REINVENTING DEMOCRACY
IN AND FOR EUROPE
FROM DEMOI-CRACY TO DiEM25
Name: Maarten de Groot Student ID#: 10647694 Supervisor: Robin Celikates Second reader: Gijs van Donselaar Submitted on: July 15th2016
Abstract
The starting point of my thesis consists of four basic premises: (1) ‘demoi-cracy’ – literally, ‘rule of the peoples’ - is prima facie an interesting conceptual innovation in the political theory of European integration; (2) the launch of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025
(shorthand: DiEM25) – a pan-European political movement initiated by former Greek Minister of Finance Yanis Varoufakis – is prima facie an interesting political development in the struggle for a more democratized European Union; (3) those preoccupied with ‘demoi-cracy’ and those involved in DiEM25 are ultimately concerned with the same thing: the future of democracy in and for Europe; (4) democracy is a political ideal worth resurrecting. By going back and forth between a standard picture and an alternative picture, I aim to widen our understanding of political theory and democracy in a manner that allows us to see the relevance of progressive popular movements, and DiEM25 in particular, for political theory. Similarly, I intend to show the relevance of the concept of demoi-cracy for the socio-political discourse on the future of the European project. Lastly, by aiming for a synergy between those theorizing about and those struggling for European democracy, I hope to deliver certain critical insights relevant for the progressive advancement of both activities.
Table of Contents
Preface p. 4
Introduction p. 6
The promise of demoi-cracy p. 8
The promise of DiEM25 p. 10
What’s next – an effort in synchronizing p. 12
Chapter 1: Meta pictures - the occupation, ethos and authority of the
political theorist p. 16
The occupation of the political theorist – territorial vs. grammatical p. 17 The ethos of the political theorist – expert vs. public p. 23 The authority of the political theorist – command vs. connection p. 28 Chapter 2: Theoretical pictures - from demos to kratos in democratic theory p. 36 Models of democratic authority – civil vs. civic p. 37 Models of democratic legitimacy – restricted vs. extended p. 42 Globalization vis-à-vis democracy – external threat vs. challenge of
a considered conviction p. 47
Chapter 3: Political pictures - taking sides in the struggle for a democratized
Europe p. 50
Populism vis-à-vis democracy – corrective vs. threat p. 51 Progressive popular movements in Europe – left-wing vs. democratic p. 59 DiEM25 vis-à-vis the European Left – burden vs. blessing p. 65
Conclusion p. 70
Demoi-cracy revisited p. 71
DiEM25 revisited p. 73
Preface
Start cooking - recipe will follow.
(Brian Eno) Sometimes, when I use some of the insights I have gained during my studies in my
discussions with others, I feel lost. The problem is not so much that I do not have the social and intellectual means to translate philosophical ideas into popular, easy-to-understand language, although this can certainly be challenging at times. The real problem - that what makes me feel lost and uncomfortable - is that I suddenly come to realize that the ‘play of words’ has blinded me to the practical context in which words have their meaning. Simply put, I get absorbed by the discussion, and then fail to see the person behind the words, and the effects of my words on that person.
This ‘play of words’ is what philosophy is all about. Having only recourse to words in their studies, philosophy students like me are likely to become pretty good at playing with words. However, I have come to realize that the type of playing with words that I am
interested in only has any real value when it is considered in its practical context, i.e., in its effects on others. But, if that is the case, how come I do not sufficiently take this into account in my dealings with others? The only answer I can give is: because I have not been trained to do so. In my studies I have been trained in focusing on words, in seeing relations between them, and between groups of words, but I have had hardly any training in seeing the persons behind the words, and even less in seeing the effects of my words on others. Certainly, I have experience in teachers grading me, which may depend on the
comprehensibility of my pieces and my responsiveness to the input from others. However, these are only skills that one develops while playing with words, they do not necessarily allow me to see how this playing with words as such, and my contribution thereto, affects the participants in the discussion as human beings, and ultimately the world out there. What is more, I feel that my trained focus on words is part of the reason that I am less sensitive to the persons behind the words, to the practical context in which the play of words is
embedded.
This thesis is a plea for the type of philosophy I want to engage in, i.e. the type of philosophy in which the play of words is only a means to changing the world out there. I do
not claim that my insights are innovative. My primary purpose is to offer myself, and anyone else who aims to engage in the same type of philosophy, a number of reminders. Moreover, I will specify this plea for an area of philosophizing in which this type of philosophy is direly needed, or at least so I argue: the study of the question of democracy in Europe. Why? Because Europe needs its philosophers now more than ever, that’s why.
The particular angle that I have chosen for my thesis on the question of democracy in Europe is the result of a sense of dissatisfaction that I was left with after attending a 2-day ‘Early Career Workshop’ on the Political Theory of European Integration at the Free University of Amsterdam in June 2015. Attending the seminar was certainly an interesting experience and there was a good and friendly atmosphere. What struck me, however, was the following: how can a topic as important and far-reaching as the future of democracy in Europe be restricted to such niche-discussions among academics in university buildings? How could Rawlsian thought experiments help us in our search for a future for democracy in Europe, if we simultaneously disregard the people out there that are fighting for
democracy ‘as we speak’? I felt - and increasingly feel - a sense of urgency regarding the question of European democracy that I did not see reflected in the seminar discussions among young academics. What I have tried to do with my thesis, therefore, is to bridge the gap between these seminar discussions and certain popular protest movements that I felt connected to, if only from behind my desk.
Brian Eno’s remark at the kick-off event of DiEM25, quoted at the start of this preface, also reflect how I have experienced the development of this thesis: it was a cooking process that I felt the need to start, without knowing what it would turn into and without knowing whether it would be any tasty. I’ll let you be the judge.
I would like also like to use this opportunity to thank a couple of people for their patience and support during the cooking process: first of all, my thesis supervisor, Robin Celikates, for his helpful feedback and ever-supportive and understanding attitude; secondly, Luigi Corrias, for his support and a number of interesting discussions on a topic we both care for; and, last but not least, my mother, Marion Zwerink, for her moral and material support, especially during the last stages of the process.
Introduction
The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of symptoms appear.
(Antonio Gramsci) This famous phrase from Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks seems to be more relevant than ever in the current European context. Many feel that the European Union is at a crossroads in its history, but without any sense of direction. The idea of an ‘ever-closer Union of peoples’ may have appeared as an ineluctable process for a long time – almost a historical law – but if the Brexit referendum has made anything crystal clear, then it is that the European
integration process can be reversed. Although some believe that crises have always been a driving force behind European integration, more and more people seem to agree that this crisis can be the last crisis the EU will ever face. Failure to face this reality can be lethal. As Guy Verhofstadt puts it in a debate with EU Council President Tusk in the aftermath of the Brexit vote: “[t]oday we are sleepwalking towards a disaster, towards another 27 referenda ending the European Union” (2016).
