Year XXXVIII, Number 1, March 2025

Céline Spector
 Former student at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, Professor at the Philosophy Dept.
of La Sorbonne University and Associate Professor at the College of Europe in Bruges

Faced with the rise of the far right in the last European elections in June 2024, we need to assess the relevance of the eurosceptic no demos” thesis, which states that in the absence of a European people, there can be no European democracy – because democracy, it is stipulated, – does not come “without demos”. The no demos thesis, as you know, comes in several versions. The most common is as follows: if the Republic presupposes the sovereignty of the people, and if there is no European people, then European political integration is illegitimate; the transfer of sovereignty to the Union is either an aberration or a betrayal. Democratic self-determination requires that the subjects of the law are also the authors of it, which is impossible if “Brussels” decides on the essentials.

Sovereignism must be taken seriously if it is to be refuted. In my view, six major objections constitute the theoretical framework of sovreignism whatever its political affiliation^[i]. This is not to deny the profound differences between its past and present variants, but to identify what I would call a “hard core”. We need to give these theses a fair chance before we can detect the fallacies they conceal.

1. It is impossible for democracy to cover a vast territory; it can only exist, for modern peoples, in nation-states. Sovereignists assert that the nation is not only historically associated with the birth of modern democracy; it is its sine qua non. In this respect, as we see in David Miller's work, the importance of the nation is primarily reaffirmed as the anchor of personal identity, ethical duties and political self-determination^[ii] . Why this persistent defense of the nation? Because, according to David Miller, it meets one of our most fundamental needs in the modern world: to maintain mutual trust and solidarity among vast, anonymous populations. For Miller, only nationality drives the consent for the sacrifices which solidarity requires. It is precisely because of its mythical and imaginary elements that it can play this role. For Pierre Manent, Marcel Gauchet and Vincent Descombes in France, Europe will always fail to build a political body. In the absence of a European nation or a European people, of a reflexive awareness of “us”, of a common receptivity on this scale, no cultural substratum can anchor European institutions. And human rights can do nothing to give them depth. This is what I call the “Rousseau path” to sovereignty.
2. The second claim at the heart of the sovereignists line of thought is that a federation can only take root in Europe if state sovereignty is destroyed. While the European Union is a slightly less conventional international organization than others, a sui generis form, it is not an authentic federation and could only become one at an exorbitant price - the dissolution of nations through their amalgamation, the calling into question of sovereignties through their absorption into a despotic European sovereignty akin to a Leviathan state.
3. Sovereignty cannot be shared. Among the great precursors of this thesis, monistic theories of sovereignty have, since Bodin and Hobbes, stipulated that sovereignty, defined as the power to legislate and decide in the last instance, cannot be shared. Even more than Hobbes, contemporary sovereigntists often rely on Rousseau to reject the idea of the division of sovereignty into parts. In their view, sovereignty must remain indivisible as the author of the Social Contract stipulated: “Sovereign authority is simple and one, and cannot be divided without destroying it” (SC, III, 13). From then on, we find ourselves in the logic of either/or: either European sovereignty, or nation-state sovereignty. Any further transfer would mean dispossession and usurpation, accompanied by the risk of despotism, imperial hegemony of Brussels and loss of political freedom.
4. There is no European citizenship beyond market citizenship. The political rights associated with citizenship in the Union are insignificant, and this contributes to the dissociation between the passive enjoyment of rights and the active exercise of citizenship. The sovereigntist argument attacks the role of the CJEU, which has assumed the prerogatives of a federal court and defends economic freedoms as a priority. In particular, the role of the Court's jurisprudence is criticized: the praetorian approach produces the effects of de-democratization and democratic devitalization. The result is that the “system of market-based jurisprudence” has eliminated all citizenship worthy of the name.
5. Thus the European demos cannot be found. The general will presupposes the constitution of an indivisible totality, a “common self” endowed with a common sensibility. In the absence of a European people, European democracy can never be achieved (this is the “no demos” thesis, a classic in European studies, which gives my book its title). Europe's democratic deficit (the power of non-elected agencies and the crucial role of the ECB or the CJEU, the poor representativity of the EP, the impenetrable technocracy in the Commission etc.) is therefore not an accident of history, but a structural necessity inscribed in the “genes” of the Union.
6. Finally, on a slightly different note, “left-wing” sovereigntists have been proclaiming for at least thirty years that “Social Europe will not happen”. The EU is neoliberalism's Trojan Horse. For the neo-Foucauldians, if a democratic Europe is an “ultimate illusion”, it is basically because corruption corrodes European politics, which is subject to corporate power and lobbying^[iii] . With this in mind, it is easy to see how the brutal blackmailing of the Greeks in 2015 reveals the true face of the neoliberalism of the European Union, subject to the dictatorship of financialized capital and its dubious hedge funds.

The question, then, is this: can national and popular sovereignty be defended at this price? My answer is no.

To sum up, we must denounce two fallacies here: 1) post-national democracy is an illusion, because only the “nation” can be the ethical substratum of democracy; 2) the federal will cannot be a general will, because the concept of a European people is a myth, an aporia. In fact, a federal republic is not inconceivable in Europe. On the one hand, the democratic devitalization linked to the power of unelected agencies or cold technocracy can be countered, as in national democracies, by rebalancing institutions in favor of the EP, as I detail in my book; on the other hand, the demos does not pre-exist as a condition for democracy: it emerges from it, as its effect (see Balibar, who also judges the no demos thesis to be incantatory and contradictory). There is no reason to believe that the nation-state is the sole or even the main foundation of democracy.  A European people is not the product of a fixed cultural identity or a linear historical identity,  any more than it is a result of  impersonal  procedures; it appears in particular, beyond the diversity of the demoi that make it up, in times of crisis, but also from within, through cohesion and solidarity heightened by the feeling of vulnerability but also of attachment to common values – peace, freedom, tolerance, democracy, the rule of law.

In this spirit, it is no longer just a question of ensuring economic stability, or even just strategic autonomy, but of creating a European “We” based on the joint production of “public goods” that can only be produced on a European scale, such as energy and ecological transition. Only fiscal, social and environmental federalism can mitigate global geopolitical, economic and climate risks, and remedy the systemic injustices of the internal market. To make solidarity the new telos of the European Union is therefore to nurture the hope that, should circumstances become favorable, a more demanding model for the application of social and environmental rights could spread across Europe. More than an abstract restoration of popular sovereignty, it is this European New Deal that I am calling for.

* Intervention at Symposium of the Scientific Committee of UEF France at Pantin, Saturday 12 March 2024

^[i] I have attempted to develop them in my book No demos? Souveraineté et démocratie à l'épreuve de l'Europe, Paris, Seuil, "L'ordre philosophique", 2021.

^[ii] David Miller, "In Defense of Nationality", Journal of Applied Philosophy, Vol. 10, No. 1, 1993, pp. 3-16.

^[iii] Ibid, p. 189.