ABSTRACT
Richard Bellamy’s new book A Republican Europe of States represents one of the strongest recent defenses of the so-called demoicratic approach to the European Union. This paper situates Bellamy’s argument in the broader normative architecture of European Studies. It then raises some skeptical objections about the viability of a European demoicracy in a G2 world – a world where the United States and China are the dominant powers. Lurking behind these skeptical objections is the worry that the EU in its current form lacks the power to protect its own political and economic interests, and Bellamy’s demoicratic reforms would simply make this situation worse.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for some helpful comments and criticisms. This paper was initially delivered in the EUI in February 2019. I would like to thank for their comments at that venue Rainer Bauböck, Sandra Kröger, Catherine Liu, Andrea Sangiovanni, and Juri Viehoff.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
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Notes on contributors
Glyn Morgan
Glyn Morgan is co-Director of the Moynihan Center for European Studies, The Maxwell School, Syracuse University