Narrative 1: ‘We, the people of Europe’

The narrative of ‘We, the people of Europe’ is geared towards the idea of a cross-border constituent power composed of European citizens. Here is the story: As a bulwark against war and a promise of wealth, the first steps of European integration represented a great achievement. From the very beginning, however, the unification of Europe was an elite project that slowly began to undermine democracy and to incrementally replace it with depoliticised, technocratic forms of rule. During the euro crisis, especially in the course of 2011, this process accelerated dramatically. Not least the establishment of ‘governments of experts’ in Italy and Greece made clear that for debtor countries in the EU democratic decision-making on economic policy has been replaced by the dictate of the Troika. As a result, European integration is now undermining its own accomplishments. While parts of the European population benefit from the current order, other segments face hardship. Social injustice prevails among the citizens of Europe. An immediate effect is the resurgence of nationalism and the success of right-wing populist parties. The way out is to transform the EU into a supranational democracy that restores solidarity and governs the existing (economic) community of fate. Building such a new order can only be the task of all Europeans who should put their nationalities aside and establish themselves as a cross-border constituent power.

Let me turn to some examples in order to outline this storyline in more detail. As mentioned above, the tale usually begins with a praise of the extraordinary accomplishments of European integration – which are presented as now being in decay. The most prominent proponent of this picture is the protest movement DiEM25, which aims at a European constituent assembly that is to enable the citizens to give the EU a new – and this time democratic – constitution. According to its manifesto, the ‘European Union was an exceptional achievement bringing together in peace European peoples […], proving that it was possible to create a shared framework of human rights across a continent that was, not long ago, home to murderous chauvinism, racism and barbarity’ (DiEM25 2016). In the same vein, the late Ulrich Beck reminds us – in a newspaper column arguing that the euro crisis ‘cries out to be transformed into the founding of a new Europe’ – that Europeans once ‘accomplished a miracle […]: enemies became neighbours’ (Beck Reference Beck2009). This miracle was built on the shared goals of preventing war and producing wealth. Driven by the hope for a better life realised through economic gains, the peoples of Europe managed to overcome their enmities and to engage in peaceful cooperation. It was the prospect of ‘shared prosperity and raised standards that brought Europeans together’ (DiEM25 2016).

However, the benefits of cooperation came at a price, namely a transfer of competences from national parliaments to less democratic EU institutions. According to DiEM25, already the ratification of the first European treaties set in motion ‘a process of de-politicising decision-making […], the result being a draining but relentless drive toward taking-the-demos-out-of-democracy’ (DiEM25 2016). The story comes to its turning point with the euro crisis, when this development is said to have escalated. For some, the crucial moment was the 2011 decision of Giorgios Papandreou, the Greek Prime Minister, to cancel the referendum on a proposed aid program: ‘Suddenly, the hidden inverted reality came to light. In Europe, which is so proud of its democracy, someone who practices democracy becomes a threat to Europe’ (Beck Reference Beck2011). For others, the installation of technocratic governments in Italy and Greece in the same year marked the watershed: ‘It is then that people began to speak, referring to the “Troika” or the European Commission as a “commissary” dictatorship or “revolution from above”’ (Balibar Reference Balibar2015). It became apparent that democracy at the nation-state level no longer commands sufficient power to resist EU policies. It is against this background that former EU politicians in 2012 published a call for ‘a bottom-up Europe’, denouncing ‘the Europe of elites and technocrats that has prevailed up to now’ (Delors et al. Reference Delors, Solana, Beck and Cohn-Bendit2012).

