Can Disintegration Be Democratic? The European Union Between Legitimate Change and Regression

Abstract

While the emerging debate about the disintegration of the European Union focuses on descriptive and explanatory questions, this article approaches the phenomenon from the perspective of democratic theory. Building on a concept of disintegration as a form of constitutional politics that includes various possibilities of dismantling supranational polities, I argue that disintegration gives rise to a democratic puzzle. While it must be possible, for democratic reasons, to partially or entirely reverse European integration, any such step threatens the European Union’s democratic achievements. Disintegration seems to be caught between legitimate change and regression. To address this democratic puzzle, I examine to what extent European integration has produced democracy-related ‘ratchet effects’ that limit the scope for legitimate reversal. This analysis leads to three principles of legitimate disintegration that can be applied to any supranational polity and have important implications for the post-Brexit relations between the United Kingdom and the European Union.

Keywords

disintegration European Union Brexit democracy legitimacy

Introduction

Brexit has amplified the debate about the disintegration of the European Union (EU), which has been burgeoning since the euro crisis. So far, the literature focuses on empirical aspects and asks whether theories of European integration can also explain disintegration or perhaps even predict under what conditions it is likely to occur (Schmitter and Lefkofridi, 2016; Vollaard, 2018; Webber, 2014). However, disintegration also gives rise to normative problems, as the controversies around Brexit demonstrate. Was the composition of the electorate for the referendum adequate? Is it legitimate to oppose the result? Does it constitute a democratic problem that some parts of the United Kingdom voted to remain? What status should be granted to EU citizens resident in the United Kingdom and UK citizens living in other member states after the separation (Bellamy, 2019a; Morgan, 2016; Shaw, 2017; Weale, 2017)? Behind these questions looms a challenge for political theory. We are used to asking: What justifies the existence of public authority? We are not used to asking: How should we proceed if we want to dissolve it? Our research agendas have traditionally focused on how public authority can be established in a legitimate way and how it should be structured. Brexit, by contrast, aims at a revocation of political power. In an unprecedented move, a member state seeks to divest the EU of the competence to subject it to binding decisions.

While current debates focus on Brexit, disintegration does not necessarily take the form of EU withdrawal – let alone dissolution – but can also consist in partial reversals of European integration, for example, when single countries negotiate exemptions from existing treaty obligations, or when all member states decide to re-nationalize particular competences. In this article, I examine the legitimacy of such decisions from a normative point of view and ask: Can disintegration be democratic? I argue that disintegration as such is neither democratic nor undemocratic. Rather, it gives rise to a democratic puzzle because the possibility of disintegration is both a requirement of political autonomy and a threat to it. While constitutional orders should be open to democratic change, which means that there must be the option of partially or entirely reversing European integration, disintegration appears problematic to the extent that it undoes democratic achievements, for example, by undermining citizens’ capacities of self-government with regard to cross-border problems. We need a theoretical account that clarifies under what conditions it is legitimate to (partially) reverse European integration. To make a first step in this direction, I invoke Jürgen Habermas’s method of rational reconstruction and examine the presuppositions of destituent power in the EU – that is, of constituent power invoked for the purpose of dismantling a supranational polity. This analysis focuses on democracy-related ‘ratchet effects’ of European integration and results in three principles of legitimate disintegration.

The article is structured as follows. In a first step, I engage with the existing literature on disintegration and develop a conception that captures those elements that are relevant for the normative problem that I seek to address. To the extent that disintegration serves to reorganize public authority, it can be understood as a form of constitutional politics. In such cases, the member states change the treaties to reduce the EU’s power to make collectively binding decisions. In a second step, I argue that disintegration is ambivalent in terms of political autonomy. For democratic reasons, it must be possible to reverse European integration, in part or entirely, and such decisions can reflect learning processes. However, disintegration always carries the risk of undermining the EU’s democratic achievements, in which case the respective decisions appear problematic. Disintegration seems to be caught between legitimate change and regression. In a third step, I consider what method and theoretical framework could allow us to address this democratic puzzle. I argue that a rational reconstruction of destituent power in the EU is a promising strategy. Through such an analysis, I formulate three principles of legitimate disintegration: the EU-internal irrevocability of the political rights of EU citizens, the restorability of the status of former EU citizens and the responsibility to substitute lost capacities of self-government. In the conclusion, I comment on the implications of my results for the post-Brexit relations between the United Kingdom and the EU.

Disintegration as a Form of Constitutional Politics

For decades, it seemed as if European integration could only move in one direction: forward. Even during longer periods of stagnation, disintegration never appeared as a serious possibility. Accordingly, EU scholarship focused on explaining the member states’ movement towards an ‘ever closer union’. In recent years, however, the situation has changed profoundly, with an increasing politicization of European integration, including the rise of Euroscepticism (De Vries, 2018). Developments such as the euro crisis, the arrival of large numbers of refugees and authoritarian patterns in several member states have put a strain on European solidarity. At least since the Brexit referendum, the reversal of European integration can no longer be treated as a purely theoretical scenario that does not warrant scholarly examination. Hence, a new literature is emerging, which stresses that not only is there no automatism towards evermore integration but also the possibility of decline. The overarching question of this debate is how disintegration can be explained and perhaps even be predicted (Jones, 2018; Zielonka, 2014). Not all conceptions of disintegration that have been put forward in this context are relevant with a view to the democratic puzzle that I seek to address. In this section, I provide a brief overview over possible ways of defining disintegration and outline a new conception that describes it as a way of reorganizing the distribution of competences in a supranational polity – that is, as a form of constitutional politics.

If we apply a broad notion of European integration that includes political, economic and social dimensions, we can distinguish three types of disintegration. Political disintegration refers to phenomena such as a decline in the number of policy fields in which common rules exist, or decisions to revoke EU competences. Economic disintegration can find expression in a decrease in the cross-border exchange of goods, capital, services or labour, or in a growing divergence of economic indicators such as GDP growth or inflation rates. Social disintegration can be diagnosed when we observe that European identities are weakening or that cross-border interaction between citizens is diminishing (Börzel, 2018: 478–479; Eppler et al., 2016: 9–14). Political (dis)integration can to a certain extent influence economic and social (dis)integration by setting a framework within which they can or cannot unfold. Yet, the latter are primarily of an informal-processual nature, in the sense that they represent aggregated effects of countless individual actions that are not conducted with the intention of bringing about European (dis)integration. The problem of legitimacy that I am interested in emerges in the political arena, where decisions are deliberately taken in order to increase or reduce the member states’ legal-institutional integration. In the following, I focus on political disintegration and further distinctions within this dimension.

