Conceptually Mapping the European Union: A Demoi-cratic Analysis

Abstract

This article identifies demoi-cracy as the most robust category for understanding the European Union, and three tasks are undertaken to contribute towards this conceptualisation. First, it is explained how demoi-cracy differs from other popular categories that have been used to describe the EU and why it stands out as the most accurate. Second, contrary to the view that places demoi-cracy in contrast to political systems existing with a singular demos, it is argued that this concept is best understood as being capable of capturing cases where a weaker demos exists alongside strong sovereign demoi. Finally, the idea of demoi-cracy is broken into two further concepts (deep diversity and dual compound regime) and elaborated upon at length with a view to further specifying the nature of the EU.

Key words:

• Demoi-cracy
• demos
• federalism
• political system
• deep diversity
• compound
• democracy

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Rainer Bauböck, Hanspeter Kriesi, Alan Patten, Philippe Schmitter and Helder De Schutter for their critical comments on previous drafts of this paper. I am also indebted to Jan Werner-Müller and Richard Bellamy for illuminating discussions on some specific themes addressed in this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I am not saying that it is possible to separate descriptive from normative analysis totally or once and for all, but for analytic purposes, we may decide to highlight one dimension of a concept over another so that we may later come to see the whole with greater sophistication.

2. This is not to say that the aforementioned authors all share the same understanding of demoi-cracy. The sharpest contrast is between Bellamy’s republican intergovernmentalism, where the statespeoples relationship to one another in securing the best deal for their citizens in a democratic fashion is emphasised, and Cheneval and Schimmelfennig’s explicit acknowledgement of citizens as playing a role in defining a demoi-cracy that is not limited to membership in a nation–state.

3. The terms constituting-units or normative subjects used in this article should not be understood as equivalent to the notion of ‘constituent power’ which refers to that which holds the locus of sovereignty in a political system. As we see from the statespeoples sovereignty principle below, it is the statespeoples and not citizens that hold this power in the EU. However, as shall become clear, the fact that citizens are in a direct legislative relationship with supranational institutions warrants their recognition as a normative subject whose rights must be taken into account in a way that is equal to member states.

4. Some of these principles are awkwardly titled in their original expression (Cheneval and Schimmelfennig 2013) and so I take the liberty of attaching more accessible labels where appropriate.

5. One reviewer of this article wondered whether or not I am myself guilty of conceptually stretching the meaning of demos here. I do not believe so. There is a difference between a fallacious strategy that makes a concept thinner by removing essential elements so that it stretches further, and a more valid strategy of identifying its minimal or non-normative content (see fn. 1). My effort to make the concept of demos more robust, by not understanding it in terms that are too static or too fluid, is a deliberate effort to avoid conceptual stretch.