By John Fossum
The ecu Union is broadly held to be afflicted by a democratic deficit, and this increases a much wider query: can democracy in any respect be utilized to decision-making our bodies past the kingdom nation? this present day, the european is a hugely complicated entity present process profound alterations. This ebook asks how the kind of cooperation that the ecu relies on should be defined; what are the integrative forces within the ecu and the way can integration at a supra-national point happen? the most important thinkers represented during this quantity pressure that during order to appreciate integration past the state country, we'd like new explanatory different types linked to deliberation simply because a supranational entity because the european posesses a ways weaker and not more well-developed technique of coercion - bargaining assets - than do states. the main acceptable time period to indicate this can be the thought of 'deliberative supranationalism'. This pioneering paintings, headed through significant writers reminiscent of Habermas, Schlesinger and Bellamy, brings a brand new standpoint to this key factor in modern politics and political idea.
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Extra info for Democracy in the European Union: Integration Through Deliberation?
Example text
In more recent years a burgeoning literature that deals with value-based transnationalism, as conveyed through for instance issue networks and epistemic communities, has emerged (for a brief listing, see Keck and Sikkink 1998; Checkel 1997). Consider for instance Phillippe Schmitter’s definition of integration as ‘the process of transferring exclusive expectations of benefits from the nation-state to some larger entity. It encompasses the process by virtue of which national actors of all sorts (government officials, interest group spokesmen, politicians, as well as ordinary people) cease to identify themselves and their future welfare entirely with their own national governments and its policies’ (Schmitter, cited in Kirchner, 1980:98).
Constitutional democracy has, in fact, built in various types of safeguards that transform values and the perception of interests, so that citizens decide on ‘who they are, what their values are, and what those values require. What “they” want must be supported by reasons’ (Sunstein 1991:13). The deliberative process of arguing and counterarguing is a process ‘that shapes the identity and interests of citizens in ways that contribute to the formation of a public conception of the common good’ (Cohen 1991:19).
It is often claimed that the EU’s democratic deficit is due to the lack of European political parties, representative accountability and a properly functioning public sphere. However, it may be argued that the underlying evaluative scheme which this diagnosis rests on, is based either on liberal aggregative or civic-republican assumptions about democracy. These perspectives offer a pessimistic assessment of the EU project and one that is premised on an overly confined notion of legitimacy. The author tries to show that discourse theory represents a promising theoretical alternative to atomistliberal and civic-republican theories of democracy and the standards associated with these because the former conceives of the public sphere as a pluralistic institution for opinion formation and conceives of representative bodies, not only as bargaining ‘markets’, but also as deliberating ‘fora’, hence the notion of deliberative supranationalism.