While the notion of political disintegration primarily deals with lawmaking and the reorganization of public authority, some authors point out that it can also take the form of a lack of enforcement of common rules and increasing non-compliance. We can say that a polity is disintegrating if we find ‘diminishing enforcement of behavioural conformity and declining behavioural conformity and loyalty to the polity and fellow actors’ to an extent that the validity of the legal order as such is called into question (Vollaard, 2014: 8; see Börzel, 2018: 481). While this aspect may be important for a comprehensive empirical diagnosis of disintegration, it does not contribute to the conflict between legitimate change and regression that I want to address. My focus is on political decisions that bring about changes in law and can in principle be legitimized through democratic procedures. In this context, we can further distinguish between horizontal, vertical and sectoral disintegration:

Horizontal (dis)integration refers to the decline/growth in the number of EU member states; vertical (dis)integration to the decline/growth in the [EU’s] competences and powers; and sectoral (dis)integration to the decline/growth in the number of issue areas in which common policies have been adopted in Europe (Webber, 2017: 336, emphasis removed).

The notions of decline and growth already indicate that, just like integration, disintegration is not an all-or-nothing affair. While the hyperbolic use of the term ‘disintegration’ in current public discourse suggests that it refers to a complete dissolution of the EU, this is only the most far-reaching option on a spectrum of possible degrees of disintegration. Setting aside the scenario of a ‘natural’ breakdown that would come about without a formal political decision, the EU could only be dissolved through a treaty between all member states, which would have to be ratified according to their domestic constitutional requirements (Kelemen, 2007: 62). Besides such a complete disintegration, the member states can engage in partial disintegration, for example, by revoking common policies, withdrawing from individual arrangements, such as the Eurozone, or abolishing particular institutions while leaving the overall structure in place. Such disintegration can either be uniform, which means that it applies to all member states, or differentiated, in which case it concerns only one (or a few) of them. Before the Brexit referendum, the United Kingdom and the EU negotiated about EU-internal measures of differentiated disintegration. In the context of a ‘new settlement’, the United Kingdom tried to achieve exemptions from existing commitments. Brexit, by contrast, is the project of a complete withdrawal from the EU’s public authority (Schimmelfennig, 2018: 1156–1157).¹

As already mentioned, I am interested in disintegration as a form of constitutional politics. The EU’s primary law is a functional equivalent to domestic constitutions in that it enables and constrains the exercise of public authority. For this reason, I treat it as a constitutional order (see Grimm, 2017: 60). To describe the EU’s form of political organization, I use the broad notion of a supranational polity, which is compatible with various constitutional models (e.g. the EU as a non-state federation) and serves to draw attention to the democratic aspects of the EU. A supranational polity is a voluntary association of states that enables citizens to self-govern across borders. While the member states remain sovereign and reserve a right to leave, they have empowered the EU to make collectively binding decisions – through legislative, executive and judicial institutions – and set up a democratic framework for that purpose. Irrespective of the EU’s many ‘democratic deficits’, individuals have been assigned the status of EU citizens, which is associated with political rights (and other entitlements such as freedom of movement). In this way, European integration has not only transformed nation-states into member states (Bickerton, 2012), but also nation-state citizens into member state citizens. The problem of legitimate disintegration arises in the context of a democratic order beyond the state.

Building on these considerations, I understand disintegration as a way of changing the constitutional order of a supranational polity. Since I do not address issues of policy, I am concerned with horizontal and vertical, but not sectoral disintegration. In other words, I focus on cases in which the member states change the EU treaties or their scope of application in order to reorganize public authority. This can take four different forms: first, a release of individual member states from rules they were previously subject to; second, a collective decision to reverse a particular aspect of integration; third, an exit of one or several member states; and fourth, a dissolution of the supranational polity. The common feature of these types of disintegration is that they result in a re-nationalization of competences – with the effect that the (former) member states are no longer in a position to make collective decisions through shared institutions. This is a form of constitutional politics, as it concerns the question of who is allowed to decide what under which conditions. Disintegration modifies the forms of public authority citizens are confronted with. For this reason, it can affect – negatively, but also positively – the status, rights and capacities of citizens, and the functionality of democratic procedures and institutions.

EU Disintegration: Legitimate Change or Regression?

Disintegration is not a popular notion, especially not in EU scholarship, which tends to endorse integration, at least implicitly. However, the normative credentials of disintegration are anything but self-evident. In this section, I argue that EU disintegration gives rise to a democratic puzzle because the possibility of reversing European integration is both a requirement of political autonomy and a threat to it. By political autonomy, I mean the self-determination of citizens through legally constituted processes of collectively binding decision-making. In other words, citizens have political autonomy when they are able to regulate their common affairs as both addressees and authors of the law (Forst, 2012: 135–136; Habermas, 1996: 123, 126–128). A political system must meet two conditions for its citizens to enjoy a significant degree of political autonomy. First, it needs to provide them with the rights and institutions necessary in order to make collectively binding decisions in a democratic manner; second, it needs to have control over at least some issues (e.g. economic, social or environmental problems) that affect their lives. While the first condition concerns the internal organization of a political system, it primarily depends on the substantial and territorial scope of its jurisdiction to what extent it can meet the second. Political autonomy with regard to particular problems can require a specific type of political system.

Political autonomy can be exercised both at the level of normal and constitutional politics, which means that it includes a reflexive democratic entitlement to reorganize the framework within which democratic decision-making takes place. Disintegration pursued in a democratic manner is an exercise of political autonomy at the level of constitutional politics. As such, it can potentially promote, but also undermine, citizens’ political autonomy at the level of normal politics. In the following, I argue, in a first step, that the specific nature of European integration as an open-ended process gives particular importance to the democratic principle that constitutional decisions must be reversible. Due to its incremental and experimental character, European integration regularly produces unintended consequences, which can be detrimental to the overall project and negatively affect people’s lives. The capacity to get rid of dysfunctional structures of public authority is a crucial part of citizens’ political autonomy. However, as I argue in a second step, withdrawals from or the (partial) dismantling of the EU can also deprive citizens of a form of political autonomy that cannot be replaced at the nation-state level. If disintegration results in a weakening or loss of rights and institutions for self-government across borders or in a weakening or loss of their regulatory capacity, it undermines supranational democracy.