The story continues with the observation that, as a result of the increasing corrosion of democracy, European integration has come to undermine its own accomplishments. A ‘Citizens Manifesto for European Democracy, Solidarity and Equality’, prepared for the 2014 European elections through public consultation, informs us that citizens not only ‘feel that the impact of their votes is increasingly diminishing’ but that they are also acutely aware that the ‘richest continent on the planet is also the one where most people have been falling below the poverty line in the first three years of this decade’ (Citizens Pact 2013). According to the narrative, an immediate effect of the growing social injustice is that the EU’s culture of international understanding is in decline. A deeply concerning ‘resurgence of nationalisms’ has followed in the shadow of the ‘rampant inequalities’ caused by the euro rescue measures (Balibar Reference Balibar2013). The lesson is that only a fundamental transformation that moves the EU in the direction of transnational solidarity could induce a turn for the better. However, there is a sense that the EU’s current rules of treaty revision provide insufficient room for citizen input and incentivise the negotiating parties to frame issues in terms of national interests. Thus, the EU is seen as ‘incapable of being reformed through the standard process of inter-governmental deliberations and gradual treaty changes’ (Varoufakis Reference Varoufakis2016).

At this point, constituent power enters the story. We are told that without ‘opportunities for interventions from below […] that send a shudder through the ocean liner Europe, the whole enterprise will fail’ (Beck Reference Beck2011). While some of the narrative’s proponents imagine that this should initially play out in the form of resistance against tendencies of de-democratisation, they aim for the ‘possibility of a “constituent moment”’ (Balibar Reference Balibar2015). In response to poverty and nationalism, the stated goal is ‘to work towards the foundation of a constituent power that imposes its social character and its democratic characterization with a federalist perspective’ (Negri and Sánchez Cedillo 2015). Specifically, the aim is to initiate a constituent assembly that is not committed to the existing EU treaties but writes a new constitution for a supranational democracy. This political demand is formulated by various actors in different ways. For example, the previously mentioned Citizens Manifesto states: ‘To kick-start [a] process of radical reform, we propose a European Convention where citizens and politicians come together to develop a new democratic architecture’ (Citizens Pact 2013). Similarly, DiEM25 promotes ‘a Constitutional Assembly consisting of representatives elected on trans-national tickets’, which ‘will be empowered to decide on a future democratic constitution that will replace all existing European Treaties within a decade’ (DiEM25 2016).

The understanding of constituent power at play here clearly seeks to transcend the borders of the Member States. The main idea is that Europe’s citizens need to overcome their division and bring about a constitutional renewal of the EU as one cross-border political community: ‘The unit of political action […] is no longer the nation but the region’ (Beck Reference Beck2009). The Citizens Manifesto communicates the same message: ‘Rather than relying on fractured national sovereignties, we want to be empowered to act at a transnational level’ (Citizens Pact 2013). The underlying conviction is that ‘it is not only possible but also empowering to overlay’ the existing multiple identities of Europe’s citizens ‘a new one – a transnational identity of our own making: radical, anti-authoritarian, democratic Europeanism’ (openDemocracy 2016a). Accordingly, a European constituent assembly would have to ‘enjoy direct legitimacy vis-à-vis all the people in Europe’, which means it should be ‘based on general and equal elections giving every human being in Europe one vote’ (Marterbauer and Oberndorfer Reference Marterbauer and Oberndorfer2013: 86, emphasis in original). As Barbara Spinelli, a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) and DiEM25 activist, puts it: The EU needs ‘an authentic Constitution: not signed [by] the governments of the Member States but starting, as the American one, with the words: “We, the people…”’ (openDemocracy 2016b).

Narrative 2: ‘We, the peoples of Europe’

The narrative of ‘We, the peoples of Europe’ ascribes constituent power to the demoi of the Member States. The story goes like this: With the Laeken process the governments admitted that European integration has reached a stage where it can no longer suffice that they negotiate EU reforms among themselves. However, the European Convention of 2002/2003 was nothing more than a pseudo-democratic fig leaf for an elite project and it prepared a highly unsatisfactory document. Thus, the rejection of the Constitutional Treaty in the French and Dutch referendums of 2005 was a glorious democratic victory. However, the governments decided to bypass the peoples. While they pretended to drop the constitutional project, only the symbolic elements were removed from the draft, while its substance was transferred into a ‘reform treaty’ prepared behind closed doors. The Lisbon Treaty could not be stopped, but at least the 2009 ruling of the German Federal Constitutional Court (FCC) made clear – legally for Germany and symbolically for all Member States – that further transfers of sovereignty would require the activation of constituent power. Since then, however, the euro crisis has brought even more integration by stealth. Now the time has come to reclaim popular sovereignty and to determine the EU’s future in a process that builds on its actual pouvoirs constituants: the peoples of the Member States.

