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A tyranny of experts
In outsourcing their authority to international institutions, governments bypass the democratic process and treat their publics as simpletons.

...It is not the external impact of international forces, but rather a loss of confidence in the authority and legitimacy of the contemporary state that explains the rise and rise of the globalisation thesis. For some time, the state and public institutions have been suffering a crisis of legitimacy. As far back as the 1970s and into the 1980s, it was clear there was a widespread loss of trust in authoritative institutions in the Western world. Back then, one British observer noted that there was ‘disturbing evidence’ of a decline of ‘public confidence in the police’, which he considered to be a symptom of a ‘crisis of authority’ that affected the ‘most elemental relations of state power and the citizen’ (1)....

...Lacking confidence in their authority, political elites have started looking for other ways to authorise their actions. For example, they have embraced the authority of science and expertise. With the rise of ‘evidence-based policymaking’, a buzzphrase in Western political life today, traditional electoral authority has been replaced by the authority of the dispassionate expert. Increasingly, national government policies are authorised by external institutions and conventions. Such outsourcing of authority is especially striking in the European Union. Governments that have joined the EU no longer have to take direct responsibility for certain policy initiatives and measures; instead they point out that these policies emanate from a technocratic, supra-national body: the EU. In earlier times, national governments jealously guarded their policymaking processes and prerogatives. Today, they are eager to subordinate themselves to international protocols, and to ‘share’ authority with others. Often, the globalisation thesis provides a political rationale for this outsourcing of authority....

...Although it is frequently justified in terms of powerful states becoming more humble and open to new ideas, the ‘sharing of authority’ is fundamentally anti-democratic. Outsourcing authority is a top-down procedural project, which breaks policymaking from democratic accountability. By coming together with other elites in international institutions, governments become more accountable to one another than to their own citizens. In recent years, it’s become commonplace for governments to avoid responsibility for certain policies by claiming that the policies were imposed on them by their ‘institutional obligations’. Laїdi describes this process as follows: ‘The sharing of sovereignty is akin, then, to a kind of joint ownership, from which it is always more difficult to extricate oneself from co-tenancy.’ This metaphor of ‘co-ownership’ is, of course, a caricature of true sovereignty. It represents a new form of sovereignty that is divested of any popular pressure or accountability.

Both the critics and supporters of the EU frequently raise concerns about its formal and bureaucratic nature. However, it is no accident that the EU governs in such a slow, clunking fashion. The EU, like other international institutions, was specifically created with a view to bypassing democratic and popular pressure. As Laїdi concedes, ‘Europe is thus, fundamentally, a normative construction that draws, depending on the particular case, on standardisation, harmonisation, voluntary convergence of incentives’. Voluntary for technocrats and policymakers, perhaps, but not for the European masses. As Laїdi notes, in the EU the ‘high degree of normativity leads, at times, to a certain formalism of procedures, which generates a democratic deficit’. Yet for Laїdi, this erosion of democratic accountability is a small price to pay for a form of governance that is based on ‘globally responsible’ rules, and which is reflective of ‘global civil society’.

Today’s celebration of global civil society is motivated by a loss of faith in the public, and by a search for new forms of authority that are insulated from popular pressure. Ultimately, the shift of authority from the national sphere to the global sphere represents the outsourcing of authority to the expert. According to Laїdi, the main source of legitimacy of international civil society – that is, non-governmental organisations and formal international institutions – is its expertise. But there is a big problem with governance through expertise: it renders political choice redundant.

Laїdi fails to note the anti-democratic implications of expert authority. He even hints that such authority is not ‘prejudicial to the sovereignty of the state’. However, international civil society invariably prefers the view of the expert to the view of the democratically elected representative. ‘Expertise is an element of power wielded by the knowledgeable against decision-makers’, says Laїdi. A political drama in which the tension is between the expert and the decision-maker has little room for ordinary people. Instead, the public is expected simply to accept and live with the wisdom of decisions taken by experts and government regulators. Expert consensus, rather than public consensus, is the driving force of new forms of governance. ...

...There is another way of making sense of the trends discussed by Laїdi. The voluntary relinquishing of sovereignty by European elites does not show that they are high-minded, forward-looking, enlightened internationalists. Rather, it is an attempt by an insecure oligarchy, which senses that its authority is feeble and falling apart, to disavow full responsibility for its actions. That is why governments today feel so much more at home hanging out in international civil society than they do engaging with their own ‘populist’ public.