The Possibility of Disintegration as a Requirement of Political Autonomy

Just like any other constitutional order, the EU should be open to democratic change, which includes the possibility of disintegration. Political autonomy requires that citizens are able to reconfigure their political systems and, if deemed necessary, reverse constitutional decisions. Assuming a nation-state setting, one might be tempted to consider this as a purely formal criterion of legitimacy without much practical relevance because domestic constitutions are usually not politicized. In the case of consolidated democracies, one might even welcome barriers to constitutional change because system stability is conducive to the goal of maintaining political autonomy in normal politics. European integration, however, is a project without a predefined finalité, which proceeds incrementally and to some extent experimentally. Time and again, the member states reshape their common institutions.² We cannot rule out – in fact, we need to expect – that mistakes will be made along the way. In such cases, (partial) disintegration can reflect learning processes. If particular forms of integration turn out to undermine fundamental principles of the whole enterprise or prove to be detrimental to other goals that the member states or their citizens consider important, it can be conducive to the success of the overall process to reverse them. Let me give you three examples of dysfunctionalities of European integration that have prompted scholars and political actors to consider disintegration as a potential countermeasure.

One example for a form of integration that was supposed to solve problems but ended up (also) creating dramatic new ones is the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) whose structural defects have contributed to the euro crisis. The EMU suffers from the fact that it encompasses a set of highly heterogeneous national economies, whose divergence it further propels while depriving them of classical instruments for dealing with their asymmetries. At the same time, the EU lacks the necessary competences in the areas of fiscal and social policy to compensate member states for the damages that some of them incur through the euro (Offe, 2015: 24–25; Scharpf, 2016: 30–36). Given that the common currency can apparently only be maintained on the basis of technocratic steering from the EU level that sidelines domestic democracy, scholars increasingly call into question the common assumption that the costs of an exit of individual countries from the Eurozone or of an end of the common currency in its present form are prohibitively high – and have started to examine alternatives (Höpner and Spielau, 2018; Scharpf, 2016: 47–48, 2018). Regardless of whether EMU disintegration is actually a viable option, the example demonstrates that European integration carries the risk that the member states manoeuvre themselves into ‘dead ends’.

Another case that underlines the potentially constructive nature of disintegration is constitutional change through emergency politics during the euro crisis. The sense of urgency at the time enabled executives to bring about institutional reforms via problematic routes of decision-making. Justifying their actions with reference to ‘existential threats’, governments contravened established rules and procedures and modified the EU in highly controversial ways (Kreuder-Sonnen, 2016; White, 2015). As is well known, new structures such as the European Stability Mechanism and the Fiscal Compact have been established outside the EU framework. In this way, executives managed to bypass veto players and to avoid the ‘democratic hassle’ of a convention according to Article 48 of the Treaty on European Union (TEU) (De Witte, 2013; Menéndez, 2014). Overall, the rescue measures have gone at the expense of parliaments and especially weakened the legislatures of debt-ridden member states. In this sense, the euro has been saved at the cost of democracy (Crum, 2013). Irrespective of whether this happened intentionally or in helpless response to functional pressures, the example indicates that disintegration may sometimes be needed as a countermeasure when public authorities take a life of their own – when procedurally or substantively problematic developments need to be ‘rolled back’ (Bellamy, 2019b: 195). Citizens should be able to review and, if necessary, reverse forms of ‘runaway integration’ – if only to replace them with better solutions.

Another problematic development is the over-constitutionalization of the EU treaties, which puts controversial issues beyond the reach of politics. This is not a recent crisis-induced phenomenon but a long-term trend that goes back to the early stages of European integration when the European Court of Justice (ECJ) established the supremacy of EU law (Grimm, 2017: 89–92; Schmidt, 2018: 1–4). Since the treaties contain many provisions that would have the status of ordinary law at the domestic level, the ECJ’s self-empowerment as a quasi-constitutional court, combined with its focus on extending and enforcing economic liberties, has resulted in a creeping competence transfer from the member states to the EU and a constant narrowing of the space for democratic decisions (Grimm, 2017: 100; Scharpf, 2017: 320). In light of this, scholars are now considering forms of disintegration that would reduce the power of the EU judiciary and restore European and domestic legislative capacities. The idea is to de-constitutionalize the EU treaties by downgrading all provisions of a non-constitutional nature to the status of secondary law so that the court can no longer immunize policy goals against revision. In addition, the EU could allow conditional opt-outs from the acquis to enable the member states to escape judicial decisions of the past and to translate new policy preferences into legislation (Grimm, 2017: 104; Scharpf, 2015: 400–401).

The crucial point of these examples is not that the respective developments undermine political autonomy at the level of normal politics (although all of them do so in one way or another). Rather, what I want to highlight is that an open-ended process of integration as we find it in the EU can have unintended consequences and thus gives particular importance to political autonomy at the level of constitutional politics. First, as the example of the Eurozone demonstrates, structures that have been established in the expectation that all member states will benefit from them can prove unstable or turn out to produce winners and losers. Second, as the rise of emergency politics shows, in a constitutional order that is constantly changing, moments of crisis can facilitate inadequately authorized institutional change. Third, as the problem of over-constitutionalization illustrates, the regular operation of such a political system can have problematic side effects such as an unintended alteration of the original distribution of competences. In light of this, we need to acknowledge that disintegration is not necessarily a destructive choice. On the contrary, it can be a constructive response when the EU’s constitutional development has taken a problematic turn. It can even be ‘integration-friendly’ if it does away with rules that undermine the mutually beneficial character of EU institutions and erode European solidarity. Sometimes, obstacles need to be removed before something better can be built. Political autonomy requires the capacity to get rid of dysfunctional structures of public authority.

