A New Kind of Europe?: Democratic Integration in the European Union

Abstract

The most urgent problem facing the European Union is to develop the best approach to conflicts over integration in the fields of culture, economics and foreign policy. The essay argues that a particular form of democratic integration is better than the two predominant approaches. This approach draws on the actual practices of the democratic negotiation of integration that citizens engage in on a daily basis but which tend to be overlooked and overridden in the dominant approaches.

Key Words:

• European Union integration
• culture
• economics
• foreign policy
• democracy
• law

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Oliver Schmidtke, President of the European Community Studies Association Canada, for inviting me to give this lecture to the 2006 Biennial Conference, What Kind of Europe? Multiculturalism, Migration, Political Community and Lessons from Canada, Victoria, BC (19–20 May, 2006) (http://www.ecsac2006.com). I would also like to thank the audience for the lively discussion, and Richard Bellamy, Quentin Skinner and Antje Wiener for their helpful comments.

Notes

1. The general orientation of turning critically to the everyday in order to begin anew, against the tendency to project an abstract form of representation over everyday activities, often in the form of ineluctable processes, procedures and rules of modernization, is of course a orientation of a wide range of scholars, such as Hannah Arendt, Talal Asad, Veit Bader, Pierre Bourdieu, Stanley Cavell, Michel Foucault, Bruno Latour and Ludwig Wittgenstein (whom I paraphrase in this paragraph). For recent work in this tradition see Kompridis 2006a.

2. The distinction between low intensity democracy and a more open‐ended and participatory democracy emerged in the early 1990s in area studies of the non‐European world. In the early years of this century it began to be applied to the study of the restricted and elite character of representative democracies in Europe and North America and to the narrow definition of democracy in policies of global democratization in international law. See, respectively, Gills et al. 1993; Sousa Santos 2003: 104–115; Marks 2000.

3. See Habermas & Derrida 2006 for a statement of this alternative approach, first published 31 May 2003. Although primarily concerned with European foreign policy, it recommends building the key features of social democracy, the welfare state and a European‐wide official public sphere into the European Union as a basis for a counter foreign policy to the United States. The manifesto is closely associated with the project of Joschka Fischer, the German Foreign Secretary, in May 2000 to renew the core countries of Europe. For the divisive effects of this alternative integration model and the rapid decline in support for it see Deppe 2005. For the foreign‐policy side of the proposal, see the following section and Habermas 2007; Walker 2007. For a defence of the classic assimilation model of European social democratic integration, including the claim that it is valid for the ‘human race’, and the dismissal of the kind of open‐ended and multicultural democratic approach I propose, see A. Honneth in Fraser & Honneth 2003: 110–197, 237–268 (for a critical introduction to this debate see Thompson 2005).

4. For a critical survey of the literature on alternative economic and environmental futures I am indebted to Quastel 2006.

5. Walker 2007 is a response to Habermas 2007, which is a concise statement of Habermas 2004. I have drawn on Tully 2007 in this section.

6. For the deep problems in conceptualizing this relationship between the people and the European Union I am indebted to Christodoulidis 2003; Lindahl 2003, 2007.