We can distinguish at least three different ‘ways of thinking’ about democracy in the EU. In the first camp we find the statists, who argue that the EU exercises real power in highly salient policy domains and should be held to the same democratic standards as the nation state. The second camp is composed by those arguing that the EU should be thought of as a demoicracy. This is a variation on the statist account of democracy, seeing the EU as an institution that consists of Member States with common objectives but separate interests. Its institutional configuration should reflect this. The third camp is one that centres on consociational democracy. This model focuses on forging consensus between different interest groups in society rather than seeking to structure politics (at whichever level) to forge majoritarian rule. As we will see in this chapter, the question whether the EU is, or can be, a true political union, can be answered (equally convincingly) in many different ways.

Chapter 7, “Matters of Faith: Catholic Intelligentsia and the Church,” asks how Catholics behaved in Warsaw and why. Roman Catholicism was the religion of the majority of Varsovians and had played an important role in the development of the Polish national project. In the absence of a Polish government, the Church provided a potential locus of authority for Poles. Warsaw’s priests drew particular negative attention from the Nazi occupation for their potential influence and they were viciously persecuted, imprisoned, and often sent to the concentration camp at Dachau. Nevertheless, leaders of the Church, from the pope in Rome to local bishops, were hesitant to provide guidance, support Nazi occupation, or encourage opposition to it. Despite the lack of a top-down Catholic policy, this chapter argues that individual priests and lay Catholic leaders were motivated by their religious faith to form everything from charities to a postwar clerical state. Crucial among Catholics was the question of the developing Holocaust and the role of Polish Jews in Polish Catholic society, which sharply divided them.

The conclusion summarizes the supranational aspects of the ECHR and reflects on the wider narrative of supranationalization of the ECHR, including its driving factors and countertrends. It further demonstrates that growing resistance towards the ECtHR, as far as it goes beyond system inherent criticism, may partly be the result of increased openness and integration in the first place and could in fact lead to a refinement of Convention law. The ECHR’s supranational aspects also lend themselves to a communitarian perspective. The conclusion therefore argues that the findings of the study allow to give meaning to the notion of Convention community which is characterized by Convention rights as community interest norms, for the protection of which the ECtHR enjoys an inalienable core of autonomy, membership of domestic authorities and natural and legal persons as well as subsidiarity and moderated supremacy of Convention law as ordering principles.

This chapter provides a reassessment of competence allocation and exercise under the UK constitution. It shows how the existing allocation needs to be understood through the prism of EU membership, and supports previously provided by the EU’s governance system. In particular, the EU’s commitment to subsidiarity, under which decisions should be taken at the lowest effective level, and its openness to regional concerns, carved out space for the exercise of devolved competence within a system of cooperative multilevel governance. This is in stark contrast to the near autonomous coexistence of the different governments within the UK nation state. As the UK embarks on the process of leaving the EU, its internal distribution of power is subjected to a recentralisation of competence. Informed by the literature on comparative federalism, it argues that there is a need for an effective domestic replacement for the shared competence space previously provided by the EU’s cooperative federalist system of governance. Powerful challenges have come from an attachment to the model of autonomous coexistence of central and devolved levels of government, reinforced by a resurgent principle of Westminster parliamentary sovereignty. Without an effective commitment to shared governance however, the Union’s future is in serious doubt.

The Augustinian, Westphalian, and Liberal traditions are each insufficient to guide ethical reasoning about war today. The answer lies in a partial synthesis among them, especially the Augustinian and Liberal traditions. The language of natural law and human rights are especially useful because they can make moral claims about the common good across the boundaries of culture and religion. In the Augustinian Liberal perspective, the principles of ordered liberty, human rights, and human flourishing do much the same work that natural law and justice did for the Augustinian tradition as an external standard above the state, to which the state must be accountable. Justice requires the vindication of rights but is not exhausted with rights because it also requires the sustainment of conditions required for rights to be meaningful, to promote human flourishing—which is a long way of saying that justice requires ordered liberty. Sovereignty means responsibility for the common good, which means responsibility for establishing, sustaining, and defending a system of ordered liberty at home and abroad. And ordered liberty is as close to a universal value system as the world has yet seen.

Significant practice has been accumulated on the right to reparation for victims of armed conflict, as a result of the work of international human rights mechanisms, domestic courts, and States undergoing transitional justice processes and setting up domestic reparation programmes. This chapter looks at some of that practice in a nuanced way. It considers the interplay on reparation’s issues taking place between international human rights mechanisms like the European Court of Human Rights and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, and domestic reparation programmes such as those established in Colombia or Guatemala. This interplay is regulated by the principle of subsidiarity, a key principle of international law. This principle manifests itself in different ways in international adjudication, including on issues related to reparations as international human rights mechanisms, including the ECHR and the IACtHR, exercise deference to States in various ways. This interplay poses major challenges as through it the scope and reach of this right is defined, and the role of these bodies decided. This Chapter looks at actual practice by these tribunals, and how they could face that interplay without diminishing their role or the content of the right to reparation

Chapter 2 addresses the legitimacy of intervention by international courts – unelected international bodies – in the decisions of democratically elected domestic officials. The chapter starts by delineating the commitment of international courts to the text of treaties that regulate their jurisdiction. It continues by explaining when expansive interpretation of these treaties is legitimate because the process of negotiation or revision of treaties gives certain countries an unjustified power to limit the treaty obligations of all member countries. Finally, the chapter explains that even if a country fully controls its treaty obligations it may not properly represent the interests of all parties affected by the treaty because of so-called democratic failures, justifying the use of expansive interpretation by international courts.