One might wonder, however, whether this must include the option of EU withdrawal (or even dissolution) or whether political autonomy could also be safeguarded through less far-reaching forms of disintegration. In this regard, two points need to be emphasized. First, I do not consider disintegration – here in the form of exit – as a remedial right that can be triggered only under certain adverse conditions, as it is often assumed for the right to secede from states (Buchanan, 2017). Rather, I conceive of it as a legitimate mode of reorganizing public authority, which has its normative basis in the political autonomy of citizens. Democracy always includes the option of revising the distribution of competences. A withdrawal from the EU is one of many ways to do that, which means that it does not presuppose ‘proof of hardship’. Second, as a supranational polity, the EU is a voluntary association. The member states have deliberately not given up their status as sovereign entities but incorporated Article 50, which allows EU exit, in the Lisbon Treaty – a decision that was democratically ratified. For nation-state demoi who have no intention of irrevocably merging into a larger political entity, the possibility of EU withdrawal secures self-determination. In line with this, most normative accounts of EU democracy endorse the right to leave. The existence of an exit option is regarded as adequate for the kind of polity that the EU is – a compound political system that remains below the threshold of a federal state and is meant to enable self-government across borders while leaving the sovereignty of its subunits intact (Cheneval and Schimmelfennig, 2013: 342; Habermas, 2015: 555; Nicolaïdis, 2012: 254).

The Possibility of Disintegration as a Threat to Political Autonomy

Given that the possibility of disintegration seems to be a crucial part of political autonomy at the level of constitutional politics, one might think that the revocation of competences or withdrawals from the EU should be as easy as possible – as long as they are brought about democratically. However, things are not that straightforward. While disintegration can be part of a reasonable reorganization of public authority and reflect learning processes, it can also have undesirable or even impermissible effects on the framework for normal politics. From the domestic context, we know that while constitutional orders should be open to democratic change, there are limits to what demoi can legitimately decide. Even without eternity clauses, this is most evident in the case of those rights and institutions that enable democracy in the first place. In the EU, however, the situation is more complex because even if the supranational polity were to be completely dissolved, individuals would not fall back into a ‘state of nature’ devoid of political autonomy but remain citizens of nation-state democracies. On the other hand, the EU provides individuals with a new form of citizenship including rights and institutions for self-government across borders. Reversals of European integration pose a threat to these democratic achievements, which gives rise to the question of whether certain forms of disintegration should be considered illegitimate.

The idea that certain steps of integration cannot be reversed is not unfamiliar to international law, especially if basic rights are at stake. According to the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, states may not (unilaterally) withdraw from treaties without exit clauses unless this possibility was intended by the parties or is implied by the nature of the agreement. When North Korea tried to denounce the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) in 1997, ‘the UN Human Rights Committee (HRC) issued a General Comment concluding that the ICCPR was not capable of denunciation or withdrawal’ because ‘the rights protected by the ICCPR “belong to the people living in the territory of the State party” and cannot be divested by changes in government or State succession’ (Helfer, 2012: 639). To be sure, in contrast to the ICCPR, the TEU explicitly allows for disintegration. While Article 50 TEU provides for the possibility of exit, Article 48 TEU enables the member states to reduce the EU’s competences. Legally speaking, there is no question that European integration can be reversed. In view of Brexit, however, there is a growing sense in political theory that disintegration gives rise to serious problems of legitimacy because of its (potential) effects on the status of EU citizens. The question is whether reversals of European integration are permissible if they undermine citizens’ political autonomy at the level of normal politics within the supranational polity.

Let us take a closer look at two instructive positions according to which disintegration produces unacceptable democratic costs. Both of them are concerned with EU withdrawal, but their arguments can be applied to other forms of reversing integration as well. The first perspective, which I describe as the ‘affected-status view’, has been advanced by Tore Olsen and Christian Rostbøll who suggest that leaving the EU is always undemocratic. This claim is based on a specific version of the all-affected principle, which states that ‘people whose status as free and equal is mutually dependent ought to be included and remain in common democratic decision-making’ (Olsen and Rostbøll, 2017: 445, emphasis added). According to this principle, EU withdrawal is undemocratic because it deprives the citizens of a number of interdependent political communities of their former capacity to make democratic decisions on issues of common concern. They no longer encounter each other as free and equals across borders but end up in relations of domination. In other words, the lives of Europe’s citizens are deeply intertwined irrespective of their countries’ membership in the EU. Once they have established a common structure of self-government for regulating their interdependencies, they cannot leave without producing a loss in terms of non-domination. It is easy to see that this argument can be extended to all forms of disintegration that undermine or abolish EU democracy.

The affected-status view rests on the important observation that leaving the EU is a more far-reaching decision than withdrawing from an ordinary international treaty. Since the EU is a supranational polity, exit means that citizens lose rights and institutions for self-government across borders. This indeed appears as an undemocratic development. However, the affected-status view seems problematic for at least two reasons. First, it seems to assume that democracy is only a matter of normal politics. In contrast, issues of constitutional politics – that is, decisions about the organization of public authority – are beyond the reach of citizens because they are predetermined by considerations about non-domination. This ignores an important dimension of political autonomy: citizens’ right to decide about the structure and competences of their political systems. Second, and related to the first point, the affected-status view ignores the nature of the EU as a voluntary association. No member state has signed over its right to leave the supranational polity. On the contrary, European integration has always proceeded on the assumption that the parties involved remain sovereign entities. In line with this, the member states have made a democratically ratified decision to include a withdrawal clause in the EU treaties. Against this background, it would amount to a form of domination to deny the possibility of exit.

A second perspective, which I describe as the ‘civil-rights view’, has been offered by Svenja Ahlhaus and Peter Niesen. They start out from the idea that legal-political progress consists in an increasing cosmopolitan realization of individual rights. In turn, cases in which such developments are undermined or reversed count as potential instances of ‘regression’ (see Geiselberger, 2017). While most of the Brexit literature is concerned with the end of freedom of movement and its consequences for individual life plans, Ahlhaus and Niesen emphasize that UK citizens will lose the political rights associated with their EU citizen status. They will no longer be allowed to vote in European elections or to advance European Citizens’ Initiatives. This is considered a more fundamental problem because it is through democratic processes that ‘material’ entitlements such as freedom of movement are distributed in the first place. According to this view, ‘Brexit represents a violation of civil rights because it leads to the irreversible political disenfranchisement of the British citizens in their role of European citizens’ (Ahlhaus and Niesen, 2019: 630, emphasis in original, my translation). If we generalize this position, disintegration is objectionable if it strips citizens of rights that enable self-government – that is, if it deprives them of the power to shape the legal conditions that structure their lives.

