Europe, laboratory for a-democracy?

In: Historical social research: HSR-Retrospective (HSR-Retro) = Historische Sozialforschung, Band 40, Heft 1, S. 185-199

Abstract

"A-democracy is for a given society a state in which, like the apples sold in supermarkets, democracy has now only the appearance of democracy, without the taste (no real practice and effectivity) that should go along with it. This contribution claims that, for the leaders of the neoliberal global market and finance, the searched political solution for its crisis is how to change everything without changing anything. The construction of Europe appears a de facto laboratory for experiments aimed at this objective. For the European Union is using in different fields forms of democracy whose specificity is to imply participants (peoples, actors, organizations, national political elites) in a game in which they control neither the rules, nor the data, the agendas, or the outcomes. The contribution reviews a series of these forms; which describe passages to a-democracy in the current crisis." (author's abstract)