A sketch of European politeia

This seminar presentation looks into the European Union’s current polity shape and raises the question: towards what kind of ‘politeia’ is the EU evolving? Linked to the above is also the question:  what kind of normative theorizing can best capture its essential character as a pluralist but ordered political whole? In attempting answer these questions by drawing a sketch of European politeia, we revisit the concept of ‘organized synarchy’ to argue that, despite integration’s current uncertainties, it has brought about an advanced system of ordered symbiosis among highly codetermined as well as co-evolving polities. The point will also be made that such a condition is not about the subordination of the parts to a superior federal centre, but rather about their preservation as distinctive but constituent units; it is about a common association retaining its essential character as a politically ordered plurality composed of multiple co-evolving polities.

Dimitris N. Chryssochoou is Professor of Theory and Institutions of European Integration at Panteion University, Greece, and Honorary University Fellow in the College of Social Sciences and International Studies of the University of Exeter. He has been Associate Professor of International Organization at the University of Crete, Reader in European Integration at the University of Exeter, and has held visiting posts at the Universities of Oxford (Centre for International Studies), Cambridge (Centre of International Studies), LSE (European Institute), Columbia (Institute on Western Europe), Geneva (Global Studies Institute), Oslo (ARENA Centre for European Studies), Catania (Department of Political and Social Sciences), Aegean (Laboratory of Social and Political Institutions), Panteion (Department of International and European Studies) and Athens (Department of Political Science and Public Administration), as well as at the Hellenic Centre for European Studies and the Centre for European Constitutional Law in Athens. He is the author of A Republic of Europeans: Civic Potential in a Liberal Milieu (Edward Elgar, 2011, with K. A. Lavdas), Theorizing European Integration (2nd edition, Routledge, 2009) and Democracy in the European Union (I. B. Tauris, 1998).