European Journal of Political Theory, Volume 21, Issue 1, Page 178-186, January 2022. Few debates in political theory are challenged as much by the constant change of their empirical subject as those about democracy in the European Union. With A Republican Europe of States, Richard Bellamy responds to the EU’s post-Lisbon era, which has been characterized by the euro crisis, conflicts over migration, the rise of Euroscepticism and Brexit. Keeping an eye on these contextual conditions and the related legal and (...) political transformations, he has developed a general theory of international democracy aimed at securing non-domination between peoples and between citizens and their representatives at the international level, and elaborated its implications for the EU. The result is a distinctive version of demoi-cracy, whose firm centring on the nation-state as the natural locus of democracy is likely to be controversially discussed. In this article, I raise some critical considerations regarding the design of demoi-cratic institutions, the adequate understanding of EU citizenship and the normative credentials of differentiated integration. (shrink)

Politicians around the globe wrangle about how to deal with trade imbalances. In the Eurozone, members running a trade deficit accuse members running a surplus of forcing them into deficit. Yet pol...

When the first Conte government began converting the Five Star Movement and Lega’s manifestos into expenditure items for the 2019 budget law, it quickly became obvious that Italy’s macroeconomic po...

Contemporary egalitarian political philosophy has become increasingly interested in the ways the international order may protect or undermine states’ capacities to deliver domestic egalitarianism. This paper draws on Miriam Ronzoni’s helpful discussion of the various different ways in which both philosophical and practical commitments can move beyond a contrast between a world of closed societies and a cosmopolis to explore how successful the theorizing prompted by that interest has been. Problems scholars like Peter Mair and Wolfgang Streeck have suggested the (...) EU faces also suggest that there are difficulties views like Ronzoni’s have to overcome to usefully orient us towards the threats posed by the interactions between domestic and international politics. These problems can be usefully framed by what the intellectual historian István Hont called jealousy of trade and used to understand debates between members of what is commonly understood as the republican tradition, especially in the eighteenth century. Jealousy of trade revolves around the way that international economic competition intensifies international political competition, requiring the restructuring of domestic politics to ensure the survival of the state, which then further intensifies international economic competition. The ways of navigating and controlling the increasing costs of an increasingly belligerent international order eighteenth century political theorists found help illustrate the challenges contemporary internationalising egalitarians face. Isaac Nakhimovsky’s work on Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s closed commercial state is, I argue, specially useful given the similarity of some of Fichte’s commitments to those of contemporary internationalising egalitarians. (shrink)

The democratic criteria for representation in the European Union are complex since its representation involves several delegation mechanisms and institutions. This paper develops institutional design principles for the representation of peoples and individuals and suggests reform options of the European Union on the basis of the theory of multilateral democracy. In particular, it addresses how the equality of individuals can be realised in EU representation while guaranteeing the mutual recognition of peoples. Unlike strict intergovernmental institutions, the EU requires an additional (...) and independent legislative chamber in which individuals are directly represented. However, strict equality of individuals cannot be the guiding principle for this chamber. In order to avoid the overruling of peoples through supranational majorities, it is necessary to bind the chamber's composition by a principle of degressive proportionality. The representation of peoples, on the other hand, needs to be connected to their domestic democratic institutions. (shrink)