Challenging Habermas’ response to the European Union democratic deficit

Philosophy & Social Criticism

Volumn 33, Issue 6, 2007, Pages 736-755

  Bowman, Jonathan ^a  

^a SAINT LOUIS UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

democratic deficit; European Union; freedom; Iris Young; James Bohman; Jurgen Habermas; non domination; Open Method of Coordination; republicanism; sovereignty

Indexed keywords

EID: 51249150588     PISSN: 01914537     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0191453707080592     Document Type: Article

References (41)

1. Jürgen Habermas, ‘Kant's Perpetual Peace’, in The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory, ed. Ciarin Cronin and Pablo de Greiff (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), pp. 165–202. See in particular footnote 62, p. 286, which reads: ‘The implications of the rights to political participation for human rights are such that everyone has at any rate the right to belong to one political community as a citizen’ (original emphases).
2. Jürgen Habermas, ‘Does Europe Need a Constitution? Response to Dieter Grimm’, in The Inclusion of the Other, pp. 155–61.
3. Jürgen Habermas, ‘The Postnational Constellation and the Future of Democracy’, in Max Pensky, The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays, trans. M. Pensky (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), pp. 58–112, 77.
4. Jürgen Habermas, ‘The European Nation-State and the Pressures of Globalization’, New Left Review 235 (1999): 46–54.
5. Habermas, ‘Postnational Constellation’, pp. 55–6.
6. Jürgen Habermas, ‘Why Europe Needs a Constitution’, New Left Review 11 (2001): 5–26.
7. John G. Ruggie, Constructing the World Polity (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 195.
8. Iris Young, Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 239, 222, 258, 259.
9. This view of rights is close to Habermas' own position: ‘the standards of human rights stem less from the particular cultural background of Western civilization than from the attempt to answer specific challenges posed by a social modernity that has in the meantime covered the globe’ (121). Habermas, ‘Remarks on Legitimation through Human Rights’, in Postnational Constellation, pp. 113–29.
10. Young, Inclusion and Democracy, p. 265.
11. Jürgen Habermas, ‘Citizenship and National Identity’, first published as a monograph, ‘Staatsbürgerschaft und nationale Identität. Überlegungen zur europäischen Zukunft’ (St Gallen: Erker-Verlag 1991), p. 514.
12. Reprinted in Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, trans. W. Rehg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), pp. 491–515.
13. Jürgen Habermas, ‘Struggles for Recognition in the Democratic State’, in The Inclusion of the Other, p. 231 (pp. 203–36).
14. Jo Shaw, ‘The Interpretation of European Union Citizenship’, p. 317.
15. The Modern Law Review 61 (1998): 293–317.
16. Young, Inclusion and Democracy, p. 219, 260.
17. Will Kymlicka, ‘The Evolving Basis of European Norms of Minority Rights: Rights to Culture, Participation, and Autonomy’, in J. McGarry and M. Keating (eds) European Integration and the Nationalities Question (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 35–63.
18. Jonathan Bowman, ‘The European Union Democratic Deficit: Federalists, Skeptics, and Revisionists’, European Journal of Political Theory 5(2) (2006): 191–212.
19. For the first discussion of the EU as a multiperspectival polity, see John G. Ruggie, Constructing the World Polity: Essays on International Institutionalization (London: Routledge, 1998).
20. Joseph Weiler, ‘European Democracy and Its Critics: Polity and System’, in The Constitution of Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 264–85, 271. While Weiler does not use the term multiperspectival, he refuses to follow federalists or Euro-skeptics in their ‘unitarian’ and ‘monolithic’ approaches to settling upon a theoretical framework for assessing the democratic qualities of the EU. Due to the three-pillar structure of the EU, Weiler opts instead to speak in terms of three interspersed ‘modes of governance’: international, supranational and infranational.
