Suchergebnisse

Reviews The Unprincipled Society: New Demands and Old Politics, David Marquand (London: Jonathan Cape, 1988). Looks at this work on the current state of British politics written by a major political commentator and leading academic, who is also a former Labour MP and has a certain influence with the current leadership of the newly formed SLD. (JLN)

Hegel's defenders would appear to concede the liberals' accusation that his philosophy is implicitly conservative; the endorsement of existing social relations as the product of a benign, if unknowable, demiurge, the 'cunning of reason'. Contests these interpretations and shows how Hegel's theory completes rather than undermines many central liberal claims regarding the primacy of the individual in the social process. (JLN)

The crisis of the euro area has severely tested the political authority of the European Union (EU). The crisis raises questions of normative legitimacy both because the EU is a normative order and because the construction of economic and monetary union (EMU) rested upon a theory that stressed the normative value of the depoliticization of money. However, this theory neglected the normative logic of the two-level game implicit in EMU. It also neglected the need for an impartial and publically acceptable constitutional order to acknowledge reasonable disagreements. By contrast, we contend that any reconstruction of the EU's economic constitution has to pay attention to reconciling a European monetary order with the legitimacy of member state governance. The EU requires a two-level contract to meet this standard. Member states must treat each other as equals and be representative of and accountable to their citizens on an equitable basis. These criteria entail that the EU's political legitimacy requires a form of demoicracy that we call 'republican intergovernmentalism'. Only rules that could be acceptable as the product of a political constitution among the peoples of Europe can ultimately meet the required standards of political legitimacy. Such a political constitution could be brought about through empowering national parliaments in EU decision-making.

SHAPED BY A LARGELY INSTRUMENTAL ETHICS OF INTEGRATION, TODAY'S EUROPEAN UNION (EU) SITS UNEASILY BETWEEN A EURO-FEDERATION AND A UNION OF NATION STATES, MIRED IN A SUBSTANTIVE IF EASILY EXAGGERATED DEMOCRATIC DEFICIT. THIS HYBRIDITY NEED NOT BE AN INSURMOUNTABLE PROBLEM. INDEED, IT COULD BE AN ASSET. HOWEVER, TO REALIZE ITS POTENTIAL TO COMBINE THE PEOPLE'S SUB-STATE, STATE, AND TRANS-STATE ALLEGIANCES INVOLVES A NORMATIVE SHIFT IN THE UNIFICATION PROCESS. THE TRADITIONAL ELITE-DRIVEN DYNAMIC MUST BE COMPLEMENTED BY AN ETHICS OF PARTICIPATION THAT GRANTS A GREATER ROLE TO EU CITIZENS. A DELIBERATIVE PROCESS THROUGH WHICH CITIZENS COULD NEGOTIATE SOLUTIONS TO CONFLICTS WOULD HELP RECONCILE COMMUNITY-SPECIFIC DUTIES WITH A MORE COSMOPOLITAN REGARD FOR JUSTICE BEYOND BORDERS. A COSMOPOLITAN COMMUNITARIAN MODEL OF EUROPEAN CITIZENSHIP, DRAWING ON NEO-REPUBLICAN CONCEPTIONS OF FREEDOM AND GOVERNMENT, WOULD GIVE NORMATIVE COHERENCE AND LEGITIMACY TO THE EMERGENT MULTI-LEVEL EUROPEAN POLITY.

This is the final version. Available on open access from Wiley via the DOI in this record ; Constitutional pluralism (CP) and differentiated integration (DI) have been criticised as potentially legitimising democratic backsliding within the EU. Critics contend that effective measures require strengthening the legal authority of the Court of Justice of the European Union and the political authority of the European Commission. We dispute this criticism, which rests on a federal conception of the EU at odds with its confederal features. We argue that the value of democracy for the EU derives from pluralism between as well as within states, thereby justifying CP and DI. While both prove incompatible with democratic backsliding, they challenge the legitimacy of the strong assertions of federal authority some advocate to tackle it. Drawing on CP, we propose four criteria for EU action against backsliding regimes, and suggest processes and penalties that meet them. We liken the latter to 'value' DI, whereby backsliding states can be excluded from EU funding and voting rights.