Besides agreement on the depth of the crisis, there also seems to be an increasing awareness that the crisis of the European Union is part of a more fundamental crisis of liberal democracy. ‘Populism’ is often used as the catch-all term for phenomena that signal this more fundamental crisis. Recent studies (e.g. Chwalisz 2015) suggest that the popular discontent cuts deeper than the mere performance of politics, but concerns the very processes of democratic representation. A rare encounter between some representatives of the Spanish protest movement Indignados and a high official of the EU is telling in this respect: “Our first message from the movement is that the politicians don’t represent us” (quoted in Gauthier 2011).
In my thesis I will take issue with theorists and activists who largely share the conviction that the future of the European Union cannot be secured by inserting democracy ‘as we know it’ to the European Union at large. That is to say, it is democracy as such that is in need of reinvention, and the process of democratizing the European Union is dialectically related to the re-democratization of political relations within and across nation-states, regions and municipalities. My thesis defends and builds on a position taken in by the
Canadian philosopher James Tully (2007, p. 76):
[I]t is my thesis that official integration will be effective and legitimate only if it is internally related to and shaped by popular practices of integration, rather than running roughshod over them. That is to say that there is not a ‘no demos’ problem in the European Union. There are multiple demoi but they tend to be overlooked and so either excluded from official integration processes or included and subordinated to elite-driven and assimilative procedures.
The argument I will make in my thesis is twofold. Based on the conviction that times of crisis call for joint efforts, my thesis is, first of all, a plea for enhanced engagement among theorists and activists in their struggles for a future for democracy in and for Europe. Secondly, I hope to make a first step in establishing such a synergy by analyzing the potential for
cross-fertilization among a particular group of theorists and a particular group of activists, that is, demoi-cracy theorists1and DiEM25 activists respectively.
The starting point of my thesis consists of four basic premises: (1) ‘demoi-cracy’ – literally, ‘rule of the peoples’ – is prima facie an interesting conceptual innovation in the political theory of European integration; (2) the launch of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (shorthand: DiEM25) – a pan-European political movement initiated by former Greek Minister of Finance Yanis Varoufakis – is prima facie an interesting political development in the struggle for a more democratized European Union; (3) those preoccupied with ‘demoi-cracy’ and those involved in DiEM25 are ultimately concerned with the same thing: the future of democracy in and for Europe;2(4) democracy is a political ideal worth
resurrecting.3By going back and forth between a standard picture and an alternative picture,
I aim to widen our understanding of political theory and democracy in a manner that allows us to see the relevance of progressive popular movements, and DiEM25 in particular, for the political theory on European integration. Similarly, I will argue that the demoi-cracy
discourse can enhance the much-needed visibility and legitimacy of DiEM25 (in direct
1My talk about ‘demoi-cracy theorists’ and ‘demoi-cracy theory’ is not meant to imply that it
constitutes a unified body in the literature. Although there is a number of theorists who have placed the concept at the center of (part of) their work (e.g. Nicolaïdis 2013, Cheneval & Schimmelfennig 2013, Bellamy 2013), and who position themselves vis-à-vis relevant others considerably, there are others who either refer to the concept only in passing (e.g. Mouffe 2013, p. 51) or who refer to it only indirectly (e.g. Tully 2007, p. 76).
2I refer rather explicitly to ‘democracy in and for Europe’, since I want to emphasize the previously
explained dialectical character of European democracy that the theorists and activists under consideration adhere to in their positions on the question of democracy in Europe.
3This is, of course, a debatable premise, as the debate between Jody Dean and Wendy Brown
opposition to the anti-democratic force of populism), and provide it with critical tools for its progressive advancement.
In the remainder of this introduction, I will first elaborate on the first two basic premises that I adopt by giving a brief introduction into the demoi-cracy scholarship and the launch of DiEM25. Afterwards, I will elaborate on my methodology of painting conceptual pictures with respect to three levels of analysis (meta, theoretical and political), and explain how my argument unfolds over the three chapters and ends in the conclusion.
The promise of demoi-crcacy
The concept of ‘demoi-cracy’ is introduced in a wider discourse on the question of the
normative justification of political authority ‘in the circumstances of globalization ‘. Bartelson differentiates two standard interpretations of globalization (Bartelson 2004, pp. 48-9). Firstly, it refers to the degree to which state autonomy has been compromised due to the influence of market forces that do not stick to “the logic of straight lines” (Inayatullah & Blaney 2004, p. 170). Secondly, it refers to the more or less free movement of people and the flow of
information across the globe, which impacts the process of identity-formation of individuals, which becomes increasingly differentiated. Given that the European Union is interpreted as the most advanced form of political organization between and above states, the question of its normative underpinnings has attracted considerable interest among international political theorists.4
In the academic debates on the future of democracy in and for Europe, the ‘no-demos thesis’ constitutes “the (mostly) implicit starting point, indeed the unquestioned horizon” (Corrias 2015, p. 6). According to this thesis, there is no European demos, which in turn is explained by the absence of a common European identity. The relevant question is then: “Does Europe need a demos to be truly democratic?” (Innerarity 2014). Those who answer this question in the positive are either nationalist or internationalist, and therefore skeptical of the possibility that any democracy above the level of the nation-state can emerge, or they are federalist, arguing optimistically that such a European demos can actually be developed or is already in the making. The adoption of the concept of ‘demoi-cracy’ is the response of a
4In what follows I will refer to this body of literature as normative political theory on European
integration (shorthand: NPTEI theory). I treat demoi-cracy theory as a subcategory of NPTEI theory, even though the former is not restricted to the discussions on the European Union.
number of scholars who answer this question in the negative: Europe does not need one
demos in order to be truly democratic. They share the conviction that democratic politics
needs to be rethought in the plural, as the rule of peoples.
How democratic legitimacy can be conferred upon political authority, and what this entails for the organization of political authority, differs from one account of demoi-cracy to another. Müller (2010) discerns two basic understandings of demoi-cracy in the literature, both relying on distinct and contestable background theories: cosmopolitan republicanism and a quasi-Hegelian theory of recognition.