The civil-rights view is based on the quasi-transcendental claim that if democracy is used to abolish rights and institutions of self-government, it illegitimately turns against itself. The core idea is that citizens must not be stripped of democratic entitlements, even if some of them vote for it and especially not against their will. While this is intuitively plausible, the civil-rights view overlooks the derivative nature of the EU citizen status. In the case of an EU exit, the citizens of the withdrawing member state do not end up generally disenfranchised. They are not deprived of basic rights and self-governing capacity per se, but only with a view to a higher level structure of public authority – of which they no longer form a part. While it may be true that it is impermissible to throw democratic citizens back into a state of heteronomy, this can hardly imply an imperative to uphold specific forms in which self-government is organized at a particular time. If the point of democracy is to make sure that everyone subject to collectively binding decisions is included in their making, EU withdrawal is not a disenfranchisement because those who lose the role of authors also escape the role of addressees. That being said, citizens undeniably lose something of (democratic) value: the status of citizens of a supranational polity and the corresponding (even if imperfect) rights and institutions for self-government across borders.

While both the affected-status view and the civil-rights view overstate their case by generally rejecting EU exit as undemocratic (which is a position in conflict with political autonomy at the level of constitutional politics), they imply an important insight: the possibility of disintegration threatens a form of political autonomy that nation-state democracy cannot replace. For EU citizens, any reversal of European integration carries the danger of a weakening or loss of supranational democracy, which can happen in different ways such as a revocation of political rights or the abolishment of institutions that provide regulatory capacities for cross-border political problems. Citizens lose in political autonomy if they no longer have (access to) a structure of public authority that enables democratic control over certain (economic, social, environmental, etc.) processes that are beyond the reach of their respective states. Depending on the form that it takes, disintegration can deprive citizens of their previous ability to deal with international interdependencies through supranational democracy. While it is Brexit that has alerted us to this problem, not only EU withdrawal but all forms of disintegration can potentially undermine political autonomy at the level of normal EU politics. Acting on motives of national self-interest, member states can strive for measures of disintegration that weaken EU institutions and diminish the value of EU citizens’ political rights – or do away with them altogether. Against this background, disintegration needs to be treated as a potentially regressive form of reorganizing public authority.

Towards a Solution to the Democratic Puzzle of EU Disintegration

Disintegration turns out to be a double-edged sword. While it is essential, for democratic reasons, that reversals of European integration are possible, they carry the risk that democratic rights and institutions are undermined or even abolished. The challenge for democratic theory is where to draw the line between legitimate change and regression. The problem is that it is unclear how to determine to what extent and under what conditions European integration can be legitimately reversed. Some scholars concerned with empirical questions suggest that we take conventional theories of European integration and turn them ‘on their head’ in order to ‘identify the conditions under which they would expect disintegration to occur’ (Webber, 2014: 343, emphasis in original). We cannot expect an analogous strategy to work for normative questions. Just because we know what legitimate integration requires (itself a difficult issue), we cannot infer, through reversal, what legitimate disintegration presupposes. European integration has provided citizens with a new form of political autonomy (at the level of normal politics in the EU), which means that disintegration starts out from conditions fundamentally different from those of an initial decision to integrate. We need a methodological approach and a theoretical framework that allow us to examine how changed legal-political realities constrain citizens’ political autonomy at the level of constitutional politics.

Against this background, I resort to the Habermasian method of rational reconstruction in order to inquire into the democracy-related ‘ratchet effects’ of European integration, by which I mean democratic achievements that limit the scope for legitimate disintegration. In doing so, I build on the established idea that certain forms of political autonomy, once introduced, become potential constraints on (democratic) constitutional politics. In his recent work on the EU, Habermas (2012: 39, emphasis in original) argues that ‘the Union must not fall below the level of taming and civilizing state power already achieved in the states’. In other words, European integration must not amount to de-democratization. Disintegration gives rise to the question of whether a similar condition holds when the process goes in the opposite direction. Can the member states allow the EU to fall below the level of political autonomy already achieved at the supranational level? For this question, rational reconstruction is a promising approach because it is geared towards uncovering the normative substance of empirical practices by identifying their presuppositions (or, ‘constitutive rules’). The goal of a rational reconstruction is to determine which idealizing – and potentially counterfactual – assumptions participants need to make in order that they can regard their practice as discursively justifiable (Iser, 2017; Patberg, 2014).

But what exactly is the practice that we are concerned with? We want to know where the democratic boundaries of democratic reversals of European integration lie. In other words, we are interested in the presuppositions of a legitimate practice of disintegration, as enabled by provisions such as Articles 48 and 50 TEU. The question is what kind of a theoretical framework would allow us to ‘operationalize’ this question in the context of a rational reconstruction. As outlined earlier, democratic decisions to (partially) dismantle the EU represent an exercise of political autonomy at the level of constitutional politics. This brings into play constituent power, the classical concept for theorizing the legitimacy of such decisions (Arato, 2017; Kalyvas, 2005). At first sight, one may be sceptical whether constituent power captures the nature of the practice in question, as the category usually refers to constructive processes of constitution making. However, as recent works in democratic theory have demonstrated, constituent power also has a ‘negativistic’ dimension that can be conceptualized as ‘destituent power’. The main idea of destituent power is that if citizens reject certain forms of public authority, they are not obligated to pursue the goal of replacing them with new ones but may simply aim for their (democratic) dismantling (Möller, 2018; Patberg, 2019).

For constructive processes of constitution making, democratic theory assumes that they should proceed in a particular way and lead to results that do not violate certain normative standards. Above all, an exercise of constituent power is supposed to produce a constitution that guarantees a set of (democracy-enabling) basic rights. Vice versa, it seems reasonable to assume that the use of destituent power can also be regarded as democratically legitimate only if the outcome conforms to certain principles. The question is what these conditions are. Crucially, normative standards for the formation and dismantling of constitutional orders need to be polity-specific (Bauböck, 2019: 236). For example, EU withdrawal differs from secession in that a unilateral right to exit is a defining feature of supranational polities but not of states. While sub-state independence movements such as in Scotland or Catalonia face similar ‘trade-offs’ as member states that want to leave the EU (between the forms of political autonomy that can be realized as part of a larger entity and as a self-standing political order), their starting conditions are different.³ My question is when destituent power is compatible with the normative logic of a supranational polity. What are the presuppositions of a democratic practice of (partially) dismantling such an order?

