentials that are marketable across national boundaries. The less- educated and unskilled, the poorly paid, and those in unstable positions may have more limited prospects for occupational mobility, are less well equipped to deal with the socio-cultural aspects of the opening of the boundaries, may be more affected by the retrenchment of the welfare state, more directly threatened by immigration and by new industrializing competitors in former Third Word countries. They are more likely to oppose of exit/entry options and to be more in favour of their control. However, even within the categories of those endowed with better economic, cultural and social resources, material and cultural opportunities may produce processes of interest differentiation.

The ‘roots-centred’ ideological base is identified by themes of ethnic purity and tradition; the rediscovery of old cultural traditions; local democracy; the themes of government closeness to citizens; local fiscal transparency versus central fiscal opacity; anti-central bureaucracy feelings; ongoing lack of confidence and interest in the 'foreign' and 'foreigners'; a security ideology insisting on proximity and the local community; an attempt to reunite identity space and decision space; rejection of the standardising effects of global communication and competition; support for the setting-up of protective barriers to defend identity in cultural, economic and administrative matters; support for the reconstitution of ‘meaningful’ frontiers for the nation state or for new forms of regionalism; a request for new boundaries against the 'nomadism' of culture, trade and administrative practices.

In contrast, the ‘option-centred’ ideological syndrome is represented by a criticism and dislike of limits placed on communication, trade, cultural exchange, etc. embedded within state boundaries; an extensive reliance on networks of communication (electronic as well as hertzian, postal or traditional); an ideology of instantaneous information covering the world; a conviction that the global flow allows the rewards of the market to enrich all of us; identification with supra-national institutions and a positive view of a trans-national civic society of NGOs to ensure the international order. The most advanced, core and outward-oriented individuals, groups and territories will be the ideological defenders of the openness of the organisation, while the immobile and peripheral may be at the centre of anti-openness ideology.

In conclusion, the dividing line opposes material interests and cultural values of a ‘nomadic’ versus ‘standing’ nature. ⁶

Is Populism a surprise?

Accountable elites remain the central focus for public protest, dissatisfaction, and demands (particularly for those groups and interests not deeply embedded in the policy networks of national

and supra-national decision-making centres) and continue to be held responsible by voters for policy choices that are no longer, or not as much as before, under their control.

The fact that in a large number of European countries a percentage of votes between 5 and 15% is by now regularly collected by non-core parties which are defined as ‘populists’ should not come as a surprise. Actually, it is perhaps surprising that the percentage of support are not higher and that some countries - notably Germany, the United Kingdom, Spain, and Portugal and in the new member states Poland, Romania and the Check republic - have proved to be relatively immune to the populist virus, so far.

The ‘populist’ ideology and the term itself are notoriously slippery to define. The virus, however, has a familiar shape: the presence of a strong and often ‘charismatic’ leader who has ‘activated’ the latent mood; the rhetorical style of ordinary peoples’ needs and wishes; the folksy appeal to the ‘average guy’; the pitting of the ‘people’ against the elites; the urging radical though unspecified social and political changes. Populism builds upon a radical ‘democratic premise’, that the ‘people’ seen as a homogeneous moral entity, and their ‘common sense’ should always prevail and take precedence over any institutional, constitutional, and international constraint, such as treaties, human rights, protection of minorities, courts decisions, regulatory bodies, etc. The appeal to the ‘people’ or the ‘nation’ rest on a devaluation of any other functional divide.

These basic elements are old and exist in some proportion at any given historical moment. The current mutation of the virus runs on platform related to anti-immigration, xenophobic, euro- scepticism, national sovereignty and protection of cultural identity, some racism, some anti- Islamism more recently. ‘Nativism’ seems to be a key element: exclusively members of the native group (the nation) should inhabit states and non-members’ peoples and ideas threaten this homogeneity.

Though current populism is more right wing than left wing, its social bases are always ‘popular’ and in this sense include both elements of traditional left and right popular support. Actually, current populist movements draw heavily from traditional left-wing voters. These ‘right-wing’ parties across Europe differ on economic, social, taxation, health, education, and other public issues. There is no necessarily consistent pro-business, anti-welfare or rightist economic platform.

As usual, populist parties rarely govern, and when they do, they differentiate themselves from the core parties, behaving often as non-loyal members of coalitions, emphasizing their concerns and constantly negotiating about their demands from within the coalitions. When in opposition, they behave usually as a semi-responsible or irresponsible opposition following a politics of over­promising.

Often Populist parties have ephemeral life, rising quickly and declining even sharply once the leader or the issue has lost momentum. However, in the last twenty years, behind the effervescence of party labels and personalities, their presence has been stable and shows no sign of systematic decline.

