standards achieved in one’s own nation state. Wherever liberal democracy has become rooted and a tolerant political culture has developed, we find in Europe among self-aware national citizens a conviction that they owe the fragile benefits of free and relatively just living conditions, which are at least partially guaranteed by their social security system, to the democratic and constitutional practices and institutions of their own country. Therefore, they have a well-founded interest in ensuring that ‘their’ nation state remains the guarantor of these achievements, and they do not want to be exposed to the risk of interventions and encroachments by a suspect supranational community. In other words, their mistrust is directed against a super-state, rather than being a xenophobic rejection of neighbouring peoples. This means that the lack of a single ‘European people’ does not form an insurmountable obstacle to a common political will in Europe. The ‘no demos’ hypothesis shifts attention to a factor that we must take seriously: the conviction that the standards achieved by the democratic constitutional state, rather than a handful of imaginary ethnic characteristics, are worth preserving. The self-affirmation of a democratic society is rather different to the reactionary response of clinging to invented features of the ethnic/national myth of origin that feeds right-wing populism. Moreover, democratic self-affirmation is not just an empirical action; it is also a justification that, under current circumstances, constitutes a reason for striving to develop
a supranational democracy. It is not as if democracies ensconced in a nation state can remain unaffected by entanglements in the systemic dynamic of the world community while preserving their democratic substance — certainly not in Europe. And here we find the answer to our initial question. European citizens today have good reasons to pursue two competing objectives at the same time. On the one hand, they want the EU, which has developed on the basis of nation states, to take the form of a supranational community that, in manner that is democratically legitimate, acts effectively and is able to solve the urgent problems of a budding global community. On the other hand, they are prepared to agree to this transnational form of democracy only under one condition: that their nation states should, even as future Member States, remain the guarantors of the level of freedom and democracy that has already been achieved. For this reason, in the supranational community, the higher political level should not be able to subjugate the lower levels. The question of which level has ultimate decision-making power should not be solved in the manner of a hierarchy, as happens in a federal state. Rather, the system should be constructed as a heterarchy between the Member States and the federation. 4.To solve this problem, I would like to propose the following thought experiment: Let us imagine a democratically developed European Union whose constitution has arisen from a twofold sovereignty(13). The constituting power should
( 13 ) I introduced the idea of a people’s sovereignty separated right from the beginning in: Habermas, J., ‘Zur Verfassung Europas’ (Suhrkamp), Berlin 2011, 62–82.
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