From Maastricht to Brexit

Democracy, Constitutionalism and Citizenship in the EU

Richard Bellamy and Dario Castiglione

Is the European Union still a viable project? The last few years have been difficult both economically and politically, while its integrative function and legitimacy have been seriously tested. For many social, economic and geo-political reasons, its expansionary moment has stopped abruptly. On the contrary, the Greek economic crisis and the Brexit referendum have raised the spectre of fragmentation and political disintegration.

The promise of the EU as a possible model for legitimate governance beyond the nation state lies somewhat in tatters. Even if the EU may indeed survive most of its current crises, is the project of a EU as a normative project beyond rescue? Ever since Maastricht, the democratic legitimacy of the EU has been a key concern of policy makers, citizens and academics alike. This issue is essentially a normative one, and over the same period our work in this area has been at the forefront in exploring what has come to be known (following an early working paper we wrote with this title in 2000) ‘the normative turn in EU studies’.

The debate on the democratic form and legitimacy of the EU is one that has gone on for some time and to which we, together with other scholars, have tried to contribute in the course of the last twenty years or so. Collecting articles written over the course of this period is not just meant as the testimony of an intellectual journey, but also a way of tracing such a journey in retrospect and mapping the important moments of the intellectual and scholarly debates that have contributed to shaping both our understanding and our expectations of the EU’s possible futures.

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers / ECPR Press

Pages: 532 • Trim: 6¼ x 9⅜

978-1-78660-992-2 • Hardback • June 2019 • $100.00 • (£65.00)

978-1-78660-994-6 • eBook • June 2019 • $38.99 • (£24.95)

Subjects: Political Science / World / European, Political Science / Political Economy, Political Science / Political Process / Campaigns & Elections

From Maastricht to Brexit

Democracy, Constitutionalism and Citizenship in the EU

Hardback

eBook

Summary

Is the European Union still a viable project? The last few years have been difficult both economically and politically, while its integrative function and legitimacy have been seriously tested. For many social, economic and geo-political reasons, its expansionary moment has stopped abruptly. On the contrary, the Greek economic crisis and the Brexit referendum have raised the spectre of fragmentation and political disintegration.

The promise of the EU as a possible model for legitimate governance beyond the nation state lies somewhat in tatters. Even if the EU may indeed survive most of its current crises, is the project of a EU as a normative project beyond rescue? Ever since Maastricht, the democratic legitimacy of the EU has been a key concern of policy makers, citizens and academics alike. This issue is essentially a normative one, and over the same period our work in this area has been at the forefront in exploring what has come to be known (following an early working paper we wrote with this title in 2000) ‘the normative turn in EU studies’.

The debate on the democratic form and legitimacy of the EU is one that has gone on for some time and to which we, together with other scholars, have tried to contribute in the course of the last twenty years or so. Collecting articles written over the course of this period is not just meant as the testimony of an intellectual journey, but also a way of tracing such a journey in retrospect and mapping the important moments of the intellectual and scholarly debates that have contributed to shaping both our understanding and our expectations of the EU’s possible futures.

Details

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers / ECPR Press

Pages: 532 • Trim: 6¼ x 9⅜

978-1-78660-992-2 • Hardback • June 2019 • $100.00 • (£65.00)

978-1-78660-994-6 • eBook • June 2019 • $38.99 • (£24.95)

Subjects: Political Science / World / European, Political Science / Political Economy, Political Science / Political Process / Campaigns & Elections

Author

Richard Bellamy is Director of the Max Weber Programme at the EUI and Professor of Political Science, University College London (UCL).

Dario Castiglione is Director of the Centre for Political Thought at the University of Exeter.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction: From Maastricht to Brexit

Richard Bellamy and Dario Castiglione

I.The Normative Turn in EU Studies: A Republican Europe?

1.The Normative Challenge of a European Polity: Cosmopolitanism and Communitarianism Compared, Criticised and Combined

Richard Bellamy and Dario Castiglione

2.Normative Theory and the European Union: Legitimising the Euro-polity and its Regime

Richard Bellamy and Dario Castiglione

3.Democracy, Sovereignty and the Constitution of the European Union: The Republican Alternative to Liberalism

Richard Bellamy and Dario Castiglione

II.Rethinking Sovereignty

4.Building the Union: The Nature of Sovereignty in Europe’s Political Architecture

Richard Bellamy and Dario Castiglione

5.Sovereignty, Post-Sovereignty and Pre-Sovereignty: Reconceptualising the State, Rights and Democracy in the EU

