Search

Defence date: 29 June 2015 Examining Board: Professor Rainer Bauböck, EUI (Supervisor); Professor Philippe Van Parijs, UC Louvain (Co-supervisor); Professor Hanspeter Kriesi, EUI; Professor Nadia Urbinati, Columbia University. This dissertation aims to arrive at a model of democratic legitimacy for the European Union. There is, however, a strain of thought pre-dominant in political theory since the nineteenth century that doubts the capacity of political systems constituted by multiple public spheres to have sustainable democratic systems. This view is referred to here as the lingua franca thesis on sustainable democratic systems (LFT). It states that, in the absence of a common language for political debate, democracy cannot function well in the long-term as citizens existing in distinctive public spheres will inevitably come to have diverging preferences that cannot be satisfactorily resolved by a collective democratic process. Poor quality democratic institutions, as well as acute demands to divide the political system (through devolution or secession) so that state and society become more congruent, are predicted by this thesis. To arrive at a model of democratic legitimacy for the EU, in light of the challenge presented by the LFT, three major steps are taken. Part One attempts to arrive at an account of democratic legitimacy as a realistic ideal for modern political systems. Understanding democracy as a system which strives to maximise citizens’ equal opportunities for control over the decisions to which they are subject, the maximisation of electoral and direct voting opportunities for citizens is recommended, subject to certain practical constraints. Importantly, democratically legitimate institutions are identified as having important external effects, which amount to more than just the peaceful resolution of conflict. Centripetal democracy is the idea that legitimate democratic institutions set in motion forms of citizen practice and representative behaviour that serve as powerful drivers of demos-formation. In the second part of this dissertation, an effort is made to both classify and normatively assess the EU. As a political system the EU is taken to be a demoi-cracy, or a democracy of democracies, whereby the demoi of the member states take sovereign precedence over the European demos constituting the citizens of Europe as a whole. While citizen’s control over their respective governments’ roles in EU decision-making is seen to have significant shortfalls, the major democratic deficiencies are detected in citizens’ control over actors located exclusively at the European level. Overall, the absence of voting opportunities directly connecting citizens to European power ensures that the EU is not controlled by its citizens in a way that is commensurate with the power it wields. If the EU is to democratise, it must be capable of dealing with the dynamics predicted by the LFT. Part Three of this dissertation analyses the sustainability of democracy in two political systems that bear striking resemblances to the EU, namely Belgium and Switzerland. Like the EU, these are multilevel and multilingual political systems attempting to organise themselves in a democratic fashion. Belgium proves to be a near perfect case for corroborating the LFT, its linguistic communities finding it increasingly difficult to coexist in one democratic community. Switzerland, by contrast, has managed to produce one of the most democratically legitimate political systems in the modern world, despite being fractured into linguistically distinct public spheres. As my conception of centripetal democracy predicts, however, the Swiss success in integrating the public spheres within one political system is in no small part related to the arrangement of its democratic institutions. That being said, there are certain conditions that made the development of centrifugal forces more likely and centripetal democracy less likely in Belgium than in Switzerland. In Part Four, where I finally derive a model of democratic legitimacy for the EU, it is demonstrated that while many of the conditions that made centrifugal forces so strong in Belgium are not (or not yet) present in the EU, the conditions for the development of a legitimate democratic process are also generally lacking. This is especially true when it comes to the introduction of direct democracy at Union level, although there may be fewer obstacles to making European institutions more electorally accountable.

Building on MEP Andrew Duff’s proposal to create a limited pan-European constituency for electing representatives to the European Parliament, this paper argues that there are good reasons for believing that such an institution would better be built around national parties rather than Europarties as they currently exist. Using data from a Voting Advice Application (VAA), the EU Profiler, we demonstrate that the overwhelming majority of individuals who used this device would be better represented in the European Parliament, in terms of their policy preferences, if they could vote for a party from a different member state than their own. Furthermore, we find that there is significant active demand to be able to vote in this manner, and that such demand is positively correlated with citizens who found that they would be better represented given the opportunity to vote transnationally. Ultimately, we argue that a transnational electoral constituency administered by a VAA that could match individuals with the closest partisan offer in Europe would not only improve the level of representation in the EP but also contribute to forging deeper transnational links in the EU.

Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro Sócio-Econômico. Programa de Pós-Graduação em Economia. O presente estudo, de modo qualitativo e teórico-analítico, apresenta o caso da aquisição da Empresa Brasileira de Compressores, S.A., Embraco, pela empresa multinacional (EMN) Whirlpool Corporation. O objetivo principal do trabalho é avaliar o processo da aquisição da Empresa Brasileira de Compressores, S.A., Embraco, pela empresa multinacional Whirlpool Corporation, um caso prático da venda da maior produtora de compressores para refrigeração para o líder mundial de produtos da linha branca na indústria de eletrodomésticos. Objetivos específicos são: Investigar os motivos determinantes para esta aquisição; Realizar a análise de fatos da trajetória a aquisição das empresas Brasmotor S.A., Embraco S.A. e Multibrás S.A.; Esclarecer o processo histórico da aquisição tendo como foco a relação existente entre estas empresas. Baseou-se na orientação teórica do modelo da estrutura OLI de Dunning e da estratégia de negócios. Os dados foram obtidos através de entrevista elaborada pelo autor, em conjunto com pesquisa secundária das empresas multinacionais Whirlpool Corporation e Embraco S.A. Os resultados demonstram que a aquisição da Embraco S.A. explica-se por um conjunto de fatores, dos quais a teoria da estratégia de negócios mais aproximadamente acompanha os eventos realizados na aplicação do Investimento Direto Externo (IDE) pela parte da Whirlpool Corporation.