This storyline is particularly popular in and around the alter-globalisation movement Attac, which was highly active in the French ‘No’ campaign of 2005. According to Susan George, an Attac campaigner at the time, the months leading up to the referendum were characterised by serious public deliberation. At the end, the people clearly stated their political will: ‘During the spring of 2005, France witnessed a debate and a positive political outcome unequalled in decades. The victory of the “No” in the referendum on the Constitutional Treaty was a victory for the Europe of the future and for the human spirit, in the best Enlightenment tradition’ (George Reference George2008: 5). Besides its content, the main reason for the rejection of the Constitutional Treaty was the drafting process. In the words of Antonis Manitakis, later an interim Minister in the Greek government, the European Convention was nothing more than a red herring: ‘The constitution required by a politically unified Europe can be neither the outcome of secret intergovernmental agreements, nor the spurious creation of a fictitious “Assembly” that is a puppet of the powerful national governments’ (Manitakis Reference Manitakis2007: 37). Fortunately, we are told, two peoples saw through the democratic façade and claimed their right to shape the EU polity. The French and Dutch ‘No’ votes were an important insurrection against an attempted suppression of democracy.

The story’s turning point is the refusal of Europe’s elites to accept their defeat. The governments decided to ignore the voice of the peoples and to pursue their goal under a new name. As Jens-Peter Bonde, a former member of the European Convention and Eurosceptic MEP from Denmark, describes it, a plan was devised to get ‘major parts of the rejected constitution approved, by the backdoor, with no referendums’ (Bonde Reference Bonde2007). In light of this, an Attac working group called the European Construction Group drafted an alternative EU constitution with the title ‘Plan P, a Constitution for the Peoples of Europe’. The document’s preface criticises that the ‘politicians of the European Union, who insist on leading this institution at their own discretion, remain deaf vis-à-vis the opposition to the Constitutional Treaty and its remake, the Lisbon Treaty, despite the rejection expressed through a sufficient number of votes in 2005 by the Dutch and French and in 2008 by the Irish citizens’ (Attac 2009: 2, my translation). By simply dismissing the referendum results and continuing the project away from the eyes of the public, the governments undid the achievement of the ‘No’ campaigns: ‘So it is as if the French and the Dutch had never voted. The whole process [of making the Lisbon Treaty] leaves all European citizens, whatever their Member State, completely out of the picture’ (George Reference George2008: 100).

The story has it that the executives’ line of action during the euro crisis was still determined by the experience of the lost votes of 2005. It is no coincidence, we are told, that the governments (once again) resorted to legal instruments that allowed them to avoid a direct involvement of their peoples. For example, in a newspaper column considering how ‘a European constitution for the 21st century’ could be brought about, Bruce Ackerman and Miguel Maduro suggest that the ‘memory of the 2005 national referendums rejecting the EU constitution has led political leaders to respond to the current crisis with emergency measures that don’t require popular approval’ (Ackerman and Maduro Reference Ackerman and Maduro2012). In other words, the bypassing of the peoples is an ongoing strategy and was invoked by European elites during the euro crisis to advance integration in the area of EU fiscal and economic governance. The peoples’ demand for control over EU constitutional politics, clearly articulated in the referendums of 2005, remains unheard. In light of this, the FCC’s Lisbon ruling of 2009 has been welcomed. Proponents of the narrative interpret it as a confirmation that the peoples – not the states – are the EU’s ultimate source of authority. As is well known, the court found ‘that the constituent power has not granted the representatives and bodies of the people a mandate to dispose of the identity of the constitution’ (BVerfG, 2 BvE 2/08).

