JÜRGEN HABERMAS
I use the term transnationalization to refer to the process that aims to create a “supranational” democracy, that is, one above the level of a state. Taking the European Union as a model, supranational is meant to express the idea that such a polity assumes a federal character but—unlike federal states—not the familiar characteristics of a state. This supranational construct is not supposed to enjoy either a monopoly on the legitimate use of force or ultimate decision-making authority. Instead, it should be based on the weak priority of applying federal law and leave the implementation of statutes, guidelines, and decrees to the governments of the member states. Can such a union satisfy the standards of democratic legitimacy that we are familiar with from nation-states? I think that this question is important not only when it comes to the future of the European Union but also when one considers the current threat to the democratic substance of all nation-states, the smaller more than the larger.
Our era is marked by a growing mismatch between a world society that is becoming increasingly interdependent at the systemic level and a world of states that remains fragmented. The states that are consciously integrated by their citizens are still the only collectives capable of acting effectively on the basis of democratic decisions and with the intention to protect and shape the social conditions of their populations. But they are becoming ever more deeply entangled in systemic relationships that permeate national boundaries. Above all, globalized markets make use of accelerated digital communication to create ever-denser networks and to bring these collective actors into completely new kinds of dependencies. In view of the politically undesirable side effects of systemic integration, a need for steering arises, which single nation-states are increasingly unable to cope with. Politicians and citizens sense this loss of political decision-making power and, in a psychologically understandable but paradoxical defensive reaction, cling even more firmly to the nation-state and its borders, which have long since become porous.
The national scope for action that has already been lost and is still shrinking can be made good only at the supranational level. Indeed, this is actually happening in the form of international cooperation. The rapidly increasing number of influential international organizations has given rise to various forms of governance beyond the nation-state. But these international treaty regimes escape proper democratic control.1 An alternative would be to form supranational communities that, as I will show, can in principle satisfy democratic standards of legitimacy even when they do not assume the format of states writ large. One need not share Marxist background assumptions to recognize in the unleashing of financial markets and the “financialization” of capitalism one of the crucial reasons for this development2—and to conclude that we must first implement a promising re-regulation of the global banking sector within an economic region of at least the size and importance of the eurozone.3 In Europe, these problems have come to a particularly drastic head as a result of the high level of economic integration we have achieved in the meantime.
I will first discuss the management of the crisis, which, although it has left the core of the problems untouched, has led to a self-empowerment of the European executive. The resulting shortfalls in legitimation, as much as the unsolved problem of structural economic imbalances, call for deeper integration, at least in the eurozone (1). Against the background of these current developments, I will then turn to the theoretical question of how a supranational polity can satisfy the principle of democracy that has hitherto been realized only in the nation-state format (2). Taking the example of how the United States arose, I will discuss the constitutional problem that must be solved in the process of European integration if the EU, or at least a future Euro Union, is one day to measure up to its own aspirations (3). On the other hand, the most important resource—namely, mutual trust among the European peoples—is lacking, even if one disregards the national prejudices that were first stirred up during the crisis. At the same time, we must not fail to recognize that the fear of a superstate mainly betrays the desire to hold on to the democratic substance guaranteed by one’s own nation-state. A democratically organized union could take this justified insistence on a normative achievement into account (4). Therefore, I will suggest a counterfactual scenario of constitution making, in which the European peoples would participate together with the European citizenry on an equal footing. This hypothetically assumed perspective reveals the innovative ways in which the European Union is already moving in the direction of a transnational democracy, as well as the reforms that would still have to be made in order to turn the existing union into a democracy (5). In conclusion, I will briefly examine some implications of the unfamiliar proposal of two subjects simultaneously engaging in the constitution of a transnational democracy (6).
1
First, some observations on a still unsolved problem that so far prevents a lasting stabilization of the eurozone. It was possible to avert the sovereign debt crisis only because the European Central Bank managed to present a credible simulation of joint liability—that is, a fiscal sovereignty that the union in fact lacks because of the ban on a bailout. Nevertheless, the lack of repayment responsibility is not the essential design flaw of the monetary union. Economists have been warning for a long time about the suboptimal conditions that the eurozone offers for a common currency area.4 Because of the real economic differences in the current account balances of the different national economies, uniform interest rates send national governments the wrong signals. One size for all fits no one. The structural differences among the economies of the member states mean that their performance will drift further apart unless a joint economic government is established.
