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The Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften: Events
Friday, 20 May 2022 - Saturday, 21 May 2022Venue: Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften, Am Wingertsberg 4, 61348 Bad Homburg
Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften
Workshop | »The Future of European Democracy«
Aliénor Ballangé (Goethe University), Sandra Seubert (Goethe University)
»The Future of European Democracy«
About the workshop
We recently witness an increase in new experimental forms of democratic participation and the EU is of major importance in this respect: As a laboratory for transnational governance, it has found its democratic credentials questioned, and in response is now moving towards the forefront of democratic experiments, hoping to scale up and spread these participatory methods within and across the Union. The recent efforts to directly involve EU citizens in the brainstorming about the future of the EU, its values, objectives, institutions, and policies via the Conference on the Future of Europe (CoFoE) materialises this move.
The CoFoE is an ambitious experiment of transnational deliberative citizen participation and a unique attempt to reconnect the EU political system with its citizens. It is also an experiment that raises fundamental questions about the possibility of re-constituting democracy on a transnational scale and the structural role that EU citizenship might play in this process. The Workshop takes this event as a starting point for reconstructing and exploring ways of reshaping and eventually re-constituting democracy in Europe. As the CoFoE-example of deliberative citizen participation is likely to be routinized, institutionalized, and reactivated whenever needed, it will be important to examine how it is perceived by citizens and institutional actors – especially by the Members of the EP – and how it might impact existing practices of representative democracy at the EU level.
The organizers
Aliénor Ballangé received her doctorate in 2018 from Sciences Po Paris with a thesis on »L’Invention de Bruxelles. L’intégration européenne: par le people ou pour le peuple?«. Her thesis was awarded the »Prix de thèse de la Chancellerie des Universités de Paris en science politique« (2019) and the »Prix de thèse Jean-Louis Quermonne de l'Association française d'études européennes« (2020). From 2017 to 2018, she taught at Sciences Po Paris and continued teaching from 2018 to 2020 at Sciences Po Bordeaux. Since January 2022, she is a Postdoctoral Researcher and Lecturer at the Institute of Political Science at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main.
Sandra Seubert has been professor of political science with a focus on political theory at Goethe University since 2009. Her research concentrates on the field of modern democratic theory, in particular on theories of transnational citizenship as well as the political theory of privacy. She has been engaged in multiple research projects on the future of European citizenship. Between 2013 and 2017 she was a PI and member of the executive board of the EU-sponsored, collaborative project Barriers towards EU citizenship (bEUcitizen). In 2019/20 she was a visiting professor at the university Sciences Po in Paris.
Further information and contact
Sandra Seubert (seubert@soz.uni-frankfurt.de)
Aliénor Ballangé (alienor.ballange@sciencespo.fr)
