Multilevel governance and conflicting political representations

In recent bibliography on the representative deficit of European institutions, it seems already established the failure of the main strategies that were supposed to lead the integration process: on the one hand, the neo-functionalist approach and, on the other, the liberal intergovernmental one (Kroger & Bellamy, 2016). The more fundamental reason for that failure, which in the long run has determined a deep disconnection between the citizen and the (European) representative institutions, is that tends to ignore —or to hidden— the salience, polarization and mobilization around EU affairs. Against this kind of diseases, the most fruitful therapy —or, at least, one of the few available therapies— would be to close the gap between national representatives and European ones, choosing the most adequate tools to politicize representative institutions. Given this analytical distinction, my concern will be to suggest that, notwithstanding the differences, there is a common epistemic assumption in these three approaches, which is constantly replicated in public debates and institutional propaganda. Indeed, they all suppose that different representative claims, coming from different institutional fora and from the rising assortment of electoral and non-electoral problem solving agencies, are consistent with each other for the very reason that the representative system, as a whole, is able or is supposed to be able “to track the truth”. My insight is that we are going to have deep conceptual troubles if the epistemic assumption begins to decline, as it seems to be the case. In a multilevel institutional architecture we could have many conflicting instances of representation, and no reason to presume that one among them is the only privileged scenario in which the general will is going to appear. This suggestion poses a thoughtful challenge to the standard accounts of supranational representation.