Building the european identity through deliberation

Abstract

The question of a European identity is at the core of the debate on the EU democratic deficit. Recent empirical analyses showed that the sense of belonging to a unique European community pertain to a minority of citizens, representing a serious limit to the implementation of the European polity. Weakness in identity may produce negative by-products on citizenship, affecting the representation and legitimacy of the EU institutions. Along with the initiatives promoted by the European Commission, many scholars tried to promote both theoretical and normative solutions to this problem. Among others, deliberative democracy has the most developed theoretical notion of what the public sphere is and how it should be understood in democratic terms. It claims that citizens can be brought back to the public sphere by becoming engaged in thoughtful deliberation that aims at solving common problems, at making policymakers more accountable, and at producing legitimate policy outcomes that can meet shared expectations of the polity. Although deliberative democracy experiments have been spread in the last decade, few studies explored empirically the effects of deliberation on European identity. How can deliberative democracy practice help to develop and intensify European identity? The present paper specifically addresses this question by analyzing the results of the EuroPolis – European deliberative polity-making project, held in Brussels before the 2009 EU Parliamentary elections.