A European Republic of Sovereign States: Sovereignty, republicanism and the European Union

Abstract

This article defends state sovereignty as necessary for a form of popular sovereignty capable of realising the republican value of non-domination and argues it remains achievable and normatively warranted in an interconnected world. Many scholars, including certain republicans, contend that the external sovereignty of states can no longer be maintained or justified in such circumstances. Consequently, we must abandon the sovereignty of states and reconceive popular sovereignty on a different basis. Some argue sovereignty must be displaced upwards to a more global state, while others advocate it be vertically and horizontally dispersed to units below, across and above the state. Each group offers a related vision of the European Union to illustrate their proposals. Both these arguments are criticised as more likely to produce than reduce domination because neither can sustain a form of popular sovereignty capable of instantiating relations of non-domination. This article proposes the alternative of a republican association of sovereign states that allows sovereign states and their peoples to mutually regulate their external sovereignty in non-dominating ways. This alternative proposal provides a more plausible and defensible means for sustaining the requisite kind of popular sovereignty in contemporary conditions and a more appropriate vision of the European Union.The issue of state sovereignty lies at the heart of many debates about the democratic legitimacy of European integration. On the one hand, critics of the European Union (EU) frequently complain it erodes state sovereignty and thereby weakens the capacity of domestic electorates to control and influence how they are governed

Demoicracy, Transnational Partisanship and the EU

“…The second important commonality in the work of demoicrats is a tendency to justify this view of democratic legitimacy by appealing to freedom as non‐domination , a notion that lies at the heart of contemporary republicanism (Bellamy, ; Cheneval, , ch. 3; Nicolaïdis, , pp.…”

“…Demoicrats typically assume that in order to ensure the non‐domination of individuals, the states whose laws they are subject to must be democratic in the sense that those who regard themselves as a demos must make their own laws, exercising sovereign democratic authority. However, to be truly effective against domination, a state must itself not be dominated by other states or transnational forces that constrain domestic popular sovereignty (Bellamy, ; Laborde and Ronzoni, ; Nicolaïdis, , pp. 358–359).…”

“…A demoicracy is a larger polity of multiple demoi, in which each demos is more or less sovereign but has agreed to ‘regulatory principles of interaction setting the bounds of acceptable political behaviour’ within the Union's ‘shared norms and purposes’ (Nicolaïdis, , p. 362). Now, the degree of sovereignty different scholars want to grant the individual peoples that compose the demoicratic polity varies quite a bit: while Bellamy declares as the ideal a ‘European Republic of Sovereign States’ (Bellamy, ) whose key institutions of collective rule‐making in Europe should be domestic parliaments, Cheneval and Nicolaïdis argue for what they sometimes call a ‘third way’ between this perspective and supranational democracy (Cheneval, ; Cheneval and Schimmelfennig, ; Nicolaïdis, ). This ‘third way’ in some respects looks much like more traditional forms of intergovernmentalism (Ronzoni, ), but it puts a premium on ‘supranationality (…) understood as a deep commitment mechanism, an instrumental rather than ontological fact’, and assumes that the ‘Union‐as‐demoicracy should remain an open‐ended process of transformation which seeks to accommodate the tensions inherent in the pursuit of radical mutual opening between separate peoples’ (Nicolaïdis, , pp.…”

“…In recent normative scholarship on the EU the no‐demos thesis has been most forcefully defended by scholars committed to the notion of demoicracy , understood as ‘a Union of peoples who govern together, but not as one’ (Nicolaïdis, , p. 351). Like many advocates of supranational democracy in the EU, demoicrats subscribe to republican ideals and principles – but they insist that these ideals and principles point not towards a democratic European federal state but to a polity of multiple demoi, in which each demos is granted either a great degree of, or full, sovereignty (Bellamy, ; Bellamy and Weale, ; Bellamy, ; Cheneval, ; Cheneval and Schimmelfennig, ; Nicolaïdis, ). This position is predicated on the idea that a ‘legitimate and well‐functioning democracy’ presupposes a ‘consolidated demos , based on a resilient collective identity, a common public sphere and a developed political infrastructure’ (Cheneval and Schimmelfennig, , pp.…”

We the people(s) of Europe: Polity‐making and democracy in the EU

“…The attraction of this view is twofold. 21 Yet, even among these there are different views on how EU decision-making is best structured; some argue in favour of a moralized mode of intergovernmentalism, 22 while others propose a model of a demoicratic confederacy. 17 On the other hand, in terms not dissimilar from Weiler's arguments, it is suggested that the idea of a demoicracy is normatively superior as it diffuses political allegiances 18 and thus abandons the exclusionary tendencies of a singular demos.…”