Tag Archives: technocracy

Greece heads back to the polls on a big question

  By

In less than one week, the people of Greece are scheduled to vote on a referendum on whether or not to accept the terms from the European Central Bank and European Commission leaders and the IMF to receive more help on meeting its debt obligations.

The terms are not particularly favorable (read: pretty terrible), and the government of Greece is urging a no vote. But Greece is also about to run out of money and go into default and probably be forced out of the eurozone, because the European leaders and IMF aren’t planning to change the terms or provide emergency funds even with a no vote.

So, there are likely to be brutal consequences coming either way the referendum goes. The average people in Greece will continue to suffer the most.

They were the victims of a lot of really irresponsible people — creditors and European leaders as well as Greece’s own past leaders — putting abstract finance and personal enrichment over human lives.

But within all the blame going around, I still remain most frustrated by the present-day handling of the situation from the European Union leaders. The lines below captured a lot of my feelings.

“The moral crusade against Greece must be opposed” by Zoe Williams for The Guardian:

The vision that Syriza swept to power on was that if you spoke truth to the troika plainly and in broad daylight, they would have to acknowledge that austerity was suffocating Greece. They have acknowledged no such thing. Whatever else one could say about the handling of the crisis, and whatever becomes of the euro, Sunday will be the moment that unstoppable democracy meets immovable supra-democracy. The Eurogroup has already won: the Greek people can vote any way they like – but what they want, they cannot have.
[…]
The euro was founded on the idea that the control of currency was apolitical. It has destroyed that myth, and taken democracy down with it.

These talks did not fail by accident. The Greeks have to be humiliated, because the alternative – of treating them as equal parties or “adults”, as Lagarde wished them to be – would lead to a debate about the Eurogroup: what its foundations are, what accountability would look like, and what its democratic levers are – if indeed it has any. Solidarity with Greece means everyone, in and outside the single currency, forcing this conversation: the country is being sacrificed to maintain a set of delusions that enfeebles us all.

 

Is EU member democracy compatible with fiscal union?

  By

After four months of mounting tension between pro-austerity European Union officials and Greece’s anti-austerity Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, a breaking point appears to have arrived. The Prime Minister published an op-ed (see below) questioning whether the increasingly centralized fiscal / currency decision-making authority in the Union is compatible with continued democratic self-determination by each member country’s populations.

Asking that question so publicly (and in a hostile tone) is likely to solidify his growing pariah status within the European Union, but it is not altogether unreasonable. In fact, more than a few political theorists and economists have been raising the point since the start of the currency crisis in 2010. Maybe it’s simply not possible to have a strong monetary / fiscal / currency union without an equally strong political union. Such an arrangement either allows individual member countries’ voters and legislators to veto necessary standardization of union-wide policies, or it forces member countries to accept rules and decisions set by unelected and unrepresentative officials without popular consent.

In Greece’s case, the voters plainly rejected the policies that the Union and the IMF demanded the government deliver. Whether or not the policies are merited, if the people exercise their sovereign self-determination to reject the policies, the ostensibly pro-democracy European Union either needs to rethink its demands or rethink its overall sustainability as an economic union without political unity.

Here are excerpts from the Tsipras op-ed, as reported by the UK’s Express newspaper:

He envisioned a future where a “super” finance minister of the eurozone wielded unlimited power and the ability to reject budgets of sovereign states that are not aligned with its “extreme” ideals.
[…]
Writing in an article for a French newspaper this weekend, Mr Tsipras blasted creditors.

He said: “The lack of an agreement so far is not due to the supposed intransigent, uncompromising and incomprehensible Greek stance.

“It is due to the insistence of certain institutional actors on submitting absurd proposals and displaying a total indifference to the recent democratic choice of the Greek people.”

He added: “An initial thought would be that this insistence is due to the desire of some to not admit their mistakes and instead, to reaffirm their choices by ignoring their failures.

“I simply cannot believe that the future of Europe depends on the stubbornness or the insistence of some individuals.

“My conclusion, therefore, is that the issue of Greece does not only concern Greece; rather, it is the very epicentre of conflict between two diametrically opposing strategies concerning the future of European unification.”

Mr Tsipras said that the strategy of EU creditors who insist on austerity means “the complete abolition of democracy in Europe, the end of every pretext of democracy, and the beginning of disintegration and of an unacceptable division of United Europe.”

He added: “This means the beginning of the creation of a technocratic monstrosity that will lead to a Europe entirely alien to its founding principles.

