To many, the rejections of the Constitutional Treaty by Dutch and French voters in 2005 came as a shock. However, given the many tensions and the many unresolved issues it was quite unsurprising. The challenges facing the Constitutional debate go to the core of the European integration process as they have to do with the terms on which to establish a post-national political order. This book deals with four themes which make up the main sources of the ‘constitutional crisis’: The problem of the rule of law in a context of governance beyond the nation state The problem of the social deficit of the Union The problem of identity and collective memories The problem of institutionalizing post-national democracy. These themes constitute the unfinished agenda of the European integration process. Law, Democracy and Solidarity in a Post-national Union is based on the efforts of a collection of top scholars in the fields of Law, Political Science, Sociology and Economics, and will appeal to students and scholars of political science, the European Union and European studies.

The widening and deepening of the European Union have brought to the fore the question of democracy at the European level. The system of domination already in place at the European level requires and aspires to direct legitimation - from the citizens themselves and not merely indirect, derived from the Member Nation States. Such can only be achieved by making the EU into a democratic polity. But can democracy be disassociated from its putative nation-state foundation? A revised concept of democratic legitimacy based on discourse theory is developed. It is argued that post-national democracy requires a constitution but not necessarily a state. The Union amounts to less than a state but more than an international organisation and a system of transnational governance. In the political theory of the multilevel constellation that makes up the EU, it is conceived of as a regional subset of an emerging cosmopolitan order. The EU is a state-less government. As it is not premised on group identity, it is able to accommodate a high measure of variance with regard to territory and function. The book analyzes the reforms undertaken to bring the EU 'closer to the citizens'. It documents elements of democratization and reduction of arbitrary power. However, democracy requires that the citizens can approve or reject the laws they are subjected to. Since the institutional as well as the civic conditions under which a public justification process would be deemed legitimate are not in place, European post-national democracy remains an unaccomplished mission.

The “imagined community” of the nation,which served as the affective basis for the post-French Revolution social contract, as well as its institutional counter-part, the welfare state, are currently under great stress as states lose control over what once was referred to as the “national economy” In this book a number of authors – historians, legal scholars, political theorists – consider the fate of national democracy in the age of globalization. In particular, the authors ask whether the order of European nation-states, with its emphasis on substantive democracy, is now, in the guise of the European Union, giving way to a more loosely constructed, often federalized system of procedural republics (partly constructed in the image of the United States). Is national parliamentary democracy being replaced by a politico-legal culture, where citizen action increasingly takes place in a transnational legal domain at the expense of traditional (and national) party politics? Is the notion of a nationally-bound citizen in the process of being superceded by a cosmopolitan legal subject?

This book examines the democratic legitimacy of the European Union (EU) and evaluates the democratic credentials of the EU’s main decision-making procedure. It finds that though there is potential for democratic decision-making in the EU, the actual process is dominated by technocrats and secret meetings. The book assesses and discusses the conditions for democratic input in decision-making with five empirical chapters each addressing the ordinary legislative procedure from different dimensions: democratic deliberative forums, inclusion, openness, power neutralising mechanisms and decision-making capacity. The analytical framework provides for an in-depth assessment of the ordinary legislative procedure’s potential democratic qualities and examines whether it fulfils democratic criteria, how the procedure works in practice and whether it has the necessary democratic clout. The author provides both a theoretical discussion and an empirical assessment of what role the principle of democracy could play in the EU. Filling a gap in EU legislative studies and contributing to the debate on the European democratic deficit, Democratic Decision-making in the EU will be of interest to students and scholars of European Union politics, legislative studies and deliberative democracy.

Transconstitutionalism is a concept used to describe what happens to constitutional law when it is emancipated from the state, in which can be found the origins of constitutional law. Transconstitutionalism does not exist because a multitude of new constitutions have appeared, but because other legal orders are now implicated in resolving basic constitutional problems. A transconstitutional problem entails a constitutional issue whose solution may involve national, international, supranational and transnational courts or arbitral tribunals, as well as native local legal institutions. Transconstitutionalism does not take any single legal order or type of order as a starting-point or ultima ratio. It rejects both nation-statism and internationalism, supranationalism, transnationalism and localism as privileged spaces for solving constitutional problems. The transconstitutional model avoids the dilemma of 'monism versus pluralism'. From the standpoint of transconstitutionalism, a plurality of legal orders entails a complementary and conflicting relationship between identity and alterity: constitutional identity is rearticulated on the basis of alterity. Rather than seeking a 'Herculean Constitution', transconstitutionalism tackles the many-headed Hydra of constitutionalism, always looking for the blind spot in one legal system and reflecting it back against the many others found in the world's legal orders.

This book develops the law of political economy as a new field of scholarly enquiry. Bringing together an exceptional group of scholars, it provides a novel conceptual framework for studying the role of law and legal instruments in political economy contexts, with a focus on historical transformations and central challenges in both European and global contexts. Its chapters reconstruct how the law of political economy plays out in diverse but central fields, ranging from competition and consumer protection law to labour and environmental law, giving a comprehensive overview of the central challenges of the law of political economy. It also provides a sophisticated and multifaceted framework for further enquires while outlining the contours of new law of political economy.