There is, therefore, relatively little new in the populist virology. The populist virus is always around, and the key question is under which circumstances it spreads with epidemic effects; why and when populist questions and answers become convincing to a large group of people.

If we take as a basic feature of populist parties their explicit refusal to take on charge and internalise the systemic responsibilities at both the national, regional and international level, it should come as no surprise that the current context proves particularly suitable to epidemic effects. Such

responsibilities and constraints have never been as intense, widespread, visible and outspoken as in the last quarter of the century. In addition, the core and traditional political parties have never been so unable to cope with these constraints in front of their citizens and voters. It seems relatively easy for populists to cut into the ‘policy gaps’ and ‘gag rules’ that the core national parties are forced to accept. As we have extensively argued in the first part of the paper, they are unable to cope because of their representative weaknesses, their policy output constraints, and their responsibility to international and regional institutional and market forces. The tension between responsiveness and representation, on the one hand, and responsibility and government, on the other hand, the tensions between ‘responsive government’ and ‘responsible government’ have never been so strong and so visible. ⁷

Populism, Europe and the Financial crisis

If the epidemiology of populism finds its main determinant in the end of the political parties ‘golden age’ and in their weakening, in Europe this is exacerbated by the current impasse of the integration process and, even more recently, by the why in which the economic and financial crisis has been politically framed.

Thanks to the highly institutionalised and publicly visible conflicts over its activities and institutions, the EU is a perfect catalyst to cement old and new value orientations and material interests of the populist variety. Integration can be challenged reviving centre-periphery oppositions, pointing to groups and territories whose distinctiveness are threatened by the integration drive. It can be conceptualised as a functional/economic divide between groups whose economic interests are threatened or fostered by integration. The EU forms of ‘governance’ based on negotiated agreement among affected interests mediated by experts’ advise open a gulf of cultural national opposition to Brussels’ bureaucracy and its standardising practices, administrative procedures, and political culture. The remoteness of a non-elected executive that manages a large and irreversible administrative delegation fuels further resentments.

Classic inter-governmentalism and the distrust and mutual horizontal control among member states, the institutional competition between Parliament, Council, Commission, Court, and ECB, modern technocracy, old and new forms of governance, the limited drive toward parliamentary partisanship all appear insufficient to rationally argue the legitimacy of the growing political production of the EU.

From an historical perspective, it is easy to understand how this came about. In the first period, the segmented definition of the EU competencies required only that the various programmes be developed by the cooperation of functional elites that, on the basis of specific criteria of economic rationality, enjoyed a large immunity in front of the public opinion and of the interests and to the national positions. The politics of integration rested on the assumption that the technical policies based on economic rationality were beneficial for all participants. As such, this politics did not require or resort to value representation and discourses of a non-economic type. To the building of this segmentary community guided by criteria of economic rationality a general and 'a-specific’ consensus towards the economic regulations of the exchange relationships was sufficient. ⁸

The expansion from the early core, however, was pursued without clear-cut constitutional guidelines - such as those enshrined in the Spinelli’s 1980s proposal - but with the same segmental logic. This eventually led to the pluralisation of the regimes and to the intertwining of the decisional levels in different sectors. This has progressively made more difficult the perception of the dynamic system, which is not only multi-level, but also multi-loci.

In fact, in certain policy areas the competences, activities, and legislation of the EU have gone so far that any constitutional foundation cannot be achieved without accepting the idea that such acquis can be put into question, challenged and eventually modified. In other areas, on the contrary, the acquis is so meagre and subject to member states approval and their mutual veto and mistrust that it can hardly be submitted to constitutionally legitimate principle of decision. Having created a market as a set of predefined rights and goals against considerable national resistance and cheating, we need to recognise honestly and publicly the difficulty to ‘constitutionalise’ and ‘legitimase’ this ex-post. The EU system is largely based on the internal disciplining and mutual mistrust and control among member states. Any attempt at effective constitutional legitimation is likely to upset and unbalance this delicate mechanism of inter-elites control.

The result is that the complex institutional set up has come to the expenses of a clear normative construction of the political responsibility and a system of sanctions. The difficulty to identify the rationality criteria in a complex system, the crumbling image of those who hold hierarchically ordered competences with territorial sovereignty, the vagueness of the relationships of interdependence breaking up the specific value references, make very hard, if not impossible, the constitution of any element of political negative or positive identification, without which ‘politicisation’ cannot occur.

