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ABSTRACT
Political theory develops its normative positions on EU legitimacy with a view to what seems possible and acceptable under given political, social, and cultural conditions. Thus, the Brexit vote should give it a pause. In this article, I discuss if and to what extent we can hold on to the claim that the EU is based on a pouvoir constituant mixte. In particular, I examine three problems that the UK’s decision to leave the EU gives rise to. First, I address the analytical challenge of whether ‘split’ popular sovereignty is refuted as a rational reconstruction of the EU. Second, I turn to the normative-theoretical challenge of whether it is a category mistake to refer to (dual) constituent power in the context of the EU. Third, I deal with the political challenge of whether pouvoir constituant mixte is prone to confuse citizens and to scare them off with excessive ‘EUphoria’.
Acknowledgments
Research for this article was supported by the DFG project ‘Reclaiming Constituent Power?’. An earlier version was presented at the ECPR General Conference 2017 in Oslo. I would like to thank Peter Niesen and Antoinette Scherz as well as two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. The pouvoir constituant mixte represents a shift in Habermas’s position on the EU. While in earlier writings he showed sympathy for ‘a Federal States of Europe’ (Citation2001a, 90), he now emphasises the significance of the member states as ‘guarantors of law and freedom’ that the citizens rightly want to see preserved (Citation2012, 41).
2. In response to the Brexit vote, it has even been suggested that an exit from the EU is undemocratic under any circumstances because ‘people whose status as free and equal is mutually dependent ought to be included and remain in common democratic decision-making’ (Olsen and Rostbøll Citation2017, 445). In other words, once countries have established a common structure of self-government that allows them to regulate their interdependencies, they cannot leave without producing a loss of democracy.
3. Due to the UK’s colonial legacy, the boundaries of its demos are less easy to delineate than in the case of other states. Some non-citizens were allowed to vote, for example Commonwealth citizens in Malta and Cyprus – which are both EU countries. At the same time, long-term non-resident UK citizens were excluded according to the 15-year external voting restriction that also applies in UK parliamentary elections.
4. Think, for example, of ‘stories of peoplehood’ that create ‘imagined communities’ (Smith Citation2003; Anderson [Citation1983] 2006).
5. The question of a sustainable public narrative for EU democracy needs to be distinguished from the idea of a public narrative of the EU as a guarantor of sustainable living conditions – something that has been proposed as a response to the Brexit vote (Nicolaïdis Citation2018).
6. This is one of the reasons why the Brexit vote represents an analytical challenge for Habermas’s rational reconstruction of the EU. See the discussion of this point in Section 2.
7. ‘Do You Want Personal EU Citizenship? Send a Message to the European Parliament.’ Accessed 20 July 2017. https://www.change.org/p/do-you-want-personal-eu-citizenship-send-a-message-to-the-european-parliament. A similar proposal has been made in political theory. Granting UK citizens unmediated EU citizenship could be one step in a ‘long-term project of re-integrating Britain’ into the EU (Morgan Citation2016, 22).