It is a well-known fact that the European Council has pursued an investor-friendly policy that, aside from necessary administrative and labor market reforms, confines itself to dictating austerity measures to the crisis-plagued countries—requirements that weigh exclusively on wages, social benefits, the civil service, and public infrastructure. The council imposes conditions on national governments that amount to treating the citizens of democratic polities like minors. Instead, the design flaw of a monetary union without a political union should have been tackled. Without the institutional framework for jointly coordinated fiscal and economic policies (with implications for a common social policy), the structural imbalances between the different economies are destined to increase. Therefore, the economic constraints speak in favor of a reform that would put the council and the European Parliament in a position to make joint decisions on federal guidelines for fiscal, economic, and social politics. But the governments of the donor countries, particularly the German government, lack the courage to canvass support for solidaristic measures among their electorates.
The pattern of off-loading problems onto pseudosovereign member states has an ironic reverse side—the power of the executive bodies has actually grown. The crisis management under German leadership has necessitated a self-empowerment of the governments assembled in the Eurogroup. In an alliance with the European executive branch—thus, the council, the commission, and the European Central Bank—they have extended their scope for action at the cost of the national parliaments, and in the process have greatly exacerbated the existing shortfalls in legitimacy.5 The European Parliament did not have any share in the increase in competences generated by the momentous reform measures of recent years—the Fiscal Compact, the European Stability Mechanism, and the so-called six-pack—even when it participated in the legislative process. To this day, the European Parliament lacks a counterpart to the powerful Eurogroup in the council. Without a standing committee for the members from the eurozone, the parliament cannot even properly exercise its monitoring rights, which are in any case far too weak.
In this complicated situation, the theoretical question of the possibility of a transnationalization of democracy in the shape of a polity that is both federal and supranational acquires immediate political relevance. In the academic literature, one finds repeated attempts to solve this persistent problem through recourse to semantic cosmetics. There is no lack of proposals that cast the existing democratic deficits in a flattering light through a cunning reduction of democratic standards.6 Therefore, I would first like to explain briefly the concept of democracy as it is properly understood.
2
With the self-empowerment of the National Assembly, the French Revolution facilitated the exemplary breakthrough of the principle of democracy in the shape of a unitary state. The Kingdom of France had long been a sovereign state. Within this national framework, the revolutionary constitutions were able to realize the principle of the self-legislation of a nation of free and equal citizens—in a different way than in federations. Democratic self-determination means that the addressees of coercive laws are subject only to the laws that they have enacted for themselves through a democratic process. This procedure owes its legitimizing force, on the one hand, to the inclusion of all citizens in political decision making (though this is mediated) and, on the other hand, to the linking of political decisions with a deliberative mode of public opinion formation and parliamentary deliberation.7
Legitimate state power proceeds from the “people” in such a way that the constitution is the result of a democratic procedure involving the entire future citizenry (or their representatives). Only in this constitution-building process do the people exercise their authority in an undivided way—this idea is expressed in the concept of popular sovereignty.8 At the level of the constituted political authority, by contrast, the citizens exercise their sovereignty only through the channels of a division of powers; legislative power is supplemented by judicial and administrative powers. Within the constitutional state, popular sovereignty is dispersed and emerges from its latency only when it comes to changing the constitution.
The same principle of democracy was realized in a different way in the shape assumed by the United States since 1789, namely, within a federation of states. Here, a democratic federation emerged from a confederation of individual states that had seceded from the British Empire. Over the course of the nineteenth century, this federation—in a manner similar to Switzerland after its constitutional revolution in 1848—developed into a national federal state with features clearly distinct from the earlier forms of a confederation of states.
The problem that arises in every federal entity is the interpenetration of the international relations among the member states with the national organization of political will-formation within each of the states. International law and the concept of a contract, on the one side, and state law and the concept of a national constitution, on the other side, intermingle in all federations. But in the early modern confederations, the integration of the legal relations between the states and the national legal systems of the member states remained superficial. In the controversies recorded in the Federalist Papers, by contrast, one can trace the chief issue at stake in the development from a confederation into a democratic federal state—namely, how the democratic character of an alliance of member states, each of which has already been democratically constructed, can be preserved.9 One result of that debate is especially relevant in our context: the debate revealed that the principle of democracy is realized in federal states in a way that is not open to federations of a supranational character.
