‘Rights to solidarity’ is a rather new expression, recently minted in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. In this chapter, the term will be used to refer to social and economic rights ; the basic question that will be posed is what the Charter has to say about the...

In this essay, it is argued that legal and political argument on the European constitution requires putting forward a normative conception of the constitution. Next to the formal and material understandings of the constitution, there is a need for a conception that determines the legitimacy...

Our aim in this article is to consider whether the Union’s deliberation over and decision-making on constitutional norms, can contribute to render it more democratic. From a normative perspective, the way a constitution is forged has deep implications for its democratic legitimacy. In light of...

The Constitutional Treaty of the European Union cannot be said to be a Constitution in the same sense that the term is generally used in most European countries. It is not a Constitution in the same sense that the German, Italian or Czech constitutions. This is mainly so because neither the...

In this paper, I explore in a systematic manner the different components of the democratic legitimacy of the Union from the standpoint of deliberative democratic theory. Contrary to standard accounts, I claim that the question must be disaggregated, given that the Union has not only several...

The capability approach developed by Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen has received substantial attention in recent years, in philosophical exchanges as well as in more applied discussions on policy-making, in particular in developing countries, but lately also in Western countries, including...

The paper suggests a practice turn in the analysis of political legitimacy. Current social science research on political legitimacy suffers twofold. First, it shows an undue (silent) impact of an ethics-first perspective. Second, empirical approaches to political legitimacy mostly focus on...

This paper analyses the prominence, content and justifications of Euroscepticism as a form of EU legitimacy contestation. Support of and opposition to European integration have so far been mainly measured through the positions of political parties or citizens’ attitudes through public opinion...

This paper shows that the main pattern of European democratisation has unfolded along the lines of an EU organised as a multilevel system of representative parliamentary government and not as a system of deliberative governance as the transnationalists propound. But the multilevel EU has...