Diana, hi, Lucas, how are you? I'm very well, I have been in a bit of a nostalgic mood recently and I'm connecting that with this episode.
And it makes me think about when do you remember first hearing the word democracy?
Probably. And in school like elementary.
It's a concept that's such a part of our lives. It's citizens who value the democratic system,
who are made aware at an early age that they're very lucky to be growing up in a time when their countries are democratic and truly democratic.
I think it's something that I introduced to to people when they're young.
I think that's my example. What about you? Yeah, I guess growing up in the 1990s, early 2000s, there were a lot of important events globally,
whether it's the fall of the Berlin Wall or Tiananmen, and I think that democracy definitely had a very specific resonance growing up in that.
Time and having an interest in politics and society.
Do you remember the first time when the word democracy seemed to have a personal residence for you?
This does not answer your question,
but perhaps it's close because obviously I turned out to study political theory and obviously democracy is a huge part of what we study.
And the way I became interested in it, I guess, is this started very early because my my father,
who was a pilot, he had been in the military and he was very interested in political theory on his own.
And he self-taught. He read a lot on the topic. And so we had a lot of conversations about that.
And I remember going to Athens with him in Greece in general,
and we went to Sparta and he was very much into classical history and and we very much lived that trip with.
The Athenian democracy, the history of Athenian democracy of mind.
So perhaps that's a personal connexion that's actually connected to travelling in Europe, by the way.
And it was a very vivid connexion with the past of European civilisation and how that concept has evolved to our days.
Obviously, Athenian democracy is very different from democracy.
So, yeah, actually, I started this answer without thinking there was a personal resonance or connexion to to the term.
But obviously there is a very strong one. It's actually one of the fondest memories I have with my father is no longer with us.
Mm hmm. Yeah. Thanks for sharing that memory. It brings back one of my teenage memories of taking a trip through Germany and
the Czech Republic and Poland were a big theme of that trip was 1930s history,
which is much less glorified than being in democracy, and rightly so.
But yeah, I remember how much that trip made me think that.
These. Concepts of democracy and liberalism, for example, that are often glorified and populism and fascism,
on the other hand, are often vilified in certain periods in history.
They're also really intertwined, whether it's European history or further abroad.
And, yeah, kind of.
It's it's tricky to try to hold on to these important concepts, but also understand that they're never quite as neat as we want them to be.
And that's I think that's a big part of what we're trying to get at with the polling and the interviews as well.
Yes. And we see that today with I mean, democracy has become such.
An accepted term that you mean branding something as undemocratic is the same as branding it negatively,
that even regimes that are clearly non-democratic brand themselves as democracies.
Nonetheless, either it's a popular democracy in the past and more recently, how do they call it illiberal, right?
Yeah, illiberal democracy. Exactly.
So much so that more recently, at least for people who are in our fields of politics and more specialised in these topics,
we tend to not refer to democracy just as democracy anymore.
We usually prefaced it with liberal to distinguish it from these new systems that are branded as illiberal democracies.
Mm hmm. How can these illiberal democracies or regimes, whatever they're called, are clearly straying from the core values of modern democracy?
How are they compatible with the rest of the European Union?
And what can the European Union do so that its member states stay true to the commitment that was necessary for them to join in the first place?
This is a union in Democratic states. Absolutely, yeah, and it's yeah,
it's fantastic to get our two co-authors in this episode who have thought about this
very deeply to kind of second those questions before we introduce our guests today.
And I wanted to ask you one more thing, kind of from a totally opposite perspective.
What would you miss if you lived in a society that was no longer a democratic?
I think. Fundamentally, perhaps freedom of speech.
I think that undemocratic societies, I mean,
you obviously have regimes that are not democracies and you can always have the ideal of the benevolent dictator or ruler.
But assuming that that's typically not the case, to maintain a system where people fall into line different ideas.
Is that question. That system are usually sit down and and.
And those ideas usually need a lot of space to breathe, so a lot of other connected ideas are also shut down.
And what you end up having is censorship in one way or another,
which in this day and age would be very easy given the technologies that we have and already see that in places like Saudi Arabia and China,
those technologies being used to control people and ultimately what they are saying think.
How about you, I guess, your thoughts about freedom of speech and you think of how connected that freedom is with.
An overall sense that society is something we participate in, that we never have total control of our environment,
nor should we, but that it's really important to continue having those avenues to shape our lives.
And I think that one important ingredient of that is this ability to talk and to discuss and to say what you think.
And I think partly that's really important in itself.
A partly it's really important because it sits at the foundation of so many.
Activities that bring us together to hash out our disagreements, to find common ground and to to think about what kind of society we want to live in.
