From Utopia to Apology: The European Union and the Challenge of Liberal Supranationalism

Amid the wealth of scholarship on European integration and its values, positive political liberty tends to languish in the background while democracy, efficiency, and other goals occupy the limelight. This short contribution aims to correct that neglect by setting out a normative approach to European integration that places positive political liberalism front and center. I offer this approach, which I call liberal supranationalism, as a complement to existing normative accounts of European integration. I make three claims.

First, I claim that liberal supranationalism offers a particularly appealing normative orientation for the European project. Second, I claim that, to the extent that liberal supranationalism is appealing, the political structure of the Union should be developed in such a way that maximally satisfies the demands of positive political liberalism across three dimensions of what I call the supranational governance triangle. Third, I claim that liberal supranationalism's analytical value can be illustrated by its application to a familiar topic-the loss of the Member State legislative veto in the Single European Act-to reveal the underappreciated relationship between exit and veto in the European legal order.