The EU and its member states must today face up to two enormous challenges. The first is how to secure and expand freedom and equality among European citizens in a situation where active participation in political decision-making is becoming increasingly depopulated and elite driven. The second is how to cope with escalating high consequence risks such as global warming, terrorism, energy shortages, financial meltdowns, aids, and famine in a timely and efficient manner. Conventionally, these two questions have been regarded as belonging to the domains of ‘the political’ and ‘the administrative’ respectively. However, they should rather be thought of and handled as revealing two loosely coupled political value questions:

(1) how can our political decision-making capacities be employed to approximate the democratic norm of equal freedom?

(2) how can our political action capacities be put to use for controlling risky policy concerns in ways that are good, rather than bad, for people?

I call (1) a politics-policy model of democratic government and (2) a policy-politics model of good governance, indicating whether they consider decision or action as being at the heart of ‘the political’.  The two models are often confused, such as when standard textbooks about governance declare that ‘’Good governance’ …expresses approval not only of the type of government (usually democracy) and its related political values (for example human rights) but also for certain kinds of additional components (Smith 2007: 4). Good governance is not ‘liberal democracy +’. It does not ‘come after’ democracy; nor does it exist ‘in the shadow’ of hierarchy.  For example, the UN Global Compact System of Good Governance ‘is a framework for businesses that are committed to aligning their operations and strategies with ten universally accepted principles in the areas of  human rights, labour, the environment and anti-corruption’ (http://www.unglobalcompact.org/AboutTheGC/index.html). However, no such principles within those 4 areas do in and of themselves guarantee that different social interests and identities enjoy free and equal opportunities for getting access to and recognition in political decision-making processes. In fact, the UN system of good governance could not function in terms of such a democratic commitment, since this would exclude or obstruct the development of, say, an Islamic or Chinese Approach to the Global Compact.
The very punch line when distinguishing democracy from good governance is exactly that such a distinction allows for the imagination of non-democratic – even totalitarian - political systems that respect human rights, fight for a clean environment, condemn child labour and combat corruption.

Good governance is on the upsurge everywhere. The political glance of citizens, publics, parties, governments, administrations, media, interest organizations and social movements is shifting from the input side of political processes towards the output side. More and more people are in their actual practices orienting themselves away from the democratic issue of equal freedom, giving priority to a political leadership that does not succumb to input-political squabbles but possesses ‘the art’ of governing extraordinary situations.  As an ‘ordinary’ Danish citizen puts it in a leading daily (Politiken, June, 7, 2008: 9):

There is a limit to democracy. This limit is the state of emergency and such a state is initiated dictatorially…..
It requires a change of consciousness to accept the thought of ‘dictatorial’ decisions in a world in which the [environmental] catastrophes that may happen within the next two centuries are yet to be felt.

Escalating high consequence risks, as this extract from a letter to the editor illuminates, may be in the process of eroding people’s democratic consciousness. Seen in this light, it seems quite paradoxical, if not directly misleading, that most public debates about the EU concern its ‘democratic deficits’ on the input side. We close our eyes to how good governance in respect of its difference from democracy is a highly expensive lesson to learn. At the same time we risk imposing an old fashioned input politics upon the EU which is silently being abandoned by more and more worried experts and laypeople in its member states. What we need to discuss is how to connect democracy and good governance in a way that manifests their mutual autonomy and dependence. As a system of governance in continuous debacle with democratic government, the EU provides us a unique chance to figure out how a deliberative politics-policy tied to a communicative policy-politics can become ‘best practices’ for us all.

But why is it that the crucial political difference between democracy and good governance has not been able to penetrate into our practical consciousness? The common understanding of ‘good governance’ as non-political administration makes up one half of the answer. The other half has to do with the blurring of the difference between participating in and deliberating on democracy and good governance, respectively. If we are to connect democracy and good governance we got to appreciate that (a) good governance is political through and through and (b) policies that prove to be good for people need not be good for democracy at all.

