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The EU’s democratic self-defence : a reflexive approach
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Florence : European University Institute, 2025
EUI; LAW; PhD Thesis
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FEISEL, Franca Maria, The EU’s democratic self-defence : a reflexive approach, Florence : European University Institute, 2025, EUI, LAW, PhD Thesis - https://hdl.handle.net/1814/94108
Abstract
Increasing democratic regression across Europe has spurred calls for the EU to become a guardian of democratic principles, amongst other reasons to preserve its own political legitimacy. The phenomenon that can be understood as the EU’s democratic self-defence raises a number of normative and legal questions. In the literature, militant democracy has become a prominent concept for approaching these questions. However, this thesis argues that we should not conceive the EU’s democratic self-defence, and the corresponding legal and political instruments for this purpose, exclusively through the lens of militant democracy. Instead, it proposes the theory of reflexive democracy and the spectrum of democratic self-defence – ranging from militant to promotional measures – as a more consistent normative and conceptual framework for the EU’s democratic self-defence. Grounded in the political philosophy of Rainer Forst on justice, democracy and toleration, reflexive democracy establishes a number of normative requirements for a polity’s democratic self-defence and the permissible legal and political means for this purpose. Reflexive democracy illustrates how the idea of democratic self-defence can be meaningfully translated to the transnational polity of the EU – whose legal and political authority is dispersed over multiple levels of government, and whose democratic legitimacy is contested. This thesis argues that the legitimacy for the EU to defend (its own) democracy derives from understanding it as a democratic-striving polity, whose political defence must be conceived of as a relational endeavour that includes all levels of the multi-level polity. Moreover, through the lens of reflexive democracy and its intermediate principles (legality, proportionality and due process), this thesis reveals how various EU instruments for defending democracy threaten to harm democracy at the same time. In this light, it calls for recasting the EU’s democratic self-defence as a decentralised, agency-oriented political project of ‘defending while democratising’ European democracy, co-authored by the people it claims to protect.
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Defence date: 01 December 2025
Examining Board: Prof. Martijn Hesselink (European University Institute, supervisor); Prof. Gráinne de Búrca (European University Institute); Prof. Neil Walker (University of Edinburgh); Prof. Anthoula Malkopoulou (Uppsala University)
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Chapter 2 'Reflexive democracy', Chapter 3 'The EU’s democratic self-defence', Chapter 4 'The EU’s democratic self-defence' and Chapter 5 'The EU’s militant democracy instruments' of the PhD thesis draw upon earlier versions published as article 'Thinking EU militant democracy beyond the challenge of backsliding member states' (2022) in the journal 'European constitutional law review', article 'Walking a democratic tightrope : EU militant democracy and the infringement action against Lex Tusk' (2023) in the journal 'Verfassungsblatt' and article 'One step forward, two steps back : the EU's 'defence of democracy' package' (2023) in the journal 'Verfassungsblatt'.