The court’s opinion, which sets limits to the transfer of competences from the state level to the EU, has become an important point of reference and is regularly invoked to criticise the EU for (perceived) violations of democracy. Especially in Germany, the Lisbon ruling has found its way into political storytelling. For example, in a libertarian think tank’s ‘Manifest [sic] for a Confederate Europe’ it provides the basis for a critique of the euro rescue measures, which are said to have resulted in an unsanctioned ‘sudden erosion of national sovereignty’ (Prometheus 2015: 2). In a similar vein, Michael Efler from the German NGO Mehr Demokratie, in 2012 referred to the Lisbon ruling to substantiate his claim that a parliamentary ratification of the European Stability Mechanism and the Fiscal Compact would constitute a violation of the Basic Law. In his view, the implied transfer of budget authority would have required ‘the approval of the constituent power’ in a direct-democratic form (Efler Reference Efler2012; my translation). Even citizens of other Member States refer to the Lisbon ruling, suggesting that it has normative (albeit not legal) implications for their political communities as well. Should we not assume that what is found to be ‘in contravention of basic democratic principles’ in Germany should be regarded as such ‘in all other Member States that claim to be democracies’ (Bonde Reference Bonde2009)?

This brings us to the issue of constituent power. The story’s main message is that the predominance of executives needs to come to an end. This demand is explicitly formulated in the terminology of pouvoir constituant and pouvoirs constitués. According to the proponents of Plan P, there is a need for rules and procedures that ‘separat[e] the constituent powers from the constituted powers’, such as referendums on popular initiative or the direct-democratic ratification of all constitutional decisions (Attac 2008: 3). In contrast to the first story, however, the narrative ascribes founding authority not to a single demos but to the several demoi of the Member States. We are told that there is no European people but only ‘27 peoples with different histories, languages and cultures’ (George Reference George2008, 101). In light of this, the subject of constituent power is imagined as being segmented into national parts. The expectation is that ‘[p]olitical Europe will be built in the name of its peoples, from its peoples and together with its peoples, themselves organised into separate and autonomous republics’ (Manitakis Reference Manitakis2007: 42). In other words, a transformation of the EU needs to take its course from a plurality of pouvoirs constituants that have an interest in defending their respective structures of nation-state democracy. Accordingly, the Plan P draft constitution opens with the words: ‘We, the Peoples of Europe’ (Attac 2009: 3, my translation).^{Footnote 5}

Narrative 3: ‘We, the citizens of Europe and of its Member States’

The narrative of ‘We, the citizens of Europe and of its Member States’ paints the picture of a dual constituent power. The story takes off with the Maastricht Treaty and the establishment of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). The decision to introduce a common currency without a political union that engages in fiscal and social policy is presented as the root cause of the EU’s current problems. According to the story, it became clear during the euro crisis that the existing EU constitutional order is deeply unstable. On paper, the Member States now have two choices for correcting the faulty design. They can either turn back the clock and renationalise competences or take bold steps in the direction of further integration. However, the narrative suggests that a return to a ‘Westphalian’ order is in fact neither feasible nor desirable because if the EU were to disintegrate, its Member States would not only lose their role as a major player in world politics but also face a dramatic economic decay. So there is actually only one way for Europe to retain its current position: a federal union. Such an order, which is meant to be a non-state federation, not a European superstate, could only be legitimately created through a process of constitution making that enables the citizens to act as a dual constituent power and to determine the common good from a European as well as from a national perspective.

