The Idea of a Social Demoicracy

A developing strand in the literature conceive the EU as a ‘demoicracy’. The aim of this paper is to investigate what a ‘social demoicracy’ is, and if it can be identified as a desirable, yet realistic, aim for the European Union. Firstly, we clarified the notion of demoicracy, which is a democracy where the demos is made by national demoi, who recognize the externalities of their decisions and decide to govern together but not as one. We have seen that it is not a transitional state towards federalism, because the demoi recognize their differences and value their independence, nor it is reducible to intergovernamentalism, because there are common decisions. Secondly, we proposed a conception of social democracy as the belief that the use of state power is a desirable and feasible means to mitigate the negative impact on individuals of the liberalization in the national market. Thirdly, we hypothesized that a social demoicracy would be the belief in the use of demoicratic power as a desirable and feasible means to mitigate the negative impact on the demoi of the liberalization in the transnational market. We then defended the desirability of a social demoicracy, by claiming that as long as we value our demoicracy, a social demoicratic system is necessary to stabilize the union by mitigating the negative effects of the ‘great transformation’ of the transnational market, which are having disruptive ripple effects on the demoi. While this should target mainly the demoi, we discussed whether it would be appropriate to also affect individual citizen. While this seems in line with the goal of protecting the union from shocks, it may also be just a step too far in the federal direction to be accepted from a demoicratic perspective. Subsequently we inquired about whether social demoicracy is a feasible direction for the European Union. We argued that it is conceptually coherent, compatible with other values like freedom, economic progress, equality, solidarity and reachable from the current status quo. However, in all these dimensions there is a substantial difficulty in balancing the perspective of the demoi, with the individual dimension (e.g. the more demoi are equal, the less individuals are). We concluded that social demoicracy is a promising framework to justify a normative aspiration for solidarity in the EU because, since it is grounded in the long term enlightened interest of every political player, it is realistic yet ambitious, and difficult yet achievable.