The first account of demoi-cracy is developed by James Bohman, and it presents demoi-cracy as a “transnational polity of polities”. He distinguishes between ‘gradualist’ and ‘transformationalist’ approaches to the question of democratic politics in the circumstances of globalization: on the former approach, the impact of globalization on state autonomy forces us to redevelop democracy for larger units, such as the European Union. On the latter approach, the impact of globalization is not restricted to the range of policy-options open to governments, but constitutes a more profound threat to people’s freedom as
non-domination. Scaling up democratic institutions need not necessarily tackle this threat, as it may even increase the potential for domination. According to the radical version of
transformationalism that Bohman defends, both the institutional form and the normative underpinnings of democracy need to be reconsidered (Bohman 2007, pp. 20-21). His proposal centers around the notion of the ‘democratic minimum’, according to which the right to initiate deliberation on the constitutional essentials of a polity constitutes the most fundamental right that must be secured for the sake of non-domination. What makes Bohman’s concept of demoi-cracy theoretically innovative, according to Müller, is the idea that this right is not restricted to members of already existing polities: “what makes demoi-cracy as a device for non-domination distinctive then, is, first, the emphasis on the capacity to initiate deliberation as necessarily belonging to all demoi – whether pre-constituted or formed through the fact of domination” (Müller 2010, p. 194).
The second context in which the concept of demoi-cracy was employed is the European Union understood as a ‘persistent plurality of peoples’. Rather than non-domination, this account of demoi-cracy emphasizes the importance of “constitutional tolerance” and mutual recognition. Müller differentiates between those who interpret this
ideal of demoi-cracy along national lines (e.g. Joseph Weiler’s “cosmopolitan
communitarianism”) and those who defend a more ambitious account according to which demoi are functionally differentiated, and may change over time (e.g. Samantha Besson) (Müller 2010, pp. 197-201).
To conclude, what makes demoi-cracy an interesting and prima facie promising
conceptual innovation in our search for a future of democracy in and for Europe? First of all, because it is commonly agreed that there is not one European demos, and few people believe this will change any time soon. As a consequence, the EU is to be treated as sui generis. The concept of demoi-cracy highlights this need to rethink democracy in an age of globalization, in terms of both its scale and its normative substance. However, what makes the concept of demoi-cracy distinctive and prima facie promising – the emphasis on the capacity to initiate and sustain reasonable deliberation – also constitutes a liability, as pointed out by Müller (2010, p. 202): “[its] normative strength, if any, derives from a particular view of civic dispositions, not any ingenious institutional design. This, then, is also [its] prime weakness, and in the absence of more institutions or practices able to generate such dispositions, it is doubtful how far demoi-cracy - as prescription and as description - can go.”5
The promise of DiEM25
DiEM25 is initiated by a small number of intellectuals, among which are Yanis Varoufakis (economist and former Greek Minister of Finance) and Srećko Horvat (philosopher and activist). Nonetheless, DiEM25 aspires to turn into a broad popular movement. Since its launch on February 9, 2016, in the Volksbühne in Berlin, DiEM25 has garnered the support of over 23,000 people in 5 months’ time, including a significant number of prominent
intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky, Slavoj Žižek, Saskia Sassen, Julian Assange, Boaventura de Sousa Santos and Toni Negri.
DiEM25 is born out of the sense “that something is rotten in the European Union,” as Varoufakis puts it in his opening speech in Berlin. Being created as a cartel of heavy
industry, Europe was never designed with democracy in mind. Contrariwise, “[p]atiently and methodically, a process of de-politiczing politics was put into place, the result being a
5A similar critique is offered by Celikates in his book review of Bohman’s Democracy across borders:
draining but relentless drive toward taking-the-demos-out-of-democracy and cloaking all forms of policy-making in a pervasive pseudo-technocratic fatalism” (DiEM25 Manifesto, p. 2). However, despite offering a radical critique of the EU, DiEM25 unambiguously calls for the reboot rather than the dissolution of the EU, thereby rejecting the “false choice” that Europeans offered: “Retreat into the cocoon of the nation-state. Or surrender to the Brussels democracy-free zone” (DiEM25 Manifesto, p. 1).
The mission of DiEM25 is to democratize the EU and the manifesto explains the motivating ideas behind DiEM25 and the steps that need to be taken in order to realize a democratized European Union by 2025. The third Memorandum of Understanding – referred to as the “Brussels diktat” by Balibar et al. (2015) - that was signed by the Greek government and the creditor institutions on July 13th, 2015, was among the key moments that
have led to the foundation of DiEM25, as follows from the manifesto: “One simple, but radical idea is the motivating force behind DiEM25: Democratize Europe! Democracy is not (and cannot be) a luxury afforded to creditors while declined to debtors” (DiEM25 Manifesto, p. 3; emphasis in original).
Given the experience of Syriza in Greece, DiEM25 is founded on the belief that
“European democrats must come together first, forge a common agenda, and then find ways of connecting it with local communities and at the national level” (DiEM25 Manifesto, p. 5). The start of, and the rudimentary guidelines for, the development of such a common agenda are laid down in the manifesto by means of four milestones (DiEM25 Manifesto, pp. 3-4): in the very short term, DiEM25 demands “full transparency in European decision-making,” which includes the live-streaming of EU Council and Eurogroup meetings and the
publication of ECB minutes. Within 12 months, it wants to “address the on-going economic crisis utilizing existing EU institutions and within existing EU Treaties.” Within the different realms in which the crisis unfolds, “DiEM25 will present detailed policy proposals to
Europeanize all four while returning power to national parliaments, to regional councils, to city halls and to communities.” Thirdly, within 2 years, a Constitutional Assembly is to take place, “comprising of representatives elected on trans-national tickets.” This Assembly is then empowered to decide on the future democratic constitution of the EU which is meant to replace all existing treaties. Lastly, the decisions of this assembly are meant to be
What makes the launch of DiEM25 an interesting and prima facie promising political development is, first and foremost, its innovative modus operandi. Instead of starting a political movement or party at the local or national level that then aims to forge alliances at the European level, DiEM25 starts at the pan-European level. Secondly, despite the fact that the movement did not grow organically but was launched by a few intellectuals by means of a manifesto that was ‘dropped’ on the European people, DiEM25 aspires to turn into a
grassroots movement, not a political party. However, what makes the movement distinctive and prima facie promising – its character as a pan-European political movement - also
constitutes its biggest challenge, as critics have pointed out (a.o. Fazi 2016): given that the decisions regarding the EU’s institutional design as laid down in EU Treaties are made at the (inter-)state level, how effective can DiEM25 ever be in effectuating institutional change?
What’s next - an effort in synchronizing
Despite the fact that my thesis constitutes a plea for a somewhat different and more engaged relationship among theorists and activists on the question of democracy in and for Europe, the chapters that follow do not purport to build an argument that is somehow conclusive or final. Instead, I aim to do two things at the same time: by means of a series of contrasts between a standard picture and an alternative picture, I hope to show the limitations of the former set of lenses with respect to the political theory on the question of democracy in and for Europe, and simultaneously enhance the appeal of the latter set of lenses. I will go back and forth between a standard picture and an alternative picture by reference to three levels of analysis: the meta-level, the theoretical level and the political level, that will each be discussed in a separate chapter. Roughly put, the meta-level concerns the way in which the political theorist positions him or herself vis-à-vis the world out there, the theoretical level concerns his or her analytical lenses, and the political level concerns the implications of his or her choice for analytical lenses for the interpretation of developments in the world out there.
