Democratic Inclusion and Political Equality in the Transforming European Dêmoicracy

Abstract

The article holds that the main threat to the construction of a common Europe after the multidimensional crisis that began in 2008 is the loss of citizens’ democratic status. Section I introduces a non-exhaustive description of the crisis of democracy in Europe stating that, even if it initially was an economic crisis, it has had echoes on other areas. Even if the transversal explanatory factor of this phenomena is the increase of inequalities, the cause of the crisis of European democracy are not these inequalities but their effect: the appearance of an increasing political precariat. Section Two focuses on analysing the sense in which this new subject represents the crisis of democracy in Europe: their exclusion from the interest weighting process violates the basic principles of political equality and democratic inclusion. Section Three proposes that, even if the answer should necessarily be European, the traditional federal and sovereigntist alternatives do not provide an adequate theoretical perspective. The dêmoicratic option, in turn, accepts descriptively reality as it is, i.e. without denying the existence of national political facts, while it also keeps the normative aspiration of building shared decision-making frameworks for the construction of democracy in Europe.

Received: 26 January 2018
Accepted: 18 February 2019
Published online: 30 April 2019