So will we be talking about democracy in this interview?
One of our guests is Sophie Verité, who completed her end through here at Oxford,
where she joined the project and is now a doctoral researcher at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs at my university.
Joseph Latter is an initial student in European politics and society at the University of Oxford.
Before coming to Oxford, Joseph studied political science and psychology at LSU Munich and worked at the Chair of
International Relations at the Twister Shell Institute for Political Science in Munich.
He is particularly interested in the effect of populism on liberal democracy in the state of democracy in the European Union.
And it was actually because of an essay that you wrote on this topic of
democracy in the European Union that led him to join us at the European project.
Hello, I'm Timothy Garton Ash, welcome to the Europe Stories podcast, what the young Europeans want the European Union to do and to be.
Over the last three years,
an amazing group of young Europeans have worked with me here at the European Studies Centre at Oxford University to answer this question.
And this podcast will present their findings.
Hosts Onomatopoeic and Luckhurst say, have a series of conversations with the authors of our concluding report and give you their answers.
So I thought we might start Sophi and Yoseph by asking you about yourself and if you could
tell us a bit about your background and how you came to write this chapter on democracy.
Sure. Well, it's an absolute pleasure to join you today for this podcast episode.
I was a master student at Oxford University in European Politics and Society.
My background is in political science and now I am doing a PhD in security and global affairs at Leiden University in the Netherlands.
Hello, I'm 20, you guys from Amsterdam. And interestingly, it was an essay on democracy in the EU that got me into Oxford.
And so that was the first time I had contact or I touched on this topic and it was a great honour to get this opportunity to go onto the set.
If I could ask a follow up to that of all the different areas that are of interest to young Europeans,
including many of the other topics in this report, what is especially interesting to you about democracy?
For me, I think it was less straightforward because actually my focus is on foreign affairs and international affairs and the EU's foreign policy.
So I thought that that was the direction in which I was going and probably that was the content that I was going to be writing about.
But eventually I was asked to write with Joseph the chapter on Democracy.
And I think it made a lot of sense because my other focus is about this information and influence
operations and how certain actors try to manipulate certain things in the information space.
And so it makes a lot of sense to talk about democracy because that's really what information operations are affecting.
It's democracy itself. So it wasn't straightforward for me to think about democracy in my work, but now that I have written this chapter,
I actually do really understand why they asked me to write about it, because it is at the core of my research.
What about you, Joseph? I think it's at the very heart of the European Union as a project.
I think it's maybe the baseline that the European Union is a union of liberal democracies.
And so it's one of the most fundamental topics.
Our chapter really shows that democracy is such an important part of the European project that people take it for granted.
They just like assume that it's always going to be there because it has always been there for young Europeans.
It's so important that they don't even think they don't even imagine that it could go away when they.
But your chapter, younger Europeans, on the one hand, tend to take democracy for granted,
but on the other hand still very much value democracy and have a hard time conceiving of the EU without thinking of it as a democratic organisation.
Do you want to talk a little bit about how young Europeans perceive democracy perhaps differently from other generations?
Yes, definitely. So, of course, democracy is important for young people and as I just explained, they take it for granted at the EU level.
Although recently there has been some kind of disappointment or frustration because clearly young
Europeans aren't as satisfied with the way the EU is protecting democracy on the continent.
So fifty seven percent are saying that they are overall satisfied with the way democracy works in the EU.
But what this person doesn't really reflect is how much young people actually know about how democracy works in the EU.
So how can they have a good assessment if they don't really know how democracy works in the EU?
When striking results that you cite in the report is that nearly half of young Europeans don't even know how MEPs are elected.
So those are members of the European Parliament, is that correct? Yes, exactly.
Most Europeans think that the presence of the European Parliament is of secondary importance and
most Europeans don't know how they are elected or they don't know that they are directly elected.
But if half of Europeans don't even know that, how can they have an informed assessment of democracy in the EU?
That's one of the first questions that we hit when writing this chapter.
And then actually when we when we were doing a little bit deeper and trying to understand where does this assessment come from?
And we realised that the young Europeans don't really understand democracy as a set of procedures,
but more as an output because they don't understand how the procedures work and they don't see the processes.
They're not really involved in that. They just look at the output, the end result, and then they assess whether that seems democratic to them or not.
Yeah, I think I agree with what Sophie said.
But still, we shouldn't forget that young Europeans are more satisfied with the way the EU works than democracy works in the member states.
We always talk about the lack of democracy at the European level, and it's of course,
it is concerning if the Europeans do not know how MEPs are elected or who gave the State of the Union address.
