EU – Unspoken Politics

EU elections – the nature of democratic fatigue

In march I wrote a lengthy piece on voter turnout in developed nations, particularly ones with low corruption. My ultimate explanation for the phenomenon of declining voter turnout was what I dubbed democratic fatigue. Google shows that I’m not the first writer to come up with this phrase, but I’m one of very few. It’s a good definition of the problem, so I will continue to use it. Perhaps it will catch on.

The European Union elections concluded last week, one of the largest democratic events on Earth. Ever since direct elections to a European Parliament started, turnout has decreased significantly. Good news in 2014 came not from a positive growth in participation but a stagnation. It was basically the same as it was the last time around in 2009.

Found at http://www.results-elections2014.eu/en/turnout.html

What this figure means is an open question. It could mean that 43%, on aggregate, is the bottom. What may be more likely is that there was an increase in interest from far-right and Eurosceptic parties, which propped up an otherwise shrinking electorate. Certainly this may explain some results in countries like France – it’s not just a big shift from other parties, but rather that the National Front electorate is just more interested in these elections. Looking at a party like UKIP, which won the UK elections, one has to see their history of success with EU elections alongside their zero Members of Parliament.

That’s an interesting modifier when looking at democratic fatigue – belief that the election results will change power relations. This applies locally, regionally, nationally, and globally. The perception is that the European Parliament is basically powerless, so voting is more an intellectual (or anti-intellectual) exercise. I find the whole process interesting as an outsider from a two-party country, but it’s quite different from the inside. There’s a thirty point difference between this year’s European elections and the 2010 general election in the United Kingdom. The split between presidential and midterm elections in the United States is well-known. It’s clear that it’s a continuum – people view the President as a clear power player, Congress as a lesser and more nebulous institution, and it goes down the line. The European Parliament at this point has more in common with the UN General Assembly; it is adjacent to power in several directions but is clearly not the group in charge of things.

How to make the EU more engaging and increase participation (an article with some of that conversation is here) is not sure- the disillusion with the elections is nearly total in Slovakia, for instance, while turnout in other countries is robust and healthy. The current state of things seems to be sliding towards a negative election, where people vote for anti-EU parties in increasing numbers, rather than groups that want to build the EU into something larger and better. This isn’t a majority of the vote but it’s headed that way. In my original post I talked about how turnout declines when things are working more or less okay; the Eurozone crisis perked some people up a bit, going against the prevailing feeling that the EU elections are pointless.

There are lessons with last week’s elections all over Europe that can apply on the local and national level. What the European Parliament lacks in power and reach may apply to other governments, and turnout may be lower because of those same issues. Overall turnout for these elections was about the same as for Egypt’s election of their new military general-turned-politician, despite an opposition boycott. Perhaps everyone has found a reason to not show up.

Political tea leaves

In 2008, one of the best posts in the time around the November election was by Ed from Gin and Tacos, a whip smart blog that I link here from time to time. It’s about the idea of constructed explanations, or what is created by the public and the media from events where there is inadequate data for a more objective explanation.

In the context of elections it’s very apt. Think about it this way. Modern society is feedback-driven, whether it’s a form asking you how your hotel experience was, or a text box that opens up when you ask to unsubscribe from an email list. It’s easier than ever to tell a business what you thought about whatever it is that they do. Far beyond the era of hotlines, it’s something you have to avoid these days.

So it seems odd that a ballot, despite being part of an immensely important process, has nothing to provide context to what is marked. Why did this person vote for Proposition 23 but not 25? Wouldn’t they want both? Don’t know. They might as well be cryptic runes from a thousand years ago.

What emerges then, is a guessing game about a huge, complex event. There is a ton of potential data to collect, but very little is; it remains in the mind of each individual voter. Exit polls are notoriously inaccurate and don’t take a representative sample. In any recent United States presidential election, you would have a pretty decent idea of what Ohio or Florida voters did – including important data like their key issues and what influenced their vote.

The hundred million plus who live in safe states? Not likely to meet a data collector. If you’re trying to create a large-scale political narrative, the map looks like a crappy cellular network. Key places are covered, but most is a black hole. When it comes to voters in states like California or Oklahoma, media explanations fall on stereotypes more than anything.

In the 21st century the only other major post-vote data source are online polls, which measure the most politically engaged slice of the electorate. Voters who keep to themselves are a question mark. When the numbers come in, the contours of the results may lie with them and the subtle, small reasons many of them showed up to vote, and what they ultimately voted for.

With the EU elections going on, and the US midterms approaching in a few months, narratives will be constructed well in advance, then paired with polling. If they line up well with the results, they are accepted as gospel. This is problematic, because there are many reasons a party wins or doesn’t win. Is the narrative that X Party won, or is it that they only won by that amount? In a context like the EU elections, where are supporters moving among the various parties? Did turnout bolster certain parties, and should it be considered high, low, or normal given the circumstances?

2012. Mitt Romney wasn’t a good communicator. It was a bad year to be a Republican. The Tea Party dragged the ticket down. Obama’s campaign was run very well. Or maybe just better than Romney’s. Or maybe they cocked things up and got lucky with a weak candidate. These are all estimations because you’re looking at numbers and assigning agency and motives to them. But just like the Man in the Moon isn’t a real face, just something that resembles a face, sometimes numbers resemble a narrative.

