Zur Verfassung Europas—Ein Essay. By Jürgen Habermas. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2011. 140 pp. Pb. €14.00.

• Author: Claudio Franzius
• Date: 01 November 2012
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/eulj.12000
• Published date: 01 November 2012

BOOK REVIEWS

Zur Verfassung Europas—Ein Essay.By Jürgen Habermas. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2011.

140 pp. Pb. €14.00.

It is largely unquestioned that the way out of the euro crisis is connected to preser-

vation of democracy. However, the question whether the euro rescue operations will

be a contributing factor moderating the imbalance between imperatives of the finan-

cial markets and the political ability to regulate has still remained open. While the

project of a shared economic government will hardly come without its parliamentari-

sation, the direct election of a president of the EU would be ‘nothing more than a fig

leaf for the technocratic self-empowerment of a core European council’ whose infor-

mal decisions are circumventing the Treaties. That is what Jürgen Habermas states in

his latest famous essay on Europe’s constitution. He opposes the so-called post-

democratic executive federalism to the vision of a transnational democracy ‘in Light

of a Constitutionalization of International Law’ (39–96).

Today, he defiantly states that Europe is even more a constitutional project of

democratic juridification. His message reads that the transnationalisation of popular

sovereignty does not have to be attended by lowering the level of legitimation.

Interesting are the following reasons: based on the European law specialists’ hardly

surprising assumption that the components of democracy are not limited to state but

enter into a new configuration at the European level, this reconfiguration implies no

loss of legitimation because the citizens of Europe have good reasons for wanting

their respective nation states to continue performing their constitutional role as guar-

antors of law and freedom. The ‘shared sovereignty’ of the union citizens and the

European peoples, however, would have to be put into a consequential shared legis-

lative competence and a symmetric accountability of the commission towards the

council and the Parliament at institutional level. With this reconstruction, the civilis-

ing role of the European unification would become a role model for the cosmopolitan

order. His main argument is that facing the limits of national decision-making capa-

bilities, the requirement to extend political decision-making capabilities beyond

national borders results from the normative meaning of democracy itself (50). This is

illustrated in five points:

1. Democracy, understood as both interest-aggregating and effective self-

influencing of a politically organised civil society, calls for a corresponding

scope for the political shaping of living conditions to enable a cooperative

influence on their social condition of existence. In this sense, there is a con-

ceptual connection between popular sovereignty and state sovereignty. Demo-

cratically constituted states recover their problem-solving capacities by

establishing international organisations involving intergovernmental govern-

ance while paying for it by lowering the level of legitimation. In opposition

to a widely held belief, this cannot be compensated by democratically elect-

ing governments, which delegate their representative to international organi-

sations (on this thesis of compensation, see J. v. Achenbach in Kirste et al.,

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European Law Journal, Vol. 18, No. 6, November 2012, pp. 887–894.

© 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK

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