“It appears that this new European power is being constructed, with Greece being the first victim. To some, this represents a golden opportunity to make an example out of Greece for other countries that might be thinking of not following this new line of discipline.”

He finished the article by adding: “If some, however, think or want to believe that this decision concerns only Greece, they are making a grave mistake.”

 
For more analysis on this tension between the European Union’s supranational democratic deficit and member-national self-determination see my March 2015 essay, “Drawbacks of Technocracy, Part 1: Europe’s Political Crisis”.

greek-euro-10-acropolis

The Economist on technocracy in democracies

  By

In March of this year, I published a very lengthy two-part essay on the political challenges technocracy increasingly poses to Western democracy.

In “Drawbacks of Technocracy, Part 1: Europe’s Political Crisis”, I defined what I meant by technocracy:

Technocracy is a term that essentially means rule by non-elected technical experts, often academics, who (theoretically) place the country’s interests above the interests of any particular “side.” By extension, technocracy is usually set in contrast with, but not opposition to, elected partisans (i.e. champions of a specific political party or faction). It is not the same as “bureaucracy,” either, because bureaucrats carry out the policy decisions of the executive and legislative branches, whereas the technocrats are replacing the role of the decision-makers themselves. That means the experts are substituted directly for politicians at the top. Also, quite unusually compared with other systems, technocracy often exists alongside democratic systems and completely within a normal constitutional framework. The replacement of the politicians does not occur in a “state of emergency” or other extra-constitutional circumstance, as would occur in a dictatorship, but rather occurs through appointments of experts to the top level of government through regular constitutional procedures.

 
I also explored how it had grown in strength in the European Union:

Technocrats, in this case, had to step in to fill a new vacuum, more than they were needed to replace existing elected officials. The democratically elective component of the EU’s political union was (and is) quite weak to begin with — like the political union itself — because the functions of the “supranational government,” such as it is, are quite limited and removed from the population.

 
And I argued this dependency on technocrats was becoming a problem for the future of the Union:

Worse, the reliance on and deference toward technocrats at all levels of the European project has suffocated all debate. Yes, it is hard to hold a debate across 28 member countries, but the lack of debate has engendered fearsome resistance to the policies and projects. Debating policy is politics. In essence, politics may be unseemly sometimes, but it is still the mechanism necessary to sell the people on policy solutions.

Europe’s drift toward unaccountable technocracy means even the good ideas can’t be sold to the masses, because no one has been selling them at all other than by alluding to the expertise of the people making the decisions. That works right up until that trust erodes, and then no one is there to make the case itself. Ideas are simply dropped on the masses as fait accompli policies, like a ton of bricks from the window of an ivory tower. The populist parties that actually bother to campaign on ideas — even horrible ideas — start to take a big share of the vote.

 
In “Drawbacks of Technocracy, Part 2: Blue-ribbon America”, I examined whether technocratic systems were creeping into the U.S. democracy as well.

The Economist has just published a new mega long-read entitled “What’s gone wrong with democracy” (Subtitle: “Democracy was the most successful political idea of the 20th century. Why has it run into trouble, and what can be done to revive it?”). I don’t necessarily agree with some of their proposed solutions, but their diagnosis seems largely correct (to me). I highly encourage people to read it. There were many, many hundreds of words I wanted to highlight, but I decided I could break up some of the great excerpts across various posts whenever I had my own things to say about specific themes it covered.

flag-of-europe

Since, as outlined and quoted above, I already covered the topic of technocracy in depth on my own in March, I figured I would start by quoting the relevant passages about technocracy from The Economist essay on threats and opportunities facing democracy in the 21st century: Read more

Drawbacks of Technocracy, Part 2: Blue-ribbon America

  By

In part 1, “Europe’s Political Crisis,” I examined the (well-intended) rise of governance and policy decision-making by unelected technical experts in the European Union, along with the effects it has had on promoting a growing political crisis there. I also suggested that a milder version of this trend is starting to make its way into the U.S. political system as well — or at least into the U.S. political philosophy that influences the system.

As I argued in [another] recent piece, in the United States, “there is now a prevailing assumption that everything can be converted into numerical values, and that we can forge our country into a Blue-ribbon technocracy of ‘best practices’ with no subjective judgment calls (or perhaps eventually even directional disagreements altogether).”

