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The Nascent Political Philosophy of the European Polity[Note 1. Versions of this argument were presented at the University ...]
Author(s) -
Friese Heidrun,
Wagner Peter
Publication year - 2002
Publication title -
journal of political philosophy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.938
H-Index - 66
eISSN - 1467-9760
pISSN - 0963-8016
DOI - 10.1111/1467-9760.00156
Subject(s) - polity , politics , citation , political science , library science , classics , history , law , computer science
VER the past decade, that is, since the signing of the Maastricht Treaty, emphasis in the analysis of the European Union has shifted from understanding the process of European integration towards exploration of the specific features of the emerging European polity. 1 In terms of scholarly approaches, this shift has entailed a move from the field of international relations, with its focus on intergovernmentalism, towards institutional analysis, policy analysis and political theory, thus expressing the by now largely consensual view that the European Union (EU) can be analyzed as a polity in its own right, certainly a very complex one and possibly even one of an entirely new kind, but no longer merely a set of treaties between sovereign states. Within this rapidly increasing literature, questions of political theory have acquired salience, not least as a consequence of the widely debated theorem of the ‘democratic deficit’ of the European Union, that is, as an issue of normative political theory. 2 However, the increased awareness that the available register for conceptualizing polities by means of political theory and philosophy is largely inadequate for understanding the emerging European polity has hardly yet led to a full exploration of the two central questions that, in our view, need to be explicitly addressed: What is the contribution that political theory and philosophy have to make in understanding the European Union, and— possibly—in investigating the normative underpinning for that specific polity? And, inversely, what is the challenge for political theory and philosophy that the creation of a novel kind of polity such as the European Union entails? Most of the discussion in what follows will be devoted to the first of these questions. But since that discussion will be based on our own view about the answer to the second question, we need to give that answer, at least in broad terms. The creation of a