3
An alliance of democratic states affects not only the relation between national governments and federal institutions, as was the case in the early federations. In addition, the peoples themselves must pool their “sovereignties.” With the founding of the United States, the integration of states had crossed a historical threshold that led to an integration not only of governments but also of the participating “peoples.” For this reason, the international legal principle of the equality of states, for the first time, served a different function: to ensure the equal status of the peoples of democratic member states. The principle of “state equality,” hitherto a principle of international law, was, if you like, domesticated for the purpose of securing the equal representation of member states in a democratic federal state. In international law, this guarantees an equal standing of states and governments, but within a federal state it protects, together with the equal standing of member states, the democratic rights of the peoples of each of the states.
Insofar as the colonial states, which had just fought for their independence, regarded themselves as the subjects of the constitution-building process, it was only logical not to communalize the constitution-amending powers of the individual states completely but to reserve decisive veto positions for the states in the federation. On the other hand, insofar as the entire future citizenry of the union recruited from the individual states regarded itself as the true constitution-framing subject, there was no obstacle to the constitution of a federal state. From a legal point of view, this issue was ultimately decided in favor of the federation. As is well known, agreement was reached in Article V of the US Constitution. Instead of unanimity, only the approval of a majority of the legislatures of the individual states is required to change the Constitution. This provision can be understood, retrospectively at any rate, as a pointer in the direction of a federal state.10
We can learn two things from this development for the comparison with a supranational democracy composed of nation-states, such as the EU. Bringing the two competing principles of the equality of states and the equality of citizens into harmony within the framework of a nation-state was accomplished by the invention of a two-chamber system and a corresponding division of powers. The Senate, or the second chamber, can ensure a suitable form of participation in federal legislation through the competing legislation of the member states. The principle of democracy finds full application in such a federal state precisely by virtue of the fact that the principle of state equality is adequately embodied in the second chamber. Only in this way are the citizens of the member states, which are themselves democratically structured, invested with the right to a form of democratic participation that is indirect but of equal weight. However, it is not the case that each individual state can claim the last word on changing the Constitution.
Thus, the first thing that is needed for a proper federal state is the normative subordination of the states to the federal level. Second, that priority of the federal level over the individual states expresses the political identity of the people, from whom all political authority proceeds; in the end, it is the national citizenry as a whole that establishes and sustains a democratic federal state, not the governments of the several states or their citizens.
4
As it happens, the citizens of Europe do not want to fulfill either of these conditions. They don’t want a large-scale federal state. The peoples who took part in the establishment of the United States comprised immigrants who had liberated themselves from the colonial rule of their common mother country; by contrast, the peoples who are playing a decisive role in the European project have been living in “old” nation-states for centuries. There are many reasons why the process of European unification is stalled. But the main one is the lack of mutual trust that the citizens of different nations would have to show one another as a precondition for their willingness to adopt a common perspective that transcends national boundaries when making political decisions on federal issues. Yet this lack of trust should not be located in the wrong place. Nationalism confuses two forms of solidarity that we must distinguish today. We should not confuse the informal solidarity that habitually develops in families and prepolitical communities with legally constituted civic solidarity.
In European states that emerged from national unification movements, a national consciousness fostered—indeed produced—by schools, the military, national historiography, and the press became superimposed on older dynastic and religious ties as well as on regional forms of life and loyalties. We see in many places today that, in times of crisis, conflicts continually flare up around these older regional and ethnic boundaries, conflicts that awaken older loyalties and can lead to the disintegration of national solidarity. But we should not be enticed into drawing hasty parallels between this sort of conflict and the awkward role that the nation-states are currently playing in blocking the European integration process.
Nations are composed of citizens, and these form political communities that did not develop spontaneously but instead were legally constructed. Contrary to the ethnonational ideologies that try to suppress this fact, the political level of civic integration acquires here a weight entirely its own, compared with the informal layers of sociocultural integration.11 Unlike the loyalty to a territorial lord, which rests on existing forms of social integration, national consciousness, including the ascriptive characteristics attributed to it retrospectively, is the result of an organized form of political integration. The mass of the population was mobilized over the course of the nineteenth century and was included, step by step, in political will-formation.
Viewed historically, a relatively high level of political inclusion has been achieved in the meantime, and we have to keep this political level in mind if we want to explain the lack of reciprocal trust among national populations. The lack of trust that we presently observe among European nations is not primarily an expression of xenophobic self-isolation against foreign nations but instead reflects, in the first place, self-conscious citizens’ insistence on the normative achievements of their respective nation-states. In present-day Europe, there is a widespread conviction that national citizens owe the fragile resource of free and relatively equitable living conditions to the democratic practices and liberal institutions of their states. Therefore, they have a well-founded interest in “their” nation-states remaining a guarantor of these achievements and in not being exposed to the risk of intrusions and encroachments by an unfamiliar supranational polity. Their suspicion is directed more against the supranational paternalism of a superstate than against the forms of life and mentalities of neighboring peoples who are rejected as foreign.
