Technocracy and the Tragedy of EU Governance

Abstract

In a historical perspective, technocracy, emphasising bureaucratic and technical expertise in political, social and economic areas, is a double edge sword: on the one side, it guaranteed the condition for international cooperation post-WW II, providing as an ostensibly ideologically neutral basis the condition for cooperation and governance in a politically bitter international climate. On the other hand, it indicates the tragedy of increasing delegitimization of EU governance, causing the alienation of political willing from the people that is (mis-)used by populists present-day and their slogan ‘back to the people’. Technocracy is theoretically symbolised through the functionalism of EU integration, politically manifest in the redefinition of democracy as expertocracy and from “input”- to “output”-orientation, and academically manifest in the mainstream of EU studies that (still) seem to operate in the legacies of functionalist/neo-functionalist epistemological commitments. The tragedy of EU politics therefore appears to be that it is trapped in a technocratic, and thus a democratically distorted (because disconnect from popular willing as one the irreducible pillars of democratic governance) understanding of governance that, however and at the same time, has been historically the condition of the possibility of cooperation. The following paper is thus an attempt to understand alienation and (populist) opposition to the EU integration processes as systemic and mutually conditioning phenomena, deeply entrenched in the structure of the EU and of EU studies themselves, and develops the argument that the epistemological commitments of neo-functionalism need finally to be overcome to bring back in democratic agency in EU politics.1