Will Individual Attachments among EU Citizens Turn Them into Europeans?

Through a closer examination of Habermas’s constitutional patriotism model, the paper disentangles the relationship between EU institutional developments, the possible unfolding of a European public sphere conceived by Habermas as the only source of legitimacy for binding decisions and as a necessary prerequisite for the development of a civic sense of belonging to the EU by European citizens, and the affective (or horizontal) relations among Europeans. Several dynamics are brought to light. First, it is clear that at the core of Habermas’s conception of supranational citizenship lies the unfolding of horizontal relations between Europeans, which is necessary to the functioning of the European public sphere that is central to Habermas’s model. However, if it is via the development of a vertical attachment, itself fostered by European policies aimed at the creation of a European identity, that affective relations among citizens can develop, how horizontal forms of integration among individuals can reciprocally feed into the identification of citizens with the EU project as a political entity is less clear. In particular, the paper argues that the EU’s institutional context is not conducive to the development of a deliberative form of democracy because institutions are structurally predetermined to filter public discussions in such a way that not all participants to the public debate feel equally represented by the political decisions that emerge. In such a context, even assuming that a genuine transnational public sphere gradually develops, citizens are unlikely to develop a sense of belonging to a genuine community of citizens.