This is why the lack of a “European people” is not the allegedly insurmountable obstacle to joint political decision making. Indeed, translingual citizenship uniting such a numerous variety of different language communities is a novelty. But Europeans already share the principles and values of largely overlapping political cultures. What is required is a Europe-wide political communication. For that, we need a European public sphere—which, however, does not mean a new one. The existing national public spheres are sufficient for this purpose; they only have to become mutually open to one another. The existing national media are sufficient, too, provided they perform a complex task of translation: they must learn to report on the discussions being conducted in one another’s countries about the issues of common concern to all citizens of the union.12 Then, the trust among citizens that currently exists in the form of a nationally limited civic solidarity may well develop into an even more abstract form of trust that reaches across national borders.13
The “no demos” thesis obscures a factor that we must take seriously: the conviction that the normative achievements of the democratic state are worth preserving. This self-assertion of a democratic civil society is something different from the reactive clinging to naturalized characteristics of ethnonational origin that provides sustenance to right-wing populism. In addition, democratic self-assertion is not only an empirical motive but also a justifying reason that, under the given circumstances, speaks for the attempt to realize a supranational democracy. For it is not as if democracies shut up in nation-states could preserve their democratic substance, as though they were unaffected by involvement in the systemic dynamics of a global society—at any rate not, as indicated, in Europe.
Let me summarize. European citizens have good reasons to pursue two competing goals simultaneously: on the one hand, they want the union that has arisen from nation-states to assume the form of a supranational polity that can act effectively in a democratically legitimate way; on the other hand, they want to embark on this transnationalization of democracy only under the proviso that their nation-states, in the role as future member states, remain guarantors of their already achieved level of justice and freedom. In the supranational polity, the higher political level should not be able to overwhelm the lower one. The issue of ultimate decision-making authority should not be resolved through hierarchization, as it is in federal states. The supranational federation should instead be constructed in such a way that the heterarchical relationship between the member states and the federation remains intact.
5
To solve this problem, I propose a thought experiment. Let us imagine a democratically developed European Union as if its constitution had been brought into existence by a double sovereign.14 The constituting authority should be composed of the entire citizenry of Europe, on the one hand, and of the peoples of Europe, on the other. Already, during the constitution-framing process, one side should be able to address the other side, with the aim of achieving a balance between the corresponding interests. In that case, the heterarchical relationship between European citizens and European peoples would structure the founding process itself. The competition over interests between the two constitution-founding subjects would then be reflected, at the level of the constituted polity, in procedures that require agreements between two legislative bodies with equal rights—such as the European Parliament and the European Council.
In this scenario, the doubled sovereign can no longer decide in a really sovereign manner. The “leveling up” of the European citizens through the addition of the European peoples indicates that, from the outset, the sovereign must have already committed itself to recognizing the historical achievement of a level of justice embodied by the nation-states. “Higher-level” or “shared” sovereignty means that the constituting authority is limited by being under an obligation to conserve, within the larger frame of the future union, the substance of what national citizens claim as the emancipatory achievements of their respective national democracies from a revolutionary past.
If one asks, from this perspective of a “double” sovereign, which further reforms of the existing European treaties are necessary to eliminate the existing legitimation deficits of the European Union in its present state, then the answer is obvious. The European Parliament would also have to be able to introduce legislative initiatives, and the so-called “ordinary legislative procedure,” which requires the approval of both chambers, would have to be extended to all policy fields. In addition, the European Council—thus, the assembly of heads of government, who to this day enjoy a semiconstitutional status—would have to be incorporated into the Council of Ministers. Finally, the European Commission would have to assume the functions of a government answerable to council and parliament in equal measure. With this transformation of the union into a supranational polity that satisfies democratic standards, the principles of equality of states and of citizens would be accorded equal consideration. The democratic will of the two constitution-framing subjects is reflected in the symmetrical participation of both “chambers” in the legislative process and in the symmetrical status of parliament and council with respect to the executive branch.
