Translating Republican Thinking into the European Context

The academic discourse on European integration has become quite obsessed with the language of democracy and legitimacy and, as a consequence, there has been a lot of ‘import-export’-activities from different lines of democratic theory to European integration theory. But what perspectives are chosen for and why? Deliberative democracy and liberal democratic theory have been especially popular and are the main forces that have shaped our critical understanding (e.g. the ‘democratic deficit’ or the missing public sphere) as well as the central reform proposals. On the other hand, republican thinking even if deeply embedded in our everyday understanding of democracy and a buzzword in modern political theory has rarely caught the attention of European Union scholars. In the paper I will analyze why there have been so few attempts to engage with the republican tradition and what conceptual tools this tradition might offer to create a different understanding of European integration.