But still they are not that dissatisfied. And as we also think, sometimes not everything is going badly at the moment at the European level.
But then to go back to your question, how do the younger generation see democracy differently?
I think the younger generation sees it as a set of values that they want to see upheld,
that they want to see reflected in policies in comparison to older generations,
which we believe see democracy really as a set of procedures and a process.
Our interviews with Europeans from different generations are a central component of the Europe Stories Project.
You can explore their answers about their formative best and worst moments on our website,
European Moments, Dotcom, several of those moments mentioned throughout this episode.
Harlington, the description. I think our discussion brings up what is often referred to as a democratic deficit at the European institutional level.
But we might kind of want to really dig deeper into whether it's really a democratic deficit or rather perhaps a deficit and effective communication.
One interviewee of ours, for example, Hardrock Fischer, who's the director of the British Museum,
emphasised the communication aspect of Democratic politics.
And I wonder, as the chapter authors,
how you evaluate the kind of relative weight of democratic deficit as an explanation versus kind of public communication.
It's sometimes a bit too,
too short sighted just to look at whether there are elections and whether there is democracy based on elections at the European level.
We made this distinction between the state of democracy and the supranational level to the state of democracy at the member state level.
And while there is a big discussion about a European democratic deficit at the supranational level,
we do not really agree because we think the European Union is democratically legitimised because.
Member states decided to join the European Union, national parliaments who are democratically elected made this possible and there is accountability.
It's not always direct accountability through elections, but in the European Council,
there are national leaders who are legitimate because they are elected in their respective nation states.
At the same time, we also argue in our report that there is a democratic deficit,
but this one is more located at the member state level because as we all know,
there are some member states who are turning away from liberal values and democratic values.
And so we we think that we should really distinguish between these two levels here.
This idea of a democratic deficit. So the idea that the EU isn't functioning democratically enough,
I think it's a debate that's either academic and helpful in that sense to look from a theoretical point of view, what is democracy?
What is an organisation that works democratically or not? What is the standard that we want to achieve?
Is the EU above that or below it? It's an actual exercise to do and it's interesting to do for academic purposes.
But in reality,
I think that anyone who has a basic understanding of how democratic democracy works in the EU would agree that it is democratically legitimate it.
So what do you think that there's such a widespread perception that there is a democratic deficit?
I mean, this is something that you hear even very well-informed academics in the social
sciences who argue that maybe it's not an institutional argument or concern,
but there is a sense that there is a democratic deficit. Can you, like, pinpoint what what exactly people are sensing here that's missing?
Well, I think the debate exists precisely because there is no clear cut.
Agreed standard of what is enough in terms of democracy.
There are many ways of defining democracy and precisely because there is no clear cut definition of what is.
Legitimate and what isn't. There's always going to be some discussion, there's always going to be some disagreement.
It's a very useful exercise to try to look at what are the assets and the weaknesses
of the EU when it comes to democracy is to look at really what's working,
what's not, and to to assess it based on certain standards. So I think that that's why that debate still exists.
And Joseph, still within the same question. What about Hartig phishers statement about the problem being communication?
Might that help explain this sense of remoteness or, you know, the European Union not being really representative of its citizens?
I think it's not only the top of the EU, I completely agree with what Sophie said about the strategic communication,
but it's over the top of the member states.
And if we look at the big member states, for example, we are having elections soon here in Germany and Europe doesn't play a role.
So the whole issue of European integration and European affairs with Europe, do we want it's a very secondary or very minor issue.
And I think it doesn't really make sense anymore because major decisions are made in Brussels and Strasbourg.
And if we really want the European Union to work and also citizens to develop a feeling as Europeans and being invested in European democracy,
it's also the job of national governments to promote that and to give up a bit of their own ownership of politics and the national realm.
The need for better communication between EU institutions and citizens came across in many interviews conducted within the Europe Stories Project.
When we talk to Holland Fisher, the director of the British Museum, he clearly expressed this concern.
The EU needs to make people understand what it is really about,
and I think it has not been very strong and it has not been very successful in making its members,
all the citizens of the EU, really understand the values, the values the EU is based on and the values it has created.
If we focus on the theme of communication for a second, it seems to relate to some of the chapter proposals on civic engagement and civic education.
One of the very interesting suggestions at the end of the chapter is that Europeans older than 16 should be given an Interrail pass.
What will this do? What will this achieve? Yes,
it's one of our key recommendations because we think that this would really contribute to building a European
public sphere and building a European public sphere would contribute to building a more fruitful democracy.
So let me unpack some of these terms, because it might be a little bit tricky to understand.