For all these reasons, the EU is and will remain for long a perfect institutional catalyst for populist feelings and for those vaguely defined negative orientation subsumed under the label of ‘euro- scepticism’. Euro-sceptical positions are often criticised for their lack of focus, for their lack of specific grievances, for their lack of specific redress requests, for their being more a ‘mood’ than a programme or a specific issue disagreement, etc. However, this nature of euro-scepticism should come as no surprise. It is the mirror effect of the lack of focus of the normative construction of political responsibility within the EU. How could it be differently given the nature and the complexity of the system it has been created. How could it be different when the institutional architecture and the policy process make difficult to distinguish to whom attribute responsibility and to whom direct expectations? This schizophrenia at times of European elections and referenda is institutionally rooted in the differential empowerment of the individuals’ roles by the effective setting up of an economic constitution of Europe - clearly appealing more to consumers and taxpayers - in the absence of a political constitution of Europe - clearly upsetting more citizens and voters.

The 2008-2011 financial and economic crisis is an even closer catalyst that has made more obvious and palpable to the mass publics those constraints, weaknesses, and inabilities to cope that we have described above.

Democracies face severe fiscal crisis after decades of running deficits and accumulated debts. After a secular increase in interest payments and social security spending, an always-smaller proportion of government revenue is available for discretionary allocations. However, the 2008 financial crisis has further reduced governments’ room for manoeuvre and will be accompanied by a politics of lasting austerity in the vast majority of countries. As governments spend huge amount of money to stabilise financial institutions and currencies, less money remain to fight poverty, inequalities, investing in education, aging population, and labour markets supports. In the extreme cases of debt, the crisis has made crystal clear to the wider public opinion that policies are shaped by the demands of international organizations and international capital markets, rather than outcome of elections. It has made crystal clear to the European citizens that political parties make little or no difference, and that whatever change of government they may bring about this can hardly translate into a change of policies.

The economic and political feasibility of carrying out long period of austerity, severe and onerous reforms implying falling standard of living, loss of control over national economic policies, massive privatisation of economic assets, is a general problems for countries at risk of default. In the case of the recent crisis, a few new elements have added. It is probably the first time that these packages apply to European countries with democratic politics and institutions. It is probably the first time that the strong emphasis on the need to generate growth as a guaranty of long term solvency has made conditionality requirements to extend from the usual fiscal and financial measures to a much broader set of reform requests, touching the educational system, the judicial system, the efficiency of the public administration, the welfare, pension rights, etc. These broader than even conditions for rescue have been formulated by international and European institutions as the IMF, the ECB and the European Commission and have been accompanied by a language of blame extensively used by the other virtuous members toward the guilty ones. This is likely to wound national pride, increase despair and anger, induce a sense of lack of future perspective, and generate strongly felt sense of injustice. The feelings of blame and ostracism (the catastrophic ‘pigs’ label) are more likely to generate widespread anti-EU feelings and responses than to generate a clear understanding of the at stakes. Some European leaders, out of fear of right-wing populism have behaved as right-wing populists (Sarkozy and many others, including Ms. Merkel) driving Europe further and further apart.

Repeating my initial question, why should we be surprised by populism? Implications for political parties and democracy may be even more momentous than we sense today: popular support for democracy may be undermined and parts of the citizenship may abstain from political participation altogether.

A final example concerning the countries currently more in trouble with the sovereign debt is telling. Currently the predicament of Greece, Portugal and Ireland is framed in the following terms by the international bodies who are dictating the conditions for financial support. One option is to default, return to national currency and devaluate. The second option is rescue accompanied by wide retrenchment and reform programs defined by the ECB-IMF, and EU technocracies in a very large set of fields. The other two options of total exit from the EU and recuperation by the state of all its economic intervention tool-kit, on the one hand, and European solution based on fiscal revenues for asymmetric shocks, on the other hand, seem out of question.

Both solutions will have tremendous social costs over a period of a generation or so. There is a lively debate among economists and policy-makers about the respective costs/benefits of each solution. There is little, if any debate about the political implications and costs of them. However, the political dimension should not be underestimated. In the first case, the consequences will be the result of the default and devaluation choice, and politics and policy will be dealing with damage control, burden sharing and reconstruction. Considerable political instability is likely to result, but it will be the charge of the national elites to take the responsibility for the choices and to define the possible ways out. And they will be judged for what they do and for how they defend and justify what they do.

In the second case, social costs will be equally high but the rescues policies will have to be proposed, defended, adopted and implemented over an extended period by national government seen as carrying decisions ‘dictated’ (and presented as such by certain political elites) by the ECB, IMF and EU Commission bureaucrats and self-interested foreign governments trying to protect their banks, investors, etc. ⁹ In other words, in this case the defaulting countries are de facto transformed into ‘protectorates’ of international institutions.

Economists are quite divided as to the viability and costs of each strategy for the countries concerned and for the whole Euro-system. For once, perhaps, political scientists are less divided on the issue and most would argue that the solution one - default-devaluation-national currency- may be politically more feasible and it would entail fewer problems for democracy and legitimacy with national political elites in charge of the inevitably tough but nationally generated and discussed rescue plans.

