On the spatio-temporal conditions of democratic practice

Este capítulo es parte de un libro contextualizado en la etapa inicial de la post Guerra Fría y los debates sobre la democratización global y el triunfo de la democracia liberal como modelo político. El texto invita a diversas reflexiones sobre la temporalidad y la espacialidad de la democracia en la teoría política, la eficacia de su aplicabilidad, y la falta de cuestionamiento sobre lo que la “democracia” implica más allá de su “encanto cosmopolita”.This chapter is part of a book contextualized in the early Post Cold War era, and within the debates regarding global democratization and the triumph of liberal democracy as political model. The text invites to diverse reflections about the temporality and spatiality of democracy in political theory, the efficiency of its applicability, and the lack of questioning regards what “democracy” implies beyond its “cosmopolitan charm”

Liberté et Sécurité en Europe : enjeux contemporains

La liberté constitue toujours le principe à partir duquel toutes les interférences des Etats en termes de sécurité doivent être limitées, justifiées et transparentes dans les traités de l’Union européenne. La perspective qui s’esquisse ici, avec les projets de recherches plus spécifiques qui en font partie, suggère que la résistance face à la marginalisation des revendications de liberté doit être plus forte dès lors que l’on invoque le besoin d’une sécurité accrue. En d’autres termes, là où les possibilités de liberté politique sont désormais retenues par des formes de fragmentation structurelle et institutionnelle, elles devraient se nourrir des formes imaginaires de coopération entre les juridictions existantes ; et là où les possibilités de coopération et d’unification sont pensées pour contrôler les populations dans une plus grande ampleur, elles devraient faire l’objet d’un contrôle démocratique plus important, qu’il soit parlementaire ou qu’il vienne de communautés et d’institutions démocratiques responsables et transparentes. Les implications en termes de politiques, que nous mettons en avant dans ce texte, suivent les principes que nous venons d’exposer.In EU Treaties «liberty» is always the principle against which any state interference on the basis of security must be limited, justified and open to judicial scrutiny. The perspective sketched here, along with the more specific research projects that inform it, suggest an urgent need for much more robust resistance to the marginalization of claims about liberty whenever the necessities of security are invoked. In general terms it might be said that where the possibilities of political liberty are currently being constrained by forms of structural and institutional fragmentation, they ought to be nurtured by imaginative forms of cooperation across existing jurisdictions; and where the possibilities of cooperation and unification are being sought in order to control human populations on a wider scale, they ought to be subject to greater scrutiny and control by many different democratically accountable communities and institutions. The policy implications advanced in this paper follow these principles

The future of sovereignty in multilevel governance Europe: a constructivist reading

Multilevel governance presents a depiction of contemporary structures in EU Europe as consisting of overlapping authorities and competing competencies. By focusing on emerging non-anarchical structures in the international system, hence moving beyond the conventional hierarchy/anarchy dichotomy to distinguish domestic and international arenas, this seems a radical transformation of the familiar Westphalian system and to undermine state sovereignty. Paradoxically, however, the principle of sovereignty proves to be resilient despite its alleged empirical decline. This article argues that social constructivism can explain the paradox, by considering sovereign statehood as a process-dependent institutional fact, and by showing that multilevel governance can feed into this process