But so a European public sphere is this kind of common space where discussions are
being held and people communicate and deliberate about what they want for Europe.
That's the idea of a European public sphere and having an Interrail passport for young people more accessible.
So like for free for anyone about 18, for instance,
would really allow young people to travel and get to know people in different parts of Europe and have these connexions.
And having this connexions here,
here and there would really help build that network and that public sphere that really connects people across borders.
In the many interviews we did, we ask young Europeans, what was your formative European moment?
And very often it is personal experience is it's something like Erasmus or Drivelling with interactive
policies where you exactly meet so many people from different European countries and everything.
But so if you just explained that about building a theoretical concept, again, a European public sphere,
but it happens in your everyday life and you do not really notice it with an interior pass.
And so we think that it's a very hands on recommendation that can be implemented very easily as well.
The EU knows this very well and knows that programmes such as Erasmus and Antaria really, really work and contribute to the EU as a project.
You know it because they have, for instance, recently had discovered a new programme.
So they would make already Interrail passes accessible to young people, but it was only in certain conditions and you had to apply for it.
So what we say is that you cannot rely on people to apply it.
You have to really give it to them in a very easy way so that they use it to.
What we say in the report is that an integral part should be given to every citizen turning
16 without an application process and valid for five years within the European Union.
Yeah, and if I may just quickly add to that. So I had the privilege of conducting many of the interviews where I heard many young Europeans
citing their Erasmus experience or just travelling across Europe as a formative experience.
And this is something that comes up in another chapter, the Freedom of Movement chapter, where your co-authors of the report,
As and Luisa, reached the conclusion that there is a discrepancy between those who actually use their freedom of movement.
Obviously, this is a right that is just to all European citizens, but not all of them use that freedom.
And there's an apparent difference between those who do and how they feel about Europe and how European they feel.
I think the majority of the people I interviewed who did have such experiences ultimately thought
of themselves primarily as Europeans and only secondarily as nationals from their countries.
Not that these identities need to be in conflict at all, but they do think of themselves,
perhaps not even as Europeans necessarily, which is cosmopolitan.
And so it's a very important recommendation you make because it is important to emphasise how access to
this sort of opportunity matters in terms of the democratic participation that younger Europeans can have.
Malgorzata Zurawski, a Polish events manager, is well aware of the formative potential of free movement.
When asked what is the single most important thing the EU has done for her personally?
Here is what she said. It's a freedom of movement is definitely one of the most important ones and how cheap and easy it has been.
And it is to travel to different countries and to meet different people and to have all those different experiences.
And you have that cultural dialogue in between people from different countries within Europe.
So pushing this thought about public sphere just a little further.
The proposals for Interrail passes or for further resources to support schemes such as Erasmus seem to highlight
the continued role for physical exchange and physical travel as the foundation of identity and of communication.
Which raises, I think, some interesting questions about democracy in an age of globalisation as well as of digitisation.
In a time when so much of these exchanges are taking place over the Internet,
so many of our political and economic ties are happening across borders without us travelling physically across borders,
how do you understand why this kind of physical travel and exchange is still so foundational?
And conversely, what is insufficient about a new development such as the Internet to kind of create the the soil for a European public sphere?
Younger generations have a different way of engaging with democratic life.
I think the older generation, our parents and the parents of our parents, they thought of democracy as voting right basic.
But as I said earlier, fifty eight percent of young Europeans don't vote for members of the European Parliament.
And I'm pretty sure that the figure is pretty similar at the national level
because young Europeans want to be involved in democracy with alternative ways,
physical ways, deliberative ways, ways that are digital, ways that are innovative and changing.
So for us, voting is really just the basics.
But we want democracy to be so much more than that.
And that's why initiatives like Erasmus and Interrail pass really would allow that democratic life to take shape in reality in front of our eyes.
It's so much more tangible. I think that even after one and a half years through this pandemic,
we also see that all the new opportunities we have in the digital space do not really
replace meeting other people deeper connexions evolve when you actually need someone,
especially when you travel, when you go somewhere, when you live in different cultures.
And I think culture is a concept that is very difficult to transfer to a digital space only.
That's why we think that travelling is still so important also in the 21st century and also when there are so many other opportunities.
But we also think that it should start early and not only with 16 or 20 when you study or when you graduate, but also already in school.
And that's why we suggest that civic education as a measure and with civic education, we do not mean any kind of indoctrination.
And it doesn't have to be pro-European either. We want to foster critical thinking and we want to foster different perspectives.
And they can be critical of the EU. They should be, but it is necessary that there is a discussion about it, because as it is at the moment,
it's either you are pro-European and you're part of this cosmopolitan elite you mentioned earlier,
Emma, or if you're a high Europe in your very fast at the corner of euro sceptics who discard the EU in general.
