Alexis de Tocqueville, the Modern Democratic Nation-State, and Its Competitors (original) (raw)
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International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 2011
The article describes the specific character of the European Union-its status as an unfinished federal quasi-state, the EU's potential as one global actor among others and the motivation behind the ongoing process of integration, especially the EU's antithetical character concerning nationalism. The article analyses the different theoretical approaches to explain why the Union has become what it is-and why it has not become a different entity. It also discusses the question of different interests promoting or opposing further integration. The basic argument is that the EU provides-in a period of declining state power-the possibility to reconstruct politics and government on a transnational level.
Political Studies, 2010
This article explores whether the supranational EU polity can be legitimised without the nation state. It claims that modern political representation depends on establishing a tripartite distinction between state, government and civil society. This is contrasted with competing notions of the modern state, notably Rousseau's idea of popular sovereignty and the Jacobin notion of 'immediate democracy'. The tripartite system, it is argued, enhances three crucial components of democratic legitimacy: governing, sanctioning and mandating accountability.Within this framework, the idea of the nation and the associated national narrative is shown to benefit democratic legitimacy by providing a trans-generational concept of the common good to which government can be held accountable. Since the EU does not fit this model, two approaches have been touted to legitimise this supranational polity in a post-national manner: democratic governance and constitutional patriotism. Yet both are highly problematic forms of engendering legitimacy. Governance offers no guarantees as to how and why citizens will be better represented and does away with the idea of a common good. Constitutional patriotism presupposes the prior acquiescence of nation states to EU integration without problematising how such acquiescence is mandated. Thus the maintenance of a genuinely post-national polity-one that does not recreate the division between state, government and people-depends on the ability to incorporate EU integration into evolving national narratives. The modern liberal democratic state is based on the principle of representation in order to render the exercise of political authority legitimate. Representative democracy as it has developed in the Western hemisphere since the nineteenth century relies on political parties to form governments and represent voters (Duverger, 1965) as well as other forms of citizen mobilisation such as social movements (Tilly, 2004). Traditionally associated solely with the nation state as a form of political organisation, it is now an open question as to whether such democratic practices are only possible within this context (Held, 2006). In particular, post-nationalism suggests that the scope for citizenship and democracy is not confined to the nation state. In the context of contemporary Europe, postnationalism posits a form of democratic politics in the European Union without recourse to a national bond between citizens. However, this article discusses whether doing away with the nation is appropriate for solving the problems of legitimacy and accountability that bedevil the EU. In an EU political system founded on indirect representation and accountability (Majone, 2005; Moravcsik, 2002), the nation is a still a highly useful means of legitimising a supranational authority that, as post-nationalism recognises, is not a replacement for the nation state. The post-national turn in EU studies is understood here as the advocacy of a form of democratic political organisation that is un-beholden to the notion of the nation state
The Construction of Europe and the Concept of the Nation-State
Contemporary European History, 2000
The campaign for the 1999 European elections, particularly in France, was articulated more clearly than ever before in terms of a rhetorical dialectic between the promotion of national interests and the construction of Europe ± although it was expressed differently by different party leaders:`We must make Europe without unmaking France' (Jacques Chirac), or`prolong and amplify the nation' (Lionel Jospin), or`put France in advance' (Franc Ëois Bayrou). All these campaign slogans ®t more or less into the framework laid down in 1995 by the former president of the European Commission, Jacques Delors, when he predicted that the European Union would become a`federation of nation-states'. While the concept thus outlined was a little vague, Delors's intention was to point out the hybrid nature of an institution whose structure combined federalist tendencies with the concept of the nation-state. It provides us with a good starting point for progressing beyond the facile and all-too-frequent opposition in the European dynamic between`nation' and`federation'. 1 Previous conceptual models have, from the beginning, sought to capture the speci®c political nature of Europe somewhere between the two extremes of full national sovereignty and out-and-out federalism. The ®rst,`neorealist', model, as progressively re®ned by Stanley Hoffmann, sees European institutions as a`pool of sovereignties' through which member states freely negotiate the creation of community functions and retain a monopoly over their application. 2 The second, the`neo-functionalist', has been associated since the 1950s with Ernst Haas and sees those institutions as pre®guring a federal super-state which will inevitably appropriate the principal functions of member states owing to a`spillover' effect. 3 By contrast, the intrinsically paradoxical nature of the expression`federation of nation-states' reminds us that since the beginnings of the European enterprise the concepts of nation and of federation have been inextricably linked. At this moment
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When referring to constitution-making, scholars and the media have compared the European Union (EU) at the beginning 21 st century to the early modern United States, and have pointed to analogies between the Convention in Brussels and the Convention of Philadelphia. 1 Such historical parallels are suggestive but overlook decisive differences between the tasks of the "Convention on the Future of Europe" that submitted the "Draft Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe" to the European Council in Thessalonica on June 20 th , 2003, and those of Madison, Franklin and the other convention members who drafted the constitution of the American Federation in summer 1787. The European experience differs from that of the U.S. notably, not only because of its much larger scale, the greater cultural and linguistic diversity of its 25 member states and 450 million inhabitants, or the unlikeliness of a bloody civil war for imposing federal unity. More importantly, in trying to mould the "contradictory sovereignties of the parts... into a whole", the challenge of democratic legitimacy plays a pivotal role in Europe. 2 The U.S. constituent act originated in a pre-democratic century and was therefore flawed by numerous democratic shortcomings. 3 The EU Convention, by contrast, was explicitly mandated by the heads of states and governments to improve the efficiency and legitimacy of European decision-making by resolving the democratic deficit in the enlarged Union. Looking back on the 15 months of constitutional debates, the chairman of the Convention, Valerie Giscard d'Estaing, found hardly any other topic on which the positions diverged as much as in relation to democratic legitimacy. 4 Vice chairman Giuliano Amato framed the task of building a consensus on this issue in a historical perspective: While the 19th and 20th centuries had witnessed the birth of democracy in Europe and its expansion among nation states, he saw the challenge of the 21st century in not only thinking a European transnational democracy, but in constructing it. 5 Did the Treaty on a Constitution for Europe that was ultimately signed by the heads of state and government in Rome on October 29, 2004, signal that the framers of the European Constitution had successfully coped with this challenge of democracy beyond the nation state?