»Democracy Without Politics in EU Citizen Participation – From European Demoi to Decolonial Multitude« – A New Book by Alvaro Oleart
Book Out NowWe are happy to share that our activist scholar friend Alvaro Oleart has published a new book that also features a lot of our work at European Alternatives and the School of Transnational Organizing!
Alvaro Oleart is a researcher at the Department of Political Science and the Institute for European Studies of the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium. He is the author of »Framing TTIP in the European Public Spheres: Towards an Empowering Dissensus for EU Integration« (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). In the last years, Alvaro has been involved in many of our activities, amongst others the »Syndicat!" transnational workers' organizing summit at the Theater Bremen.
About the Book
How does the dominant understanding(s) of the demo(i)cratic subject in the EU, and of democracy more broadly, shape the EU’s democratic innovations on ‘citizen participation’? What are the politically and normatively preferable alternatives, both in terms of the conceptualisation of the democratic subject in the EU and in the ensuing political practices? The book addresses these questions combining a political theory with a political sociology perspective, contrasting the ‘democracy without politics’ approach of the EU in the context of the Conference on the Future of Europe with that of ongoing transnational activist processes. In doing so, it develops an agonistic alternative to ‘the people(s)’ as the political imaginary of democracy in the EU, which is based on the idea of the ‘decolonial multitude’. Thus, the book puts forward a diagnosis of current debates on EU democratic legitimacy as well as proposing an alternative.