Trust and politics

The Friends of Europe held a fairly high-level one day round-table in Brussels on the 13 October and I was invited to participate as a discussant.

In the event, the session ran out of time and I wasn’t called upon to speak (even at the two-minute length that we are allocated at plenaries), but this is what I would have said had I been (or something close to it).


The problem of declining trust in Europe and EU institutions should not be looked at purely in the EU context, because it is a phenomenon that is affecting democratic politics everywhere. The reality is that the Western world is going through a paradigm shift and various transformations are taking place that we can only see in part or not at all (yet).

One of these processes, the one that bears most directly on trust, is that in the last two-three decades the parameters of politics have changed. Whereas, in previous times, politics was concentrated on party allegiance, elections, legislative activity, that concentration has been much diluted and power is, in consequence, far more fragmented than before (see also the blog entry “Where has all the power gone?”).


The most obvious new loci of power, as noted previously, are the new political actors (civil society, lobbies etc.), economic actors like the multinationals and the media. None of these is elected, yet they certainly exercise power. Citizens recognise that neither they nor legislatures have as much power over them as they might, so tend to become either disenchanted with politics as such or are radicalised (e.g. the rise of the radical right, the “Occupy” movements, the Tea Party). The complexity of interactions between global and local, between economic and political processes result in a clear sense of loss of agency. No one seems to have much idea how to restore this.

Another dimension of these processes of depoliticisation is the longer term (and obviously unintended) consequence of the collapse of communism and the dissolution of class-based politics. The outcome has been a technocratisation and bureaucratisation of areas of decision making, removing them from the political perspective, the rise of “politics as management”, which in reality is not politics at all, and the ever more widespread reliance on technical language and procedures that eliminate participation and agency.

To these may be added a particular facet of media power (see also the earlier blog entry), that the media drive the growing distrust of politics by their sensationalist and often hyperbolic exposures of abuses of power. Sometimes these abuses are real, sometimes they are trivial, at others these accounts of politicians misbehaving attack form rather than content; in such cases politicians may not actually have done anything wrong, but the media presentation is such that they are held responsible for something, i.e. whatever it is they are doing, it’s dubious or wrong.

The evidence may be thin, the narrative may be full of holes or actually mendacious, but the media have succeeded in establishing and sustaining a climate of suspicion in which the exercise of power is widely seen as inherently dubious. In other words, there is virtually no burden of proof needed where politicians are concerned, even if this is not applied to non-elected agents of power. Besides, the emphasis placed by the media on persons rather than issues devalues institutional authority and transforms politics into clashes of people, rather than making it the target of rational debate, as democratic theory supposes.

This state of affairs has brought about an evident discrediting of politicians and with that, of politics itself, which then has had a knock-on effect in accelerating the distrust sketched above. The outcome is paradoxical. There is a depoliticisation in some areas, but this is paralleled by a radical repoliticisation elsewhere. Overall, taken together with the complexity factor and the fragmentation, it is hardly surprising that the distrust of and frustration with politics is as widespread as it is.

Sch. Gy.