Most contributions to this storyline come from a social-liberal context that regards the Member States’ failure to establish a political union alongside the monetary union as the EU’s ‘original sin’. This notion can be found in several proclamations written with a view to the European elections of 2014. In their pamphlet ‘For Europe! Manifesto for a Postnational Revolution in Europe’, Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Guy Verhofstadt, at the time both MEPs, claim: ‘It is very well to have a common currency, but without establishing a single integrated Europe it is a contradiction and an impossibility’ (Cohn-Bendit and Verhofstadt Reference Cohn-Bendit and Verhofstadt2012: 13). Similarly, the former member of the European Convention and MEP Andrew Duff writes in his ‘On Governing Europe’: ‘The seat of the problem is that the Maastricht treaty established a monetary union without putting in place a decent system to govern the political economy’ (Duff Reference Duff2012: 17). The story’s turning point is the near breakdown of the current order during the euro crisis. While the narrative acknowledges that the EU cannot be blamed for the outbreak of the global financial crisis, its subsequent struggles are seen as self-inflicted. In a tractate making ‘The Case for a Fundamental Reform of the European Union’, a group of academics, unionists, and politicians puts it as follows: ‘The fact that an exposed Europe became an early casualty of the crisis of the financial markets is largely due to the institutional weakness of the European Union’ (Nida-Rümelin et al. Reference Nida-Rümelin, Hirschel, Meyer, Meyer, Möller, Scheer, Schwan and Schwengel2013: 5).

Given the EU’s apparent incapacity, it might now seem tempting to return to the status quo ante with national currencies and greater control over economic matters for individual states. However, we learn that Europeans ‘might as well commit suicide! Because thinking that the nation state is best placed in today’s world to guard the economic and financial interests of its citizens and businesses is pure folly’ (Cohn-Bendit and Verhofstadt Reference Cohn-Bendit and Verhofstadt2012: 14). In the context of rapid globalisation single European countries will soon no longer be able to compete with the world’s economic superpowers and alliances. Moreover, as Duff’s treatise ‘Federal Union Now’ claims, the euro crisis has demonstrated that already today individual states are ‘too weak to get out of trouble by themselves’ (Duff Reference Duff2011: 1). Against this background, the trade-union initiated call ‘Founding Europe Anew!’ claims that cross-border solidarity between the citizens of Europe must become an essential element of a transformed EU: ‘[I]t is necessary that the EU develops further into a transfer-union’ (Bsirske et al. Reference Bsirske, Buntenbach, Hickel, Lehndorff and Urban2012: 2). Given the circumstances, the right move would be to deepen European integration through institution building that ‘take[s] account both of the close economic and financial ties between Member States and of the fact that the Eurozone has long since become a union based on shared liabilities and wealth transfer’ (Nida-Rümelin et al. Reference Nida-Rümelin, Hirschel, Meyer, Meyer, Möller, Scheer, Schwan and Schwengel2013: 6).

The constitutional model that is put forward in this context is a federal union with the competences necessary to become active in the fields of fiscal and social policy. While certainly presupposing further transfers of sovereignty, this future EU is not meant to be a federal state. Those in favour of the project aim for a ‘complex multi-level parliamentary democracy’ but distance themselves from ‘the ogre of the centralised superstate which so fixates those “eurosceptic” sovereignists who cling to the nation state’ (Duff Reference Duff2011: 4). The federal union would derive its democratic legitimacy from the citizens in a dual role: as European citizens and nation-state citizens. Thus, its political system would have to include classical features of federalism such as a bicameral legislature. In the new EU, law-making should be ‘subject to the control and legitimacy of a Parliament that is only answerable to the citizens of Europe. Alongside a European Senate composed of representatives of the Member States’ (Cohn-Bendit and Verhofstadt Reference Cohn-Bendit and Verhofstadt2012: 69).^{Footnote 6} For such an order to be functional, the citizens would have to conceive of themselves as members of two different political communities at the same time. For that reason, a federal union would have to ‘foster from the outset a sophisticated sense of European political citizenship’ while being aware and respectful of ‘the powerful lasting legacy of Europe’s nation states’ (Duff Reference Duff2012: 57).

