Much of the current literature normatively evaluating the EU is fixated on the “in” and “out” of emerging European citizenship: What will it mean to be European as the EU consolidates internally and enlarges outward? What will be the juridical status within EU member states and throughout the Union generally of residents and migrants originating from other member states and from non-EU nations? In Chapter 5, we observed Habermas focus on the less fashionable but equally important issue of the EU's institutional form and internal workings: Whoever European citizens are, how and under what conditions will they govern or be governed? Will the EU constitutionally facilitate the political accountability and substantively ensure as much social welfare as European nation-states traditionally afforded their citizens? Will the EU reproduce supranationally the same institutions that ensured constitutional and social democracy on the nation-state level or will it at least establish similar ones? Drawing upon the example of Weber's efforts to answer commensurate questions amid a previous structural transformation, in this book I have accentuated the critical-historical limitations of Habermas's answers to such questions.

Yet, I do not intend my analysis of Habermas's reflections on the EU, or my own engagement with the EU democracy literature in the preceding two chapters, to imply that we ought not to be hopeful about the future of democratic practices in supranational institutions and therefore not work to attain them.