A comprehensive account of destituent power in the EU would specify who is entitled to initiate what forms of disintegration through what kinds of procedures. Such a model is beyond the scope of this article. Instead, I limit myself to the question of democracy-related ratchet effects by asking what statuses, rights, or capacities of self-government need to be kept in place or substituted if disintegration is to be regarded as a democratic form of constitutional politics.⁴ To that end, I build on earlier work of mine in which I have conducted a rational reconstruction of constitutional politics in supranational polities in order to track the enabling conditions of a legitimate (constructive) exercise of constituent power in the EU (Patberg, 2017). Here, I extend this analysis to the problem of disintegration by asking what normative standards an exercise of destituent power aiming at a (partial) dismantling of the EU should follow. I suggest a thought experiment in which we put ourselves in the shoes of (hypothetical) citizens who have set themselves the goal of founding a supranational polity and engage in a rational discourse about the following question: What entitlements must we mutually accord one another if we want to allow for the possibility of future democratic reversals of integration? From this perspective, we can defend three principles of legitimate disintegration, each of which responds to particular forms of reversing integration.⁵

The first principle is the EU-internal irrevocability of the political rights of EU citizens. This principle responds to measures of partial disintegration among a constant EU membership – that is, it does not extend to the cases of EU exit and dissolution. From the perspective of the parties of our thought experiment, constitutional decisions that result in a weakening or loss of the rights that give EU citizens democratic control over EU politics appear unacceptable. There is no reason why individuals who have attained political autonomy with regard to a (supranational) structure of public authority should accept a regression to heteronomy. In a way, this is a variant of the traditional view that democracy cannot include the right to abolish its own preconditions (Habermas, 1996). However, this does not mean that EU citizens must not ‘disenfranchise’ themselves through EU exit (or dissolution), as the civil-rights view holds. If the citizens of a member state decide that their political community shall withdraw from the EU, they make a legitimate decision to leave a voluntary association of states. While this implies a decision to no longer participate in the EU’s democratic processes, it is not a decision to give up political autonomy as such. The EU is a structure for self-government, but it is not the democratic order ‘of last resort’. Citizens of withdrawing member states remain citizens of nation-state democracies. Thus, the political rights of EU citizens should count as irrevocable only within the supranational polity – that is, as long as their states form part of it.

The second principle is the restorability of the status of former EU citizens. This principle addresses the situation of citizens of member states that leave the EU. From the perspective of the parties of our thought experiment, it is reasonable to insist that current EU citizens should treat former EU citizens as co-citizens ‘on stand-by’, who can reactivate their status. This seems adequate given that by allowing – for reasons of political autonomy – the possibility of EU exit, they accept that domestic majorities can deprive their co-citizens (and themselves) of their democratic rights in the supranational polity. In response to this, some scholars have suggested that EU citizenship could be transformed into an independent status that can be awarded to individuals regardless of their nationality (Kochenov, 2017: 279–281). However, to sustain the status of active citizens for individuals who are no longer subject to the laws in whose making they participate seems misguided. A more plausible way of reconciling the right to leave the EU with the loss of political autonomy that it implies at the supranational level would be to make sure that former EU citizens can restore their status if the domestic political situation allows it. One way of implementing this principle would be for the EU to keep the door open for a re-entry of former member states, by offering them a unilateral option of return, via a democratic decision by their citizens or their representatives. This solution would not undermine the sovereignty of the (remaining) EU states to decide about the admission of new members, because exit would practically no longer be a termination of membership but rather an indefinite suspension – an arrangement to which all member states would of course have to give their consent.⁶

The third principle is the responsibility to substitute lost capacities of self-government. This principle responds to exits from the EU and the scenario of its complete dissolution. These forms of disintegration mean that citizens who previously shared a structure for self-government across borders no longer do so, while their various interdependencies (economic, social, environmental, etc.) continue to exist and require regulation. Citizens who once had a political system that enabled them to make democratic decisions with regard to issues of common concern are thrown back to intergovernmental bargaining. Member states that leave the EU will often be unable to fully escape the effects of EU decisions and find themselves under EU hegemony (Eriksen, 2018). At the same time, the citizens of the remaining member states will lose political autonomy as a result of the EU’s decreasing territorial reach. Thus, from the perspective of the parties of our thought experiment, former and, if applicable, remaining member states should see themselves as obligated to establish alternative forms of democratic co-operation that at least to some extent make up for the incurred loss of self-governing capacities.⁷ The EU’s broad range of affiliations with non-members, none of which appears particularly attractive from a democratic point of view, indicates that this is easier said than done (Fossum, 2018). One way of avoiding the unsatisfactory ‘in-between’ of rule-subjection without representation could be a form of associate EU membership with its own democratic institutions. An alternative would be non-affiliation and the regulation of common problems through ad hoc treaties on the basis of a participatory form of democratic intergovernmentalism.

Taken together, these three principles suggest that democracy can (legitimately) only move forward even if integration sometimes moves backwards. Any exercise of destituent power in the EU should observe certain boundaries that result from the democratic achievements of European integration. Once democratic rights and institutions have been established and individuals have been awarded a supranational citizen status, there is no legitimate way back to the status quo ante. Rather, from the perspective of democratic theory, disintegration is intimately linked to the possibility of and the need for renewed integration. For example, even if the EU were to be completely dissolved, the member states would have to regard themselves as obligated to substitute the lost capacities of self-government across borders with new forms of democratic co-operation. While disintegration is permissible, it requires compensatory measures or finds its limits where it negatively affects democratic statuses, rights or capacities. Finally, let me reiterate that the three principles by no means cover all issues of legitimacy that destituent power in the EU gives rise to. A comprehensive solution to the democratic puzzle of EU disintegration requires further research.

