From Imperial Legacies to Participatory Pluralism: Hannah Arendt and John Dewey for Europe’s Future

Taking its argumentative departure from John Dewey’s writings on international law, his critique of imperialism, and his guarded hopes for the League of Nations, as well as from Hannah Arendt’s proposals for a federated post-war Europe, her analysis of statelessness and the “right to have rights,” and her reflections on American foreign policy, my paper interpretively reconstructs a joint program for Europe under internal strain and external pressure. It treats today’s European predicament as both constitutional and geopolitical, as rule-of-law backsliding and democratic deficits within member states intersect with disinformation, migration governance, and security dilemmas. Europe’s external action also remains shadowed by imperial legacies and dependencies that tempt the Union to manage its neighbors rather than to relate to them as political equals. My argument’s core claim is that Dewey’s democratic experimentalism and Arendt’s pluralist republicanism are mutually reinforcing and that a dialogue between these two conceptual perspectives is promising for productive theoretical work. Dewey understands democracy as a method that educates publics, as collectively shared problems become politically addressable when those persons affected can form a public, deliberate over shared consequences of politics, and revise policies in light of experience. His idea of transborder publics is therefore crucial for the EU, where many consequences – such as economic interdependence, mobility, and security risks, to name but only a few – cross state boundaries and demand cooperative problem-solving. On the other hand, Arendt complements this with an account of power as acting-in-concert, insisting that politics is sustained when people can freely appear to one another, initiate something new, and bind themselves through mutual promises rather than through domination. Her federal imagination shows how sovereignty can be dispersed through layered, federated institutional arrangements without dissolving politics into technocratic administration. The resulting framework, which I term Participatory Pluralism, yields three practically applicable normative mid-level principles for today, serving justificatory, diagnostic, critical, and communicative functions. (1) Layered federalism: According to this first principle, Europe should be empowered as a non-sovereign federation that institutionalizes council-like citizens’ assemblies at multiple levels and extends European civic membership to long-term residents, including refugees, so that participation and protection track lives lived in Europe and so that rightlessness is countered through durable inclusion. (2) Experimentalist foreign policy: Opaque, prestige-driven diplomacy should be replaced with reversible, reviewable commitments. Following this principle, crisis measures should be complemented with sunset clauses and mandatory public reason-giving, thereby treating external action as an educative public process. (3) Post-imperial solidarity: Finally, the EU’s external policy-action should be reoriented from paternal management to the equal co-creation of policies with its neighbors at eye level, including by linking mobility regimes to credible pathways of political membership. Read together, Dewey and Arendt offer not a strict policy-blueprint but a productive conceptual repertoire, which I show by argumentatively explicating how these commitments generate concrete effective responses to rule-of-law erosion, disinformation, migration governance, and security dilemmas without reproducing imperial habits. Europe’s future depends not on more centralized control, but on institutions that make plurality perceptible and democratic action learnable.