From Practice to Principle and Back: Applying a New Realist Method to the European Union’s Democratic Deficit

Abstract

The prospect of a Brexit illustrates that the European Union’s legitimacy deficit can have far-reaching political consequences. In normative political theory, realists take a keen interest in questions of legitimacy. Building on Bernard Williams’ realist writings, I propose a two-step method of normative political theorization. Each step contains both a practice-sensitive phase and a practice-insensitive phase. First, the conceptualization of a norm should draw on conceptual resources available to agents within their historical circumstances. Second, the prescriptions that follow from this norm should take into account whether political order can be maintained. Applying this method to the European Union’s democratic deficit yields, first, based on public opinion research, the norm of European deep diversity and, second, a set of prescriptions for a demoicratic confederacy. Thereby, I demonstrate that this realist method is able to yield political theories distinct from other philosophical approaches. Moreover, I contribute a realist theory to the normative literature in European Union studies.

Sovereignty Conflicts in the European Union

“…And the structuring of a genuine, effectively functioning multi-level parliamentary system associating national parliaments and the EP has remained elusive until today. To democratize, and first and foremost the Euro-area where, some scholars have called for the direct involvement of national MPs either through a 'Parliamentary Legislative Initiative' (Kröger and Bellamy 2016) or the creation of a new powerful parliamentary assembly (Beetz 2018, Hennette et al 2017.…”

Safeguarding, shifting, splitting or sharing? Conflicting conceptions of popular sovereignty in the EU-polity

“…A senate of national parliamentarians with a double mandate should become the democratic heart of EU decision-making (e.g. Beetz 2018;Dawson and de Witte 2016;Piketty and Vauchez 2018). This assembly should replace European representation, because national peoples are the sole democratic authority of the Europe's transnational polity.…”

Unpacking old and new conflicts of sovereignty in the European polity

“…And the structuring of a genuine, effectively functioning multi-level parliamentary system associating national parliaments and the EP has remained elusive until today. To democratize, and first and foremost the Euro-area where, some scholars have called for the direct involvement of national MPs either through a 'Parliamentary Legislative Initiative' (Kröger and Bellamy 2016) or the creation of a new powerful parliamentary assembly (Beetz 2018;Hennette et al 2016).…”