Clearly, European integration is central to the project of advancing democratic principles and practices in a dawning supranational age. In the 1990s, as the primarily economic entity, the European Community, became the quasi-political EU, observers began to ponder integration's relationship to wider-scale phenomena associated with internationalization, multilateralism, or globalization. Since the emergence and maintenance of the modern state was integral to the achievements of liberal and social democracy in the last three centuries, the state's precarious position in globalization debates, as discussed in the previous chapter, has become cause for serious consternation among progressives of many stripes. Integration raises momentous questions concerning the institutional and legal means by which democratic principles and practices may be preserved and perhaps even advanced at a potentially novel supranational historical moment. In this context, and notwithstanding recent setbacks in the ratification process of a European constitution, the EU remains the crucial test case for exploring the possibility of democracy beyond the state.

Among the now seemingly innumerable attempts to make sense of these developments, both European and global, Jürgen Habermas's foray into EU analysis stands out for its high level of normative sophistication and empirical sensitivity. As discussed in the previous chapter, Habermas attempted to transpose his discursive legal theory of democracy, developed in BFN, from a state to a European level. The previous chapter employed immanent critique to evaluate Habermas's EU model “internally,” that is, on the basis of its own conceptual logic and the critical historical and social scientific strictures of his own earlier works.