ARENA Report 03/2010 (RECON Report No. 11)
Erik Oddvar Eriksen and John Erik Fossum (eds)
RECON is a five-year research project that seeks to clarify whether democracy is possible under conditions of pluralism, diversity, and complex multilevel governance. RECON spells out three different models for democratic reconstitution in Europe. The first posits that democracy can be reconstituted as a combination of audit democracy at the Union level and representative democracy at the member state level. The second model posits that democracy can be reconstituted through establishing the EU as a multinational federal state. The third posits that European democracy can be reconfigured through the EU serving as a regional post-national Union with an explicit cosmopolitan imprint. The project has contributed to frame the debate on democracy in Europe by seeking to bridge the broad international debate on democratic theory with due attention to the specifics of the European integration process.
In 2009 the project reached halfway in its project period, and a two days conference in Prague marked the occasion. The first conference day was dedicated to three keynote speeches and prepared comments on each of the three RECON models. This was followed up by roundtable panel debates, which allowed for more indepth discussions on the models and on preliminary findings from the project. In this report we have collected the papers and comments from the first day of the conference.
ARENA Report 03/2010 (pdf)
ISBN 978-82-93137-75-7 (online) 978-82-93137-25-2 (print)