I borrow the methodology of painting conceptual pictures from Anthony Laden (2012), who in turn refers to Wittgenstein’s well-known remark regarding a picture ‘holding us captive’. As Laden explains, what differentiates drafting a taxonomy from painting conceptual pictures is that in the latter activity a set of disparate elements are represented as
fitting or hanging together, without rendering the relations among the elements strictly logically necessary. This has a number of implications (Laden 2012, p. 42):
[D]escribing certain bundles as constituting pictures is not to rule out other bundles as incoherent or even false. The point, rather, is that because the picture as a whole hangs together, we can be led to adopt some of its elements without really noticing that we are doing so. One danger of this, one way that a picture can hold us captive, is that even when we consciously and explicitly reject one feature of a picture, we may be pulled back towards that feature by other aspects of the picture we do not even recognize that we have endorsed.
By seeing a contrasting picture based on a contrasting set of elements, we may become reflexively aware of certain features of the structure of our analysis that we do not endorse, or even explicitly reject. Moreover, such a contrasting picture enriches our imagination, without thereby declaring either one of the two pictures as the ultimate answer to the question under consideration (Laden 2012, pp. 42-3).
In my case, the picture metaphor is meant to convey that there are a variety of ways of picturing the task of political theory on the question of democracy in and for Europe, above and beyond the two contrasting pictures presented, and that every picture captures certain features while missing out on others. Rather than arguing against the standard picture per se, I hope to contribute to enhanced self-awareness among political theorists of European integration, thereby allowing for a variety of approaches to the question of
democracy in and for Europe without any one approach being dominant at the detriment of others. Moreover, I aim to stimulate cutting approaches for the sake of
cross-fertilization among different types of theories.
There are three sets of questions that have informed my framing of the pictures in the chapters that follow, each relating to a different level of analysis:
∑ Meta-level: how can civil and civic theory be made to complement one another? How is the relation between ideal and non-ideal theory to be interpreted?6
∑ Theoretical level: how is the relation between the question of stability and the question (democratic) legitimacy to be represented? Does it make sense to
differentiate between the functional and the normative aspects of democracy, and, if
6The differentiation between ‘civil theory’ and ‘civic theory’ theory is made by James Tully (2014), and
my thinking on this question is mostly stimulated and informed by him, by Anthony Laden (2013) and by Elizabeth Anderson (2014).
so, how are the two related? What is the relation between effective and legitimate integration?7
∑ Political level: what is the relation between institutional change and wider societal and cultural – so-called “subterranean, magmatic” – change? How can a popular movement’s symbolic effectiveness be translated into institutional change?8
In chapter 1, I will discuss the activity of political theorizing from both the standard picture and the alternative picture. On the former, political theoretical questions are represented as ‘engineering problems’ to be discussed among philosophers as experts, not as fellow citizens. That is to say, only those who uphold certain previously established philosophical virtues are treated as one’s audience and potentially relevant interlocutors. On the alternative picture, there is no categorical differentiation between expert philosophical deliberation and democratic deliberation, and political theory is represented as a ‘specialized form of
conversation’.
In chapter 2, I will discuss two ways of picturing democracy. On the standard picture, democratic authority is represented on the civil model, according to which there is a
necessary and prior separation between ruler and ruled. Institutions of representative democracy are needed to keep antagonism at bay, i.e., to negotiate a precarious balance between identity and difference. On the alternative picture, democratic authority is not represented as the civilized and legitimized exercise of power of the rulers over the ruled, but primarily as a particular type of relation among citizens themselves. It is a relationship that is continuously open to negotiation, and that is characterized by an equal distribution of what Laden (2007) calls “constructive social power” – that is, the power to shape the
contours of one’s shared identity – and what Tully calls ‘civic freedom’. Delegation of this authority to institutions is only democratic insofar as these institutions “enable the exercise of civic freedom within and on them” (Tully 2014, p. 272). Moreover, I will discuss what these two pictures of democracy imply for understanding of globalization.
In chapter 3, I will discuss the implications of the theoretical pictures for the framing of popular discontent that has risen over the last one or two decades in Europe in a variety of
7Thomas Nagel’s essay ‘The problem of global justice’ (2005), to which I will return later, has greatly
stimulated my thinking on this question, although I do not buy into his representation of the matter ultimately.
8Íñigo Errejón uses the term of ‘subterranean, magmatic change’ (Errejón & Mouffe 2016, p. 52), and
forms. I will argue that, on the standard picture, populism is interpreted as intrinsically connected to democracy, and thus that it can be turned to both progressive and regressive ends. Right-wing populism, it is argued, can only be countered by means of left-wing populism. In order to do so effectively, the European Left must overcome its fear for the ‘n-word’ (nationalism) and unify parliamentary and extra-parliamentary struggles. Seen from the alternative set of theoretical lenses, populism – once it is properly understood as a dynamic phenomenon – appears unambiguously as a threat to democracy. Populism and neoliberal technocracy are represented as twin degenerations of a more original democratic logic, degenerations that arguably feed each other in the current European political climate. Seen from this perspective, it becomes important – crucial even for the survival or
resurrection of democracy – to differentiate the democratic activists from the populists. Lastly, I will discuss two critiques of DiEM25 and their responses as illustrations of the standard and alternative picture respectively.
In the conclusion, I will recapitulate the previous chapters by reference to the overarching question of the relation between theorists and activists on the question of the future of democracy in and for Europe. Afterwards, I will discuss return to the first two premises of my thesis and discuss, on the basis of my previous analysis, what the most promising routes are to developing demoicracy theory and DiEM25 activism respectively, measured by their potential to generate a synergy between theory and practice.
Chapter 1
Meta Pictures – The Occupation, Ethos and Authority of the Political Theorist
Moral reasoning, in order to be effective in changing social practices, must be done together. (Anderson 2014, p. 14)
In this chapter I will sketch two pictures of political theory, approached as activities of theorists-being-in-the-world with others, rather than as an essentially passive body of thought.9These sketches are meta pictures insofar as they are concerned with the way
political theorists relate to political agents, and how the relation between political theory and political practice is envisioned. On the standard picture, political theory is represented as the activity of solving certain ‘engineering problems’ within the domain of the ‘things political’. What ultimately justifies the choice for a particular set of theoretical lenses is whether it enhances our understanding in some relevant sense. Philosophers have the status of experts in the sense that they are only responsive to reasonable argumentation, the standards of which are internal to the practice of political theory. Philosophers aim to offer ‘knock-down’ arguments in the sense that they claim to win out over all others in some relevant subdomain of the marketplace of ideas. On the alternative picture, there is no categorical difference between philosophical deliberation and democratic deliberation, and political theory is represented as a ‘specialized form of conversation’.
