'Representation' in Postnational European Context

Representation is a sophisticated and highly nuanced concept in both political practice and political theory. Centuries old, its tradition dates back to times before modern democratic theory. Yet nonetheless, every new era required a calibration of the question of representation to adjust it to institutional, social, and cultural-symbolic actualities. The contemporary, still hesitantly evolving debate on representation suffers from two deficits: first, it is solely focussed on nation states, which leads to an outdated perspective that disconnects this debate from the institutional and political ones in the developing postnational era of political regimes. Secondly, it is incapable of integrating earlier i.e. the ‘classical’ debates in its respective contexts, thus of embracing the latter’s prevailing one-sidedness and contextual perspectives. Where questions of repeated representation are subject to discussion, for instance, they are so merely in the context of a concurrent democracy with which it shares the political and geographical space. A misjudgement of the traditional prosperity of representation results and moves new perspectives out of the range of vision. In any case, both deficits (the “implicit nationalism” of the political perspective and the conceptual debate’s ahistorical nature) urgently need to be overcome through a conceptual change of representation. This also allows examining the political development in Europe — in all its institutional variability, procedural dynamic, asymmetry, and heterogeneity — with a renewed theoretical approach and altered concepts. The European Studies so far has no ambitious debate on the question of representation. The general and theoretical discussions linger in a ghetto that is the argument of the “democratic deficit”. Yet conceptual change in the sense of representation overcomes the institutional fixation of the democracy discussion: it considers the questions of real and symbolic representation as equally influential factors and applies them to the political structure.