The EU’s Pouvoir Constituant Mixte: A Systematic Justification

Who holds constituent power in the EU? For a long time, this was not even considered a relevant question in the political theory of European integration. Only recently, in the wake of the Eurozone crisis, interest in the notion of pouvoir constituant has been revived as the question of who should be entitled to determine the future course of the European polity has become pressing. In light of the executive-centred mode of crisis ‘management’ as well as the debates about a potential ‘Brexit’, differentiated integration, austerity politics and increasing social inequality, public intellectuals advance the view that the EU is not a polity that belongs to the governments (and especially not to the executives of the economically strong member states) but a polity of the European citizens, who they call on to reclaim it. The campaign ‘DiEM 25’, which aims for a European constituent assembly that is to put the EU on a new constitutional basis, is only the most recent expression of this development. In political theory, the EU’s politicization is mirrored in the emergence of a number of competing ideas of its constituent power. Two positions figure most prominently in this emerging debate. While accounts of ‘regional cosmopolitanism’ assume that the EU’s constituent subject is formed by a cross-border demos of European citizens, advocates of ‘demoi-cracy’ insist that the EU needs to base its legitimacy in the political communities of the member states. However, while the cosmopolitan account too easily brushes aside the continuing importance of democratic peoples within the European polity, the demoi-cratic position does not adequately account for the EU’s supranational elements. In this paper, I defend a view that combines these approaches. According to the notion of pouvoir constituant mixte, the adequate conception of the EU’s constituent subject is a combination of the community of European citizens on the one hand and the communities of state citizens on the other.