Markus Patberg

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.