Knowledge of the EU and citizen participation in European governance: an agonistic democracy perspective

ABSTRACT

This article examines how knowledge of the EU affects citizen participation in European governance. Drawing upon the theoretical approach of agonistic democracy and discerning EU awareness from EU political knowledge, the article argues that absence of the former limits the political capacity of citizen participation in European governance, while absence of the latter restrains its normative potential. The narrative starts with a brief overview of the existing literature on knowledge of the EU and introduces the distinction between EU awareness and EU political knowledge. It continues with the basic features of agonistic democracy, referring in particular to citizen participation and questions about knowledge. The third section of the essay puts in use the distinction between awareness and political knowledge to show how the two impact on the political capacity and normative potential of civic involvement in EU politics. The concluding section summarises the article’s main points and proposes new research pathways for the sub-discipline of EU democracy.

KEYWORDS:

• Citizen participation
• European governance
• EU knowledge
• agonistic democracy
• citizenization

Notes

1 The article adopts a broad definition of European governance as the institutions, practices, structures, actors and norms associated with governing the EU, its member-states and citizens.

2 The political capacity of civic engagement with governance links to input as well as throughput (how open, transparent and accountable the policy- and decision-making procedures are) forms of legitimacy; see Schmidt (2013).

3 It is not in the objectives of the article to present in full detail the approach of governmentality or how it can be applied in the context of EU politics. For the interested reader, Walters and Haahr (2005) provide one of the first attempts to read specific cases in EU politics through the theoretical lens of Foucauldian governmentality. For a more recent effort, see Fanoulis (2017).

4 The recent work on contestation in international politics by Antje Wiener is worth mentioning at this point. Seeing it as a social, discursive practice, Wiener (2014) investigates both the ontology of contestation as critical engagement with the politics of ‘inter-national’ governance and the socio-political factors which validate contestation and render it plausible. Since the present narrative inspects the role of knowledge in enabling contestatory civic participation in European governance, it presents epistemological proximity to Wiener's reading on contestation.

5 Democratic subjectivity is defined here as politically empowered civic conduct.

6 Literature on the politicisation of the everyday maker has extensively explored how loss of interest and apathy affects civic engagement with politics. For some seminal readings in this field, see Bang and Sørensen (1999) and Bang (2005).

7 Nousiainen and Mäkinen (2015, p. 220) explore this idea from a different perspective, emphasising that citizens should be fully conscious of the political potential of their participation for it to legitimise European governance: ‘ … .if participants themselves do not consider their role as political, participation – no matter how wide and broad – may have very little to do with democracy, understood as the political legitimation of power’. The type of civic realisation that they prescribe gets closer to what this narrative depicts as EU political knowledge.

8 See also Naurin’s (2007) account about cases in European governance, for which transparency at face value may not positively affect EU democracy. Normatively speaking, though, these should be regarded as exceptions rather than the rule.

9 See for example the arguments by Eriksen (2011) and Juncos and Pomorska (2011) on the lack of sufficient accountability of appointed expertise and technocracy in the case of EU foreign policy.