The theory and practice of democratic pluralism

New sociologists, media researchers and policy analysts are producing pile after pile of books and articles dealing with what is termed the switch from modern industrialized society to late modern  Risk Society (Beck 1992), Network Society (Castells and Cardoso (eds.) 2006), Information Society (Webster 2002) or Reflexive Modernization (Beck, Giddens and Lash 1994). One speaks of how new communication and transportation technologies are (i) facilitating the creation of a new globalized economy based on cooperation more than opposition between employers and employees; (ii) changing social relations towards more change oriented and ‘thinner’ socialities for connecting people across old national, cultural and religious boundaries; and (iii) compelling nation-states to find new ways beyond their formal institutions to co-manage ‘glocal’ (local in the global) high consequence risks of global warming, famine, aids, terrorism, energy shortage, financial meltdowns, etc. Yet, in the mainstream, one generally proceeds as if all these glocal changes are inconsequential to the way in which ‘big’ politics is conducted within and between sovereign nation-states. In fact, most actors involved in national politics agree that despite all transformations, ‘the political’ is solidly anchored in intense power struggles springing from deep seated cleavages between groups and classes in society. No matter how much new knowledge is put on the table about changes from allocative politics to value politics, citizenship to political consumerism, representative politics to sub-politics, parliamentarism to managerialism, corporatism to partnerships, government to governance, nation-state to network-state, and bureaucratic domination to empowering administration, this is routinely dismissed as peripheral or secondary to what is defining ‘big’ politics: the struggle for acquiring power over decision-making in and among sovereign nation states. Robert A. Dahl, one of the founding fathers of Modern Political Science, succinctly formulated it like this 52 years ago:

If some citizens believe that their interests conflict with the interests of others, how should the matter be decided? (Dahl 2006 (1956): 160, italics added).

Politics on Dahl’s view is about combining interest and power as a political decision. Policy, as the action that operationalizes and carries out the decision, in contrast, is purely administrative and non-political. As Almond and Verba, two other icons in mainstream political science, formulated it more than 45 years ago (1963: 14):

incumbents and decisions may…be classified broadly by whether they are involved either in the political or “input” process or in the     administrative or “output” process. By “political” or “input” process we refer to the flow of demands from the society into the polity and the conversion of these demands into authoritative decisions.

Modern politics is still shaped according to this distinction between ‘the political’ and ‘the administrative’. If interests in society enjoy a free and equal possibility for being voiced and getting heard in the ‘input’ process, then power will be dispersed on many hands and pluralism will prevail. Inversely, if a dominant group or class manages to silence all social voices in the output process, then monism becomes the rule.

As Dahl puts it with a view to what at that time was going on in the communist world (ibid: 50):

With all its defects, [American government] does nonetheless provide a high probability that any active and legitimate group will make itself heard effectively at some stage in the process of decision. This is no mean thing in a political system.

On this ‘Cold War’ model of democratic pluralism versus bureaucratic monism, as long as good governance appears as the prolonged administrative arm of pluralism as long will it also come out as inconsequential to the conduct of ‘big’ politics. The challenge in relation to the EU then becomes how to prevent good governance from turning into a weapon for expanding monism so that democratic deficits occur. The quest is to ‘tame’ the EU administration by democratic rules and procedures so that every group in society can voice its concerns and will be heard in the EU political decision-making process. Only by stopping administrative domination in the EU can one hinder the EU bureaucracy from employing ‘good governance’ to silence the critical voice of citizens in the democratic public sphere.   

Thus the tacit norm underlying the discussion of democratic deficits is Dahl’s one of maximizing the multiple points of access to the political process as a fundamental part of the way plurality is stabilized and channeled into pluralism. Democratic pluralists do not deny that the building of networks and partnerships of good governance across old boundaries are becoming progressively more important to implementing decisions, locally, regionally and in the EU. Nor do they ignore how more and more citizens are abandoning input politics in order to find new ways of influencing the exercise of good governance. They only reject that these new forms of governance and participation are politically significant and important. As long as they function ‘in the shadow’ of democratic government, they seem to think, they do not constitute a political problem for democratic pluralism. Rather, they can function as neutral administrative tools for implementing ‘a relatively efficient system for reinforcing agreement, encouraging moderation, and maintaining social peace’ (Dahl 1956: 151). It is only when policy networks and partnerships set themselves loose from democracy and take on an autonomous role of their own that they turn into the enemy of pluralism as concerted administrative domination grounded in vested interests.

