Markus Patberg

Much of political theory today is informed, explicitly or implicitly, by the model of the democratic underlabourer. This model combines a claim to know-how in the normative problems of politics with a commitment to political modesty. Democratic underlabourers seek to empower the public, not impose their own ‘wisdom’ on them. This self-understanding is difficult to maintain at the international level, given the lack of a democratic framework, inequalities among states, and the various forms of contestation the liberal international order is facing. At the same time, the field of international political theory (IPT) is increasingly turning to questions with immediate practical implications and seeks to provide normative guidance for international politics. This special issue examines to what extent the model of the democratic underlabourer can and should be reformulated to provide IPT with a plausible and coherent methodological self-understanding.

The international order is increasingly characterised by withdrawals from international treaties. Member states renounce multilateral agreements and declare exit from international institutions. These withdrawals are often seen as a threat to normative achievements. And indeed, exit can create significant costs – for example, deprive individuals of certain rights, or do away with legitimate decision procedures. In this article, I address the methodological question of how political theory can determine whether and to what extent exit amounts to institutional regression. Focusing on the example of the European Union, I argue that the key issue is how to deal with the fact of essentially contested progress. Using elements of political realism to modify Habermas’s method of rational reconstruction, I explain how political theorists who conceive of themselves as democratic underlabourers can draw on the political views of citizens in charting a path to legitimate forms of exit.

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.

European Journal of Political Theory, Volume 21, Issue 1, Page 178-186, January 2022. 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. 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 integration.

In The Crisis of the European Union Jürgen Habermas claims that the constituent power in the EU is shared between the community of EU citizens and the political communities of the member states. By his own account, Habermas arrives at this concept of a dual constituent subject through a rational reconstruction of the genesis of the European constitution. This explanation, however, is not particularly illuminating since it is controversial what the term ‘rational reconstruction’ stands for. This article critically discusses the current state of research on rational reconstruction, develops a new reading of Habermas’ method and invokes this account for an explanation and evaluation of the notion of a European pouvoir constituant mixte

In his guest contribution to the PVS 4/2011 Michael Zürn analyses the development of empirical legitimacy in the western democracies, in authoritarian states and in the context of the proliferation of political authority and law beyond the state. He claims that democracy is losing ground as justificatory principle of legitimate authority. His argument is based on a conception of legitimacy which can be elucidated by reference to a “judgment model” for the empirical study of legitimacy. This model is differentiated here from a model which conceptualizes the empirical study of legitimacy as measurement. It is argued that Zürn’s empirical analysis does not meet the requirements of his own, complex understanding of empirical legitimacy and that therefore his main thesis – that the significance of democracy as a source of political legitimacy is declining – needs to be questioned.