21. See, for example, Kostas A. Lavdas, ‘Republican Europe and Multicultural Citizenship’, Politics 21(1) (2001): 1–10.
22. John Schwarzmantel, Citizenship and Identity: Towards a New Republic (London: Routledge, 2003).
23. For a multicultural approach to republicanism with France as the model, see Jeremy Jennings, ‘Citizenship, Republicanism and Multiculturalism in Contemporary France’, British Journal of Political Science 30 (2000): 575–98.
24. James Bohman, ‘Decentering Democracy: Inclusion and Transformation in Complex Societies’, in The Good Society 13(2) (2004): 49–55.
25. James Bohman, Democracy Across Borders: From Demos to Demoi (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007).
26. Bohman, ‘Decentering Democracy’, p. 51.
27. Rika Kastoryano, ‘Transnational Networks and Political Participation: The Place of Immigrants in the European Union’, in Mabel Berezin and Martin Schain (eds) Europe Without Borders: Remapping Territory, Citizenship, and Identity in a Transnational Age (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), pp. 76–7 (64–85), 66, 69–70.
28. Nick Bernard, ‘A “New Governance” Approach to Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights in the EU’, in T. K. Hervey and J. Kenner (eds) Economic and Social Rights under the Fundamental Charter of Social Rights of the European Union (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2003), pp. 247–68.
29. Olivier de Schutter, ‘The Implementation of Fundamental Rights through the Open Method of Coordination’, in Olivier de Schutter and Simon Deakin (eds) Social Rights and Market Forces: Is the Open Method of Coordination of Employment and Social Policies the Future of Social Europe? (Brussels: Bruylant, forthcoming).
30. See Alexander Caviedes, ‘The Open Method of Coordination in Immigration Policy: A Tool for Prying Open Fortress Europe?’, Journal of Public Policy 11(2) (2004): 289–310.
31. For a good discussion of minority rights and the OMC, see Guido Schwellnus ‘Much Ado about Nothing?’ Minority Protection and the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights', in Constitutionalism Web-Papers: ConWEB No. 5/2001, available at: http://les1.amn.ac.uk/conweb/
32. Joseph Weiler, points to the case of Gayusuz v. Austria that went to the European Court of Human Rights and led to the extension of social security benefits to third-country nationals (p. 719). ‘An “Ever Closer Union” in Need of a Human Rights Policy’, European Journal of International Law 9 (1998): 658–723.
33. Jeremy Jennings, ‘Citizenship, Republicanism and Multiculturalism in Contemporary France’, British Journal of Political Science 30 (2000): 575–98.
34. Philip Pettit, Republicanism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 180.
35. Jennings, ‘Citizenship, Republicanism and Multiculturalism’, pp. 593–4.
36. Rika Kastoryano, ‘Citizenship: Beyond Blood and Soil’, in Mohsen-Finan Leveau and Wihtol de Wenden (eds) New European Identity and Citizenship (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2002), pp. 101–16.
37. Bruno de Witte, ‘Politics versus Law in the EU's Approach to Minorities’, in Jan Zielonka (ed.) Europe Unbound: Enlarging and Reshaping the Boundaries of the European Union (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 145 (pp. 137–60).
38. For such approaches to the democratic deficit, see Andreas Follesdal, ‘Subsidiarity and Democratic Deliberation’, in Erik Eriksen and John Fossum (eds) Democracy in the European Union — Integration through Deliberation? (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 85–110.
39. See also Andreas Follesdal, ‘Survey Article: Subsidiarity’, Journal of Political Philosophy 6(2) (1998a): 190–219.
40. Neil MacCormick, ‘Democracy, Subsidiarity, and Citizenship in the “European Commonwealth”’, Law and Philosophy 16 (1997): 331–56.
41. Bruno de Witte, in ‘Politics versus Law in the EU's Approach to Minorities’ emphasizes that this was precisely the justification of the judgment given by the European Court which found that ‘It is of the essence of democracy to allow diverse political programs to be proposed and debated, provided that they do not harm democracy itself’ (p. 145).