BETWEEN GOVERNING AND GOVERNANCE. ON THE EMERGENCE, FUNCTION AND FORM OF EUROPE'S POST‐NATIONAL CONSTELLATION by POUL F. KJAER
| Author | CHRIS THORNHILL |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6478.2010.00528.x |
| Published date | 01 December 2010 |
| Date | 01 December 2010 |
BETWEEN GOVERNING AND GOVERNANCE. ON THE EMERGENCE,
FUNCTION AND FORM OF EUROPE'S POST-NATIONAL
CONSTELLATION by POUL F. KJAER
(Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2010, 194 + xviii pp., £50.00)
Research on the EU as a distinctive polity, possessing a distinctive con-
stitutional apparatus and distinctive sources of legitimacy, is clearly a very
crowded field, and accounts of the legitimating structures and problems
underlying the EU as a post-national and post-sovereign polity now incor-
porate a number of outlooks. Indeed, in recent years most disciplines in the
social sciences have habitually strained and extended their explanatory
resources in the attempt to comprehend the pattern of statehood emerging,
under conditions notionally tied to a wider process of global political and
economic transformation, within and above the member states of the EU. In
political science, conventionally, the approach to the EU has been largely
functional or rationalist, implicitly based on analysis of cost-benefit calcula-
tions undertaken by actors in single states. In sociology, the focus has been
widely placed upon critical questions of democratic weakness in the EU:
sociological theorists generally, in the wake of Habermas and Touraine, aim
to correct the absence of a conjoined demos in the EU by envisioning
alternative sites of legitimating democratic foundation in a new multi-
levelled polity. More recently, though, more specifically legal-sociological
research has also brought forth a number of perspectives on the political/
constitutional structure of the EU. Increasingly, in fact, much of the finest
work on new governmental systems is conducted by sociologists of public,
private, and international law, and legal sociology has gradually assumed a
position in the forefront of structural analysis of European statehood and its
transformation.
For the work under review, the writings of Christian Joerges, Karl-Heinz
Ladeur, and Gunther Teubner have the most immediate importance in this
respect. Joerges has proposed a model of `deliberative supranationalism'
which explains the EU as a polity deriving form and legitimacy from ver-
tical, horizontal, and diagonal conflicts of law occurring between different
dimensions of the multilevel European legal system. Ladeur's work revolves
around the concept of the network state. In this theory, he argues that the
free-standing, sovereign, and politically condensed legislative and executive
institutions of the states of classical modernity have been supplanted by a
model of statehood formed around multi-levelled networks, in which
political power is produced and exercised in heterarchical sites of decision-
making authority, and in which the use of power is exempt from single/
volitional acts of steering: the EU stands in the vanguard of this
developmental tendency. Less centrally focused on the EU, yet still of far-
reaching influence in this respect, then, Teubner has recently developed a
theory which (amongst much else) accounts for the position and status of the
EU by explaining legal hybridity as a defining feature of transnational or
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ß2010 The Author. Journal of Law and Society ß2010 Cardiff University Law School
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