Towards a new late modern politics

No wonder that the voters in France, the Netherlands and recently in Ireland chose to ignore the authoritative public voice for transforming the EU into a kind of modified American government. Like many European social scientists outside the mainstream they have become skeptical of the capacity of both democracy and bureaucracy to deliver. As they put it in deliberative policy analysis:

If the traditional forms of government are unable to deliver – either because of a lack of legitimacy or simply because there is a mismatch between the scope of the problem and the existing territorial jurisdiction – then networks of actors must create the capacity to interact and communicate (Hajer and Waagenar 2003:11)

Like the ‘ordinary’ Dane quoted in the introduction, Hayer and Waagenar are here pointing to the concrete need for converting the nation state into a ‘true’ network state characterized by reasoned and capable action with regard to things that are good or bad for man (Aristotle 1976, 1140a24-b12). Good governance, they communicate, does not come from the ability to make and implement a rational decision within the democratic chain of steering.  Rather it shows how the handling of extraordinary situations, such as the one of rapidly escalating global warming, relies on the political capacity to act in a way which is ethical, pragmatic, variable and context dependent. Thus policy articulation and policy delivery must be made more autonomous from the conversion of conflicting interests into consensual decisions. Otherwise it will be impossible for democracy to tie itself to a deliberative and participatory form of good governance which is capable of creating widespread political acceptance and recognition among all relevant participants of ‘what has to be done’.

Connecting democracy and good governance in light of their intrinsic difference is far from an ad hoc solution determined by the mood of the day. It is a functional necessity. Only by changing the market driven and bureaucratic state into a partnering network state can we hope to develop the kind of communicative and empowering policy required to govern and develop not merely the new kind of cooperation and collaboration between capital and work in the glocalized economy but also the new ‘thinner’ sociality of mutual and reciprocal acceptance and recognition of difference in glocalized civil society. Politicians and opinion makers should take the concept of network state much more seriously, contemplating how the pluralization of the political on the output side as multiple policy networks and policy partnerships composed of actors from the public, private and voluntary domain affect plurality and pluralism on the input side. This development is simply compelling conventional political actors in democracy to take on new roles and identities as agents and institutions of good governance.
For example, media are complementing their old role and identity as civil society’s ‘watch dogs’ with a new one as ‘hunting dogs’ for getting direct influence over policy articulation and delivery inside the political system. The same holds for voluntary associations, which no longer see their role solely, or even primarily, as one of giving voice to laypeople’s concerns in civil society. Much more important is their ‘colonization’ of the political system as policy-politics actors, who want to demonstrate that they can do social policy better than both public and private organizations. Even political parties are abandoning their conventional representative role and identity on the input side, turning themselves into cartel parties which cooperate and collaborate with one another in order to become the leading managerial forces in the new policy-politics networks and partnerships. To ignore or try to stop these changes would be tantamount to political suicide. Society is no longer as it used to be. Things are growing much more complex are moving much faster than in industrialized society, and the time where representative politics had a solid foundation in clearly distinguishable social groups and classes is long gone.

The EU as exemplar of the network state

When most EU-citizens do not want to leave the EU and yet feel quite disconnected from its input determined political rhetoric and battles, it may be because they sense that the solving of high consequences risks, and thus their own prospects for getting a better life, are becoming more and more dependent on the EU’s exercise of good governance. To the degree that they support the EU system, it is not because they trust its politicians or believe that it is right and proper for them to abide by the requirements of its regime (‘input legitimacy’). It is rather because they have been convinced and also can experience that the EU will and can deliver (‘output legitimacy’).
Hence, the attempts to try to convert the EU into a ‘melting pot’ with American government as the role model may simply be a chimera. It is virtually impossible to imagine an EU in which people share the same norms and thus act out their differences politically on account of an underlying normative consensus. Irresolvable differences will probably always prevail in the EU. More important than establishing consensus on decision-making in the EU is it to create a mutual tact and respect for what it does.  The EU is necessary first of all because high consequence risks do not and cannot await a rational or ideological democratic decision; they require concrete and sound political policy interventions right here and now. Seen in this light, the attempts to reform the EU according to input political principles will probably do more harm than good to the multiple new policy practices constructed by it for the exercise of good governance. They will also cover up how democracy is becoming increasingly dependent for its survival and development on the creation and spread of the new policy-politics of good governance above, below, within and across nation states

The political novelty created by the EU comes from its change from a huge bureaucracy into a multi-governance system placing plurality and pluralism among elites and sub-elites inside the political system before plurality and pluralism among groups and classes in the society outside. To the extent that its member states will be successful in ‘taming’ the EU administration by input political norms and procedures, we will be deprived of an important lesson. This is that the EU system of good governance is intrinsically political and cannot be reduced to an effect of either a capitalist economy set loose in its own dynamic or a ‘monistic’ bureaucracy rendered autonomous as an administrative form of domination. The exercise of good governance is clearly distinguishable from both the kind of preference calculation that drives the market and the kind of technical (and normative) rationality that characterizes a modern bureaucracy.  The practical wisdom and action capacity required for exercising good governance exists in growing tension with both the ‘self-healing powers’ of an anarchic market economy and the state interventions ‘from above’ conducted by a specialist planning bureaucracy. Neither of these is attuned to deal directly, contextually and ethically with articulating and delivering policies in ways that are good for people.

