{"title":"Unboxing the Conference on the Future of Europe and its democratic raison d'être","authors":"Alberto Alemanno","doi":"10.1111/eulj.12413","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article situates the Conference on the Future of Europe within past attempts at reforming the Union by unpacking its democratic raison d'être and its experimental participatory architecture. After rehearsing the standard account of its genesis, the article frames the Conference as an attempt at creating a new, yet temporary, transnational opportunity structure for participatory deliberation capable of compensating for the lack of a genuine, pan-EU political and media space. While it would be naïve political solutionism to expect that this ad hoc, top-down initiative could magically address the EU democratic malaise, the Conference's embedded experimentalism offers a promising first step towards the realisation of the legitimacy-enhancing potential of participation. Ultimately, the launch of the Conference marks the first explicit admission that citizens—not the Member States or the EU institutions—are the EU's ultimate source of authority and legitimacy. Once Europe's democratic genie is out of the bottle, it will be difficult to put it back in.</p>","PeriodicalId":47166,"journal":{"name":"European Law Journal","volume":"26 5-6","pages":"484-508"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4000,"publicationDate":"2022-01-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"4","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"European Law Journal","FirstCategoryId":"90","ListUrlMain":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eulj.12413","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"LAW","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 4
Abstract
This article situates the Conference on the Future of Europe within past attempts at reforming the Union by unpacking its democratic raison d'être and its experimental participatory architecture. After rehearsing the standard account of its genesis, the article frames the Conference as an attempt at creating a new, yet temporary, transnational opportunity structure for participatory deliberation capable of compensating for the lack of a genuine, pan-EU political and media space. While it would be naïve political solutionism to expect that this ad hoc, top-down initiative could magically address the EU democratic malaise, the Conference's embedded experimentalism offers a promising first step towards the realisation of the legitimacy-enhancing potential of participation. Ultimately, the launch of the Conference marks the first explicit admission that citizens—not the Member States or the EU institutions—are the EU's ultimate source of authority and legitimacy. Once Europe's democratic genie is out of the bottle, it will be difficult to put it back in.
期刊介绍：
The European Law Journal represents an authoritative new approach to the study of European Law, developed specifically to express and develop the study and understanding of European law in its social, cultural, political and economic context. It has a highly reputed board of editors. The journal fills a major gap in the current literature on all issues of European law, and is essential reading for anyone studying or practising EU law and its diverse impact on the environment, national legal systems, local government, economic organizations, and European citizens. As well as focusing on the European Union, the journal also examines the national legal systems of countries in Western, Central and Eastern Europe and relations between Europe and other parts of the world, particularly the United States, Japan, China, India, Mercosur and developing countries. The journal is published in English but is dedicated to publishing native language articles and has a dedicated translation fund available for this purpose. It is a refereed journal.
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