As the most developed political organisation beyond the state, the EU has been regarded by many political theorists as indicative of a major shift towards post- and supranational forms of global governance, as well as offering a model for how such new political forms might be organised. However, as a growing number of political theorists have engaged more closely with the specifics of European integration and the operations of its institutions, these idealisations have largely fallen away. The process of European integration has been less straightforward and far more contested than has been often assumed, while the peculiar nature of the European political community and the uniquely complex organisation of its institutions have presented intriguing challenges to the core categories with which political theory operates. These concepts, which have been developed over the last centuries with the nation-state in mind as the primary example of modern political organization, cannot be applied wholesale to the EU. Concepts such as legitimacy, sovereignty, democracy, identity, citizenship, constitutionalism, representation, solidarity, etc. must be reassessed if they are to be useful for understanding and normatively scrutinising this political entity. This volume brings together some of the most important scholarly contributions over the last decades that have sought to contribute towards developing a political theory of the EU as an idiosyncratic political organisation. These contributions raise issues not only about the feasibility of attempts to construct political forms beyond the nation state, but also the extent to which they may be desirable. A mixed picture emerges from the state of the art: one that emphasises the existence and importance of continuities with the past in the development of international institutions on the one hand, and conceptual and practical innovations that point towards the need to break with the familiar on the other. Acknowledgments Introduction Part 1: The Normative Turn in EU Studies: The Issue of Legitimacy 1. Erik Oddvar Eriksen and John Erik Fossum, ‘Europe in Search of Legitimacy: Strategies of Legitimation Assessed’, International Political Science Review 25, 4, 2004, 435-459. 2. Richard Bellamy and Dario Castiglione, `Legitimising the Euro-"Polity" and its "Regime": The Normative Turn in EU Studies’, European Journal of Political Theory 2, 1, 2003, 7-34. Part 2: Conceptualising Sovereignty in the EU 3. Daniel J. Elazar, ‘The New Europe: A Federal State or a Confederation of States?’, Swiss Political Science Review 4, 4, 1998, 119-139. 4. Olivier Costa and Paul Magnette, ‘The EU as a Consociation: A Methodologial Assessment’, West European Politics 26, 3, 2003, 1-18. 5. Nicole Bolleyer and Christine Reh, ‘EU Legitimacy Revisited: The Normative Foundations of a Multilevel Polity’, Journal of European Public Policy 19, 4, 2012, 472-490. 6. Kalypso Nicolaïdis, ‘We, the Peoples of Europe…’, Foreign Affairs 83, 6, 2004, 97-110. Part 3: Constitution and constitutionalism in the EU 7. Jürgen Habermas, ‘Why Europe Needs a Constitution’, New Left Review 11, 2001, 5-26. 8. Pavlos Eleftheriadis, ‘The Idea of a European Constitution’, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 27, 1, 2007, 1-21. 9. Dieter Grimm, ‘The Democratic Costs of Constitutionalisation: The European Case’, European Law Journal 21, 4, 2015, 460–473. 10. Sergio Fabbrini, ‘The Constitutional Conundrum of the European Union’, Journal of European Public Policy 23, 1, 2016, 84-100. Part 4: The Democratic Deficit Debate 11. Giandomenico Majone, ‘Europe’s "Democratic Deficit": The Question of Standards’, European Law Journal 4, 1, 1998, 5-28. 12. Andrew Moravcsik, ‘The Myth of Europe’s Democratic Deficit’, Intereconomics November/December 2008, 331-340. 13. Andreas Follesdal and Simon Hix, ‘Why There is a Democratic Deficit in the EU: A Response to Majone and Moravcsik’, Journal of Common Market Studies 44, 3, 2006, 533-562. 14. Fritz W. Scharpf, ‘Legitimacy in the Multilevel European Polity’, European Political Science Review 1, 2, 2009, 173-204. 15. Sandra Kröger and Richard Bellamy, ‘Beyond a Constraining Dissensus: The Role of National Parliaments in Domesticating and Normalising the Politicization of European Integration’, Comparative European Politics 14, 2016, 131-153. Part 5: The European Public: Communication and Identity 16. Erik Odvar Eriksen, ‘An Emerging European Public Sphere’, European Journal of Social Theory 8, 3, 2005, 341-363. 17. Klaus Eder, ‘A Theory of Collective Identity: Making Sense of the Debate on a European Identity’, European Journal of Social Theory 12, 4, 2009, 427-447. 18. Joseph Lacey, ‘Must Europe be Swiss? On the Idea of a Voting Space and the Possibility of a Multilingual Demos’, British Journal of Political Science 44, 1, 2014, 61-82. 19. Beate Kohler-Koch, ‘Civil Society and EU Democracy: "Astroturf" Representation?’, Journal of European Public Policy 17, 1, 2011, 100-116. Part 6: European Citizenship 20. Chris Shore, `Whither European Citizenship? Eros and Civilisation Revisited’, European Journal of Social Theory 7, 1, 2004, 27-44. 21. Rainer Baubock, ‘Why European Citizenship? Normative Approaches to Supranational Union’, Theoretical Inquiries in Law 8, 2, 2007, 452-488. 22. Yasemin Nuhoglu Soysal, ‘Citizenship, Immigration, and the European Social Project: Rights and Obligations of Individuality', British Journal of Sociology 63, 1, 2012, 1-21. 23. Andrea Sangiovanni, ‘Solidarity in the European Union’, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 33, 2, 2013, 213-241.