The Third Democratic Transformation: From European to Planetary Politics

Abstract

This contribution to the symposium explores one aspect of the arrival of planetary politics under the broad label of the third democratic transformation, a transformation unfolding now at all levels of governance, from the local to the global through the regional, in spite of the anti‐democratic forces at play around the world. This article starts by exploring the new frontier of normative power Europe in a post‐colonial key, arguing that the European Union can serve as a laboratory for such a democratic transformation, around four interrogations related to claims of decentring, doubting, experimenting and decolonising. It then offers a descriptive‐normative typology of the core attributes of the third democratic transformation observable in numerous signs and practices both in Europe and around the world through a sixfold evolution, namely, trans‐temporal, transnational, trans‐modal, trans‐local, trans‐scalar and, across all these, translational. It concludes on the conditions of possibility for this transformation.