A Dual Legitimacy for a Democratic European Community? Jürgen Habermas and Constituent Power in the European Union (original) (raw)
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Res Publica, 2021
In this article, I question the use of the notion of ‘constituent power’ as a tool for the democratization of the European Union (EU). Rather than seeing the absence of a transnational constituent power as a cause of the EU’s ‘democratic deficit’, I identify it as an opportunity for unfettered democratic participation. Against the reification of power-in-action into a power-constituted-in-law, I argue that the democratization of the EU can only be achieved through the multiplication of ‘constituent moments’. I begin by deconstructing the normative justifications surrounding the concept of constituent power. Here I analyze the structural aporia of constituent power and question the autonomous and emancipatory dimension of this notion. I then test the theoretical hypothesis of this structural aporia of the popular constituent power by comparing it with the historical experiments of a European popular constituent power. Finally, based on these theoretical and empirical observations, I ...
2020
The euro crisis, rising Euroscepticism, and Brexit have once again highlighted the European Union's unresolved legitimacy deficit. Increasingly, citizens claim to have been illegitimately excluded from decisions about the future of European integration. Movements such as DiEM25 call into question the authority of the states as the 'masters of the treaties'. At the same time, political theory's debate about the EU has become ever more academic. The discipline is preoccupied with the production and refinement of abstract models of democratic constitutionalism whose connection to real politics is thin. This book seeks to develop a new approach to EU legitimacy by reorienting the debate from the question of how the supranational polity should ideally be organized to the question of who is entitled to make that decision and how. To that end, it reformulates the classical notion of constituent power for the context of European integration. This account challenges conventional theoretical assumptions regarding the EU's ultimate source of legitimacy and enables political theory to put to the test the claims of those who challenge the established mode of EU constitutional politics.
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Contemporary Political Theory, 2023
The problem of the democratic legitimacy of the European Union (EU) is one of the key topics in the study of European integration. In the past two years alone, three explicitly critical books on the subject have been published-by Michael Wilkinson (2021), Perry Anderson (2022), Stefan Auer (2022), as well as an apology for the EU's response to pandemics (and the EU more broadly), by Luuk van Middelaar (2021). These issues are also politically important, as many European citizens also feel that the EU lacks a democratic basis. This has been evident in Greece and Italy, when they were facing economic crises after 2008, or, in another way, in the United Kingdom, when it was discussing its withdrawal from the European Union. The need to improve Europe's democratic credibility is also one of the reasons behind the Conference on the Future of Europe (CoFoE), a twoyear consultative process involving randomly selected EU citizens and representatives of European institutions to identify the policies and institutions that need to change in the EU. However, due to a total lack of interest from the European public and a lack of involvement from member states' governments, the process failed spectacularly. In his new book, Markus Patberg presents a clear position on this debate. He believes that the key question we should answer to reduce the democratic deficit is: who has the authority to decide the institutional shape of public power in the EU. Or, to put it in other words, what should its constituent power look like? Patberg's book is elegantly structured. In the first part, he diagnoses the poor condition of the European constitution-making process, which is either hijacked by governments or by the European Court of Justice (using the 'integration through law' method). The former is particularly evident in times of emergency politics, which we have witnessed since the 2008 economic crisis. The response to the pandemic was another example of emergency politics favouring governments over all the other decision-making bodies. That is how the Recovery and Resilience Facility, dubbed by some as a Hamiltonian moment of European integration, as it relies on to a large degree on the collective issuance of bonds, was created. The second method, integration through law, has been part of the European integration
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Constitutional lawyers and political scientists have described the European Union as a federation of states (fédération, Bund). They deny that federations generate a new union-wide constituent authority besides the pouvoirs constituants of the member states. Habermas argues that federative constituent power lies with individuals in their dual roles as citizens of the several states and as citizens of the Union. I argue that from the perspective of democratic theory, this view is methodologically superior to other 'dualist' views of federative constituent power (J. Cohen), but go on to criticize it in two respects. It gives insufficient justification for the persistence of domestic pouvoirs constituants, and it reifies their defensive function.
Political Studies, 2010
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The EU's political system represents European citizens via three different channels: through the European Parliament, indirectly through their Governments in the Council, and through domestic elections, which hold these last democratically accountable to National Parliaments or citizens. However, these channels involve different and incompatible types of representation and forms of democracy, reflecting divergent conceptions of political community which, following
Global Constitutionalism, 2023
In this article, I ask to what extent the Conference on the Future of Europe (CoFoE) has advanced democracy in the European Union (EU). I critically engage with the claim that the CoFoE's success should not be measured by whether it enabled constituent power, or ultimately results in treaty reforms, but by the fact that, by introducing citizens' assemblies to EU politics, it has laid the foundation for participatory democracy in the EU. Drawing on established theories of participatory democracy, I argue that this interpretation misses the point. To put forward an alternative view, I revisit James Bohman's concept of a democratic minimum. The best democratic defence of permanent EU citizens' assemblies is that they could provide citizens with the capacity to initiate deliberation about common concerns-and thus function as a nucleus for constituent power in the EU. Nevertheless, the idea should be viewed with caution, as permanent citizens' assemblies could just as well become a democratic fig leaf allowing EU institutions to reject calls for fundamental reforms. Much therefore depends on their institutional design.
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