The eu’s Legitimacy in the Eye of the Beholders

2.3 – Mongrel Concepts in Modern Discourse

In reality, these republicanisms have mutated, taken each other’s place from time-to-time, are often not compatible, and even at odds with one another within what David Blaazer has strikingly called ‘mongrel concepts’. We will take a closer look at the two most important mongrel concepts – the nation-state and national sovereignty – and explain how nationalist republicanism is hidden in modern discourse.

2.3.1 – The Nation-State...

The nation-state was essentially a victory for absolutising monarchs. It combines two different interests: the people’s and the state’s.²⁸ Nationalising monarch corrupted people into seeing their (state) interests as their interests by representing them as one nation and then the monarch as the will of that nation.²⁹ Nowadays these interests have theoretically converged, because the people are the rulers of the state. The nation-states – nationalist republicanism – have become democratic states – universalist republicanism.

This convergence is only theoretical, because the raison d’État is still important. Politicians have to balance the books to some extent and pursue economic prosperity, therefore trade interests and military interventions can still be important. These are in part important to sustain government, exercise power and make it possible to pursue popular policy for important groups, whose support is needed to get re-elected and thus to stay in power. Politicians will therefore at times still follow raison d’État and not pursue policy in the direct interest of the majority of the people, let alone humanity. On the other hand, fiscal stability and economic prosperity are also important for societies with a capitalist system, in which jobs depend on economic growth. Further, politicians will hope to enact the best policy for the majority and not just because it will lead to popular support. The state’s and the people’s interests are connected and more converged in a democratic system, but there is no complete overlap.

Furthermore, the idea of the nation itself has become common ground and people have become attached to their national identities. It is therefore possible for part of or even the entire political program of a party to be the pursuit of ‘the nation’s interests’ (identity politics). The identity itself is felt sincerely, but is vague, hence the fierce debates surrounding the national identity in many European countries. For states, the problem is finding an inclusive notion of identity for immigrants, but which is more than ‘merely’ a political identity, because that does not create the attachment wanted from it by both state and people (WRR 2007: 103).

The democratic nation-states still balance universalist and nationalist values. There is a democratic deficit on the level of the nation-state, but it is obscured by the fact that state-interests are hidden behind a veil of rhetoric: the nation-state acts in the interest of the nation – even when this might not be apparent. People’s sincerely felt national (cultural) identity is rhetorically politicized as a means to support the state. In order to further understand this ‘corruption’, we will analyse another mongrel concept: popular sovereignty.

2.3.2 – and (National/Popular) Sovereignty...

Sovereignty³⁰ is also referred to as national or popular sovereignty. The multiple pre-scripts almost tell the entire story on their own. To understand sovereignty and more importantly its dual heritage and recognize it in discourse today, we are going to treat the ‘nation’ and the ‘people’ as images of two different communities following Bernard Yack (2001). Note the two images are nowadays used interchangeably and the distinction is conceptual rather than linguistic (Ibid., 520). The images are different ways we can imagine ourselves bound together in community.
[The nation is] an image of community over time. What binds us into national communities is our image of a shared heritage that is passed, in modified form, from one generation to another (Ibid.; Emphasis in original).
Yack notes that this is an a-political pre-state view of what a nation is. It is based on the idea that nations existed before states. Smith (2001), Hont (2005: 463) and Viroli (2002: 87) make similar points, although it is not uncontested.³¹ Opposed to this stands the relatively modern notion of the people.
The people, in contrast, presents an image of community over space. It portrays all individuals within the given boundaries of a state as members of a community from which the state derives its legitimate authority […] the whole body of a territory's inhabitants imagined as the final or sovereign judge of how the state's authority should be constructed and employed (Yack 2001: 520-521; Emphasis in original).
The people³² are thus the source of legitimacy of a state. The term is used in struggles over political authority or competitions for political power. They exist by right and ‘[t]o assert or deny its existence is a matter of ideology rather than a matter of sociology’ (Ibid., 521). The people are a principle of legitimacy and need no nurturing for they are asserted into being as a solution to the legitimacy problems of the modern state.

The people in the doctrine of popular sovereignty is not the majority who rule – governing sovereignty – but are the owners of political authority, who can decide on who governs them.³³ Hont calls this ‘indirect sovereignty’³⁴, because the people are not necessarily sovereigns – they could opt for monarchical government –, but it is ‘a proprietary right’. The notion does tend to favour democracy, because the sovereign people can extend consent through accountability and the election of office holders (Ibid., 518-519).

This idea of indirect sovereignty ‘tends both to nationalize our understanding of politics and to politicize our understanding of nationality’ (Ibid., 520). This is possible, because the concept of the people has two important shortcomings: first it is a very abstract notion (Ibid., 522) and secondly, if the people are the constituent of the state this means they are a pre-political community as well as a post-political community. The post-political community derives its borders from the state, but where did the pre-political community derive them from? The abstractness of the notion and the question of the pre-political borders are the main reasons that the people became a sovereign nation. The nation went from a cultural to a political notion.³⁵

This explains that although nowadays popular sovereignty is seen as a democratic principle it also has a more cultural connotation. In discussion on the EU this surfaces when reference is made to national sovereignty. The two terms – popular and national sovereignty – might be seen as representatives of the two versions of republicanism, but this would be a mistake, because the distinction is conceptual and not linguistic.

2.3.3 – in Modern Discourse

In modern discourse, state-interests and power are often hidden behind a veil of democratic discourse. The nation is seen as the equivalent of the people and thus invoking the nation is associated with democracy. Case-in-point is that the European political elites tried to create a common identity (the German road) to overcome the democratic deficit. The point here is not the possible strength of this method. One might convincingly argue it has been and still is a very successful way of creating nation-state legitimacy. The point is that it is not a democratic form of legitimacy.

Another example of how nationalist republicanism has become salient in modern discourse is that the term nation-state is nowadays used as a descriptive term. The national level is a description of a level of governance in contrast to the regional, municipal and supranational levels. The concept has seemingly been completely severed from both its republican roots. This is not actually the case rather it has gained this third ‘neutral’ meaning. Some argue this is part of its current strength and use to (democratic) states³⁶, but it is also the source of confusion for the three meanings are often hard to separate.

The two republicanisms still reside in the mongrel concepts that are central to the legitimacy of modern democracies. The non-democratic side of this heritage might account for the EU’s legitimacy problems related to the strong identification of people with their nation-state or lack thereof with the EU. Further, behind arguments of national sovereignty and identity might still hide state interests and power, rather than the people’s best interests.