The EUI Constitutionalism and Politics Working Group hosts a session with Professor Phillippe Van Parijs (UCLouvain, Chaire Hoover d'éthique économique et sociale, EUI Simone Veil Fellow).
Abstract:
The establishment of trans-national lists for the European elections was deemed Utopian a few years ago but this idea is now making some headway. Such a system would certainly contribute to the emergence of a genuine European political awareness and to the establishment of proper European political parties" So wrote MEP Georgios Anastassopoulos already in June 1998, on behalf of the European Parliament's Committee on Constitutional Affairs; the European Commission supported this idea.
However, to this day MEPs are elected on national lists. Advocates of the proposal need to overcome the general difficulty of getting people in power to change the rules that gave them that power. They face above all the difficulty of circumventing the principled nationalist opposition of those who believe that monolingual nations are the only level at which it makes sense to develop a "demos" and operate a democracy.
Yet, these obstacles must be overcome. A healthy democratic life is fundamentally a conversation that involves directly or indirectly the whole "demos", the entire people for which and in whose name collective decisions are being made. For a representative democracy to function properly, it is crucial that the electoral space, the arena in which political parties compete and argue with one another, should coincide with the perimeter of this "demos".
This is generally not too difficult to achieve in monolingual states, with a single media space and with political parties competing for the voters' favour in all corners of the country. It is far harder to achieve in linguistically divided polities, such as Belgium and the European Union, with different media and different parties operating its various components. Some ad-hoc institutional engineering is then required, and a federation-wide constituency is part of the bricolage that is needed.
The European Commission understood this twenty years ago. In May 2022, the European Parliament made a new proposal on the introduction of transnational lists. However, a number of national governments seem opposed. Shall we have to wait another twenty years for the European Council to follow?
About the speaker:
Philippe Van Parijs is professor at the Faculty of economic, social and political sciences of the University of Louvain (UCL), where he set up the Hoover Chair of economic and social ethics. He is a special guest professor at the KU Leuven, where he co-teaches a research seminar in political philosophy. At the moment, Philippe Van Parijs is a Simone Veil Fellow at the EUI, where he co-organizes a series on "Conversations for the future of Europe". Amongst others, he was a Regular Visiting Professor at Harvard University, Department of Philosophy, and at the University of Oxford, Nuffield College.
Philippe Van Parijs is a Fellow of the British Academy and a member of Belgium's Royal Academy of Sciences, Letters and Fine Arts and of the European Academy of Arts and Sciences. He holds an honorary doctorate from Laval University (Québec). In 2001, he was awarded the Francqui Prize, and in 2011 the Arkprijs voor het Vrije Woord, an annual prize meant to honour public personalities who illustrate the freedom to speak out.
Amongst his recent publications are Basic Income. A radical proposal for a free society and a sane economy (2017, with Y. Vanderborght), After the Storm. How to save democracy in Europe (2015, with L. van Middelaar), Just Democracy. The Rawls-Machiavelli Programme (2011) and Linguistic Justice for Europe and for the World (2011).
Philippe Van Parijs is a co-founder of the Basic Income European Network (now: the Basic Income Earth Network) and chairs its international board.