And I think that's why it is so important to have critical thinking and a real discussion of it.
And you of. Only of that, if you start very early on to discuss these issues in school and people have to learn
that democracy is not always very easy and to deal with diverging opinions as well.
I think in our report we also cite rock star endorse and he says that populism is very easy while democracy is complex.
And I think it's the task of civic education to.
Tell people early on that it isn't always very easy to deal with tensions in the democracy, but that it's worth it.
And so it's also good to have diverging opinions and it's important to.
To have some kind of common denominator from which you can reach conclusions and compromises,
but it's not always necessary and we want to foster that. We want to foster this public sphere where Europe is discussed.
But Eneko golfBall, a professor of linguistics and Esperanto,
has emphasised the need for a European public school and need to listen to what he had to say.
We have to build up a space in which Europeans can do something they don't do.
I mean, an agora, a space to do politics together.
We don't do politics without.
Sophie, as you were mentioning earlier, young Europeans tend to care more about outcomes than apparently democratic procedures,
something that you mentioned in the report based on an opinion poll that we conducted in March of twenty,
where fifty seven percent of young Europeans stated that they think an authoritarian
state might be better equipped to deal with climate change than democracies.
So how do you square this like you're on the one hand saying that young Europeans value democracy and are concerned with democracy in the EU?
At the same time, they don't seem to believe in it very much when it comes to causes,
which at the end of the day is how they're politically active these days is by focussing on causes.
So how do you square these two things? These are two very interesting points that are linked.
And of course, I'm glad you bring it up. So first, let me explain what performance, legitimacy and procedural legitimacy is.
So when this when you have this idea of a working democracy,
there are two ways in which someone from the general public may think, oh, this government really is doing your job.
It has all my trust and it has a legitimate place to be there.
The first way of thinking that is because of what the government is doing.
So it's performing very well. The output is something that I'm happy with, and that's reformist legitimacy.
The other way of thinking is procedural legitimacy.
I think that this government is legitimate and it has my trust because of the process that it's using to achieve these outcomes.
And what we find is that indeed young Europeans are much more interested in performance legitimacy than procedural legitimacy.
And it all comes down to this one finding that we have, which is that young people want to see results.
They're interested in seeing outputs, performance.
The process matters less to them because they are not so familiar with how the process is working anyway.
When you think of a young European right now, they haven't known anything else but a democracy,
so they don't know what could be in the process of making policy happening for them.
It's just taken for granted that it's going to be democratic. So they don't even think about the process.
They don't value it. They just think of outputs. They want to see performance.
And it really does make sense as well. When you live in an era like that where everything seems like a life or death emergency.
When you think of climate change, of course, I want to see the result as fast as possible.
And if in my mind, I think that may maybe less democratic process is going to achieve better results, yes, I'm going to prefer that.
Or at least that's what our findings show. Yes.
And we also have this one interesting finding that young Europeans think that
autocratic states are better equipped to deal with climate change than democracies.
And we discussed that with the several experts.
And what they mention is, yeah, it's a difficult question to ask in such an opinion poll,
because, as Sophie said, young Europeans do not really know how it is to live in an autocracy.
What it means, maybe they see the advantages and they think of China, for example, and how they can deal with some issues in a quick and direct way.
But they forget all the disadvantages when reading this particular question about
climate change and they forget what is behind it and which disadvantages come with it.
And so it wasn't maybe the best question we figured out in retrospect to judge whether young people value democracy or autocracy more.
It's we shouldn't see that as a sign that young Europeans are against democracy.
It's just they want this urgent issue dealt with.
Yeah,
it's probably more a critique or an expression of frustration with a democratic system than it is an expression of favour for authoritarian systems.
I actually have a very simple or or at least seemingly simple question about about that polling results,
which is, I mean, as young Europeans yourselves and knowing other young Europeans,
were you surprised by the results that 52 percent of young Europeans believe that authoritarian regimes were better equipped to handle climate change?
Yes, I was very surprised, I have to admit, because if I think of authoritarian regimes, I think of.
China, I think, of Russia. Now, maybe also hungry, and these are not countries, I think, that are pretty good at dealing with climate change.
So I was a bit surprised, actually, I wasn't. These results do not surprise me, because the question was,
do you think that authoritarian states are better equipped than democracies to tackle climate change?
Do you think that they're better equipped not to? Do you think that they're doing it better?
Because clearly they're not. What do you think of China? It's not doing better, but it has the potential to.