Such a radically reformed union would still deviate considerably from the model of a federal state. Interestingly enough, current EU law includes a range of important provisions that, on the assumption of a sovereignty shared by European citizens and peoples, can be understood as legitimate deviations from the model of the federal state:
These principles and provisions can be understood from a reconstructive perspective as a logical expression of democratic will-formation in a constituent assembly that has a heterogeneous composition in the sense outlined. To this extent, the European treaties already prefigure an at once federally and democratically constituted supranational polity.
6
With this step, the democratic legitimation of the constituted polity is shifted from the level of the constitution-building process to the metalevel justification for the peculiar composition of the constituting authority itself. What counts as a legitimating reason at this level is the assumption that, in the course of the founding process, the citizens of a future European Union as a whole are willing to share equal rights with the peoples of the future member states. According to the assumption, these peoples are willing to participate in the project, in turn, only on the condition that, in the supranational political community to be established, the integrity of their states, in their role as guarantors of the historically achieved levels of freedom and justice, is assured. Even though the totalities of “citizens” and “peoples” overlap exactly, so that they are composed of the same persons, the willingness on both sides to accept these terms does not fall from the sky—neither the concession made by the future European citizens to restrict their sovereignty in favor of the involvement of European peoples nor the reservation that the European peoples make by insisting on the normative substance of their respective national states. Seeping down from the abstract level of political theory to the rough waves of history, such an agreement, which Europeans must reach with themselves, can come about only as the result of a painful learning process.
From the perspective of democratic theory, which I have preferred to adopt in this chapter, the agreement by the two sides to cooperate in founding a constitution opens up a new dimension. Such a process, which precedes the actual process of constitution making, is reminiscent of the controversy recorded in the Federalist Papers. However, that discussion had a different outcome: the result of a long process was the first democratically legitimized federal state.
Today we are conducting a discussion in the European Union that is similar in some respects. To judge by the course of our present discussion, however, it does not seem possible to resolve the tension-laden relationship between the two subjects—the citizens of the separate states and the future citizens of the union—in favor of a hierarchical arrangement. The best that we can hope for is to throw light on two competing objectives that the respective proponents regard as nonnegotiable. The formation of a federation composed of nation-states is already de facto far advanced. Under the pressure of the problems of the banking and sovereign debt crisis, it is now a matter of how this project can be brought to a conclusion in such a way that the conflicting goals can be achieved simultaneously. The supranational polity that is empowered to act in important policy fields should, on the one hand, be allowed to exercise its jurisdiction only in democratically legitimate ways, without, on the other hand, depriving the member states of the measure of autonomy that allows them to keep watch, themselves, over the conservation of the normative substance that our national democracies embody today.
The best outcome that can be hoped for is that the citizens satisfy their two allegiances when they press ahead with the integration process, as if they had participated in the constitution-building process from the outset as equal subjects, in the dual role of future citizens of the union and current national citizens. In addition, if this shared intention of both parties could be reconstructed as if it were the result of a process of democratic opinion- and will-formation, then the last remaining gap in the chain of legitimation would be closed in our scenario.
From the viewpoint of political theory, this “higher-level” constitutional process differs from all that have gone before. Following in the footsteps of the two constitutional revolutions of the late eighteenth century, many more constitutional states have been founded, right up to the present day. All of these constitutional foundations can be understood (at the requisite level of abstraction) as a replication of the two original founding acts in Philadelphia and Paris. As we can now see, the creation of a supranational democracy, by contrast, cannot be understood on the model of a two-stage process, according to which the constitutional democracies are a product of one homogenous constitution-framing process. More suitable here is instead a three-stage model in which the existence of democratically constituted nation-states is already presupposed. With the citizens who want to defend the historical achievement of constitutional revolutions, a subject comes into play that now empowers itself to serve as another constituting authority.
Unlike the case of the revolutionary popular sovereign, this is, of course, not a case of self-empowerment in the strict sense. The empowerment of the already democratically constituted subjects to engage in constitution building at a higher level depends on the consent of a classical popular sovereign, which now comes on the scene in the guise of the European citizenry as a whole and must be willing to divide its constituent authority. With the prior constitution of a higher-level sovereignty itself—hence, with the agreement between the two designated constitution-building subjects—the classical picture of a constituting and a constituted level is supplemented by a further dimension that once again underlies the actual constitution-building process.
Translated by Ciaran Cronin
NOTES
1. For an account of this deficiency that focuses on the legal branch of the international governance network, see Armin Bogdandy and Ingo Venzke, In wessen Namen? Internationale Gerichte in Zeiten des globalen Regierens (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2014). For a general account, see Jürgen Habermas, “Stichworte zu einer Diskurstheorie des Rechts und des demokratischen Rechtsstaates,” in Im Sog der Technokratie (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2013), 67–81; here 77–80.
