Republican intergovernmentalism as a realistic utopia

ABSTRACT

Richard Bellamy’s A Republican Europe of States offers a major contribution to the debate on the future of Europe by exending important democratic concerns beyond state borders without conflating into an overly demanding cosmopolitan account. Key to Bellamy’s normative proposal are the two ideas of realistic utopia and ‘freedom as non-domination’. Inspired by Rawls’s political philosophy, the idea of realistic utopia helps to understand the proper relationships between facts and principles and ideal and non-ideal theory. Petitt’s idea of ‘freedom as-non domination’, in turn, provides the foundation for the ideal of democratic legitimacy presented in the book. This paper critically examines Bellamy’s republican intergovernmentalism in light of these two features. It ultimately seeks to show that these two ideas are in tension with one each other and seem to lead to two contrasting models of normative political theorizing.

KEYWORDS:

• Demoi-cracy
• democratic legitimacy
• freedom as non-domination
• realistic utopia
• methodological turn
• ideal vs non-ideal theory
• J. rawls

Acknowledgments

I am thankful to Richard Bellamy, Megan Foster, Simona Piattoni, David Reidy and an anonymous reviewer for insightful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In the ideal theory Rawls famously includes also decent peoples. I will take this case out of my discussion here, for the sake of clarity.

2. Remember that whereas in the case of a domestic society there are no options but cooperation among citizens understood as moral agents, in the international realm instead the option of non-cooperation is a real, albeit unattractive, possibility (Reidy, 2004, p. 303) and the case of Brexit within the EU shows it.

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Notes on contributors

Valentina Gentile

Valentina Gentile is Assistant Professor in Political Philosophy at LUISS University of Rome. She specializes in normative political philosophy, liberal theory and, especially, the work of John Rawls. Her research focuses on moral stability, pluralism and the principles of reciprocity, toleration, transitional justice, equality and social justice. Her work has also appeared in International Theory, Journal of Social Philosophy and Philosophia.