IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/erp/reconx/p0002.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Democratizing the transnational polity: The European Union and the presuppositions of democracy

Author

Listed:
  • James Bohman

Abstract

After briefly considering the problems of political authority and democratic reform typical of formal transnational institutions, this paper offers a theory of democratization for transnational polities. Democratizing a polity such as the European Union requires two conditions to be realized across borders: the emergence of transnational publics that create social relationships based on mutually recognized communicative freedom and the institutionalization of new normative powers of citizens that realize freedom as nondomination. In light of these conditions, the republican dimension of democratization can be made explicit in a conception of a democratic minimum, in which democratization depends upon the effective capacity of citizens to initiate deliberation. Current theories of cosmopolitan and transnational democracy (either from above or from below) cannot elaborate sufficient institutional conditions that make democratization possible in a multilevel polity such as the EU.

Suggested Citation

  • James Bohman, 2007. "Democratizing the transnational polity: The European Union and the presuppositions of democracy," RECON Online Working Papers Series 2, RECON.
    • Handle: RePEc:erp:reconx:p0002
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.reconproject.eu/main.php/RECON_wp_0702.pdf?fileitem=5456958
    File Function: Full text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Christopher Lord, 2008. "Some indicators of the democratic performance of the European Union and how they might relate to the RECON models," RECON Online Working Papers Series 11, RECON.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:erp:reconx:p0002. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Marit Eldholm (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.reconproject.eu .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.