In 2005 a proposed constitution was rejected by several member states of the EU, largely because its proponents failed to articulate a grand vision of a legally, socially, and politically integrated Europe. Jürgen Habermas, arguably Europe's greatest living philosopher, is virtually the only scholar or public intellectual to set out the requisite comprehensive vision of constitutional democracy in the EU. This chapter evaluates the strengths and deficiencies of Habermas's vision of supranational democracy in Europe. Habermas argues that the EU will solve socioeconomic problems posed by globalization, as well as capitalize on legal and cultural possibilities opened by it: on the one hand, the EU will address the threat that increased capital mobility poses to the European welfare state; and, on the other, a constitutionally integrated Europe will generate a postnational citizenship that accommodates the multicultural dimensions of contemporary member states.

I demonstrate that the plausibility of Habermas's normative vision of the EU hinges on two contradictory accounts of globalization: the dominant theme of his essays, the historical continuity of globalization within the history of capitalism, supports Habermas's vision of supranational constitutional-social democracy but does not portend the overcoming of exclusionist identity politics that is central to Habermas's theory of postnational citizenship. Conversely, alternate strains of Habermas's account of globalization – those that depict it as an example of historical disrupture or what he once called a “structural transformation” – raise doubts about the possibility of a supranational constitutional-welfare regime even as they render conceivable a transcendence of the elite-manipulated politics of ethnic and cultural exclusion.