Constituent power comes into play when it comes to establishing the federal union. At this point, the narrative turns against the leading role of governments. A declaration entitled ‘No to the Europe of Walls: Building Together the European Democracy’, signed by numerous civil society organisations, highlights executive dominance as a major problem of recent EU crisis politics: ‘[I]ntergovernmental decision making – the one in which governments alone are entrusted with decisions and that lacks substantial democratic legitimacy – had paralysing, unequal, and non-transparent effects’ (European Alternatives 2016). The alternative put forward is ‘a European constitutive process from below’, as Mario Candeias, co-director of the Institute for Social Analysis at the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, describes it (Candeias Reference Candeias2016).^{Footnote 7} At a more general level, it is claimed that a far-reaching decision such as building a federal union requires a special procedure of constitution making: ‘[T]he reform of the EU cannot be left to a conference of the governments of the Member States […]. It is of such momentous importance that a convention is needed’ (Nida-Rümelin et al. Reference Nida-Rümelin, Hirschel, Meyer, Meyer, Möller, Scheer, Schwan and Schwengel2013: 21). The role of the states as the ‘masters of the treaties’ is outrightly rejected: ‘Let us not accept the biggest lie that the nation states continue to tell their citizens, i.e. that they are the foundation of the European Union’ (Cohn-Bendit and Verhofstadt Reference Cohn-Bendit and Verhofstadt2012: 53).

But who is the subject of constituent power? Steering a middle course between the first two narratives, the story presents each individual as a member of two different demoi at the same time. From this perspective, the EU’s constituent power consists of European and national parts: ‘Being European is your surname. Just like your own nationality is your first name’ (Cohn-Bendit and Verhofstadt Reference Cohn-Bendit and Verhofstadt2012: 66). The hope is that, at least in the long term, ‘the citizens of Europe will acquire a dual political identity, as citizens both of a common Europe and of the individual countries that have come together to form a European Union’ (Nida-Rümelin et al. Reference Nida-Rümelin, Hirschel, Meyer, Meyer, Möller, Scheer, Schwan and Schwengel2013: 8). The composition of the convention that is to bring about the federal union mirrors the idea of a dual source of democratic legitimacy. The body is meant to include delegates from the Member States as well EU representatives – according to Duff’s proposal ‘national as well as European parliamentarians’ (Duff Reference Duff2012: 10).^{Footnote 8} Moreover, dual constituent power implies that single countries should not have a veto in the founding process but only the option of not entering the federal union. The constitution should be adopted ‘by referendum in all the countries by double majority (majority of states and citizens)’ (Cohn-Bendit and Verhofstadt Reference Cohn-Bendit and Verhofstadt2012: 124; see Duff Reference Duff2011: 24). In a nutshell, an ideal EU constitution would start with the words ‘We, the citizens of Europe and of its Member States’.

Narrative 4: ‘We, the multitude of Europe’

The narrative of ‘We, the multitude of Europe’ refrains from delineating a subject and focuses on resistance as a trigger of constitutional change. The story’s basic assertion is that the EU and especially the euro are instruments for the realisation of a neoliberal agenda aiming at the deregulation of markets and the privatisation of public sectors. To achieve these goals, more and more constraints on nation-state democracy had to be established over time. This internal logic of European integration is said to have come fully to light in 2015 when the Tsipras government was openly blackmailed into accepting strangulating conditions for a new bail-out package, despite the clear ‘OXI’ of the Greek people in a referendum. This event was nothing less than a coup d’état and revealed that Europe’s citizens are no longer in control of their destiny. To reinstall democracy, they need to aim for a radical transformation. However, the story has it that the institutional structure of the EU is specifically designed to obstruct any change that could pose a threat to the neoliberal hegemony. We are told that a progressive, democratic reform is an illusion and that the only option for restoring popular sovereignty is a rupture that forces a renegotiation of the treaties. This could either take the form of disobedience, i.e. of targeted non-compliance with oppressive EU rules, or of an exit from the EMU. The citizens of Europe must act as an anti-hegemonic multitude.