And I think that question for me clearly was going to be in that direction, because when you think of the general public, again,
I don't think most people really understand what are the tangible differences between living
in a democracy and an authoritarian states when you are living in the European Union,
except when you think of Hungary and Poland that are leaning towards that direction.
The rest are well functioning democracies, but not so.
These results did not surprise me because that's what I would think, too, if I was part of the general public,
that, yes, authoritarian states are probably better equipped to deal with crises like situations.
I'm glad we got to a question where the two of you had different responses.
That's very exciting. One follow up on that.
Perhaps it's true that this result doesn't mean that young Europeans suddenly favour authoritarian regimes over democratic ones.
But do you think it might mean that significant doubts about the superiority of democratic regimes might be
connected with difficulties in mustering the political will to deal with democratic backsliding within Europe?
Oh, sure, for sure.
For instance, we talk about China here as an example of a kind of an authoritarian state, which is, I think, the leading example at the moment.
China is doing everything it can. For the outside world to be perceiving it as a very efficient and very well functioning system of government.
This side being authoritarian, they want the world to think that it's actually more efficient.
So, of course, most people are going to think that way because China is really, really good at its public diplomacy.
It's has a very smart approach of strategy, communication and, you know,
showing its best sides and hiding everything that's not working really well and has a
very tight grip on the media and on there is literally no opposition in the country.
So they control very much the information space. And that's why most people would think, oh,
then it must it must be really working well because there is nothing else really being said and in the mainstream media.
And coming back to the second part of your question,
I think we can see the same things now in these European states that lean to towards autocracies or authoritarian regimes,
because Viktor Orban in Hungary doesn't say and he portrays himself as a person who does things, who solve problems.
He's not just talking. He's discrediting those people in democracies that talk parliaments and so on.
He's a man of the executive. And that's problematic. And I think, of course, China is believing itself, but we can also see it in Europe.
And I think it's also probably symptomatic of our generation where we really have I mean,
right now we're dealing with a global pandemic, climate change.
Everything seems so urgent. So we want to see things happening now.
We don't have a lot of time in front of us.
So we I think young Europeans really do value a system that seems effective, a system that seems efficient.
I think it is possible that this generational thing opens the door for populists who pretend that they do something,
that they are different than the establishment,
and that maybe the next thing we have to think about when when talking about democracy in the European Union as well.
Even Krastev, a Bulgarian political science who has written prolifically about the risks of EU disintegration,
commented on young Europeans apparent belief that authoritarian states are better equipped to deal with crises and democracies.
The millions of people are going to play that.
For example, China authoritarian regimes are going to do better when it comes to climate change, but they don't know many workers.
The activists want to go to live in kind of that once their own society to start group like China.
We could now shift the discussion to a very important part of your chapter,
which discusses what the European Union is doing and is not doing about democratic backsliding and rule of law in Europe.
Yeah, I think in a nutshell, the European Union is talking a lot about safeguarding liberal democracy and its member states at the moment,
but it's not acting properly. They are creating many new mechanisms.
For example, last year they launched the new annual Rule of Law Report.
And there are many reports now, but we know what the problem is.
And as you mentioned correctly, it is Democratic backsliding in some member states.
I think, first of all, we have to think of Hungary, then Poland, but also other member states who are following these examples.
It's not only Hungary and Poland. And we also do not claim in our report that everything is well in Western European countries.
Not at all. But these are definitely for example, if you look at the Freedom House report, Hungary is not considered a democracy anymore.
Why? What is one reason for which Freedom House no longer considers Hungary a democracy?
The elections are not free and fair any longer. I think that's a major issue.
And of course, the rights of the opposition are severely limited.
There is no free media anymore. There is no separation of powers.
And it's very hard for independent judges to practise in Hungary that have been replaced very early on after the constitutional revolution,
which is taking place since 2010. And we see similar developments in Poland since 2015 since.
The ruling party came into government. And.
This has been well known for several years now,
but somehow both the Hungarian government and the Polish government played with the European Union so that Brummies little things,
they promised that they would change, but they didn't. They do not apply European Union law anymore.
And so the EU is like a paper tiger in this respect, which doesn't really follow up on its fundamental values.
I will probably just like first separate this debate, because, you know, so far we were talking about democracy mostly at the EU level.
So how is the EU? Functioning in a democratic way.
And what can you do to function in a more democratic way?
And our conclusion with that was that, you know, young Europeans actually mostly interested with the output they want to see the EU deliver.
But there are also some things that you can do to improve their participation and their awareness of the democratic process that precedes that.
And that's a more central role for civil society, etc.
And then the other question that we need to tackle was how is democracy working at the member state level?
