Constituent Power in the European Union: A Critique of Demoi-Cracy

In the course of the recent crises of European integration, the politicization of the EU has increased. Not only do Eurosceptic forces seek to ‘take back control’, as in the case of Brexit or opposition to austerity, but also pro-European citizens claim to have been illegitimately excluded from decisions about the EU. Protest movements challenge the role of the states as the ‘masters of the treaties’. Drawing on vocabulary of popular sovereignty and self-government, they suggest that ‘the people’ should decide on the EU’s structure and competences. In this paper, I examine whether the public narrative of ‘We, the peoples of Europe’, which purports that the EU should be shaped through decisions of a pouvoir constituant composed of the political communities of the member states, articulates a notion of constituent power that can be defended in systematic terms. To this end, I draw on the political theory of demoi-cracy, according to which the EU is a political system meant to enable a number of separate peoples to engage in democratic decision-making on issues of common concern without having to give up their status as sovereign entities. Addressing questions of allocation, conceptualization, and procedural design, I argue that while the idea of demoi-cratic constituent power has a certain intuitive appeal and comparative advantages over some of its theoretical competitors, it ultimately represents a model of national constituent power inadequate for a supranational polity. In particular, it neglects that European integration has brought about politically significant connections between EU citizens, rests on the problematic assumption that the authority of domestic constituent powers simply extends to the EU level, and fails to escape the prevailing top-down logic of decision-making.