Conclusion

Brexit and the rise of Eurosceptic parties, but also the emergence of pro-European protest movements opposing particular EU institutions, indicate that the question of (partial) reversals of European integration will continue to pervade public discourse in the foreseeable future. Democratic theory would be well advised to engage systematically with disintegration and to develop a normative account of the conditions under which such decisions can be deemed legitimate. Disintegration is not necessarily a destructive choice. While it can reflect a decay of hard-won and altogether beneficial institutional structures, it can also be an ‘integration-friendly’ measure directed against dysfunctionalities of European integration. If EU institutions produce negative effects that undermine European solidarity and turn the member states against each other, (deliberate) disintegration in some areas can be a way of countering (unwanted) disintegration in others. The crucial question, however, is not whether disintegration can be defended or criticized in instrumental terms, but under what conditions the democratic entitlement to re-nationalize competences can be brought in line with the (possible) weakening or loss of supranational democracy that goes along with such decisions.

I have argued that EU disintegration gives rise to a democratic puzzle. For democratic reasons, this form of constitutional politics must be possible, but it threatens democratic achievements. Thus, two views that have repeatedly been articulated in public debates around Brexit seem untenable. On the one hand, it is unconvincing to say that disintegration cannot be subject to any constraints because sovereign states must be able to make autonomous democratic decisions regarding (the level of) their involvement in the EU. On the other hand, it is just as implausible to claim that European integration has created normative path-dependencies that rule out any possibility of legitimate reversal. As a supranational polity, the EU is a (democratic) constitutional order somewhere between an international organization and a federal state. Thus, familiar arguments about the (il)legitimacy of treaty withdrawal or secession cannot simply be transferred to the EU context. There is a need for a (normative) political theory of disintegration. As a first step in this direction, I have examined to what extent European integration has produced democracy-related ratchet effects. To that end, I have conducted a rational reconstruction of destituent power in the EU in order to determine under what conditions it appears discursively justifiable to allow the possibility of disintegration. On this basis, I have offered three principles of legitimate disintegration.

The results of my analysis invite a new perspective on Brexit. The core message is that we have reached a point where we should worry less about how the decision to leave was made and more about how the United Kingdom and the EU could address its democratic ramifications in the future. Even if the dreaded ‘no deal’ scenario became a reality and the United Kingdom simply dropped out of the EU framework, which is still possible as I am writing this, the proposed principles of legitimate disintegration would provide constructive guidance in terms of measures that would retroactively enhance the democratic legitimacy of the separation. The EU could take steps in order to guarantee the restorability of the UK citizens’ former status as EU citizens. Through a treaty amendment, the EU could keep the door open for a return of the United Kingdom by a unilateral decision of its people, taken by referendum or act of parliament. While such a step might be regarded as ‘undeserved’ or strategically imprudent, it would be an adequate response to the fact that Brexit will strip UK citizens of political rights – in many cases against their will. On the other hand, the United Kingdom would have to assume new responsibilities towards the citizens of the remaining member states, who stand to lose political autonomy due to the EU’s decreasing territorial reach (which implies a loss of regulatory capacity). They can insist that the United Kingdom and the EU should immediately start to establish new forms of democratic co-operation with regard to their ongoing interdependencies. Again, this might seem unlikely for political reasons, but it would address a democratic ‘debt’ that the relevant actors have incurred through their decisions.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I have presented earlier versions of this article in 2018 at the ECPR General Conference, the DVPW Congress, the Hamburg Colloquium in Political Theory and the First Workshop of the Normative Theory Group and, in 2019, at the European University Institute. I would like to thank the participants of these events as well as those who provided me with written comments, in particular, Svenja Ahlhaus, Rainer Bauböck, Ludvig Beckman, Jan Pieter Beetz, Ben Crum, Chiara Destri, Dimitrios Efthymiou, Alice el-Wakil, Oliver Garner, Kim Henningsen, Bas Leijssenaar, Marcus Häggrot, Ervin Kondakciu, Peter Niesen, Andreas Oldenbourg, Cord Schmelzle and Fabio Wolkenstein. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their constructive suggestions.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: Research for this article was supported by the DFG Project ‘Reclaiming Constituent Power? Emerging Counter-Narratives of EU Constitutionalisation’ (Grant No. 319145390).

ORCID iD

Markus Patberg

Notes

Author Biography

Markus Patberg is a Research Fellow in Political Theory at the University of Hamburg, where he is part of the DFG-funded project ‘Reclaiming Constituent Power? Emerging Counter-Narratives of EU Constitutionalisation’. His research interests include questions of democracy and constitutionalism, especially in supranational contexts such as the European Union. Among his publications are articles in Constellations, European Law Journal, Global Constitutionalism, International Journal of Constitutional Law, Journal of Common Market Studies, Journal of European Integration, Journal of International Political Theory and Philosophy & Social Criticism.

References

Ahlhaus

Niesen

(2019) Regressionen des Mitgliedschaftsrechts: Für einen Kosmopolitismus von innen. In: Bohmann

Sorensen

(eds) Kritische Theorie der Politik. Berlin: Suhrkamp, pp.610–633.

Arato

(2017) The Adventures of the Constituent Power: Beyond Revolutions? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bauböck

(2019) A Multilevel Theory of Democratic Secession. Ethnopolitics 18 (3): 227–246.

Bellamy

(2019a) Was the Brexit Referendum Legitimate, and Would a Second One Be So? European Political Science 18 (1): 126–133.

Bellamy

(2019b) A Republican Europe of States: Cosmopolitanism, Intergovernmentalism and Democracy in the EU. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bickerton

(2012) European Integration: From Nation-States to Member States. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Börzel

(2018) Researching the EU (Studies) Into Demise? Journal of European Public Policy 25 (3): 475–485.

Buchanan

(2017) Secession. In: Zalta

(ed.) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2017/entries/secession (accessed 28 November 2018).

Cheneval

(2011) The Government of the Peoples: On the Idea and Principles of Multilateral Democracy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

10.

Cheneval

Schimmelfennig

(2013) The Case for Demoicracy in the European Union. Journal of Common Market Studies 51 (2): 334–350.

11.

Crum

(2013) Saving the Euro at the Cost of Democracy? Journal of Common Market Studies 51 (4): 614–630.

12.

De Vries

(2018) Euroscepticism and the Future of European Integration. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

13.

De Witte

(2013) Using International Law in the Euro Crisis: Causes and Consequences. ARENA Working Paper no. 4, June. Oslo: ARENA Centre for European Studies.

14.