Yet, national political elites may be tempted to go for solution two and not resist the temptation to discharge themselves of the hard choices presenting them as ‘imposed’ by the international market and environment, by international organisations, by the egoism of other member states, etc. In the short run, this may appear less politically damaging. Yet I guess that in the medium term what I have labelled the ‘protectorate solution’ may have devastating effects on national democracy and open wide space for stronger ‘populist’ cum ‘anti-EU’ political movements and ‘lumpenelites’.

To combine the economic costs equation with the political cost equation makes the consequences more difficult to calculate. Yet, the political side should not be regarded as merely residual and infinitely adaptable by those elites who draft the plans and who, by their very nature, are totally insulated from popular demands and reactions.

What to do about this?

This conference aims at saying something about what could be done to get out of a situation objectively dangerous for both democratic regimes and European integration. I feel far more difficult to prescribe solutions than to analyse situations. However, a few prescriptive conclusions can be highlighted.

An optimistic scenario suggests no hysteria. Traditional parties are in difficulty but populist tendencies have their own problems. They could be a short-term wave destined to be incorporated soon (like the green in the past). Once in government, populist parties will face their own contradictions and reduce their appeal, if not collapse. They capacity to build extra-national coalitions or alliances is null for their strong nativist and nationalists roots. Moreover, one can see populism also as a positive element, as a warning that helps and facilitates adjustments signalling issues and concerns than core parties will have to deal with. Core parties’ leaders will go populist sometimes and for a while in order to recuperate these electorates. Eventually, once the immediate triggering factors will fade away, traditional parties will take control again. This optimistic scenario is appealing but unlikely. Populism is not merely a short-term result of the contingent set of events. Though they might reinforce it, Populism has its deep roots exactly in the national representation and output crisis of the political parties. The latter cannot hope that after the current difficulties voters will massively return confidence to them. Some more profound and demanding effort is required.

The first and most obvious is that European politicians at all levels should speak less and watch more carefully their language. More mutual respect and understanding has to be displayed. The tendency to go ‘against Brussels’, to blame Brussels for what was commonly agreed there may be electorally rewarding in the short term (in the single regional or national election) but it is undermining the already limited legitimacy of the supranational coordinating institutions available. More dangerously, it educates the national electorates to see external constraints as fundamentally wrong, unfair, and illegitimate.

Member states are unwilling to resort to true European solutions, endowing the EU with the fiscal and monetary instruments to deal politically with these shocks. Therefore, if external constraints

can affect representative politics by forcing national agents into behaviours that neither they nor their national principals would have freely chosen, and if the people, the national agents, can only react changing governments but with no or little hope to change the policies, then, the economic constraints that derives from membership and their implications should be ‘constitutionalised’ at home. The constraints that currently limit the latitude of action of national elites, if they cannot be legitimated politically at a higher level, then have to be internalised into national politics, explicitly and publicly discussed, and enshrined into national legislation ad constitution in an explicit way.

These national debates can perhaps dissolve some of the ‘gag rules’ that currently surrounds the EU, bringing about in the public debates the real arguments to explain what and why it is done and to highlight the duties of integration (particularly the monetary integration) and not only its presumed advantages.

It is likely that the national constitutionalisation of the integration constraints and the debate surrounding them will bring about some politicisation of the underlining divides between ‘integration versus independence’ and ‘openness versus control’, will exacerbate to a certain extent the oppositions and conflicts between the ‘nomadic’ and ‘sedentary’ ideological syndrome I have tried to describe in the second section of the paper. Yet, this is a risk that national political elites have to take. They have to learn how to live with new ‘nomadic versus sedentary’ conflict dimension. They have to accept that ‘globalisation’, to use the catchy and imprecise word, is a contentious issue and that Europe can be presented also as a possible solution to handle and manage it, not only as one of its manifestations. Democracy under constraints has to be politically conceptualised and handled by political elites, rather than hided.

On the contrary, the often-invoked further politicisation of the EU institutions, processes, and policies along the left-right dimension of political competition and mobilisation will not do, or will not do much. That dimension - left versus right - is the one most familiar to the core traditional parties and it is only natural that they and their political elites tend to see a natural way out by its extension and intensification at the EU level. In a different contribution, ^[5] I have argued how difficult it is to adopt such political alignment to the peculiar EU institutional architecture. In this context, I underline that Populism, as we have quickly outlined it here, has its roots at the national level in the crisis of the left-right alignment there. Most of the various and complex syndrome of the populist ideology draw their strength on the nomadic versus standing opposition that is difficult to reconcile with a left-right alignment at home, and even more at the EU level.

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