The advantage for the media is that it’s hard to call bullshit. And as any detour into cable news can show you, the narrative factory – the myth-making, if you will, goes beyond being a part of the business.

It is the business, now.

From Conservative to UKIP, from Lib Dem to Labour.

English council election results as of 430 GMT, May 23

So there is a massive election going on throughout Europe for the European Parliament, with the Netherlands and the United Kingdom voting Thursday, and the bulk of the continent following on Saturday. The election dynamic is an interesting one – historically the Parliament has been without much authority and thus most elections have had very low turnout. Two dynamics are at play that makes this one a bit different. The first is that since the Treaty of Lisbon, EU bodies have been gaining more authority. Thus these elections are gaining some importance, at least in terms of party prestige.

The second is that in the past few years there has been a sharp increase in eurosceptic parties – a generic term for any party that opposes their country’s inclusion in the European Union. These parties are on balance, though not exclusively, conservative to far-right.

Projections indicate a rise for a coalition headed by the UK Independence Party (‘UKIP’, which is said as a word) and increasing seats for parties to the right of UKIP, like the National Front in France. The influence of these parties is also creeping into other groups. The UK Conservatives are being hounded towards a referendum on Britain in the EU, and the Greens support a referendum out of the necessity of getting it over with and focusing on other policy issues.

What I’ve posted up are the current local election results for councils in England, which were held the same day. EU results will not be posted until Sunday (after all the other countries have voted), so this is the data we have to look at now. It is interesting because British political news has been dominated by three questions:

1) Is UKIP racist? The answer to this, at least from my perspective, is “at the very least, unintentionally.”
2) How big will UKIP’s win be, and will they win the European Parliament elections in the UK?
3) Where is UKIP getting all this support from?

The second question is outstanding, though polling indicates it’s likely. The third we can start looking at thanks to this local election data.

I’m going to make a theory based on the simplest look at this current data, which has been developing since returns started coming in. An issue with this is that positive results are necessarily good results. One can still underperform. However, it seems UKIP is getting their increased support from Conservatives that are either upset with the current Cameron administration, angry at the European Union, or both. It seems to me that the switch between the Liberal Democrats and Labour may also be a simple swing – people that aren’t Conservatives (which to some is a lifestyle, or a cultural taboo) but are tired of the coalition government are switching to Labour. The big loser is the UK government, the big winner are parties in the opposition. It’s something that looks familiar to any American who’s seen enough midterm elections, though this has the dynamic of a new political force entering and taking support, rather than it falling back to the traditional opposition.

The EU vote will be interesting for me, since the Greens enjoyed a late poll surge and may hit 10%. Local elections are a bit more difficult (the EU is very environmentally-focused, so a Green vote makes sense), but I hope they pick up a bit of support. As an outsider it’s difficult to grasp all the subtleties – much of the UK election has been about immigration, and I’m not part of the American contingent that thinks immigration is bad or dangerous.

At some level elections are always interesting. No matter what political body they are for, they can tell people, locals or foreigners, something about the country in question. Here we see two shifts, one against the incumbent regime, and another against the larger union that the United Kingdom is a key part of. Combined they benefit two different forces, namely the establishment opposition and the anti-EU front.

Will Russian expansion provoke a serious EU/NATO response?

When asked this question two days ago, I gave a long comment on the subject. Here’s what I wrote. It’s not meant to be authoritative, just my feelings as an American outsider. The question was both about Russia vs. EU/NATO, with special concern to Estonia, given rhetoric that seems similar to that over Crimea.

It’s not a rosy situation. A couple things are clear-

a) Russia let go of its regional control in the 1990s not because of the arrival of democracy (never arrived, insufficient postage or whatever) or the end of ultranationalism, but rather because at the time their economy had ground to a halt and everyone with a decent education was leaving for the West. They had no ability to project power, so they signed deals like the one with Ukraine that guaranteed its sovereignty.

b) Putin-era Russia clearly has a way of gaining territory. They support a nominal independence movement within a country. One may remember Abkhazia and South Ossetia as being the reasons for the Russians invading Georgia in 2008. They’ve done a similar thing with Transnistria in Moldova, which doesn’t even share a land border with Russia.

However, let’s be clear here. if Russia decides to invade a NATO nation- which includes the Baltic states- there will be serious retaliation beyond strong words. This isn’t just an American thing- one of the most important NATO nations historically is Turkey, who a) are now in a very strange position since they control the only way out of the Black Sea for Russia’s Crimean naval bases, b) just saw a half million Tatars (who are Muslim and Turkic) fall under the control of a very racist, ultranationalist power, and c) has hated Russia since the creation of Russia a millennia ago. The Ukraine wasn’t in NATO, or the EU, was very far to the east, and was politically unstable with a very weak military- a large portion of which defected. That’s not going to happen again.

