Justine Lacroix

For a European Constitutional Patriotism

In recent years, two dominant models for understanding the source of common political identities have emerged in the European context: the universalist paradigm of constitutional patriotism and the communitarian paradigm of ‘civic nationalism’. In view of this dichotomy, one could be tempted to think that only a combination of these two positions could deal with the mixed nature of European architecture. The European Union would thus give birth to the appealing synthesis of a ‘cosmopolitan communitarianism’. This choice of a middle way is challenged in this paper. Instead, I argue that the national or communitarian challenge would be better met by the development of constitutional patriotism rather than by a loose compromise. Contrary to what most commentators seem to believe, constitutional patriotism has practical significance, is historically embedded and seeks to promote a shared political culture.

A Liberal Defence of Compulsory Voting

At first sight, it might seem difficult to defend compulsory voting from a liberal point of view. Indeed, compulsory voting is widely considered as a breach of individual rights – even if such a minor restriction may be justified for the sake of common good. In this article, I challenge such an interpretation and I present a case for a non-utilitarian conception of compulsory voting. I first emphasise the importance of political participation in the liberal paradigm. I then insist on the notions of autonomy and equal liberty which legitimate compulsory voting in the name of the very principles of political liberalism.

Order and Justice Beyond the Nation-State: Europe's Competing Paradigms

The authors focus on the European Union both as a regional organization with distinctive norms and practices, and as a grouping of states that reflect specific individual traditions and views. The chapter describes two core paradigms: the national and the post-national. The national paradigm is recognizably realist and state-centric in approach. It suggests that the focus of external behaviour should be the promotion of order via traditional power-political means and for traditional state-based normative ends. The post-national paradigm, however, reflects a more cosmopolitan understanding of global society in which Europes institutional and substantive understanding of justice questions can be reflected in its policies beyond EU borders. These propositions are tested in three issue areas. The authors conclude that while the EU may have the capacity to shape an order/justice agenda beyond its borders, its members have not yet agreed what that agenda should be.

A Reply to Bellamy and Castiglione

Regarding their typology of schools of thought on European Union identity, I fully agree with the new one which they offer in their response. Yet one has to admit that this typology differs from the one proposed in the paper (Bellamy and Castiglione, 1998) on which I focused my criticism. In that earlier paper, they chose to include the supranationalists and the post-nationalists in the same category, that of cosmopolitans, and conflated this category with that of ‘pro-Europeans’. This assertion is founded on a scrupulous reading of their paper, which states explicitly that the distinction between cosmopolitans and communitarians ‘often provides the background assumption of proand anti-Europeans respectively’ (Bellamy and Castiglione, 1998, p. 153). The authors then add that ‘cosmopolitans’ include both supranationalists and post-nationalists (p. 156), while ‘communitarians’ include conservative Eurosceptics and civic nationalists. In my own article, I questioned this typology in order to show that the supranationalists who plead for a federal Europe have actually more in common with the civic nationalists than with the post-nationalists, since they both consider the nation as the ultimate horizon of democracy (Lacroix, 2002, p. 953). This is why I believe that supranationalists are closer to ‘communitarians’ than to ‘cosmopolitans’.

A Democracy without a People? The Rights of Man in French Contemporary Political Thought

At the end of the 1970s, philosopher Claude Lefort emphasised – against the excessively restrictive Marxist vision – the political dynamics attached to the affirmation of human rights. This theme has remained predominant in theoretical debate about democracy in France until the present day. A first strand of thought considers the primacy of human rights as a driver of depoliticisation. Authors such as Marcel Gauchet and Pierre Manent have argued that the vitality of the plural society described by Lefort could ultimately backfire on democracy itself. This article argues that this school of thought rests on a narrow conception of rights and an insufficiently dialectical conception of the relationship between rights and practice. Consequently, it defends Leforts position by relying heavily on a second strand of thought that conceives human rights as the way forward for a radicalisation of democratic ambitions.