Western democracies must readjust themselves towards imperatives of good governance, if they are not to regress and fall prey to democratic orthodoxy. Conventional pluralist democracy in the nation-state is becoming a functional as well as an ethical problem for handling our common high consequence risks. Functionally, because input politics can be a barrier for acting with the speed and efficiency required to deal with an urgent policy situation.
Ethically, because the moral idea that input politics can function only if there is an underlying normative consensus among groups in civil society tends to obstruct the creation of a general acceptance and recognition of differences that sometimes may be irresolvable, such as those that we are experiencing between Christian and Muslim religions and cultures. However, combining democracy and good governance is certainly no easy task, whether in theory or practice. Yet, one can wonder why mass media do not pay more attention to this issue, but instead reduces it to a clash between redistributive politics and value politics. Of course, particular cases about sex scandals in governments, mudslinging political celebrities, racial tensions in urban ‘hot spots’, human stories about failures in hospital treatment and elder care, etc. sell much better; and so does apparently the public image and rhetoric of the journalist as a watchdog fighting against all democratic deficits and abuses of political power. Yet, it should be evident that the biggest challenge to democracy and good governance in a situation where everybody is deserting their representative role to acquire some control over the articulation and delivery of salient policies is how to transfer a larger share of control to laypeople. Although late modern political systems are indeed becoming increasingly pluralized due the autonomization of more and more elites and sub-elites in policy-politics, they are simultaneously growing less and less open to laypeople

The EU is not primarily to be blamed for the return and reshaping of elitism as a republican one composed of multiple, relatively autonomous ‘professionals’ from all over society. After all, the EU was not, and is not, primarily constructed for purposes of protecting and serving the democratic public. It was, and is, mostly designed to cope with the high consequence risks and extraordinary situations that its single member states have become too small to handle themselves. The EU is a political system of good governance first and a democratic polity only second. The EU is made ‘for’, ‘by’ and ‘with’ elites and sub-elites. It was not intended to be 'popular' or ‘public’ in any significant democratic senses of these words. However, in a situation where more and more communicative power is leaking out of Parliament and civil society to reconfigure around the discussion of good governance among elites and sub-elites, the voice of laypeople is silenced to the advantage of the voice of ‘the professionals’ (Bang and Esmark (eds.) 2007). New, highly mediatised policy-politics publics are taking charge inside the going political systems. These are in principle open to everybody – but only as long as one can and knows how to speak, act and make oneself visible in the media as a ‘true professional’ attempting to affect the articulation and delivery of salient policies.

It is a growing problem for democracy that laypeople get fewer and fewer possibilities for exerting their influence in politics-policy as well as in policy-politics. Of course, many laypeople realize this, and they are also developing multiple new forms for exercising indirect influence, for instance by chatting, blogging, making petitions and forming protest movements on the net. Furthermore, voters have since long figured out that they must compensate for their loss of voice on the input side by voting with their feet on the output side, kicking their politicians out, if they are not able to deliver, or sidelining them via opinion polls and focus groups.  Yet, these new form of discourse and participation cannot compensate for their loss of control over democratic government and the new governance. Hence, the big challenge in the EU is how to balance relations of autonomy and dependence between elites and laypeople in a way that can expand both equal freedom and good governance.

References

Almond, Gabriel and Sidney Verba (1963) The Civic Culture. London: Sage.Aristotle (1976) The Nicomachean Ethics. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Bang, Henrik Paul & Anders Esmark (eds.) (2007) New publics with/out democracy. Frederiksberg: Samfundslitteratur Press/ Nordicom.

Beck, Ulrich (1992) Risk Society. London: Sage

Beck, Ulrich, Anthony Giddens,  & Scott Lash (1994). Reflexive Modernization. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Castells, Manuel and Gustavo Cardoso (2006) The Network Society. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press.

Dahl, Robert A (2006) (1956) A Preface to Democratic Theory. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Hajer, Maarten A. & Hendrik Wagenaar (eds.) (2003). Deliberative Policy Analysis. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press.

Smith, B.C. (2007) Good Governance and Development. Houndsmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave-macmillan.

Webster, Frank (2002) Theories of the Information Society 2nd Edition. London: Routledge.