So you have democracy as the overarching thing within the EU and now we're going down to the democracy in each member state,
which is something that, of course, the EU was meant to be protecting.
But it's very difficult because the EU doesn't have any way of imposing of enforcing its rules, or at least it has really been happening so far.
So that's really the main issue that we have tackled in that part of the chapter.
How is it that democracy is one of the core values, yet there is really no one to defend it?
So we need to find the defenders of democracy. And according to the treaties, it's the job of the European Commission.
That's what what is meant by the guardian of the treaties.
What the commission is. But as Sophie said on paper, we have mechanisms, for example, the Article seven procedure,
but you cannot really apply it because the threshold is very high.
You need, for example, unanimity in the European Council.
That means as long as both Hungary and Poland are democratic backsliding, they will cover each other and nothing will happen.
And they publicly announced that and it's well known.
What doesn't make a lot of sense is that even the hearings are not ongoing and we criticise that as well,
because even if there is the chance of enforcing that, you could still have public hearings and put public pressure on Hungary and Poland.
And that is not happening.
And the excuse for the whole of last year was that it's because of the pandemic, but with so many other hearings going on digitally.
So why not these Article seven hearings?
And there are many of these small issues where the EU is certainly not doing enough, even if the mechanism is toothless,
many say sounds like there are many open questions that remain about the causes
of democratic backsliding as well as who who can act decisively to prevent it.
But one one of the strong opinions we heard in our interviews was from the mayor of Warsaw, Reforge Calfskin,
who spoke about the need to make sure the local people and perhaps by extension local governments,
were not punished by decisive action taken by the institutions of the European Union to address democratic backsliding.
I wonder how much you think this. Could be achieved and how the European situations might be able to make this a priority?
Yeah, that is a very interesting suggestion. And we also took up this idea in our recommendation section,
and we suggest that the EU should allocate funding from the EU recovery fund directly to regional and local governments,
because we can see, for example, in both Hungary and Poland that the capital are still very liberal and it's the idea of the mayor of Warsaw.
So he was very supportive of this recommendation, of course.
But we also think that talking about other countries, this could be a very efficient way to limit the leeway of autocratic leaning national leaders.
Article seven is a procedure of the Lisbon Treaty,
it enables the EU to suspend certain member state rights in order to prevent democratic backsliding by ensuring that,
quote, all EU countries respect the common values of the EU.
It has thus far been triggered against Poland and Hungary.
Our team interviewed Reformatories Korski, the mayor of Warsaw, an opponent of Poland's incumbent president.
Here's what he had to say about the shortcomings of Article seven.
Let's put it bluntly. I mean, the Article seven is not very, very effective and we knew it all along.
The mechanism of actually subjecting a rule of law like the rule of law and international transfers is not liked by quite a lot of member states.
Why should we, local government or the people be penalised for the irresponsible behaviour of our government?
So, of course, we want the European Union to be tough. But I think that there are other ways in which to demonstrate to peace that their
behaviour will not be tolerated by directly supporting independent local media,
independent NGOs and independent local governments. You make a series of recommendations, you've already mentioned some,
so perhaps we could move on to what the European Union should be doing, in your opinion?
Yes, actually, one of the first recommendations we made was about the conference on the future of Europe,
which is this idea that the EU had to join young Europeans together and re discuss the future of Europe together.
That was the original plan.
What happened is that actually they made this event become so bureaucratic and involving the same kind of like high level people.
It wasn't really the genuine.
Popular kind of event, that was the original intention because there was so much disagreement about who should chair what and when and how,
eventually it ended up being a very bureaucratic event like like they all are kind of.
And we regret that because the original intention of discussing the future of Europe amongst us young Europeans would be absolutely fantastic.
But in order to do that and to have kept that genuine intention, then they should really put a central role for civil society organisations right now.
And I mean, at the time that we wrote the report, they were not allowed of joining the event as organisations.
You could only join as an individual.
We think that also these kind of events would be so much more popular and so much more successful if they were a festival like events,
like a tour of Europe that also involves music and culture.
And then you put the Democratic discussion with it.
But to have something that looks bureaucratic and serious and, you know,
with the same kind of faces that nobody knows about aside from Brussels, it isn't really attractive to most young Europeans.
And I think it's quite telling that even as probably the most enthusiastic young Europeans about Europe and the European project.
I'm sorry, have you been involved in the conference of the conference on the Future of Europe?
Well, I've actually tried to get in touch with them.
It's not easy. There you go. So I think we really they really miss the point.
They really had a great opportunity and they kind of ruined it.
And it's sad. But hopefully this will be ground for lessons for next time.
