The EU is facing increasing contestation, geared towards (partial) disintegration. Political actors – from civil society movements to political parties to governments – call upon member states to reverse elements of European integration (see, e.g., the new “French sovereignism”). These empirical developments are flanked by a growing academic literature that recommends member states take the “way out downwards” (Streeck), i.e., exit, in response to perceived legitimacy deficits of EU governance. Yet, any step of EU disintegration also carries the danger of a loss of normative achievements – in particular, a weakening of supranational democracy. This raises the question of when reversals of European integration can be considered legitimate and under what conditions they amount to (democratic) regression. In this paper, I argue that political theory needs to develop a new methodology to approach this issue. Bringing together the literature on rational reconstruction and political realism, I develop an approach of ‘realist reconstructivism’ that is meant to allow distinguishing between regressive and non-regressive forms of EU disintegration.