My aim in this chapter is not to defend one picture of political theory against another, but rather to respond to the question that Tully addresses: “What comparative difference does it make to study politics this way rather than that? (Tully 2008, p. 15;
emphasis in original). Given the high level of abstraction of these pictures, I will illustrate the two pictures by reference to a number of scholars engaged in the normative political theory on European integration (hereafter referred to as NPTEI). Although I hereby try to show that this is prima facie a valid interpretation of (parts of) their work, I do not claim that this is how they conceive of their own work, or that this is the best reading of their work, all things
9I paraphrase Tully’s use here, who refers to a particular approach to citizenship “as activities of
considered.10For my painting of these two pictures, I rely for a great deal on the work of
James Tully and Anthony Laden.11
In the first section, I will discuss the way political theorists conceive of their own
occupation(s): is political theory a domain of study pertaining to the ‘things political’ or
should we conceive of political theorizing, first and foremost, as an activity that derives its point and purpose from its political effect? In the second section, I will discuss the ethos of the political theorist, by raising the question to whom the political theorist is answerable, to his fellow academics only or to the public at large. Are there certain questions that fall outside the scope of democratic activity, insofar as they provide the conditions for this activity? In the third and last section, I will discuss, not the scope of answerability, but the type of answerability and the related models of authority that the two pictures are predicated upon.
The occupation of the political theorist – territorial vs. grammatical
On the standard picture, the political theorist´s occupation12is determined by reference to the
object of study, the ‘things political’.13What is meant by this is disputed within the discourse
itself, but what is disputed is what ‘things’ are kept in and what out, not whether this is the right way for political theory to identify itself. As a consequence, I refer to this as the
territorial approach. On the alternative picture, it is not the nature of the object of study but
the practical function or point of the study which makes the activity of theorizing ‘political’. This is what I call the grammatical approach (referring to the later Wittgenstein’s use of the
10When I engage in these illustrations, I will have to ask you to bear with me, not to get lost in the
specifics of a particular position of an NPTEI theorist that I happen to use, but to consider it in the light of the more general point I am trying to make.
11James Tully speaks of ‘civil philosophy’ as opposed to ‘civic philosophy’ (see e.g. Tully 2014, p. 319),
but the differentiation is essentially the same.
12Before I came up with the word of ‘occupation’, I thought of the terms ‘domain’ and ‘task’ as ways
to describe the aspect of the picture of the political theorist that I wish to describe in this section. However, the former term is biased toward the territorial approach and the latter to the grammatical approach. My choice for ‘occupation’ is based on the recognition that the term can has a plurality of meanings and associations, some of which relate to ‘domain’ and others to ‘task’.
13This difference in (self-)understanding the ‘political’ in political theory is set out by Singh & Nichols
in the editors´ introduction to Freedom and Democracy in an Imperial Context: Dialogues with James Tully (2014).
term ‘grammar’14). The crucial difference between the territorial and the grammatical
approach is that the former assigns logical priority to theory, whereas the latter assigns – or rather practices – a primacy to practice. In what follows, I will argue that standard, territorial picture of the occupation of the political theorist is dominant within the NPTEI discourse, whereas Tully´s work is exemplary of the alternative, grammatical understanding of the occupation of the political theorist.
Within the NPTEI discourse, there is a variety of approaches to the question of the future of democracy in and for Europe. The common denominator is that they are all concerned with setting a normative benchmark for the EU and the trajectory of European integration. The majority of theorists seems to adopt, implicitly or explicitly, what I call an institutional understanding of the domain of political theory. Influential in this respect is Rawls’s differentiation between a ‘thin’ account of social justice and ‘thick’, moral or metaphysical questions.15The normative questions that NPTEI theorists are engaged with
pertain to the “basic structure of [European] society,” that is, to the social and political institutions. The assumption is, here, that questions related to political values, norms and principles that should guide the design of the basic structure can be dealt with
independently from discussions on human nature or ‘the good life’. Cheneval &
Schimmelfennig make this assumption explicit: “[t]he principles of demoicracy apply to the basic framework of the institutional design of demoicracy and only thereto. In other words, they are not principles for individual political action within the demoicratic polity”
(Cheneval et al. 2013, p. 341). Additionally, they start from the Rawlsian premise “that in order to determine the democratic quality of the EU as demoicracy, a free-standing benchmark for this form of polity needs to be established” (ibid., p. 335).
Although Nicolaïdis does not follow Cheneval & Schimmelfennig in appropriating Rawlsian ideal theory in order to build her case for demoicracy, she similarly adopts the institutional variant of the territorial approach. Her normative approach is inductive rather
14For my interpretation of Wittgenstein’s use of this word, I rely on McGinn’s interpretation of
Wittgenstein: “Wittgenstein describes a grammatical investigation as one in which ‘we remind ourselves…of the kind of statement that we make about phenomena’ (PI 90). This should not be taken to express an interest simply in what constitutes a syntactically well-formed sentence; Wittgenstein’s use of the concept of ‘grammar’ is, to this extent, different from the traditional one. His use of the concept of ‘grammar’ relates, not to language considered as a system of signs, but to our use of words, to the structure of our practice of using language” (McGinn 1997, pp. 12-3; emphasis in original).
than deductive. She argues that “demoicracy is what the EU has become over time,” and that “its peoples should aspire to nurture its demoicratic features in the context of the eurocrisis” (Nicolaïdis 2013, p. 352). Demoicracy is presented as the ‘third way’ that is to be
distinguished from both federalist accounts (see e.g. Habermas) – which represent the EU as a (supranational) democracy in the making – and intergovernmentalist accounts – on which the democratic potential is claimed to be restricted to the nation-state. What is revolutionary or transformative about demoicracy as a third way is that it challenges the equation of “democracy with a single demos, whether national or European” (ibid., p. 353). Insofar as Nicolaïdis identifies her third way in contradistinction to these two other ways or
approaches to the question of the future of democracy in and for Europe, I believe I can reasonably assume that she adheres to the Rawlsian distinction between politico-institutional and ethico-metaphysical questions. This assumption is also confirmed by Mouffe who
discusses and positively evaluates Nicolaïdis “felicitous expression” of demoicracy. In Mouffe’s words, Nicolaïdis portrays the “EU on the model of a ‘demoicracy’ […] [as] a union which respects the national identity of its members as represented in its political and
constitutional structures” (Mouffe 2012, p. 635, emphasis added).
