This article introduces the concept of the ‘Multilevel Parliamentary Field’ as a means for analysing the structure of democratic representation in the European Union (EU). This concept is warranted for several reasons. First, the multilevel configuration that makes up the EU contains two channels of democratic representation: one directly through the European Parliament, the other indirectly through the national parliaments and governments. These two channels are likely to persist side by side; hence, both the European and the national parliaments can claim to represent ‘the people’ in EU decision-making. Second, this structure of representation is in many respects without precedent; it does not fit established concepts of democratic representation derived from the nation-state or from international relations, such as a federal two-channel system or a parliamentary network. Third, the representative bodies in the EU are interlinked, also across levels. Up until now, no proper conceptual apparatus has been devised that can capture the distinctive traits of this EU multilevel representative system, and help to assess its democratic quality. The concept of the Multilevel Parliamentary Field fills both these tasks. It serves as a heuristic device to integrate the empirical analysis of the different forms of democratic representation in the EU’s multilevel system, and it provides new angles for analysing the democratic challenges that this system faces.
This article explores the democratizing role of strong publics, which are institutionalized bodies of deliberation and decision-making. Strong publics are important to modern democracy as they subject decision-making to justificatory debate. This article evaluates selected aspects of the institutional nexus of the EU in order to see if they qualify as strong publics. The focus is on comitology, the European Parliament and the Charter Convention. These bodies vary in their status as strong publics, but to various degrees they all inject the logic of impartial justification and reason-giving into the EU system.
In this article, we assess three explicit strategies (based on three logics of political integration) as possible solutions to the European Union’s legitimacy problems. The first strategy amounts to a scaling down of the ambitions of the polity-makers in the European Union (EU). The second strategy emphasizes the need to deepen the collective self-understanding of Europeans. These two modes of legitimation figure strongly in the debate on aspects of the EU, but both have become problematic. The third strategy concentrates on the need to readjust and heighten the ambitions of the polity-makers so as to make the EU into a federal multicultural union founded on basic rights and democratic decision-making procedures. Taking stock of the ongoing constitution-making process, the authors ask how robust such an alternative is and how salient it is, as opposed to the other two strategies.
This contribution addresses two questions. First, what forms and shapes does European Union (EU) differentiation take in the realm of representative democracy in the multilevel constellation that makes up the EU? Second, what are the implications of differentiation for the theory and the practice of democracy?The question is whether citizens are capable of governing themselves in a political entity marked by patterns of authority and/or policy-making that vary in unprecedented ways along territorial and functional lines. Drawing on differentiation rather than the more commonly used term differentiated integration entails a somewhat different research focus and allows considering the democratic challenges of patterns of integration and disintegration actualized by the euro crisis. The contribution establishes a set of democratic standards and assesses the democratic implications of differentiation in the EU. Doing that requires paying explicit attention to the distinctive character of the multilevel EU's structure of democratic representation.
The European Union is presently at a major crossroads. The Laeken process which launched the EU onto an explicit constitution-making process, has ground to a halt after the negative referendum results in France and the Netherlands. The European Council at its [16][17] June 2005 meeting decided to postpone the ratification process (by then 10 states had ratified and 2 had rejected) and instead issue a period of reflection. These events represent a significant re-politicization of the European integration process. From a research perspective they underline the need to study the dynamic interrelation between the emerging European polity and its social constituency. In this article we provide an analytical model of EUconstitutionalisation in terms of polity building and constituency building, a model that links institutional performance back to public voice and mobilisation. Our focus on determining the character of the EU's emerging social constituency goes beyond the contentious politics approach because it does not only focus on public voice but also provides a research framework for properly understanding the role of public silence.In empirical terms, this implies looking at the structure of public communication and claims-making in the EU and in the Member States. The European public sphere in relation to constitution making is then our object of analysis. More specifically, we present a research framework that will help us to shed light on the character of the EU's social constituency, as it emerges in dynamic interaction with the process of polity formation. 2… the democratic debate has focused on the distribution and use of power within a given community rather than on the definition of the community (Guéhenno 1998: 1
This article critically engages with Sabel and Zeitlin's important notion of experimentalist governance (EG). It is cast as a "recursive process of provisional goal-setting and revision based on learning from the comparison of alternative approaches to advancing them in different contexts." This is a useful heuristic device to capture policymaking and implementation in complex, dynamic, and highly diverse political entities. This article discusses the micro-foundations underpinning EG, how it relates to hierarchical modes of governing, and how well it captures the distinctive traits of the EU. It also discusses EG from a democratic perspective. In democratic terms EG is understood as a form of direct deliberative polyarchy. This article notes that the question of EG's contribution to democratization cannot, however, be adequately addressed unless we pay more systematic attention to representation and representative democracy.
This article shows that the main pattern of European democratization has unfolded along the lines of an EU organized as a multilevel system of representative parliamentary government and not as a system of deliberative governance as the transnationalists propound. But the multilevel EU has developed a structure of representation that is theoretically challenging. In order to come to grips with this we present an institutional variant of deliberative theory, which understands democracy as the combination of a principle of justification and an organizational form. It comes with the following explanatory mechanisms: claimsmaking, justification and learning which in the EU also program institutional copying and emulation mechanisms. We show that the EU has established an incomplete system of representative democracy steeped in a distinct representation-deliberation interface, which has emerged through a particular and distinct configuration of democratization mechanisms.
The purpose of this article is to explore the question of European identity. The EU consists of Member States whose national identities are well entrenched. The question of a European identity must therefore be seen in relation to entrenched national identities. Does a European identity have to supplant the national ones? Can it supplement or transform these? How much of a transformation is necessary? Will a European identity be a novel, post-national type of identity? The article explores the question of a European identity by drawing on the analytical categories associated with the politics of recognition and by applying these to different conceptions of the EU qua polity. Four different options are explored and the conclusion is that -although the picture is complex -the EU appears to be in the process of developing a post-national type of identity.
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