One of the familiar justifications for the rise of independent powers – courts, central banks, regulators – is that expert-based institutions are well-placed to pursue long-term objectives, free of the constraints of partisanship and public opinion. In the European Union, Commission officials like to contrast themselves positively in this respect with their political colleagues in the European Council, whose authority is tied to national elections and whose time horizons are said to be shorter (Vogt and Pukarinen 2022). The authority of the CJEU and the ECB is likewise often connected to an idea of temporal long-sightedness (e.g. Majone 1996). This paper explores how such claims about time are used to rationalise the institutional distribution of powers in the EU, and critically examines how far these claims are well founded.
Underpinning the argument for transferring power to unelected bodies is typically the suggestion that democratic institutions are prone to short-termism. The ‘democratic myopia’ thesis is long-standing, yet downplays the possibility of ‘technocratic myopia’ – that independent institutions have their own distinctive drivers of short-termism (White 2024). Especially in the contemporary period, as a sharp divide between expertise and politics is increasingly challenged, one sees a multiplication of controversies undermining the social authority of independent institutions to reign over the definition of long-term issues (Eyal 2019). From financial capitalism to climate change, the regulation of the long-term is increasingly embroiled in the emergency politics of the here and now; reciprocally, politicians and governments are increasingly called upon to deal with long-term ecological issues and to position themselves in long-term horizons. The paper uses the experiences of the EU, and a variety of field-work in particular in Frankfurt and Luxembourg (Madsen, Nicola, Vauchez, 2023; Mudge, Vauchez, 2022), to chart the un-making of a division of labour, always precarious, between democratic institutions as managers of the short term and independent institutions as guardians of the long term.
