Introduction: European constitutionalism beyond the state

Weiler, Joseph H. H.; Wind, Marlene

doi:10.1017/cbo9780511495106.001

Cited by 13 publications

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“…The popularity of the constitutional idea and the convention method was, of course, rooted in many factors (Weiler and Wind 2003), of which two have proven particularly salient: First, the reform of EU institutions. The call was for more efficient, more legitimate and more transparent institutions.…”

Section: The Constitutional Debatesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…"an autonomous voluntary act, endlessly renewed on each occasion, of subordination, in the discrete areas governed by Europe to a norm which is the aggregate expression of other wills, other political identities, other political communities" (Weiler 2001:53). This is Europe's Sonderweg (Weiler 2003), the notion that one are bound by "precepts articulated, not by 'my people', but by a community composed of distinct political communities: a people, if you wish, of 'others'" (Weiler 2003:20).…”

Section: Audit Democracy and Constitutional Tolerancementioning

confidence: 99%

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Democratic legitimacy: Is there a legitimacy crisis in contemporary politics?

Kriesi¹

2013

PVS

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The Uses of Legitimacy. Models of EU Legitimacy Assessed in Light of the European Parliament's debates on BSE and the Constitutional Treaty. This thesis examines the uses of legitimacy in debates on European integration. It treats the issue at a normative and empirical level. The normative part is an analysis of four theoretical contributions to the discourse on EU democracy: the standard version of the democratic deficit, the regulatory state, multi-level governance and integration through deliberation. The empirical part explores the political use of the theories' legitimacy claims in two cases: the European Parliament's inquiry into BSE and its debates relating to the Convention on the Future of Europe. The analysis reveals certain problems in theoretical and political discourse. Whereas the critique of the standard version has some merit, the positions formulating non-majoritarian notions of EU democracy are equally, if not more, problematic. The regulatory state, multilevel governance and integration through deliberation dress up old ideas-technocracy, interest group pluralism and constitutionalism respectively-and attempt to reinvest them with democratic legitimacy. The cases further illustrate the problem. For one thing, they indicate that the assumptions of the positions do not hold. What is more, non-majoritarian approaches to EU democracy, while allowing political actors to use the language of democracy, do not provide them with concrete proposals as to how existing structures might be democratised. The result is a discrepancy between the language of democracy, promising popular control and political equality, and the proposals for institutional and constitutional reforms, which tend to either discourage mass engagement or obscure how and in what capacity citizens are to participate. There is a tendency, I conclude, to confuse democracy with legitimacy, and legitimacy with consensus. As a result, the attempts at rearticulating EU democracy succeed neither in establishing a new basis for EU democracy, nor in identifying different or new forms of legitimacy. From this, three consequences derive: First, the democratic deficit should be regarded as structurally determined. Second, the persistence of the democratic deficit requires a thorough debate on the scope of EU competences. Finally, more attention should be devoted to the role of national and regional actors in European integration.

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Section: The Constitutional Debatesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Audit Democracy and Constitutional Tolerancementioning

confidence: 99%

Democratic legitimacy: Is there a legitimacy crisis in contemporary politics?

Kriesi¹

2013

PVS

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“…The concept of normative power emerged in the field of EU studies and is used to explore the EU's ability to shape international politics. From this perspective, the EU's constitutive principles and its commitment to human rights mean that certain values are internalized within collective European society and policy (Laidi, ; Manners, ; Sjursen, ; Weiler and Wind, ). In particular, peace, freedom, democracy, the rule of law and respect for human rights are considered to be the indivisible foundation to European identity, and they in turn provide a normative worldview that has an external impact through European external policy and through various forms of diffusion (Manners, ; Tocci, ).…”

Section: The Eu's Engagement With the R2p Normmentioning

confidence: 99%

Normative Power Europe? The EU's Embrace of the Responsibility to Protect in a Transitional International Order

Newman

Stefan

2019

J of Common Market Studies

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This article assesses the EU's engagement with the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) norm and considers the scope for its integration into the EU's activities and global strategy. We examine how the EU's engagement with R2P tests its normative leadership in the context of internal and external political challenges to its authority. We expand on previous studies of the EU's failure to live by example over R2P by adding a missing analytical dimension – trends at the global level – and by suggesting an alternative explanation for the apparent ambivalence towards R2P in some parts of the EU. The EU has engaged with R2P – albeit labelling it differently at times – more than many observers recognize and despite bureaucratic resistance and diverging national approaches. Rather, the fundamental constraint on the EU's role in promoting R2P relates to a transitional international order in which the EU's normative traction is in decline and European foreign policy elites are increasingly pragmatic and cautious.

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“…European constitutionalism “is a self‐referential concept—not a reflection of something that contains or embodies something else (like values) but the reflection of the very thing itself” (Weiler and Wind 2003, 3). Its semantics does not cover the contingency of the collective will under the veil of a fictional moral unity.…”

Section: Concluding Remarks: Sovereignty As Semantic Management Ofmentioning

confidence: 99%

Multiple Sovereignty: On Europe's Self-Constitutionalization and Legal Self-Reference

Priban¹

2010

Ratio Juris

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This article focuses on theoretical reflections on sovereignty and constitutionalism in the context of the globalization and Europeanisation of the nation states, their politics, and legal systems. Starting from a critical assessment of the Kelsen-Schmitt polemic, the author claims that sovereignty needs to be analysed by the sociological method in order to disclose its current structural differentiation. The constitution of society may be imagined as the multitude of self-constituted and functionally differentiated social subsystems. The constitutional pluralism argument subsequently reconceptualizes sovereignty as socially differentiated and divided between specific subsystems. The EU's differentiated constitutional domain and the paradox of divided sovereignty are used as examples of profound structural and semantic changes in contemporary national and transnational societies. While the sovereign nation-state institutions have become marginalized in political structures of European societies, the self-constitutionalization of the functionally differentiated EU legal system proceeds by internalizing the concept of divided sovereignty and using it semantically as its mode of self-reference.Although the notion of a "sovereign state" may obfuscate rather than clarify the current state of national and international law and politics, sovereignty remains the starting point of many legal, political and social theoretical arguments. It is considered a relational concept with both legal and political dimensions and often described as paradoxical: It is constitutive of politics but escapes the regulatory logic of political institutions and belongs to the domain of "real life" with all its excesses; in modern constitutional rule of law it is both defining and defined by positive law and thus both outside and inside the juridical domain; furthermore, it signifies both the power that enacts laws (the political sovereignty of pouvoir constituent) and the law that restrains and regulates the constituent power of the people (the legal sovereignty of pouvoir constitué) (see, for instance, Loughlin 2003; Loughlin and Walker 2007).Sovereignty, together with democracy and constitution, forms the conceptual trinity of legal, social, and political theory which creates the many different semantic linkages and complex reflections of modern political societies. It is one of the constitutive metaphors of modernity and its persuasive force still profoundly affects theoretical discussions of the last three decades, reflecting the social transformation of modernity into postmodernity with its recent conceptualizations of "post-sovereignty" (Mac-

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Introduction: European constitutionalism beyond the state

Cited by 13 publications

References 0 publications

Democratic legitimacy: Is there a legitimacy crisis in contemporary politics?

Democratic legitimacy: Is there a legitimacy crisis in contemporary politics?

Normative Power Europe? The EU's Embrace of the Responsibility to Protect in a Transitional International Order

Multiple Sovereignty: On Europe's Self-Constitutionalization and Legal Self-Reference

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