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Patricia Mindus
I am Professor in Practical Philosophy at Uppsala University. I have been visiting or affiliated researcher at several universities, including the University of Turin, LUISS Guido Carli, EUI, and more.
Richard Bellamy: Taking Back Control: Why National Democracy Needs the EU, and the EU Needs National Democracy
Richard Bellamy, Professor of Political Science, UCL and Director of the Max Weber Programme, EUI. Visiting Professor at the University of Exeter. Abstract The muted popular support for, and certain faiI dispute this analysis. I argue that the EU’s role consists of supporting the democratic institutions of the member states, not least by enabling them to regulate their mutual interactions in non-dominating ways. From this perspective, the standard solution to the EU’s democratic deficit would create a domestic democratic deficit within each of the member states, one I contend democracy at the EU level would be unable to compensate for. Indeed, the current rise in Euro scepticism can be regarded as a product of this situation. By contrast, I suggest we conceive the EU as an association of democratic states, the decisions of which are under their joint and equal control. Drawing on the book, the talk will cover why such an arrangement is necessary, the norms that govern it, and the institutional framework required for it to work effectively and efficiently as well as equitably.
Rainer Bauböck: Globalization, new technologies and the future of democratic citizenship
Professor of Social and Political Theory, European University Institute. ABSTRACT Liberal democratic citizenship has been shaped by the legacies of Athens (democracy) and Rome (legal rights) but operate between individuals and states. In a Westphalian world, citizenship has both instrumental and identity value. Enhanced opportunities and interests in mobility rights strengthen instrumental interests in multiple citizenship among immigrants, among populations in less developed countries, and among wealthy elites. The latter two trends potentially undermine a genuine link norm and, if they prevail, might replace the Westphalian allocation of citizenship with a global market. New digital technologies create a second challenge to Westphalian citizenship. As has argued, digital identities could provide a global legal persona for all human beings independently of their nationality, and blockchain technologies could enable the formation of non-territorial political communities providing governance services to their members independently of states. Both the instrumental uses of citizenship for geographic mobility and technologies that create substitutes for territorial citizenship are not merely relevant as current trends. They are also advocated and defended normatively as responses to the global injustice of the birthright lottery. I will challenge this idea and argue that liberal democracies should not be conceived as voluntary associations whose membership is freely chosen, but as communities of destiny among people who have been thrown together by history and their circumstances of life. How these foundations of democratic community can be maintained in the context of rising mobility and the digital revolution remains an open question.