Mouffe herself comes to embrace the concept of demoicracy through a different route. Her conception of the ‘the political’ is not institutional (in the Rawlsian sense adopted by Cheneval & Schimmelfennig and Nicolaïdis), and yet I argue that she similarly adopts the territorial approach to the political theorist’s occupation, i.e., she similarly demarcates the political from the non-political in a (quasi-)pre-political manoeuvre. Her variant of the territorial approach borrows from the work of Carl Schmitt, and may be called ontological rather than institutional: the political is the domain that is essential to the construction of people’s identities. Identity construction, whether individual or collective, only occurs through differentiating between an ‘us’ and a ‘them’. It is therefore an “every-present possibility in politics” that this us/them relation turns into a friend/enemy relation, and it is the task of democratic politics to prevent such a situation (Mouffe 2000, p. 13). As Mouffe argues elsewhere, this account of the domain of the political is “strictly theoretical,” and it must not be confused with questions regarding political strategy. Theoretical questions and political questions concern “two levels of reflection” that cannot be mixed up.
What unifies the institutional and the ontological variant of the territorial approach, representing otherwise disparate traditions of political theorizing, is that they adopt an understanding of the domain of ‘the political’, and thus an understanding of their occupation as political theorist, according to which theoretical questions and political questions concern “two levels of reflection” that cannot be mixed up. The latter is informed by the former, but not vice versa. One could say that the ‘constitutional essentials’ of political theory, the terms on which one operates as political theorist, cannot be contested by reference to their political effects, but only by reference to pre-political theoretical considerations that are internal to the discipline of political theory. By contrast, on the grammatical approach, there is not such a categorical difference between theoretical and politico-strategic questions. This is not to say that one cannot sensibly differentiate between theoretical questions and politico-strategic strategic questions (as I do myself in this thesis16). It merely means that Waldron’s
observation regarding the ‘circumstances of politics’ also applies to political theory: “the potential for reasonable disagreement about what we should do goes all the way down,” including the (choice for the) terms of political theorizing (Bentley & Owen, p. 229).
I believe this difference in understanding of one’s occupation as political theorist is likely to have certain implications for how one exercises one’s occupation.17I will try to
explain these implications by reference to Tully’s analysis on Quentin Skinner’s
methodology. Tully introduces a distinction between two senses in which a text has a point, which he believes to follow from Skinner’s work, although not always equally clearly. This is the “distinction between the ideological point or points of a text relative to the available conventions and the author’s point in writing it.”18To ask about the point of a text in sense
(1) is to ask “about the character of a text as an ideological manoeuvre,” and to ask about it in sense (2) is to ask “about the character of the ideological manoeuvre as a political
manoeuvre” (Tully 1983, pp. 492-3). What differentiates those adopting the territorial approach from those adopting the grammatical approach is that the former are more likely to act under the presumption that answers to question (1) can be given and justified
16It does mean that any such differentiation merely serves as a heuristic device, which is therefore also
how I understand my differentiation into meta-, theoretical and political concerns.
17Please note that I am not arguing that these are logical implications following the respective
approaches. Rather, I am trying to explain that a particular approach to the occupation of political theory is more likely to come with a particular sensitivity.
independently from question (2), whereas the latter are more likely to act under the
presumption that the two questions ultimately always need to be dealt with in relation to one another, and that the ultimate source of justification of an ideological manoeuvre resides in its practical effect.19Put simply, on the territorial approach question (1) is crucial, whereas
on the grammatical approach question (2) is.
Let me try to clarify the above distinction by applying it to demoicracy theory. Question (1) is the following: what was Nicolaïdis doing when she first built the case for demoicracy in 2003 “in relation to other available texts which make up the ideological context?” (ibid., p. 490). As has been said before, her account challenges the prevailing “no demos => no democracy” assumption, and it is clearly intended for that purpose (Nicolaïdis 2013, p. 353):
Crucially, a third way may look like the traditional ‘in between’ (international organization versus federal state) and may empirically borrow from both sides, but contrary to a via media it is normatively antithetic to both. As with every third way, the idea of demoicracy holds the promise of escape from the tyranny of dichotomies which still dominate EU debates” (Nicolaïdis 2013, p. 353, emphasis in original).
Given the amount of literature published on the concept of demoicracy in the last decade, we may argue that Nicolaïdis and other demoicracy theorists have been considerably successful in transforming the NPTEI discourse. Question (2) is as follows: what was Nicolaïdis “doing in manipulating the available ideological conventions?” A textual hint on the political predicament that she is addressing can be found in the introduction (ibid., p. 351):
[T]he name of the democratic game in Europe today is democratic interdependence [...] Threats to democracy in the EU lie in the insularity of its Member States’ governments and their refusal to face pervading democratic externalities. They lie with citizens who fail to engage across borders. And they lie in Brussels’ (partial) inability legitimately to address these democratic flaws while respecting democratic boundaries. We may better understand what is at stake, I argue, if we
analyze, defend and criticize the EU as a demoicracy – highly imperfect demoicracy though it is. I interpret this in the following manner: Nicolaïdis claims here that, if we agree that this is the political predicament that Europe faces, demoicracy theory can provide us with the theoretical answer. How this answer is to be applied to ‘the world out there’ is a different
19By using the term ‘ultimate source of justification’ I do not mean anything extraordinary: I just mean
to say that, at the end of the day, what we need to provide reasons for is not that a political theory solves a conundrum in political theory discourse but that it has desirable political effects, whatever this may mean.
question that falls beyond the scope of her inquiry.20By placing her work on demoicracy in a
practical context, she establishes the relevance of her work. However, how exactly her work is not merely theoretically or potentially relevant, but also practically relevant, i.e., how it is not a mere progressive ideological but also a progressive political intervention, is a question that is barely touched upon. To say that something leads to a ‘better understanding’ does not make much of a difference in this respect.21Consequently, I believe that question (1) is treated as
the crucial question by Nicolaïdis.22
Those adopting the grammatical approach, by contrast, are concerned not merely with philosophy about politics, but with philosophy that is political” (Singh & Nichols 2014, p. 4). In other words, the ideological intervention (that question (1) refers to) is judged by reference to its practical effect (to which question (2) refers). This should not be interpreted too narrowly, however: it does not mean to say that political theories are only considered relevant if politicians or activists take them up. In a sense, this image once again reinforces the purported logical difference between moral norms and their application to ´the world out there’, which those adopting the grammatical approach seek to prove wrong in practice. Rather, the point of grammatical investigations is to show that ideological interventions are
always already political interventions, legitimizing some lines of inquiry and action and
delegitimizing others; to show that political theorizing is a human activity that does not take place in a vacuum but is embedded in spatiotemporal and political reality.