Richard Bellamy

III.Constituting the EU

6.Constitution Making as Normal Politics: Disagreement and Compromise in the Drafting of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and Constitution

Richard Bellamy and Justus Schönlau

7.Constitutional Politics in the European Union’

Dario Castiglione

8.Back to the future? The euro and the EU silent constitution building

Dario Castiglione

IV.Citizenship, Identity and Language

9.The Liberty of the Moderns: Civic and Market Freedom in the EU

Richard Bellamy

10.Political identity in a ‘community of strangers’

Dario Castiglione

11. Negotiating language regimes

Dario Castiglione

V.The Democratic Deficit

12.The Uses of Democracy: Reflections on the EU’s Democratic Deficit

Richard Bellamy and Dario Castiglione

13.Still in Deficit: Rights, Regulation and Democracy in the EU

Richard Bellamy

14.Democracy without Democracy?: Can the EU’s Democratic ‘Outputs’ be Separated from the Democratic ‘Inputs’ Provided by Competitive Parties and Majority Rule?

Richard Bellamy

15.Beyond a Constraining Dissensus: The Role of National Parliaments in Domesticating and Normalising the Politicization of European Integration

Richard Bellamy and Sandra Kröger

VI.Representing Europeans

16.Democracy by Delegation? Who Represents Whom and How in European Governance

Richard Bellamy and Dario Castiglione

17.Three Models of Democracy, Political Community and Representation in the EU

Richard Bellamy and Dario Castiglione

18.An Ever Closer Union of Peoples: Republican Intergovernmentalism, Demoi-cracy and Representation in the EU

Richard Bellamy

VII Conclusions: Confronting the Eurocrisis and Brexit

19.Political Legitimacy and European Monetary Union: Contracts, Constitutionalism and the Normative Logic of Two-Level Games

Richard Bellamy and Albert Weale

20.It’s the politics, stupid! The EU after Brexit, and its Demoi-cratic Disconnect

Richard Bellamy and Dario Castiglione

References

Cases cited in the book

Reviews

Richard Bellamy and Dario Castiglione have authored - together, alone and with others - many essays on European democracy which they now assemble in a rich compilation prefaced by a new essay spanning from Maastricht to Brexit. The challenges that interconnectedness poses to legitimate governance in Europe, at both national and EU level, are addressed from a republican view of politics which puts a premium on freedom as non-domination. Between the contraposed solutions offered by cosmopolitanism and communitarianism that propose, respectively, a leap forward into global governance and a retrenchment into national self-determination, Bellamy and Castiglione advance "cosmopolitan communitarianism" as a normative position that holds together a sense of responsibility vis-à-vis the citizens of other national communities and a sense of ownership of the decisions made on behalf of one's national community in a context of interdependency. It is in the balance between a new and more complex notion of sovereignty and multilevel inter-institutional checks that the idea of the republican mixed government which "removes arbitrary power from any single agent or agency" can be resurrected to yield the solution for legitimate governance in the contemporary EU. A highly readable and remarkably coherent set of essays that contribute sometimes in a conclusive manner to the many normative debates that have characterized European Union studies.
— Simona Piattoni, Professor of Political Science, University of Trento

This book has the potential to make people think afresh about the EU. Rather than trying to persuade the reader with familiar arguments of either Eurosceptics or Euroenthusiasts, the authors conceive of the EU as a paradigmatic case for “taking back control” in an interconnected world by a kind of international governance between democratic states and their peoples—demoicracy.
— Ulrich K. Preuss, Professor Emeritus of Law and Politics, Hertie School of Governance

Dario Castiglione and Richard Bellamy have managed to cover all important challenges of the current state of the European Union. Their tightly composed volume is a lucid and transparent exercise in what I would call constitutional sociology of the European Union. Legitimacy of both the "polity" and "regime" of the EU are the key reference problems. After the silent majority of compliant Europeans has been displaced by the noisy minority of populists, the gap between them and the ruling EU technocracy must be filled by a politics of building supranational democracy. The book makes us understand the magnitude of this challenge.
— Claus Offe, Professor Emeritus of Political Sociology at the Hertie School of Governance

The two authors are the Gold Standard when it comes to this topic.
— Glyn Morgan, Director of the Moynihan Center of European Studies, Syracuse University

From Maastricht to Brexit

Democracy, Constitutionalism and Citizenship in the EU

Richard Bellamy and Dario Castiglione

From Maastricht to Brexit

Democracy, Constitutionalism and Citizenship in the EU

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