Abstract
Principal theories about European democracy agree that there is no European demos. In my opinion, the “no demos theory” has an excessively demanding concept of demos, utopian for federalists and static for intergovernmentalists. In both cases, it is so categorical that it does not correspond to the history from which political communities have arisen, nor to how a sense of belonging is truly established, nor to the limits on the expectations we can reasonably hold for Europe. The demos could be more practical and contingent, more performative and vulnerable. Additionally, what if the demoi who “truly exist” were not such a solid group or did not need to be so? In that case, it may even be that European integration represents an opportunity to articulate unity and diversity in a manner that is more respectful of its internal plurality.
“The very notions we employ in thinking and talking of political matters have gradually become deceptive and inconvenient. The word ‘people,’ for instance, had an exact meaning when it was possible to gather all the citizens of a town together, round a hillock in a public square. But the increase in numbers, the transition from the order of thousands to millions, has made the word ‘people’ a monstrous term whose sense depends on the sentence into which it enters”
(Valéry 1996 [1931], 15–16).
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Innerarity, D. (2018). Who Are We? A Democracy Without Demos. In: Democracy in Europe. The Theories, Concepts and Practices of Democracy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72197-2_5
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