NATO is a military alliance and not a theoretical one- Kosovo, Libya, Afghanistan. If they’re willing to fight on the other side of Asia, they’ll fight in their own backyards when it’s one of their members. Article 5 has been used, so it’s not just words on paper.

Regarding Estonia, there are some things to point out here. Estonia’s history under post-World War II Soviet control involved sending a lot of Russian speakers into the country to dominate it culturally. However, as the Christian Science Monitor points out in the featur e on the issue, a lot of them speak Russian, but are not ethnically Russian. Jews, Ukranians, Finns. They cite a poll that shows the Russian population there are split right down the middle on whether Crimea was a good things, with most having no opinion at all. Clearly if Estonia circled the wagons it’s not “Estonians vs. Russian speakers” clearly divided.

Of course, what a ‘conflict’ means is important. The Cold War had much bigger situations- for instance, the forcible blockade of Berlin. One will hope that the lack of top-level cooperation that made Soviet control of places like Czechoslovakia and Hungary possible (they used to have friendly Communist governments, now they’re run by the majority non-Russian groups) means that Russia will be checked. On the other hand, it’s difficult to envision a near future where eastern Ukraine isn’t drawn into the Russian orbit. It’s not like Libya- the Ukrainian government is also disorganized like the rebels there, but Gaddafi and the Russian military are two vastly different classes. If Russia occupies, there would need to be a superior force on the ground.

Unfortunately, the idiocy that was (and is) Afghanistan has really killed the whole “boots on the ground” idea- this is good in some sense since it makes diplomacy and other means more relied upon. However, some countries are too big to threaten. Russia and China are the two big ones.

Now I’m a strict non-violent proponent so I don’t think using military force to drive the Russian military off is the ‘right’ course of action. Sealing the Bosporus to military vessels contingent on Russia withdrawal, mixed with a large-scale boycott and freezing the billions upon billions of dollars the oligarchs have stashed in European countries might help, as some off-the-cuff ideas. Certainly making a concrete plan where NATO troops would be deployed to places like Estonia known would dissuade Russia occupation- just a note that there is something beyond ‘strong reservations’. The Warsaw Pact countries joined EU and NATO because they feared continued Russian control. Even if places like France are ambivalent, any former country under the Iron Curtain with a pocket of Russians knows that they are the next potential domino.

Is Europe in decline, confused, or just changed its methods?

Depending on how you shake it, the answer to all three parts could be “yes.”

The online version of the German paper Der Spiegel published an interview Friday with Walter Laqueur, a historian of Europe. At 92, he predates the Second World War, the division of Europe in half, and the rise of European integration and the eventual political and monetary union. With all this perspective, he has grown increasingly pessimistic about the future of the continent.

His central thesis is that Europe lacks the resources and willpower to project power globally, and have the kind of economic and military influence that the United States or China pursue. Staying on the sidelines, nevertheless, does not make you immune to the actions of others. As Howard Zinn titled his autobiography, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train. Laqueur responds to the idea that the current state of affairs is low-risk, musing:

I’m not so sure about that. Only time will tell. The Europeans haven’t quite understood that trying to stay out of the fray offers no protection against the consequences of global policy. Retreat offers no security against the consequences. Perhaps exaggerated caution is sometimes appropriate, but inaction can also prove to be disastrous.

Let it not be assumed that the United States has a superior foreign policy. If one believes that America is in decline, the human and economic cost of global military vigilance would be a key reason to think so. To use non-military influence, a state must have some amount of moral capital. But the credibility, for instance, of France is strained after their actions before and during the Rwandan Genocide- professor Howard Adelman found the military support (PDF, p. 6-10) for the Rwandan government leading up to the genocide to be “open” and “blatant.” Western inaction on Darfur creates a similar skepticism towards Europe being the go-to power bloc for countries and their conflicts.

Another question raised is that whether the wealth of Europe, and its comparatively advanced welfare states, removes incentive to be a global leader. Laqueur poses “Has material prosperity created a timid society…?” Two things quickly come into play here. Firstly, whether the large-scale debt crisis is changing any kind of timid behavior that may exist, and secondly whether wealthy countries are more able to assist and influence other countries.

As you learn in introductory psychology, Abraham Maslow proposed a “Hierarchy of Needs”- proposing that humans meet certain needs before progressing to less urgent needs. The fact that this pyramid inverted is also a theory shows that it is far from established canon- but nation-states may act like individuals in their priorities. A question to ask is whether wealth makes a nation more open or more reclusive on the world stage.

During these crisis years, several EU countries seem weeks away from total collapse- and unemployment is as bad or worse than America during the 1933 trough of the Great Depression. Thus the questions of where Europe is going in the mid-to-long term is very much in the background. When this crisis is staunched, what will European states do with their money and willpower? Is Europe committed to further integration, or have certain weak points scattered the consensus?

I don’t know if Laqueur is correct in his insights. Since he’s almost seventy years older than me, I have far less information to go on. It seems that what he laments in Europe is its loss of imperial ambitions. The portion of the world that was a colony of one power or another into the 20th century would be cautious of such a turn in attitude. But the trajectory of Europe will be of interest throughout the 21st century, even if the EU as a whole recedes behind new players in Asia, Africa, and South America.