This storyline is usually presented from within far-left movements and organisations. For example, in a joint statement calling for an ‘Austerexit’ – an exit from austerity – the politicians Olivier Besançenot from the New Anti-Capitalist Party in France, Antonis Davanellos from Popular Unity in Greece, and Miguel Urbán Crespo from Podemos in Spain suggest that from ‘the 1957 Treaty of Rome to the 1986 Single European Act to the 1992 Maastricht Treaty to the 2005 European Constitution Treaty, the political and economic elite has only ever been motivated by the desire to construct a large economic market with the goal of satisfying the immediate interests of certain capitalists and financiers’ (Besançenot et al. Reference Besançenot, Davanellos and Crespo2015). In a similar vein, the Lexit Network, which campaigns for a (general) exit from the euro, claims that with ‘the implementation of the European single market and the Maastricht Treaty, European integration was established as a neoliberal project for the long run’ (Lexit Network 2016). In particular, the common currency is seen as a source of domination that deprives the Member States of their freedom to determine the guidelines of public spending. According to the Italian anti-capitalist movement Ross@ – an acronym for Resistenza, Organizzazione, Solidarietà, Socialismo, Anticapitalismo – the ‘euro is an instrument for the capillary control’ of national budgetary policy (Ross@ 2015: 14).

The turning point of the story is the Greek referendum of 2015 and the subsequent decision of the Tsipras government to accept the EU’s conditions for a new bail-out package even though a large majority of citizens had voted against it. Syriza’s renunciation of its anti-austerity program is regarded as the result of blackmail. In ‘An Open Letter to the British Left’, published after the Brexit referendum, Stathis Kouvelakis, a former member of the central committee of Syriza, describes it as follows: ‘Syriza was initially elected, in January 2015, to abolish austerity and cancel the major part of an odious and illegitimate debt. It confronted an immediate all-out war launched by the European Union, which started with the strangulation of its banking system and the escalating restrictions on its liquidity provision that took effect days after its victory’ (Kouvelakis Reference Kouvelakis2016). According to the narrative, the EU did not even pretend anymore to respect democratic decision-making but without hesitation used its economic power to overturn a popular vote that contradicted its interests. As the initiators of the so-called ‘Plan B in Europe’ put it, the ‘elected Greek government of Alexis Tsipras was brought to its knees by the European Union. The “agreement” of 13th July is in fact a coup d’état. […] [O]fficial Europe could not stand the idea that a people suffering from its self-defeating austerity program dared elect a government determined to say “No!”’ (Mélenchon et al. 2015).

Against this background, proponents of the story suggest that the main question today is how popular sovereignty could be restored. According to them, the problem is that the EU is incapable of progressive reform from within because European integration proceeds under the hegemony of neoliberal interests. The ‘Declaration for a Democratic Rebellion in Europe’ claims that the executives of the Member States ‘are subservient to the corporations and financial firms that deploy armies of lobbyists. They are negotiating new treaties in the name but against the interests of Europe’s peoples’ (Plan B 2016). In a blog post on ‘Austerity, Limited Sovereignty and Social Devastation’, Panagiotis Sotiris, an activist and member of Popular Unity in Greece, argues that only in theory one can imagine the EU as a democratic polity working towards solidarity between the peoples of Europe, while ‘with the actual configuration of forces, this is not possible. […] There is no way such a change can be accomplished through normal processes of deliberation and decision-making’ (Sotiris Reference Sotiris2012). Even more, Syriza’s attempt to change the system from within has not simply failed but triggered a backlash from the creditor institutions: ‘[T]he strategy of pursuing a reversal in the terms of austerity without breaking with the institutions of neoliberal domination – the EU, the Eurozone and the IMF – has backfired’ (Karyotis Reference Karyotis2015).

