The Third Democratic Transformation: From European to Planetary Politics

Abstract

This contribution to the symposium explores one aspect of the arrival of planetary politics under the broad label of the third democratic transformation, a transformation unfolding now at all levels of governance, from the local to the global through the regional, in spite of the anti-democratic forces at play around the world. This article starts by exploring the new frontier of normative power Europe in a post-colonial key, arguing that the European Union can serve as a laboratory for such a democratic transformation, around four interrogations related to claims of decentring, doubting, experimenting and decolonising. It then offers a descriptive-normative typology of the core attributes of the third democratic transformation observable in numerous signs and practices both in Europe and around the world through a sixfold evolution, namely, trans-temporal, transnational, trans-modal, trans-local, trans-scalar and, across all these, translational. It concludes on the conditions of possibility for this transformation.