After National Democracy: Rights, Law and Power in America and the New Europe

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Description

The "imagined community" of the nation, which served as the affective basis for the post-French Revolution social contract, as well as its institutional counter-part, the welfare state, are currently under great stress as states lose control over what once was referred to as the "national economy" In this book a number of authors - historians, legal scholars, political theorists - consider the fate of national democracy in the age of globalization. In particular, the authors ask whether the order of European nation-states, with its emphasis on substantive democracy, is now, in the guise of the European Union, giving way to a more loosely constructed, often federalized system of procedural republics (partly constructed in the image of the United States). Is national parliamentary democracy being replaced by a politico-legal culture, where citizen action increasingly takes place in a transnational legal domain at the expense of traditional (and national) party politics Is the notion of a nationally-bound citizen in the process of being superceded by a cosmopolitan legal subject

Reviews

Set against the backdrop of current developments within the EU...the thematic relevance and timeliness of the inspiring deliberations contained in After National Democracy become apparent. -- Christian Pippin, Institute of International Law and International Relations, Karl-Franzens University, Graz, Austria * www.globallawbooks.org *
For legal scholars, this volume presents interesting and thoughtful insights into the process of state building in relation to protecting the individual against the Leviathan through use of the 'least dangerous branch,' the courts, a concept foreign to Europe. -- Roger Handberg * The Law and Politics Book Review *

Author Bio

Lars Trgrdh is a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for the Study of Europe at Columbia University,New York.