Eppler

Anders

Tuntschew

(2016) Europe’s Political, Social, and Economic (Dis-)Integration: Revisiting the Elephant in Times of Crises. IHS Political Science Series Working Paper 143, October. Vienna: Institute for Advanced Studies.

15.

Eriksen

(2018) Political Differentiation and the Problem of Dominance: Segmentation and Hegemony. European Journal of Political Research 57 (4): 989–1008.

16.

Fabbrini

(2019) Europe’s Future: Decoupling and Reforming. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

17.

Forst

(2012) The Right to Justification: Elements of a Constructivist Theory of Justice. New York: Columbia University Press.

18.

Fossum

(2018) Brexit and the EU’s Affiliated Non-Members. In: Rosamond

Diamond

Nedergaard

(eds) Routledge Handbook of the Politics of Brexit. London; New York: Routledge, pp.278–289.

19.

Geiselberger

(ed.) (2017) The Great Regression. Cambridge; Malden, MA: Polity Press.

20.

Grimm

(2017) The Constitution of European Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

21.

Habermas

(1996) Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

22.

Habermas

(2012) The Crisis of the European Union: A Response. Cambridge: Polity Press.

23.

Habermas

(2015) Democracy in Europe: Why the Development of the EU into a Transnational Democracy Is Necessary and How It Is Possible. European Law Journal 21 (4): 546–557.

24.

Helfer

(2012) Terminating Treaties. In: Hollis

(ed.) The Oxford Guide to Treaties. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp.634–650.

25.

Höpner

Spielau

(2018) Better Than the Euro? The European Monetary System (1979–1998). New Political Economy 23 (2): 160–173.

26.

Iser

(2017) Rational Reconstruction. In: Brunkhorst

Kreide

Lafont

(eds) The Habermas Handbook. New York: Columbia University Press, pp.614–618.

27.

Jones

(2018) Towards a Theory of Disintegration. Journal of European Public Policy 25 (3): 440–451.

28.

Kalyvas

(2005) Popular Sovereignty, Democracy, and the Constituent Power. Constellations 12 (2): 223–244.

29.

Kelemen

(2007) Built to Last? The Durability of EU Federalism. In: Meunier

MacNamara

(eds) Making History: European Integration and Institutional Change at Fifty. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp.51–66.

30.

Kochenov

(2017) EU Citizenship and Withdrawals from the Union: How Inevitable Is the Radical Downgrading of Rights? In: Closa

(ed.) Secession from a Member State and Withdrawal from the European Union: Troubled Membership. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.257–286.

31.

Kreuder-Sonnen

(2016) Beyond Integration Theory: The (Anti-)Constitutional Dimension of European Crisis Governance. Journal of Common Market Studies 54 (6): 1350–1366.

32.

Lord

(2017) The Legitimacy of Exits from the European Union. Journal of European Integration 39 (5): 499–513.

33.

Menéndez

(2014) Editorial: A European Union in Constitutional Mutation? European Law Journal 20 (2): 127–141.

34.

Möller

(2018) From Constituent to Destituent Power beyond the State. Transnational Legal Theory 9 (1): 32–55.

35.

Morgan

(2016) Liberalism, Nationalism, and Post-Brexit Europe. Biblioteca della libertà 51 (215): 7–25.

36.

Nicolaïdis

(2012) The Idea of European Demoicracy. In: Dickson

Eleutheriadēs

(eds) Philosophical Foundations of European Union Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp.247–274.

37.

Offe

(2015) Europe Entrapped. Cambridge; Malden, MA: Polity Press.

38.

Olsen

Rostbøll

(2017) Why Withdrawal from the European Union Is Undemocratic. International Theory 9 (3): 436–465.

39.

Patberg

(2014) Supranational Constitutional Politics and the Method of Rational Reconstruction. Philosophy & Social Criticism 40 (6): 501–521.

40.

Patberg

(2017) A Systematic Justification for the EU’s Pouvoir Constituant Mixte: Principles of Constitutional Politics in Supranational Polities. European Law Journal 23 (6): 441–453.

41.

Patberg

(2019) Destituent Power in the European Union: On the Limits of a Negativistic Logic of Constitutional Politics. Journal of International Political Theory 15 (1): 82–99.

42.

Scharpf

(2015) After the Crash: A Perspective on Multilevel European Democracy. European Law Journal 21 (3): 384–405.

43.

Scharpf

(2016) The Costs of Non-Disintegration: The Case of the European Monetary Union. In: Chalmers

Jachtenfuchs

Joerges

(eds) The End of the Eurocrats’ Dream: Adjusting to European Diversity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.29–49.

44.

Scharpf

(2017) De-Constitutionalisation and Majority Rule: A Democratic Vision for Europe. European Law Journal 23 (5): 315–334.

45.

Scharpf

(2018) There Is an Alternative: A Two-Tier European Currency Community. MPIfG Discussion Paper 18/7, July. Cologne: Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies.

46.

Schimmelfennig

(2018) Brexit: Differentiated Disintegration in the European Union. Journal of European Public Policy 25 (8): 1154–1173.

47.

Schmidt

(2018) The European Court of Justice and the Policy Process: The Shadow of Case Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

48.

Schmitter

Lefkofridi

(2016) Neo-Functionalism as a Theory of Disintegration. Chinese Political Science Review 1 (1): 1–29.

49.

Shaw

(2017) The Quintessentially Democratic Act? Democracy, Political Community and Citizenship in and after the UK’s EU Referendum of June 2016. Journal of European Integration 39 (5): 559–574.

50.

Vollaard

(2014) Explaining European Disintegration. Journal of Common Market Studies 52 (5): 1142–1159.

51.

Vollaard

(2018) European Disintegration: A Search for Explanations. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

52.

Weale

(2017) The Democratic Duty to Oppose Brexit. The Political Quarterly 88 (2): 170–181.

53.

Webber

(2014) How Likely Is It That the European Union Will Disintegrate? A Critical Analysis of Competing Theoretical Perspectives. European Journal of International Relations 20 (2): 341–365.

54.

Webber

(2017) Can the EU Survive? In: Dinan

Nugent

Paterson

(eds) The European Union in Crisis. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp.336–359.

55.

White

(2015) Emergency Europe. Political Studies 63 (2): 300–318.

56.

Zielonka

(2014) Is the EU Doomed? Cambridge: Polity Press.