The second element that I would like to discuss in relation to the two pictures of political theory is closely connected to the former section. In a sense, it constitutes another implication of the two approaches to the occupation of political theorist previously
20See also Fossen 2013, who argues that on what he calls the ‘normativist account’ moral principles
and their applications are logically separated.
21Let me say here that the point or meaning of a text, in either of its two senses, is not exhausted by, or
reducible to, the text itself. Nonetheless, on the basis of the textual evidence presented here I have no reason to arrive at another conclusion than I do.
22This is not meant as an indictment: to some extent, I think it is only natural that some scholars are
more sensitive to the ideological context and some more to the practical context of their work, and I also believe that the one almost necessarily comes at the cost of the other (although there may be exceptions, such as Tully). My thesis, in any case, insofar as it can be said to operate within the ideological context of NPTEI theory, is certainly more oriented to the practical context of demoi-cracy theory, which has led to a rather superficial account of the ideological context of demoi-cracy theory, i.e., rather minimal knowledge regarding the specific positions of demoi-cracy theorists and how they relate to one another.
differentiated. However, where I previously discussed texts in abstraction from its authors, in the upcoming two sections I will discuss political theory as a social activity.
The ethos of the political theorist – expert vs. public
By ‘ethos’ – or ‘attitude’ – I refer to the sense in which Foucault has taken up this term (1984): a mode of relating to contemporary reality; a voluntary choice made by certain people; in the end, a way of thinking and feeling; a way, too, of acting and behaving that at one and the same time marks a relation of belonging and presents itself as a task.
On the standard picture, the theorist manifests himself at a distance from every-day political discussions and other political activities among citizens. As a theorist he is merely concerned with the conditions of the possibility of democratic activity, not with the activity as such. This is what I call the expert ethos. On the alternative picture, the theorist does not present herself outside or above the demos, but as one member of it. Discussions within political theory discourse are not different ‘in kind’ from ordinary political discussions among engaged citizens. Therefore, I refer to this as the public ethos.
One can read the image that Jürgen Neyer & Antje Wiener present of both the EU and NPTEI discourse in their editors’ introduction to Political Theory of the European Union (2010) as an example of the expert ethos. Neyer et al. compare the “the difficulties and successes [of the EU] to those of a group of skippers and a crew, who notice that they lack the certificates for the conduct of the vessel and cannot find the map to take them through the uncharted waters they have chosen to cross” (Neyer et al. 2010, p. 1). Although every crew member acknowledges the difficulty, if not impossibility, of completing the journey in the absence of a unified plan or the delegation of decision-making authority, most of them value their autonomy too highly to agree on a common course. What further complicates matters is that they all speak different languages and they are all burdened with the wishes of their
respective ‘local clubs at home’, to which they are accountable. “The puzzling finding,” Neyer et al. hold, “is that the ship has not sunk yet. Despite much frustration with Europe, and some sailors’ preference for boarding a smaller vessel in order to implement their preferred construction plan, the EU has continued to develop as the international
organization that is arguably best equipped to deal with the challenge of globalization. This book’s contributions take on that puzzle” (Neyer et al. 2010, p. 2). Additionally, they state
that this metaphor does not only help to understand the EU as a polity, but also the (academic) debates on the EU.
The above representation of political theorizing on the EU as the activity of solving a a puzzle, a riddle or what Anthony Laden calls an “engineering problem” is a central feature of the expert ethos that fuels the mainstream NPTEI discourse (Laden 2013, p. 209). Let me try to explain this by reference to the so-called ‘no-demos thesis’, the idea that there is no single European demos: the European does not exist, and thus legitimacy for European decision-making needs to come about differently than within the nation state. This thesis is described as “the (mostly) implicit starting point, indeed the unquestioned horizon, of any discussion on democracy within the EU” (Corrias 2015, p. 6). What is important to note here is that the Dutch, French and Irish who may have shown in their respective referendums that they do not feel European are not treated as moral subjects of practical engagement but as objects of theoretical reflection. In other words, those referendums may have forced NPTEI theorists to change their conceptions of democratic governance so as to allow for the
development of a theory of democracy in and for Europe that treats the plurality of demoi as a given – and yet those people never rise to the status of interlocutors. Conversely, the political theorist emerges as someone who approaches questions like justice and democracy from a non-engaged perspective. That is to say, his practical engagement with citizens as a
fellow citizen bears no relevance to his work in political theory. What makes the political
theorist’s ethos expert-oriented is that in his capacity as a political theorist he is only answerable to his fellow academics, not to the general European public(s) to whom his theory of
democracy allegedly applies.23
As a prominent representative of the alternative picture of political theory, Tully brings in two of Wittgenstein’s arguments to substantiate his general opposition to the expert ethos. Firstly, “[t]he model of applying a rule or a theory to particular cases cannot account for the phenomenon of understanding the meaning of a general term, and so of being able to use it and to give reasons and explanations for its use in various contexts” (Tully 2008, pp. 26-7). In other words, once we set out to develop a definitive theory of democracy in and for Europe, we will need to base ourselves on a certain prior understanding of the general political term ‘democracy’. However, it is not possible to reflect on the appropriateness of
this particular understanding of democracy while developing a theory of democracy in and
for Europe. His second objection is that “the actual criteria for the application of a general
term are too various, indeterminate and hence open to unpredictable extension to be explicated in terms of an implicit or transcendental set of rules or theory, no matter how complex” (ibid., p. 27). This means that there is no general set of criteria to be deduced from all uses of the term ‘democracy’ because there are countless ways of using the term, each appropriate (i.e. meaningful) in its specific context. All instances share certain features with others, but there is not one feature that applies to all. This is what Wittgenstein refers to as ‘family resemblance’.
Since it is not possible to account for the conditions of possibility of theorizing about general political terms, i.e., not without appealing to conventions, Tully arrives at the following conclusion (ibid., p. 28):
When political philosophers enter into political discussions and disputes to help to clarify the language being used and the appropriate procedures for exchanging reasons, as well as to present reasons of their own, they are not doing anything different in kind from citizens involved in the argumentation, as the picture of political reflection as a theoretical enterprise would lead us to believe.
