Professional Documents
Culture Documents
This publication is the outcome of a year-long project, run by the UCL European Institute in cooperation with the European
Commission Representation in London entitled Reconnect: Citizens, institutions and democracy after the Eurozone crisis.
The project aimed to discuss the implications the Eurozone crisis is likely to have for the democratic standards of the Union and
its Member States, specifically with regard to citizens perceptions of and participation in EU policy making. The project involved
a public roundtable discussion, a UCL-Yale PhD workshop and a final conference with academics, policy professionals and the
media. This booklet comprises versions of some of the presentations from the conference.
CONTENTS
WHY MAGIC BULLETS WILL NOT PLACATE EU CITIZENS AND WHY WE SHOULD NURTURE A
EUROPEAN DEMOICRACY INSTEAD
Kalypso Nicolaidis
13 THE DEMOCRATIC LEGITIMACY OF THE EU:
IS FEDERALISM THE SOLUTION OR THE PROBLEM?
Francis Cheneval
16 THE EURODIVIDEND
Philippe Van Parijs
18 FEDERALISM, PAN-EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT, AND AGAINST ARTICLE 50:
A COMMENT ON THE EUS DEMOCRATIC DEFICIT
Andrew Walton
20 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
For a fuller defense of this argument, see Richard Bellamy, `An Ever
Closer Union of Peoples: Republican Intergovernmentalism, Demoicracy and Representation in the EU, Journal of European Integration,
35: 5 (2013), pp. 499-516.
14 Henry Richardson also writes that civic integrity and civic magnanimity
are virtues that are practically necessary for [policy] discussion to
progress towards a mutual acceptance of conclusions about what
we ought to do and hence are necessary to motivate involvement in
public discussion; Henry S. Richardson, Democratic Autonomy: Public
Reasoning about the Ends of Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2002) 188.
10 John Dewey, The Public and its Problems in John Dewey, The Later
Works 1925-1953, edited by Jo Ann Boydston, volume 2 (Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press,1984 ; originally published 1927) 289.
Transnational solidarity.
Finally, lets look at the social aspects and our need for
European solidarity and transfers. The EU, or more precisely
Euroland, needs a new social contract. There have been
ample analyses of the economic flaws of the Euro-system,
which brought us into the social and populist mess we are
currently in, but I do not have the space to go into this here.
What is however very important to understand is that we
have also been trapped in biased national discourses about
10
11
Kalypso Nicolaidis
Bread
Fair enough. When all this new centralisation will have
helped Euro-trains run on time again, the EU is likely to
see approval recover. If European leaders manage to save
the Euro and restore the conditions for growth across the
EU, much will be forgiven and analysts will hail the return
of output legitimacy. But more immediate and superficial
means of appeasement of the masses are unlikely to be an
effective diversion from the pain of unemployment and
disenfranchisement.And even if and when better times
come, understandings and expectations will have changed
in a post-crisis EU. As the EUs global relative decline will
Games
A second category of remedies has to do with the offer of
better, more transparent and participatory political games
at the EU level to mirror its radical increase in economic
competences linked to Eurocrisis management. Audiences
are offered better advertised and bigger arenas, EU
institutions will rent bigger and better billboards to explain,
showcase or communicate Europe, while more European
politics will become more transparent, in particular through
the internet. It may be the case that revamped games will
deliver some shallow input legitimacy to the EU, but is the
EUs democratic ambition to compete with its memberstates dmocratie du spectacle? Could the EU be more
responsive to the crowds thumbs up or down? And beyond,
do we believe that such games, however entertaining (and it
would be a stretch to say that the EUs are), give citizens a
sense of control and ownership over political choices?
Gladiators
Ultimately however, we are told that politics requires fights
and faces. Indeed, leadership, and better still, leadership
contests, serve as the mother of all magic bullets in times
of crisis. And thus we have seen much of the attention to
addressing the EUs legitimacy crisis channelled towards
providing recognisable EU faces for EU citizens. Since
the EU Commission has acquired significant powers
to intervene in the budgetary powers of member states,
we are further told it needs to have its President elected
democratically, which means through the European
Parliament and accountable to it. Many assumptions feed
this reasoning. One first is that EU citizens care about the
president of the Commission. Another is that a European
body politic exists such that a majority of Europeans
12
References
Bellamy, Richard and Sandra Krger (2013). Representation Deficits and
Surpluses in EU Policy-making Richard Bellamy, Journal of European
Integration, Vol.35, Iss.5,2013
Chalmers, Damian (2013) Democratic Self-Government in Europe:
Domestic Solutions to the EU Legitimacy Crisis Policy Network Paper,
May.
Cheneval, Francis and Frank Schimmelfennig (2013), The Case for
Demoicracy in the European Union, JCMS: Journal of Common Market
Studies 51, no. 2 (2012): 334350.
Duchesne, Sophie, Elizabeth Frazer, Florence Haegel, Virginie Van
Ingelgom. (2013). Overlooking Europe:
Citizens reactions to European Integration Compared.
Palgrave McMillan.
Lindseth, Peter, (2010), Legitimacy and Power: Reconciling Europe and the
Nation State, Oxford University Press
Nicoladis, Kalypso (2004) We, the Peoples of Europe ..., Foreign Affairs,
83, no. 6, Nov.Dec. 97110;
Nicoladis, Kalypso (2013) European Demoicracy and Its Crisis, JCMS:
Journal of Common Market Studies 51, no. 2 (2013): 351369.
Scharpf, Fritz (2009) Legitimacy in the Multilevel European Polity.
European Political Science Review, Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 173204
.
Schrag Sternberg, Claudia (2013) The Struggle for EU legitimacy - Public
Contestation, 1950-2005, Palgrave MacMillan.
Van Middlelaar, Luuk (2012) Le Passage a LEurope: Histoire dun
commencement, Gallimard.
Anand Menon (2008) Europe, the State of the Union Atlantic Books
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14
15
References
Cheneval, Francis. 2007. Caminante, No Hay Camino, Se Hace Camino
Al Andar: EU Citizenship, Direct Democracy and Treaty Ratification.
European Law Journal 13 (5): 647663.
Cheneval, Francis, and Frank Schimmelfennig. 2013. The Case for
Demoicracy in the European Union. JCMS: Journal of Common Market
Studies 51 (2) (March): 334350. doi:10.1111/j.1468-5965.2012.02262.x.
Nicoladis, Kalypso. 2013. European Demoicracy and Its Crisis: European
Demoicracy and Its Crisis. JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies 51
(2) (March): 351369. doi:10.1111/jcms.12006.
16
THE EURODIVIDEND
Philippe Van Parijs
An earlier version of this article first appeared in the Social Europe Journal,
2 July 2013
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10 Indeed, maintaining the unilateral right to exit has been seen by some
discussants of the European Union as a vital part of its inter-national
structure. See, for example, K. Nicoladis, European Demoicracy and
its Crisis, Journal of Common Market Studies, 51:2 (2013), pp. 362363.
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CONTRIBUTORS
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