ARENA Report 02/2007
John Erik Fossum, Philip Schlesinger and Geir Ove Kværk (eds)
CIDEL – Citizenship and Democratic Legitimacy in the EU, was a 3-years (2003-2005) joint research project with ten partners in six European countries. The project was coordinated by ARENA at the University of Oslo, and was funded by the European Commission’s Fifth Framework Programme for Research. The main purpose of CIDEL was to examine the prospects for a citizens’ Europe through analysing what kind of order is emerging in Europe. A key question was to examine whether the EU is best understood as a mere problem-solving entity based on economic citizenship; whether it is moving towards a value-based community premised on social and cultural citizenship; or whether it is moving towards a rights-based post-national union, based on a full-fledged political citizenship.
These notions of the EU correspond to different underlying conceptions of the public sphere and of civil society, and this report approaches the question of whether the EU is moving beyond a narrow regulatory regime from three complementary angles. The first part focuses on the prospects for a viable European public sphere (or spheres). The second and third parts take stock of the status of the EU as a rights-based post-national Union by examining the nature and character of European civil society. While part two addresses aspects of the EU’s strong publics with particular emphasis on the Charter and the Constitutional Convention, the third and final part proposes an analytical framework to map the character of the EU’s social constituency.
ARENA Report 02/2007 (pdf)
ISBN 978-82-93137-51-1 (online) 978-82-93137-01-6 (print)