This is the final version. Available on open access from Routledge via the DOI in this record ; Data Availability Statement: This article does not use original data. ; Differentiated integration (DI), whereby some MS opt out or are excluded from certain common EU policies for sovereignty or capacity reasons, may be thought to undermine the EU's functioning as what John Rawls called a fair scheme of cooperation, grounded in norms of impartiality and reciprocity. However, we argue that different forms of DI can be compatible with either fair cooperation between states on the model of Rawls' Law of Peoples or cooperation among citizens on the model of Rawls' two principles of domestic justice. Meanwhile, the EU has features of both, being an international Union of states and a supra- and trans-national Union of citizens. We defend the coherence of this combination and contend that DI can provide a justified mechanism for ensuring fairness between states remains compatible with fairness between citizens both within and across states. Indeed it offers a potential model for other forms of international cooperation. ; European Commission

How should we conceive of the relationship between European citizenship and national citizenship from a normative perspective? While the Treaties assert the supplementary nature of European citizenship vis-à-vis national citizenship, advocates of trans- and supra-national citizenship perspectives have agreed with the European Court of Justice that Union citizenship will ultimately supplant or subsume national citizenship. By contrast, we draw upon demoicratic and stakeholder citizenship theories to defend the primacy of national over European citizenship. Taking the cases of political and welfare rights, we argue that member states may have special duties to second-country nationals stemming from a European social contract, but that these duties must be balanced against the rights and duties of national citizens stemming from the national social contract.

It is increasingly recognised that meeting the obligations set out in the Paris Agreement on climate change will not be physically possible without deploying large-scale techniques for either removing greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere or reflecting sunlight away from the Earth. In this article we report on the findings of a scenarios method designed to interrogate how far these 'climate engineering' ideas may develop in the future and under what governance arrangements. Unlike previous studies in climate engineering foresight that have narrowly focussed on academic perspectives, a single climate engineering idea and a restricted range of issues, our approach sought to respond to theoretical imperatives for 'broadening out' and 'opening up' research methods applied to highly uncertain and ambiguous topics. We convened a one-day event with experts in climate change and climate engineering from across the sectors of government, industry, civil society and academia in the UK, with additional experts from Brazil, Germany and India. The participants were invited to develop scenarios for four climate engineering ideas: bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, direct air capture and storage, stratospheric aerosol injection and marine cloud brightening. Manifold challenges for future research were identified, placing the scenarios in sharp contrast with early portrayals of climate engineering research as threatening a 'slippery slope' of possible entrenchments, lock-ins and path dependencies that would inexorably lead to deployment. We suggest that the governance challenges for climate engineering should therefore today be thought of as less of a slippery slope than an 'uphill struggle' and that there is an increasingly apparent need for governance that responsibly incentivises, rather than constrains, research. We find that affecting market processes by introducing an effective global carbon price and direct government expenditure on research and development are incentives with broad potential applications to ...

At the heart of the growing politicization of the EU lies a concern with how European integration potentially undermines forms of communal self-government linked to established political identities. This concern originates not from the much discussed democratic deficit of EU institutions but from a 'democratic disconnect' between domestic democratic institutions and processes and the decisions made at the EU level by national executives and EU officials. Our contention is that enhancing the role of national parliaments in EU decision making offers a way to reconnect the integration process with the communal self-rule of the member states. We ground this argument in an account of the normative basis of the EU that we dub 'republican intergovernmentalism'. We argue that national parliaments offer a means for what we term the domestication and normalization of EU policymaking within the democratic processes of the member states. However, these effects will only occur if mainstream domestic parties employ these new parliamentary powers to develop competing EU policies that reflect their core ideological positions and those of their voters. We propose the introduction of a Parliamentary Legislative Initiative as a mechanism to provide an incentive for them to do so.

Representation and democracy are not always complementary. Sometimes the one undermines the other. Too much democracy can create a representation deficit, as occurs when majorities oppress or neglect minorities. However, the opposite can also arise. The over representation of different groups can undermine the processes whereby representatives are authorised by and accountable to those they are supposed to serve. The EU offers multiple channels of representation. In some respects, this multiplicity reflects the diversity of the peoples, individuals and interests represented within the EU. Yet in overcoming a potential representation deficit in EU policy-making, this arrangement leads to a representation surplus and creates a democratic deficit.