 

us-flag-eu-flag-merge

The conditions for technocracy’s growth

The circumstances that have encouraged the beginnings of technocracy to emerge in the United States are not exactly the same as the circumstances in Europe. Here, it is philosophically grounded in the now largely faded early American notions of a republican government of wise and elite elders who do what is best for the people, with or without their consent. The role of experts in the United States has so far been limited to advisory roles with far less formal and front-row power than in Europe. Very rarely have they gained official, high-ranking decision-making roles in place of politicians.

In Europe, in contrast, a major factor in the rise of powerful technocrats was the creation of the European Union as an economic union that required — but did not officially hold — significant political power to be able to implement its economic integration policies. That gap between needs in practice and anticipated needs on paper created a decision-making vacuum that the experts filled. No politicians were being replaced directly because there were no powerful federal politicians in the EU or predecessor European Economic Community to begin with. (In the United States, obviously, there has been a strong political union of the member states with its own strong and elected federal government since the Constitution of 1787.) The creation of that pseudo-federal “European” layer of unelected experts making decisions then established a precedent for deferring to national level experts when the national political systems began breaking down more recently in the face of very serious policy and budgetary demands from the Union and elections failed to produce the necessary leadership to enact them. Such crises create the conditions for the constitutional but non-democratic elevation of unelected experts to the cabinet and, in Italy’s case, even the premiership.

The stalemate in elected governance, though, does bear similarity to much of what we have seen in the United States lately. With polarization and dysfunction mounting, rather than making smaller procedural fixes like overhauling the Senate rules, there is likely to be a growing chorus of people seriously suggesting drastic alternatives for achieving policy aims. In past gridlock/crises points, radical reformation of the American constitutional system has been suggested. This time, following the European model, it is more likely that the proposed alternatives would be the gentler introduction of expert commissions empowered to present big decisions for rubber-stamping to the legislative branch or executive bureaucracy.

This solution is particularly likely to be applied, as in Europe, to budgetary reform gridlock, because a certain set of people is already convinced that such reforms are desperately needed and cannot be entrusted with making the “hard choices.” (Interestingly, we don’t see such a push on global warming.)

Redistricting

The gold standard example of American technocracy so far is the trend toward elimination in many states of legislature-driven redistricting in favor of unelected “nonpartisan” commissions. Nine states have abdicated redistricting entirely to outside commissions. A further 13 have some kind of commission in parallel with or assisting the legislators in the redistricting — including five where the commission serves as a “backup” when the normal process fails and a few where a commission is empowered to draw the state districts but not the congressional districts.
Read more

Drawbacks of Technocracy, Part 1: Europe’s Political Crisis

  By

A common Republican talking point in the United States is a fear of “becoming like Europe” with its purportedly omnipresent “European socialism.” As someone who actually pays attention to the politics and economics of Europe, I dismiss that as a pretty absurd view of the world, for any number of reasons. But lately I’ve had a different question: What if the (negative) way that the United States is “becoming like Europe” is actually the adoption of its technocratic governance trends?

In part one of this two-part essay, I’ll examine what technocracy is and what it looks like in the modern European democracies. In part two, I’ll examine how it is starting to manifest in the United States.

flag-of-europe

What is technocracy?

Technocracy is a term that essentially means rule by non-elected technical experts, often academics, who (theoretically) place the country’s interests above the interests of any particular “side.” By extension, technocracy is usually set in contrast with, but not opposition to, elected partisans (i.e. champions of a specific political party or faction). It is not the same as “bureaucracy,” either, because bureaucrats carry out the policy decisions of the executive and legislative branches, whereas the technocrats are replacing the role of the decision-makers themselves. That means the experts are substituted directly for politicians at the top. Also, quite unusually compared with other systems, technocracy often exists alongside democratic systems and completely within a normal constitutional framework. The replacement of the politicians does not occur in a “state of emergency” or other extra-constitutional circumstance, as would occur in a dictatorship, but rather occurs through appointments of experts to the top level of government through regular constitutional procedures.

The most common use of technocrats around the world is a logical and reasonable one: Many democratic countries, mostly in the developing world, will hand the government over to a temporary cabinet of nonpartisan technocrats — called “caretakers” — to run the country during a very brief period during which new elections are held. That way, someone is still “at the wheel” during campaign season but the ruling party can’t control the power of government offices, the security forces, or election officials. This is particularly useful in countries with relatively young and sometimes unstable democracies, to help build ongoing public confidence that a system of elected government can be trusted and will turn over periodically as expected. If the ruling party loses the election and rejects the outcome, they can’t cling to power because they already had to vacate office to the technocrats before the start of the campaign.

But in the past quarter-century, the rise of the European Union has introduced an entirely new form of technocracy, though. Read more