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How should we conceive of the relationship between European citizenship and national citizenship from a normative perspective? While the Treaties assert the supplementary nature of European citizenship vis-à-vis national citizenship, advocates of trans- and supra-national citizenship perspectives have agreed with the European Court of Justice that Union citizenship will ultimately supplant or subsume national citizenship. By contrast, we draw upon demoicratic and stakeholder citizenship theories to defend the primacy of national over European citizenship. Taking the cases of political and welfare rights, we argue that member states may have special duties to second-country nationals stemming from a European social contract, but that these duties must be balanced against the rights and duties of national citizens stemming from the national social contract. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Given the increasing use of direct democratic devices on questions of European integration, this paper explores whether or not Member States may have good reason to agree on common regulations for popular votes of this nature. Conceiving of the European Union as a political system designed to serve the interests of states and citizens, it is argued that where direct votes have the potential to undermine the territorial, functional, normative or existential integrity of the EU, then states may have good reason to sacrifice a degree of national autonomy to adopt common regulations for certain uses of direct democracy. This leads to a case for democratic standardization across Member States when it comes to withdrawal, accession, Treaty ratification and opt‐in decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction provides a descriptive typology and normative analysis of the ways boundaries are being questioned in Europe. We distinguish between boundary-making (defining or redefining the territorial borders of a polity), boundary-crossing (determining the rules of access to territorial borders) and boundary-unbundling (allowing boundary-making and boundary-crossing to vary between policies and polities), noting each of these categories possesses internal and external dimensions. Cosmopolitans and statists offer contrasting normative evaluations of these processes, favouring weakening and maintaining or strengthening state boundaries respectively. We endorse a demoicratic approach lying between these two as better reflecting how individuals relate to each other and to the EU, a view shared by some but not all contributors to this volume. We conclude by situating the contributions within our topological framework, highlighting how they illustrate the contemporary questioning of European boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper deals with the legitimacy of the EU’s external borders and the decision-making rules for changing them. First, while the EU should not indefinitely expand, we can identify no normative grounds for precluding in advance any liberal democratic nation-states from participation in the European project. Second, for those countries having more or less thick legal ties with the EU, or who are otherwise substantially affected by European decision-making, we argue for the institutionalisation of flexible deliberative communities. For closely associated countries, we argue that the EU has special duties in opening the door to membership. Third, we address the legitimacy of the EU’s decision-making procedures for deciding on accession candidates and creating association agreements with non-member states. Here we defend the EU’s current unanimity requirement for the former and its supermajoritarian decision rules for the latter. Finally, we suggest that nationalism is the primary obstacle to the achievement of just inclusion outcomes for non-member states. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article offers an empirically driven critical consideration of the idea of transnationalising Europe’s voting space, which would mean allowing European citizens to vote for a party from any member state at the European Parliament elections. We argue that such a move would reduce the second-order problem in European elections, as it would force political parties to move away from campaigning solely on national issues. We also claim that it would improve the extent to which Europeans are represented in their parliament and would be particularly welcomed by citizens currently dissatisfied with the state of their national democracy. We offer evidence to back up these claims, based on data on the political preferences of almost half a million Europeans and 274 European parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article identifies demoi-cracy as the most robust category for understanding the European Union, and three tasks are undertaken to contribute towards this conceptualisation. First, it is explained how demoi-cracy differs from other popular categories that have been used to describe the EU and why it stands out as the most accurate. Second, contrary to the view that places demoi-cracy in contrast to political systems existing with a singular demos, it is argued that this concept is best understood as being capable of capturing cases where a weaker demos exists alongside strong sovereign demoi. Finally, the idea of demoi-cracy is broken into two further concepts (deep diversity and dual compound regime) and elaborated upon at length with a view to further specifying the nature of the EU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]