Bulletin n. 1-2/2014
November 2014
CONTENTS
  • Section A) The theory and practise of the federal states and multi-level systems of government
  • Section B) Global governance and international organizations
  • Section C) Regional integration processes
  • Section D) Federalism as a political idea
    • Offe Claus
    The Europolis experiment and its lessons for deliberation on Europe
    in European Union Politics , vol. 15, n. 3, September, Special issue: Can European elections be deliberative? The 2009 Europolis deliberative poll ,  2014 ,  430-441
    The Europolis experiment took place at a time when the worst crisis in the history of the EU began to unfold. There is little confidence that the year 2014 (or any later year in the near future) will bring its definitive resolution that would also have to minimize the risk of the crisis repeating itself. The crisis can be understood as consisting of three interrelated components: the political economy of the Euro zone and its dynamics, an inadequate institutional shell of the EU polity and its deficient democratic quality, and the widespread disenchantment of publics in Europe with the narratives about what ‘Europe’ is good for and what the finalité might be that would make its further integration intrinsically desirable. In a nutshell, the crisis unfolded in four stages. First, as in the US, the financial industries engaged in risky, often frivolous kinds of investments, correctly trusting that, if investments failed on a significant scale, national governments would step in to bail them out. Second, governments, lacking any viable alternative, did as expected, thus causing an economic crisis with sharp (if uneven, given the vast economic differences between Euro zone members) declines in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and employment. Third, in order to rescue the Euro monetary system and to prevent the depression from becoming ever deeper, governments had to rely on banks (including the European Central Bank (ECB)) to provide deeply indebted sovereigns with the liquidity needed to rescue their economies. Fourth, there is no democratic mechanism in place at the EU level that would allow for the legitimation of the major redistributive effects that any conceivable economic rescue operation would involve.
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