To deny a categorical distinction between academic discussions in political theory and political discussions amongst engaged citizens, is to hold that any language game is ultimately grounded in an intersubjective practice, in a ‘form of life’.24
One may wonder, what is left to do for the political theorist if it is not to develop a definitive political theory? If we forsake the search for an Archimedean standpoint by which the theorist places himself above the demos, we are left with public philosophy. Tully states that “the aim [of his public philosophy] is to establish pedagogical relationships of reciprocal elucidation between academic research and the civic activities of fellow citizens” (Tully 2008, p. 3). Public philosophy is based on the “logic of a dialogue of questions and answers” rather than one of “problems and solutions” (Tully 2008, p. 15). What differentiates the two logics, in a nutshell, is that the logic of problems and solutions is premised on the logical priority of problems over solutions: although solutions to problems may always be provisional and
24There is a famous passage in the Philosophical Investigations in which Wittgenstein points out this
insurmountable limit to the game of justification, i.e., of grounding statements theoretically: “If I have exhausted the justifications I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: ‘This is simply what I do.’” (Wittgenstein quoted in Tully 2008a, p. 50).
open to revision, the problems they respond to are framed as relatively stable and uncontestable. The logic of a dialogue, by contrast, is premised on the historicity and
contestability of any question in the (course of) dialogue: to give an answer is always already to understand a question in a particular way. Public philosophy starts off from the premise that there are countless ways of studying politics and thus of identifying problems and solutions. Therefore, Tully’s public philosophy aims to “to disclose the historically singular set of practices of governance and the range of characteristic problems and solutions to which it gives rise (its form of problematisation)” (ibid., p. 16).
Tully distinguishes between two methodological steps that work towards this aim: contemporary surveys and historical surveys. Each step, in turn, consists of two types of survey: one focusing on languages, i.e., the ideological context of struggles, and the other on practices, i.e. the political context in which struggles arise. The objective of the first
contemporary survey is to describe the ways concepts are being used in practice, i.e., “to bring back words from their metaphysical to their everyday use” (Wittgenstein quoted in Tully 2008, p. 29). By doing so, you should not expect to discover a general rule uniting all uses of the term, but you may expect to learn “to reason perspectivally” (ibid., p. 30), i.e., to learn practically to give reasons for using a general term one way rather than another in a particular circumstance, while acknowledging the ever-present “possibility of reasonable disagreement” on the use of a term in most circumstances.25The second type of
contemporary survey explores the ways in which these language games are embedded in power relations: how much freedom is there on the part of subjects and by what means are relations of power stabilized?
However, in order to not only know “what can be said and done within a set of practices and problematisation,” but also to envisage room for moving beyond the
established language games and practices, historical surveys are needed. Those genealogical accounts show how certain currently hegemonic concepts or practices have come into being. By studying the moments in which, and the background conditions against which,
established (linguistic and non-linguistic) conventions were questioned, tested and possibly
25I say ‘most circumstances’ because there are certain circumstances – think especially of legal
discourse – whereby the use of a term is completely bounded by rules. In those circumstances, it is not possible to contest the use of a term on a particular instance, but only to contest the (rules defining the) practice as a whole. On this matter, see Rawls 1955.
successfully transformed we can come to develop a critical relation with our contemporary conventions. That is to say, they help us to see how our contemporary conventions are not universally given but the products of concrete choices made in the past, which have displaced a number of alternative commonplaces. As a consequence, we could say that historical surveys allow us to open up doors that were previously not even seen.
In the context of the question of the future of democracy in and for Europe, I interpret the work of Prentoulis & Thomassen (2013) and that of my own to contribute to the first type of contemporary survey, although we do so in different ways. Prentoulis explicitly aim to practice public philosophy in Tully’s sense (ibid., p. 169):
[W]e treat the protesters as political theorists rather than as objects of social reality. […] The aim is not to test whether the actions of and claims of the protesters correspond to this or that theoretical perspective. The aim is to let the protesters speak for themselves, and to treat the language as the language in which our analysis is cast.
With this aim in mind, they address the following questions (ibid., p. 166): What, if anything, do the ‘square’ protests and ‘occupy’ movements of 2011 bring to contemporary democratic theory? And how can we, as political theorists, do justice to it? Prentoulis et al. start off from the protest movements in Spain and Greece, and seek to find out how this can enrich democratic theory. I, by contrast, start off with an analysis of the limitations of mainstream NPTEI discourse, and explain how the expert ethos forecloses a potential fruitful engagement between demoicracy theorists and active citizens. By doing so, I hope to meet Prentoulis et al. halfway, so to speak.
The work of Claudia Schrag Sternberg (2013) and Luuk van Middelaar (2009) are examples of historical surveys on European politics, broadly conceived. The Struggle for EU
Legitimacy by Schrag Sternberg is a clear example of the first language-oriented type of
historical survey, focusing on the developments in the understanding of the concept of EU legitimacy and related notions, such as democracy and citizenship (pp. 8-9):
[M]y research aim is exploratory rather than explanatory. […] I investigate [the] discursive history [of the concept of EU legitimacy] for its own sake, in order to explore the ‘conditions of possibility’ for how certain understandings came to make sense to people at certain points when they did not before or in different contexts, and how some understandings lost their relative plausibility while others preserved it. The question underlying my analysis is essentially genealogical ‘what
happened there and then that allowed things to be like this?’.
Van Middelaar’s De passage naar Europa constitutes a historical survey that is more akin to the second, practice-oriented type. He tries to rewrite or redescribe the history of the
European project – or European construction, integration, cooperation (depending on one’s academic lens and/or political agenda) – in an alternative vocabulary. He decides to let go off the established theoretical categories, such as supranationalism and intergovernmentalism – because these are more likely to be co-opted by politicians. Unlike Schrag Sternberg, Van Middelaar is not only interested in the (language) game, but also in the players and the way they respond to game-changing events. As a consequence of this approach, he discovers a new sphere of European politics, which was obscured by established ways of thinking: the intermediate sphere, referring to the moments at which the EU member states respond collectively to certain events, but outside the legal-institutional framework of the treaties.26
The authority of the political theorist – command vs. connection
The last methodological feature that I would like to call attention to follows directly from analyses made in the previous two sections. It concerns the different types or models of authority the two pictures of the political theorist are predicated upon. On the standard meta picture, the political theorist is represented as an expert on his field of expertise, the ´things political´ (the territorial approach). Moreover, based on the presupposition of a categorical distinction between expert rationality and public reasoning, the political theorist is
ultimately only answerable to his fellow academics, not to the general public (the expert ethos). The rules of conduct among experts are presumably independently justifiable, i.e., independent from the practical context in which ideological dispute takes place. The most basic rule of expert rationality is that you submit to the “unforced force of the better
argument” (Laden 2012, p. 51). Although even this basic rule of rationality is contestable in
theory, i.e., through the activity of theorizing, it cannot be contested directly in practice. This
practical or performative incontestability makes political theory, on the standard picture, a hierarchically structured activity. The authority of a political theorist is determined by reference to his performance in the game that is structured by the rules of expert rationality. Insofar as the rules apply equally to everyone, we can speak of a relation of ‘mutual
26Let me note here already that this notion of the intermediate sphere is closely connected to the
concept of demoicracy as Nicolaïdis defines it: “a Union of peoples, understood both as states and as citizens, who govern together but not as one” (Nicolaïdis 2013, p. 351, emphasis added).
