Reductionism versus Holism in the European Union: The Case of the European Citizens’ Panel on EU Values

‘Value talk’ is gaining increasing traction in European politics and law. What is the meaning and relevance of the ‘EU values’, in the abstract as well as through their articulation in legally binding pronouncements (notably Art. 2 of the TEU)? This paper suggests that examining how the EU values are invoked and ‘worked with’ by various stakeholders in EU politics is indicative of hitherto neglected tensions present in the ‘value talk’, and has implications for their interpretation in EU (constitutional) law as well. To scrutinize this claim, the paper explores the case of the European Citizens’ Panel on EU Democracy/Values, Rights, Rule of Law, Security (ECP) at the Conference on the Future of Europe, which was the component of the EU institutions’ forays into deliberative democracy that most explicitly invited the participants’ reflections on the EU values as a whole, with the aim to produce concrete recommendations to be considered further by the plenary of the Conference. Due to organizational reshufflings, it, moreover, became the first of the four ECPs to conclude its deliberations, thus representing a trailblazer for learning and refining the approaches and methodologies adopted in its course. Utilizing first-hand observations from the ECP and the official public documents presenting the partial results of each of the three sessions of the ECP, the analysis demonstrates that the final recommendations as the ECP’s main result are an outcome of tensions between two competing perspectives on (EU) values. Value reductionism treats values as unrelated to and even in potential tension with each other, whereas value holism considers them as mutually constitutive. The holistic perspective that the participating citizens adopted at times was not aided by the design of the deliberations, which tended to favour a reductionist approach. These findings invite further studies, among others, of (1) the interaction between the design and process of experiments with deliberative democracy, and their outcome, (2) the competing conceptions of values in EU law and politics, the ‘hierarchy’ of Art. 2 values, among which democracy, human rights and the rule of law are most typically invoked, and (3) the implications of holistic and reductionist accounts of values for the EU’s capacity to ‘protect’ or ‘defend’ them.