2. Wolfgang Streeck, Gekaufte Zeit: Die Krise des demokratischen Kapitalismus (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2013).
3. The startling decisions taken by the first G-20 in London, in November 2008, under the influence of the banking crisis that had just broken out, have predictably remained without consequences. International agreements among states are insufficient unless the coordination of divergent interests is also subjected to institutional regulation. Politics can take an effective stand against the imperatives of markets, which play the interests of different states against one another, only by establishing institutions that generalize interests, that is, by constructing supranational capacities for joint action.
4. Henrick Enderlein, Nationale Wirtschaftspolitik in der europäischen Währungsunion (Frankfurt: Campus, 2014); Fritz W. Scharpf, “Monetary Union, Fiscal Crisis and the Preemption of Democracy,” Zeitschrift für Staats- und Europawissenschaften 2 (2011): 163–98; Scharpf, “The Costs of Non-Disintegration: The Case of the European Monetary Union,” in Zur Konzeptionalisierung europäischer Desintegration: Zug- und Gegenkräfte im europäischen Integrationsprozess, ed. Annegret Eppler and Henrik Scheller (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2013), 165–84; and Scharpf, “Die Finanzkrise als Krise der ökonomischen und rechtlichen Überintegration,” in Grenzen der europäischen Integration, ed. Claudio Franzius, Franz C. Mayer, and Jürgen Neyer (Baden-Baden, 2014), 51–60.
5. Eppler and Scheller, eds., Zur Konzeptionalisierung europäischer Desintegration.
6. Recently, on the “shared sovereignty” line of argument, see Francis Chevenal, “The Case for Democracy in the European Union,” Journal of Common Market Studies 51 (2013): 334–50. For critical accounts, see Daniel Gaus, “Demoi-kratie ohne Demos-kratie: Welche Polity braucht eine demokratische EU?,” in Deliberative Kritik—Kritik der Deliberation: Festschrift für Rainer Schmalz-Bruns, ed. Oliver Flügel-Martinsen, Daniel Gaus, Tanja Hitzel-Cassagnes, and Franziska Martinsen (Wiesbaden: VS-Verlag, 2014).
7. Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).
8. Ingeborg Maus, Zur Aufklärung der Demokratietheorie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1992); Maus, Volkssouveränität: Elemente einer Demokratietheorie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2011).
9. The Federalist Papers are often used as a reference point in discussions of European law. See Christoph Schönberger, “Die Europäische Union als Bund,” Archiv des öffentlichen Rechts 129 (2004): 81–120; Schönberger, “The European Union’s Democratic Deficit Between Federal and State Prohibition,” Der Staat 48 (2009); and Robert Schütze, “On ‘Federal’ Ground: The European Union as an (Inter)national Phenomenon,” Common Market Law Review 46 (2009): 1069–105.
10. However, the centuries-old ambivalence about whether “We the people of the United States” in the preamble to the US Constitution must be interpreted, after all, in the sense of the totality of the “peoples” of the individual states suggests that, as an empirical matter, the alternative between the citizens of the American nation taking precedence over the citizens of the states and, conversely, the state peoples taking precedence over the heterogeneous nation of an immigrant society remains open.
11. Interestingly enough, migration research is currently discovering that citizenship status is the crucial dimension of social integration for immigrants. This status is the point of reference for the communication strategies of official naturalization policy. Daniel Naujolis shows this, using the integration of people from India into the United States as an example. Naujolis, Migration, Citizenship, and Development (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013).
12. Jürgen Habermas, “Political Communication in Media Society: Does Democracy Still Have an Epistemic Dimension?,” in Europe: The Faltering Project, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge: Polity, 2009), 181–3.
13. Drawing on Ulrich K. Preuss, Claudio Franzius develops the concept of a “transaction-we in the sense of a we of others” for supranational federations. See Preuss, “Europa als politische Gemeinschaft,” in Europawissenschaft, ed. Gunnar Folke Schuppert, Ingolf Pernice, and Ulrich Haltern (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2005), 489–539; and Franzius, “Europäisches Vertrauen? Eine Skizze,” Humboldt Forum Recht, Aufsätze 12 (2010): 159–76.
14. I introduced the idea of a form of popular sovereignty split at the root in Jürgen Habermas, The Crisis of the European Union: A Response, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge: Polity, 2012), 28–53.