- A pattern of avoidance: Each new European policy crisis is met with appeals to shared values or incremental tinkering, never with the foundational question of who the demos actually is.
- Three diagnostic tests: Neofunctionalist spillover, liberal intergovernmentalism and the Follesdal-Hix democratic deficit each impose conditions current reform proposals fail to meet.
- Veil of ignorance, dissolved: Buti and Messori’s Rawlsian fiscal capacity arrives too late, since the distribution of winners and losers across Member States is already known.
- No mandate, no revocation: Citizens’ assemblies and mixed parliamentary bodies cannot supply the electoral channel that genuine democratic authorisation requires.
- Geopolitics without foundation: Procedural acceleration may answer the urgency of repositioning Europe in a fractured world, but it cannot construct the demos that geopolitical agency presupposes.
Europe’s public debate on integration has settled into a pattern. Each new policy crisis is named, deplored, and then addressed through appeals to values or proposals for incremental reform within the existing institutional frame. Both manoeuvres obscure rather than confront the unresolved constitutive question they presuppose. In recent weeks, contributions to these columns by Étienne Balibar, Thomas Piketty, Katharina Pistor and others on social federalism, and by Arjen Leerkes, Maurizio Ambrosini and Sandra Lavenex on migration policy, have documented real problems. Yet both illustrate the same structural limit of contemporary European debate: the eluding of the question of constitutive democratic foundation.
This avoidance is not a recent failure. A substantial body of political-science scholarship on European integration has long converged on a finding that should constrain any serious reform proposal: institutional engineering cannot produce democratic legitimacy where the demos has not been politically constituted. Where this condition is unmet, integration has repeatedly produced blocked negotiations, fragile compromises, and policy arrangements that neither hold nor secure sustained political support. Three analytical strands articulate the diagnosis as conditions any serious proposal must meet.
Haas and the neofunctionalists showed that functional spillover — integration in one sector pushing integration in others — does not automatically generate a European demos. Spillover fails systematically whenever it encounters divergent redistributive preferences across Member States. Aggregating institutional levels produces coordination, not constitution.
Moravcsik’s liberal intergovernmentalism identified the conditions under which indirect democratic legitimacy through national governments holds. It works for regulatory politics, but ceases to function when integration extends into constitutive domains such as defence and fiscal capacity. The deficit produced is not generic but specific: a misalignment between the level of decision and the level of democratic authorisation.
Follesdal and Hix articulated the structural sources of the democratic deficit as a joint condition: direct European elections, parliamentary control over executive power, and institutional accountability. The absence of any one of the three compromises the chain of democratic authorisation. Procedural acceleration without democratic foundation tends to aggravate all three at once.
The official European response to the converging crises has taken procedural form. Draghi and von der Leyen both propose acceleration through enhanced cooperation, passerelle clauses, extended qualified majority voting in the Council, and differentiated integration. The Moravcsikian critique applies directly. Extending QMV to defence, fiscal capacity, and strategic industrial policy reaches precisely those constitutive domains in which indirect intergovernmental legitimacy ceases to suffice. The Haasian critique compounds the problem: procedural acceleration without political consent is sectoral spillover by another name, and the integration record shows that spillover blocked by divergent redistributive preferences produces resistance, not loyalty.
Marco Buti and Marcello Messori propose a permanent European fiscal capacity, supported by automatic solidarity mechanisms. Their argument applies a Rawlsian veil of ignorance to justify mutual trust, but once the distribution of costs and benefits is known, the probabilities are no longer uniform across Member States. The veil has been dissolved by history. Tools designed for the foundation of an order ex ante are misapplied to one already constituted ex post, with identifiable winners and losers. To this conceptual misuse, the political-science findings add structural objections. The Moravcsikian condition fails: a European social contract presupposes a European-level formation of preferences that does not exist, so the contracting subject is missing. The Follesdal-Hix joint condition fails as well: without direct European elections, parliamentary control matching the supranational scope, and electoral accountability, the contract cannot be democratically anchored or revoked. Habermas’s own foundational formulation thematised explicitly the constitutive question that proceduralist appropriations now elude.
Balibar, Piketty, Pistor and others propose an incremental social federalism: mixed parliamentary assemblies of national and European representatives, with the Union acting as the “central bank of democracy” against imperial conquest from outside and nationalist authoritarianism from within. Here the Haasian condition presses hardest. Aggregating two existing institutional levels generates coordination, not constitution. The mixed assemblies introduce a problem of dual representation without resolving the level at which the demos is constituted. The Follesdal-Hix critique reinforces the difficulty: the parliamentarians of those assemblies remain nationally elected, and aggregating their mandates does not produce the direct European electoral channel that the foundational question requires.
The most ambitious proposal comes from within the deliberative camp: Kalypso Nicolaïdis’s European Citizens’ Assembly, an expanded permanent body with decision-making powers, criticised by theorists of citizen participation such as Cristina Lafont and Nadia Urbinati. In her own response, “A Permanent Citizens’ Assembly is not a Magic Wand for Europe”, Nicolaïdis abandons decision-making powers and concedes that to the foundational question — by what right should a randomly selected few bind everyone else — “there is no easy answer”. The Follesdal-Hix joint condition proves decisive. Sortition not only bypasses the electoral channel any democratic foundation would require; it produces a structural problem of attributability, since randomly selected citizens hold no mandate that can be revoked. The chain of democratic authorisation breaks at both ends. The most articulate defender of deliberative innovation thus converges with the consultative ceiling her own critics had already identified as insufficient.
This convergent avoidance is not accidental. It reflects how European public discourse has been structured since the failure of the 2005 Constitutional Treaty and its replacement by the Treaty of Lisbon. In the absence of a constitutive democratic foundation, the Union built its legitimacy on the codification of shared values. The price has been the displacement of debate onto the moral-legal register, where public argument drifts into advocacy rather than analysis.
The Leerkes-Ambrosini-Lavenex intervention is paradigmatic. It cites long-known problems, repeats the diagnosis, and concludes with an appeal for greater political honesty and broader fairness — leaving the structural question untouched. The narrative is useful for elites who voice democratic concern while eluding the constitutive question it presupposes: at what scale, through what process, and by whose mandate the European polity becomes the legitimate subject of its own decisions.
The point is not academic. In her March 2026 address to European ambassadors, Ursula von der Leyen articulated the ambition of repositioning Europe as an autonomous subject in a fractured global order. The geopolitical urgency invoked to justify procedural acceleration is real. But no Europe procedurally accelerated or incrementally federalised can assume that position in the world without the democratic foundation that none of these moves constructs.
A minimum epistemic condition can therefore be specified: any proposal must say who the demos is, how it is formed, and through what channel it authorises and controls decisions. Absent such specification, proposals to extend integration into constitutive domains should be treated as analytically defective rather than normatively insufficient. The issue is not whether they are desirable, but whether they meet the conditions under which democratic authority can be said to exist at the level they presuppose. These are not solutions but conditions of admissibility for serious discourse on European reform.
In their absence, coordination fragments into shifting coalitions across policy domains, with partially misaligned objectives and no authority capable of converting conflicts of interest into stable, generalisable solutions. Governments struggle to justify such configurations to their citizens, weakening consent — and, with it, the Union’s capacity to act as a coherent geopolitical actor.
