An "Ever More Differentiated“ European Union? Reconstructing Arendt, Habermas, and the Ideational Foundations of Differentiated European Integration

Models of differentiated integration have (re)appeared time and again in political, normative, public and theoretical debates about European integration. The public and scholarly resonance of these discussions and their underlying models have a long record in the course of the history of European integration since the early post-War years—indeed, they can be traced back, indeed, to the intellectual origins of European democracy even well before the end of World War II. However, there significance has fluctuated alongside European integration histroy, and differentiated integration models tend to become more popular in times of integration stagnation and crisis, which incentivize the search for alternatives. The question of democratic legitimacy has become more pressing in the context of rising integration fatigue among relevant segments of the European electorates. In light of this contemporary European horizon, this paper focuses on political theory questions and respective normatively grounded models related to the concept of differentiated integration and the reconfigured democratic legitimacy problem in today’s Europe. It is driven by three major research questions: What normative models plausibly justify differentiated integration in the history of political ideas? What theoretical and normative problems can we detect in existing models of differentiated integration? And how can available models be reconstructed in light of current challenges in order to meet requirements of both democratic legitimacy and post-national cooperation increasing inner-European divisions, and thus undermining the European project altogether? The paper turns, first, to both likely and unlikely candidates for theorizing and justifying European post-national democracy and governance: Hannah Arendt and Jürgen Habermas. At different junctures of their writings, they propose, implicitly or explicitly, models of differentiated integration. Reconstructing Arendt’s early arguments about the normative and political origins of European democracy as well as her agent-centered notions of democratic participation and will-formation opens the conceptual space for a variety of models of differentiated European integration. In partial contrast but also specifying Arendt’s arguments, in recent years Habermas, who is like Arendt also an ardent supporter of the idea of European post- and supranational democracy, has theoretically experimented with and provides justification for differentiated dual track systems of European integration. In so doing, he seeks to better mediate, on the one hand, the normative requirements and procedural principles of deliberative democracy, which both presuppose and reinforce certain politico-cultural conditions of public will-formation and integration, with, on the other hand, post-national liberal-universalistic norms within the European Union. Such dual track is designed to “thicken” democratic legitimacy among core member states while proceeding with vertical political integration. In the second part of the paper, potential contradictions, problems and limitations will be discussed. Models of differentiated integration may increase democratic legitimacy and make citizens’ support among core members more robust, yet risk to increase divisions within Europe (two classes of states) and may endanger European integration as a whole. On this basis, in a third step the paper will reconstruct older models of differentiated European integration, reflecting systematically on hiterto marginalized questions of inclusion/exclusion, deliberative democracy, and conditions of democratic legitimacy.