Richard Bellamy

The author replies to five questions about his approach to political philosophy and his views about its prospects for the future

The legitimacy of the European human rights regime : a view from the United Kingdom

The author would like to thank Paul Beaumont, Richard Bellamy, Mátyás Bódig, Andreas Føllesdal, Gábor Halmai, András Jakab and Zsolt Körtvélyesi for valuable comments, discussions and suggestions.Peer reviewedPostprin

How the EU can counter democratic backsliding in its member states

The issue of democratic backsliding in the EU’s member states has received substantial attention in recent years, but it is far from clear how the EU’s institutions should respond. Richard Bellamy and Sandra Kröger set out a framework for understanding and tackling the problem, built on the principle of ‘value differentiated integration’. Recent developments in ... Continue

Is differentiated integration democratic? Taking stock of the views of political party actors

Differentiated integration has become an important feature of the European integration process, but are there potential democratic pitfalls that come with some EU member states pursuing closer cooperation than others? Sandra Kröger, Marta Lorimer and Richard Bellamy present findings from a new study assessing the views of political party actors in seven EU member states

The Normality of Constitutional Politics: an Analysis of the Drafting of the EU Charta of Fundamental Rights

Constitutional politics is often contrasted with normal politics as being more deliberative and so able to produce a principled consensus rather than a compromise. This article qualifies this view. The authors argue that the potential exists for reasonable disagreement even over such basic constitutional principles as rights. As a result, a constitution can only be agreed by employing the art of compromise typical of normal politics. Indeed, a prime role of constitutional politics lies in showing how conflicts can be normalised. The authors illustrate their argument via a detailed analysis of the various political compromises employed by the convention to draft the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights.constitution building; EU Charter of Fundamental Rights; fundamental/human rights

Looking Backward: Richard Epstein Ponders the Progressive Peril

In the 1888 novel Looking Backward, Edward Bellamy dreamed up a twentieth century America that was a socialist utopia, a vision invoked four years later by the conservative Justice David J. Brewer as a warning against government regulation. In How Progressives Rewrote the Constitution, Richard Epstein, looking back at the twentieth century through an interpretive lens much more similar to Brewer\u27s than Bellamy\u27s, sees and bemoans the growth of a dominant big government of which the novelist could only dream. Epstein pulls no punches in his attack on those he deems responsible for the shift in the American polity from private to public control, asserting that the Progressives . . . were determined that their vision of the managed economy should take precedence in all areas of life, and that they and their modern defenders have to live with the stark truth that the noblest innovations of the Progressive Era were its greatest failures

The liberty of the post-moderns? Market and civic freedom within the EU

Taking its cue from Benjamin's Constant's famous essay, this article uses the case of EU citizenship to explore how far ancient, civic, freedom can be combined with modern, market, freedom. Many commentators have, in different ways, argued that the forces promoting European integration call for a new form of post-national citizenship that either builds civic freedom on the basis of the liberties of the moderns or does away with the need for it altogether. These arguments are disputed. Constant perceptively raised a number of problems with this analysis, while ignoring - or being ignorant of - a number of others. As he noted, ancient liberty corrects various pathologies and lacunas of modern liberty, but he overlooked the degree to which its survival rested on the continuing importance of certain pre-modern forms of social solidarity in modern times. Those seeking new forms of post-modern citizenship tend to ignore one or other or both these points. The piece concludes by arguing that the only practical way of combining ancient and modern liberty within the EU is to view it as a particularly intense form of international cooperation between democratic states rather than as a supranational organisation that transcends its component parts

Political legitimacy and European monetary union: contracts, constitutionalism and the normative logic of two-level games

The crisis of the euro area has severely tested the political authority of the European Union (EU). The crisis raises questions of normative legitimacy both because the EU is a normative order and because the construction of economic and monetary union (EMU) rested upon a theory that stressed the normative value of the depoliticization of money. However, this theory neglected the normative logic of the two-level game implicit in EMU. It also neglected the need for an impartial and publically acceptable constitutional order to acknowledge reasonable disagreements. By contrast, we contend that any reconstruction of the EU's economic constitution has to pay attention to reconciling a European monetary order with the legitimacy of member state governance. The EU requires a two-level contract to meet this standard. Member states must treat each other as equals and be representative of and accountable to their citizens on an equitable basis. These criteria entail that the EU's political legitimacy requires a form of demoicracy that we call ‘republican intergovernmentalism’. Only rules that could be acceptable as the product of a political constitution among the peoples of Europe can ultimately meet the required standards of political legitimacy. Such a political constitution could be brought about through empowering national parliaments in EU decision-making

A note from the editors: the state of the political constitution

The revival of the political constitution has come about in parallel with two developments, one in constitutional practice and the other in political theory. With regard to the former, the political constitution has been seen as something of a bulwark against the rise of legal (or judicial, or common law) constitutionalism.  The seeming hegemony of this latter model of constitutionalism among contemporary lawyers and political scientists has produced from (so-called) political constitutionalists a reaction against the delegation of important decisions to non-political institutions and an obsessively court-centered scholarship.  Perceiving this shift in focus from political to legal institutions to be the very antithesis of the traditional Commonwealth (more particularly, of the United Kingdom’s parliamentary) model of constitutionalism, and, more broadly, to be an affront to democratic sensibilities, the notion of the political constitution was retrieved and defended in a seminal article in the 1979 edition of the Modern Law Review, written (though first delivered in his Chorley Lecture the previous year) by the late John Griffith.  More recently, in the work of Adam Tomkins, Richard Bellamy, and Grégoire Webber and Graham Gee, a normative interpretation has been lent to Griffith’s thesis so as to provide a full-fledged constitutional theory capable of standing as an alternative to the liberal-legal paradigm—a turn, one might say, from the political constitution to political constitutionalism