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THREAD 1/ One of the claims that sparked most controversy in my recent Jacobin piece is the notion that democracy requires a demos – a political community defined in cultural *not* ethnic terms – and that given the lack of a European demos, European democracy is not possible.
2/ Well this is what Joseph H. H. Weiler, Jean Monnet Chair at New York University Law School and Senior Fellow of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard – so not a right-wing nativist or an anti-European, we can assume – had to say about it:
3/ “Citizenship is not only about the politics of public authority. It is also about the social reality of peoplehood and the identity of the polity. Citizens constitute the demos of the polity – citizenship is frequently, though not necessarily, conflated with nationality”.
4/ “This, then, is the other, collective side, of the citizenship coin. Demos provides another way of expressing the link between citizenship and democracy. Democracy does not exist in a vacuum”.
5/ “[Democracy] is premised on the existence of a polity with members – the demos – by whom and for whom democratic discourse with its many variants takes place”.
6/ “The authority and legitimacy of a majority to compel a minority exists only within political boundaries defined by a demos. Simply put, if there is no demos, there can be no democracy”.
7/ “The nation, which is the modern expression of demos, constitutes the basis for the modern democratic state: the nation and its members constitute the polity for the purposes of accepting the discipline of democratic, majoritarian governance”.
8/ “Both descriptively and prescriptively (how it is and how it ought to be) a minority will/should accept the legitimacy of a majority decision because both majority and minority are part of the same demos, belong to the nation”.
9/ “That is an integral part of what rule-by-the-people, democracy, means on this reading. Thus, nationality constitutes the state (hence nation-state) which in turn constitutes its political boundary”.
10/ “The significance of the political boundary is not only to the older notion of political independence and territorial integrity, but also to the very democratic nature of the polity”.
11/ “A parliament is, on this view, an institution of democracy not only because it provides a mechanism for representation and majority voting, but because it represents the nation, the demos from which derive the authority and legitimacy of its decisions”.
12/ “Turning to Europe, it is argued as a matter of empirical observation that there is no European demos – not a people not a nation. Neither the subjective element (the sense of shared collective identity and loyalty) nor the objective conditions which could produce these”.
13/ “The rigorous implication of this view would be that absent a demos, there cannot, by definition, be a democracy or democratization at the European level. This is not a semantic proposition”.
14/ “Since [a European demos does not exist], the EU and its institutions can have neither the authority nor the legitimacy of a demos-cratic state. On this view, a parliament without a demos is conceptually impossible, practically despotic”.
15/ “If the European Parliament is not the representative of a people, if the territorial boundaries of the EU do not correspond to its political boundaries, than the writ of such a parliament has only slightly more legitimacy than the writ of an emperor”. END
