Europe in the Republican Imagination

Dimitris N. Chryssochoou

The Constitutionalism Web-Papers from University of Hamburg, Faculty for Economics and Social Sciences, Department of Social Sciences, Institute of Political Science

Abstract: This paper makes the case for democratising Europe’s ‘political constitution’ from a republican perspective. Such a ‘constitution’ refers to the norms, principles and procedures of institutionalised governance that constitute the political foundation of the European Union (EU). Although the paper is not a philosophical exercise in the foundations of good governance per se, it links republican views of democracy and constitutionalism with the process of EU polity-building. It is also argues that a well thought out and at the same time consequential process of democratic reform should bring about a purposeful European res publica: a community of equal citizens, whose multiple interactions aim at sustaining a particular normative order based on free public deliberation and active citizenship. Key to the above republican conception of Europe is the notion of ‘civic competence’: the institutional capacity of citizens to be actively engaged in the governance of the polity to which they belong. But it is also a means of incorporating social norms of legitimacy in the EU’s policy performance, as well as of equipping citizens to become agents of civic change - ie, a systemsteering demos within a pluralist order composed of increasingly entangled arenas for action.

Keywords: constitution building; governance; treaty reform; democratization; democratization; democracy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2002-06-20
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.wiso.uni-hamburg.de/fachbereich-sowi/p ... 002/conweb3-2002.pdf Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:erp:conweb:p0012

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in The Constitutionalism Web-Papers from University of Hamburg, Faculty for Economics and Social Sciences, Department of Social Sciences, Institute of Political Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jan WILKENS (glob-gov.wiso@uni-hamburg.de).