Suchergebnisse

Der politische Raum jenseits des Staates ist in den vergangenen Jahrzehnten zum Schauplatz folgenreicher Prozesse der Verfassungsbildung geworden. Markus Patberg argumentiert, dass der globale Konstitutionalismus mit Problemen der Usurpation einhergeht. Diese können überhaupt erst erkannt und einer Lösung zugeführt werden, wenn man die Kategorie der verfassunggebenden Gewalt für die suprastaatliche Ebene neu entwickelt. Im Zentrum seiner Studie steht die Frage, wie ein legitimer Modus der Autorisierung konstitutioneller Normsetzung aussehen könnte.

Abstract
In this article, I ask about the extent to which the Conference on the Future of Europe (CoFoE) has advanced democracy in the European Union. I critically engage with the claim that the CoFoE's success should not be measured by whether it enabled constituent power, or ultimately results in treaty reforms, but by the fact that, by introducing citizens' assemblies to EU politics, it has laid the foundation for participatory democracy in the European Union. Drawing on established theories of participatory democracy, I argue that this interpretation misses the point. To put forward an alternative view, I revisit James Bohman's concept of a democratic minimum. The best democratic defence of permanent EU citizens' assemblies is that they could provide citizens with the capacity to initiate deliberation about common concerns – and thus function as a nucleus for constituent power in the European Union. Nevertheless, the idea should be viewed with caution, as permanent citizens' assemblies could just as well become a democratic fig-leaf allowing EU institutions to reject calls for fundamental reforms. Much therefore depends on their institutional design.

AbstractSince Brexit, there has been increasing interest in democratic theory in the question of the conditions under which reversals of European integration can be considered legitimate. So far, however, the literature is very much focused on the specific case of the United Kingdom's withdrawal from the European Union. In this article, I seek to prepare the ground for a systematic theory that clarifies, at a general level, the scope and limits as well as the actors and procedures of democratically legitimate disintegration. To that end, I map the potential democratic costs and benefits of EU disintegration. In doing so, I distinguish five types of disintegration: retreat, revocation, exit, expulsion, and dissolution. All of these measures can produce conflicts between the democratic claims of citizens and peoples. Many of these cannot be resolved but must be dealt with politically. Overall, disintegration bears more potential costs for citizens than for peoples.

Few debates in political theory are challenged as much by the constant change of their empirical subject as those about democracy in the European Union (EU). With A Republican Europe of States, Richard Bellamy responds to the EU's post-Lisbon era, which has been characterized by the euro crisis, conflicts over migration, the rise of Euroscepticism and Brexit. Keeping an eye on these contextual conditions and the related legal and political transformations, he has developed a general theory of international democracy aimed at securing non-domination between peoples and between citizens and their representatives at the international level, and elaborated its implications for the EU. The result is a distinctive version of demoi-cracy, whose firm centring on the nation-state as the natural locus of democracy is likely to be controversially discussed. In this article, I raise some critical considerations regarding the design of demoi-cratic institutions, the adequate understanding of EU citizenship and the normative credentials of differentiated (dis-)integration.

Dagmar Comtesse, Oliver Flügel-Martinsen, Franziska Martinsen und Martin Nonhoff (Hrsg.): Radikale Demokratietheorie - Ein Handbuch. Berlin: Suhrkamp 2019. 978-3-518-29848-0

While the emerging debate about the disintegration of the European Union focuses on descriptive and explanatory questions, this article approaches the phenomenon from the perspective of democratic theory. Building on a concept of disintegration as a form of constitutional politics that includes various possibilities of dismantling supranational polities, I argue that disintegration gives rise to a democratic puzzle. While it must be possible, for democratic reasons, to partially or entirely reverse European integration, any such step threatens the European Union's democratic achievements. Disintegration seems to be caught between legitimate change and regression. To address this democratic puzzle, I examine to what extent European integration has produced democracy-related 'ratchet effects' that limit the scope for legitimate reversal. This analysis leads to three principles of legitimate disintegration that can be applied to any supranational polity and have important implications for the post-Brexit relations between the United Kingdom and the European Union.

Since the euro crisis, protest movements present the European Union as a neoliberal hegemony that undermines democracy and prevents progressive reforms. They call for acts of resistance and partial disintegration to force a renegotiation of the treaties. In this article, I ask whether these 'disruptive' political strategies can be defended as a democratic practice of constitutional politics. To that end, I turn to the notion of destituent power, according to which opposition to or withdrawal from public authority can function as a legitimate trigger for constitutional change. I systematise the emerging debate on destituent power and discuss the plausibility of competing approaches. I argue that destituent power is best understood as grounded in popular sovereignty. It denotes the right to dismantle constitutional orders without the intention to construct new ones. While this idea supports some of the acts of contestation proposed by European protest movements, it faces a lure towards the jurisgenerative dimension of constituent power. Ultimately, the potential of a purely negativistic logic of constitutional politics is limited.

Abstract:There is a growing sense that if the EU is to avoid disintegration, it needs a constitutional renewal. However, a reform negotiated between executives will hardly revitalise the European project. In light of this, commentators have suggested that the EU needs a democratic refounding on popular initiative. But that is easier said than done. Shaping the EU has been an elite enterprise for decades and it is hard to imagine how things could be otherwise. In this article, I map four public narratives of constituent power in the EU to sketch out potential alternatives. Political actors increasingly call into question the conventional role of the states as the 'masters of the treaties' and construct alternative stories as to who should be in charge of EU constitutional politics, how the respective subject came to find itself in that position, and how it should invoke its founding authority in the future. These public narratives represent a promising starting point for a normative theory that outlines a viable and justifiable path for transforming the EU in a bottom-up mode.