Republicanism, EU democracy and differentiated (dis-)integration
| Date | 01 January 2022 |
| Published date | 01 January 2022 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1474885119900324 |
| Subject Matter | Review Articles |
Review Article EJPT
Republicanism,
EU democracy and
differentiated
(dis-)integration
Markus Patberg
University of Hamburg, Germany
Richard Bellamy, A Republican Europe of States: Cosmopolitanism,
Intergovernmentalism and Democracy in the EU, Cambridge University Press:
Cambridge, 2019; 260 pp. £22.99, ISBN: 9781107678125, pbk.
Abstract
Few debates in political theory are challenged as much by the constant change of their
empirical subject as those about democracy in the European Union (EU). With A
Republican Europe of States, Richard Bellamy responds to the EU’s post-Lisbon era,
which has been characterized by the euro crisis, conflicts over migration, the rise of
Euroscepticism and Brexit. Keeping an eye on these contextual conditions and the
related legal and political transformations, he has developed a general theory of inter-
national democracy aimed at securing non-domination between peoples and between
citizens and their representatives at the international level, and elaborated its implica-
tions for the EU. The result is a distinctive version of demoi-cracy, whose firm centring
on the nation-state as the natural locus of democracy is likely to be controversially
discussed. In this article, I raise some critical considerations regarding the design of
demoi-cratic institutions, the adequate understanding of EU citizenship and the nor-
mative credentials of differentiated (dis-)integration.
Keywords
Demoi-cracy, differentiated integration, disintegration, European Union, intergovernmentalism
Corresponding author:
Markus Patberg, University of Hamburg, Allende-Platz 1, 20146 Hamburg, Germany.
Email: markus.patberg@uni-hamburg.de
European Journal of Political Theory
!The Author(s) 2020
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/1474885119900324
journals.sagepub.com/home/ept
2022, Vol. 21(1) 178–186
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