The main lesson is that the way forward needs to involve rupture: a break with the current EU or at the very least a deconstruction of the EMU. This position comes in two variants. The first opts for disobedience in the form of a refusal to implement austerity policies and to pay debt. Elements of this view are endorsed in the context of DiEM25. In order to force a radical EU reform, Member States – especially debtor countries – should bring about ‘a clash with the European establishment based on a campaign of wilfully disobeying the unenforceable EU “rules” […] while making no move whatsoever to leave the EU’ (Varoufakis Reference Varoufakis2016). Similarly, Catherine Samary, a co-founder of the now-dissolved French party Revolutionary Communist League, suggests that the ‘OXI of the Greek people was a mandate of opposition to the new austerity plan negotiated with the Eurogroup’ and should be interpreted as support for measures such as the ‘refusal to pay the unsupportable and illegitimate, indeed illegal, part’ of the Greek debt (Samary Reference Samary2016, emphasis removed). The Plan B supporters pursue a double strategy. While their immediate goal is to achieve a ‘complete renegotiation’ of the EU treaties through a campaign of ‘disobedience toward arbitrary European practices and irrational “rules”’, they plead in favour of leaving the common currency if it turns out that ‘the euro cannot be democratised’ (Mélenchon et al. 2015).

This leads us to the second variant of the narrative, which argues for exit. Given that the EU is seen as barring ‘the implementation of any agenda that would halt […] the advances of neoliberalism and austerity’, the Brexit referendum is seen as exemplary (Kouvelakis Reference Kouvelakis2016). In contrast to the UK’s decision, however, the idea is not to leave the EU altogether but to withdraw from the EMU. Assuming that the euro cannot be turned into something that is beneficial for all parties involved, it is suggested that ‘a Lexit (left exit) must be advanced as a tool to reclaim democracy’ (Lexit Network 2016). For proponents of this view, abandoning the euro is part of an anti-hegemonic strategy directed against a specific economic agenda. It is ‘an attempt to reclaim monetary sovereignty as part of a break with “actually existing neoliberalism”’ (Sotiris Reference Sotiris2012). Irrespective of whether proponents of the narrative opt for disobedience or exit, the general message – which distinguishes this story from the others – is that progressive change in the EU is not to be had on the path of constitution making. In the current constellation, the only hope is that a significant number of citizens decide to force a break with the existing structures. Moreover, the narrative is not concerned with the question of who should form part of such a process. The motto is: ‘We, the multitude of Europe’.

Comparing the four narratives: Differences and connections

The general picture that we get from the above analysis is that various political actors in the EU, in particular protest movements and public intellectuals, draw on ideas of constituent power to challenge the authority of the states as the ‘masters of the treaties’. The common denominator of the four stories is the rejection of executive-centred treaty making, which is seen as lacking democratic legitimacy. All narratives call into question the view that the complexity and fast growth of the EU has left intergovernmentalism as the only plausible steering mechanism of European integration. The bottom line is that ‘the people’ should reclaim what – according to these narratives – has been illegitimately withheld from them: the right to decide on the EU’s structure and competences. However, we also see fundamental disagreement regarding the identity of this collective subject. We are offered four different views as to who exactly should take control of European integration: a cross-border demos, the demoi of the Member States, the citizens as members of two demoi, or a non-delineated multitude. Even though this in part has to do with the different plots leading up to the competing allocations of constituent power, there are also various connections between the storylines (see Table 1).

Table 1.

Narratives of constituent power in the European Union

One of the most interesting interrelations can be found between narratives 1 and 4. Both point to the de-democratising effects of the euro crisis in order to explain why citizens need to take action. Some actors such as DiEM25 even contribute to the construction of both stories and conceive of resistance against the EU as a preparatory step for a European project of constitution making. In fact, the negativistic logic of narrative 4 seems in principle compatible with all other stories since its proponents could adopt any (constructive) idea of constituent power in the EU once a multitude has done away with the structures that are said to currently prevent progressive change on the path of democratic higher law-making. With a view to the future structure of the EU, narratives 1 and 3 point in similar directions. Both aim for deeper integration in order to enable a European form of social policy. In contrast, narratives 2 and 4 share a sceptical view on the transfer of competences to the EU level and are primarily worried about the loss of democracy at the nation-state level. Finally, it is worth noting that narrative 3 has common ground with narratives 1 and 2 in that it combines their respective interpretations of the subject of constituent power in the EU.