And hopefully next time that we have an event like that, we can make it really fun and moving and inclusive and non-standard and digital and
aggregates and something that would really stimulate the interest of young Europeans.
Yeah, did this, like, really frustrate you, given that on paper, it seems exactly like the thing that you would want the European Union to be doing?
I mean, it very much coincides with your recommendations in this chapter in theory.
But then in practise, it seems to confirm every or the main negative things that are usually said about the European Union,
that it's this massive bureaucratic organisation that makes no progress on any issue because it can't make up its mind because of how complex it is.
So does that really?
Frustrate you or it's exactly that it really confirms all these myths and all these typical critiques that young people have about Europe,
so it's really a shame. But, you know, I think at the same time, you can't expect everything to happen in one go.
Progress is slow, but steady. We didn't used to have these kind of events five, 10 years ago.
So at least now there is the intention. The intention is there. Now we just need to turn the attention and do something practical.
The other big recommendation we had is that the EU should stand up for liberal democracy and the rule of law in its member states.
And we make several smaller suggestions and I think we have already mentioned some.
But overall, we think that is the task of the European Union, the European Commission,
but also other member states not to tolerate a liberal democracy in its midst.
And for that, we suggest that the council should resume organising public hearings on the Article seven procedure, as mentioned earlier,
that the other parties or party groups in the European Parliament shouldn't cooperate with ruling parties in Hungary and Poland.
We saw a pretty good development in the sense by writing the report, because, as we all know, Fidesz,
the Hungarian ruling party, got left the EPP, but somehow also got expelled for the expulsion was imminent like before.
And there are several small or not small, but there are several mechanisms that could work but that haven't been tried yet.
For example, member states could sue each other if there is a serious breach of the European of the European treaties.
And the Netherlands discussed this mechanism and they consider it maybe suing Poland for not obeying to EU law.
And so taking this together, we think that it's the task of the European Union to stand up and to defend liberal democracy.
To zoom out again a little bit from the trees back to the forest, I wonder for both of you having worked on this project of Europe, stories now for.
A considerable amount of time, do you feel more or less hopeful about the future of European democracy?
I didn't expect this action and. You want to go first, the.
To be honest, I'm not sure, because it's very hard to answer, because we are and we all know that we are working in the pro-European bubble in Oxford,
and I think I became pro-European through working in this project.
But looking at the political developments in Europe, I think it's more a negative assessment.
I think populism is evidently on the rise in many countries.
It's not just Hungary and Poland. And it's concerning we saw published government, also Italy and in Austria,
and these governments are against the European Union, they want to undermine our fundamental European values.
And so I think it's it's a hard time for democracy in the EU and that's why we have to stand up for it.
Exactly. So I think now that I thought a little bit about it,
I personally feel more or less hopeful about the future of democracy in Europe after working for this project.
I think I feel more uncertain because everything is so uncertain at the moment and there is so much uncertainty, so much instability.
So it's hard to know how things are going to develop,
which is why we need now more than ever people who are really passionate and people who are really going to act as the defenders of democracy,
which requires also being realistic about it and not just being naive and hopeful
that like certain that Europe is the best in Europe is always going to prevail.
You have to be realistic. And in order to stay realistic, you also have to stay grounded.
And that's something that is so important to me, is to go outside of this bubble.
Of course, we're all Oxford graduates. It's amazing.
It's beautiful. It's outstanding to be discussing these kind of issues with people who are super smart and very well-educated and very well-spoken.
But it's also so important to stay connected with people who have very little education,
people who know nothing about the people who know nothing about democracy, because these people are also part of our society.
And it's really important to make them part of this debate.
I just want to stress this point again,
because we also highlight that in our recommendation on the Interrail polls that it is necessary to promote this
Interrail proposal for educationally disadvantaged groups because they often do not benefit from these programmes.
And we have to change that. That is our job and that's also the job of the EU.
But also everyone can do something about that.
Our guests today were Sophie BBT and Joseph, a huge thanks to our podcast editor, Billy Creagan, our research manager, Luisa Malow, and our report.
Professor Timothy Garton Ash. We're also grateful to our founders, the Swedish Nobel Foundation,
the title Diphthong and the System Mercato for making the Europe Stories Project podcast possible.
A special thank you to Ellen Lefsetz, illustrator Maev Moynihan,
Sophie Verité and Victoria Hansell for contributing to the podcast production music by Unicorn Heads and Ketso.
Finally, thank you to the whole Europe Stories Project. I'm your host and Americans.
I'm your host. Lucasta, thank you for listening today. Join us for the next episode of the Europe Stories podcast.
And until then, you can find out more about our research project at European moments.
Dotcom.