The UN and its Charter, despite the many laudable aims, legal principles and values it enshrines, is today too heavily constrained by the commitments it makes to uphold outdated notions of state sovereignty; it is saddled by the veto; it is inadequately resourced; it has not succeeded in establishing a genuine international system of rule by law; and it has consistently proved incapable of controlling or preventing abuses of power and other forms of internationally dangerous state behavior. Nevertheless, we argue that the more sensible approach in developing the foundations of an enhanced global constitutional order is to build on the existing institutional infrastructure associated with the United Nations: it has universal membership; it has accumulated over the past 70 years a body of texts and practices that have precipitated important changes in selected areas; it has participated, however ineffectively, in most of the peace and security debates of the postwar period; and the Security Council has the power to enforce binding international law. More importantly, the UN Charter can be amended, modernized and adapted to the needs of the present. We discuss the possible ways ahead, suggesting the most workable mechanisms for next steps in our evolving governance system.

Aristotle valued small associations more than today’s liberals: he considered villages, fraternal organizations and guilds to be civic friendships in their own right. He criticized utopian theories such as Plato’s Republic for quixotically attempting to destroy associations. In liberal democracies, associations formed to tackle causes reproduce some of the advantages of the small polis: in such associations, each member acts in view of his fellow citizens, and thus is influenced by the moral suasion of the group. Each perceives the influence he exercises, seeing the local impact of his power and taking ownership of incremental social change. Rethinking associations as civic friendships runs up against the problem of involuntary associations with their “solidarity and hostility.” Michael Walzer would correct liberalism’s deracinating tendencies by incentivizing us to remain in our involuntary identity groups. But his plan to channel government benefits through such groups would compromise the groups he means to help. To break the stranglehold of the bad associations—lobbies—to clear space for good associations, Congressional reforms are needed.

Global governance is a particularly challenging area of global politics in which to assess and develop Green contributions because the nature of global governance reform that Greens would like to see is far less clear than for Green visions regarding related areas such as the economy, the state or security. I argue, nevertheless, that there is a clear need for a Green account of global governance, one which uniquely assesses the project and practice of global governance as a whole from the point of view of its ability to create a sustainable society rather than its ability to preserve order as an end in itself. This chapter firstl outlines Green critiques of prevailing global governance arrangements, focused on their democratic deficits and poor levels of accountability, the concentration of power in global neoliberal institutions such as the World Trade Organization,the World Bank and the IMF and their failure to advance a more sustainable model of development. Second, it proposes a vision for Green global governance in which there is a rebalancing and repurposing of global governance institutions around the need to move towards a sustainable society. Third, it evaluates strategies for achieving Green global governance.

This chapter examines the Christian Democratic conception of the state through a discussion of the meaning that this ideological tradition has historically attached to the concept of subsidiarity. Broadly understood as a principle of distribution of state power through its devolution both downwards to local and regional public authorities and upwards to international organizations, this principle is at the heart of all Christian Democratic political programs and manifestoes.

This chapter explores how Pius XI’s social encyclical Quadragesimo anno – “On the Reconstruction of the Social Order”– not only reiterated Leo XIII’s condemnation of socialism and his critique of aspects of capitalism, but also outlined a program for Catholics to follow in order to address the social and economic upheavals of the time in a lasting and far-reaching manner. It also analyzes the two primary contributions of Quadragesimo anno to Catholic social doctrine. The first concerns Pius XI’s articulation of two principles of Catholic social teaching: subsidiarity and social justice. The second contribution is the encyclical’s articulation of a very substantial prescription for fundamental social change. While the developments at the level of principle introduced by Quadragesimo anno have proved lasting and become a set fixture of Catholic social doctrine, we observe how the particular proposals associated by Pius XI with these principles– most notably, the development of vocational groups and the establishment of a type of corporatist social order– had, by the time of Saint John XXIII, been considerably relativized by the magisterium.

This chapter is an analytical summary of Rerum novarum. Its goal is to illuminate the purpose of the encyclical and the main lines of Pope Leo’s reasoning, his key premises and central ethical conclusions, and in this way, to articulate as clearly as possible the teaching that comprises Rerum novarum. Rerum’s influence on Catholic teaching and practice is most manifest in the Church’s “social teaching,” which in various ways identifies the encyclical as its founding statement. This identification is made in the names and citations of some of the most important papal contributions to Catholic Social Teaching (CST) and is pervasive throughout the corpus of CST. And it is revealed in the ways in which the accepted principles of CST are present or anticipated in Rerum novarum. Although the chapter does not undertake the large and formidable task of characterizing CST, it does indicate how these principles figure in Pope Leo’s analysis. It also underlines the extent to which these principles are not the main point of Rerum novarum, but stand in the service of the moral and religious reform urged by Pope Leo.

Although the roots of subsidiarity predate Christianity, we can usefully explore encyclical teaching to appreciate how the Catholic Church has given intelligible expression to this concept in the midst of her broader social teaching. The paradox of subsidiarity is that it mandates contradictory things: requiring on the one hand that the state should not interfere with the internal life of civic associations and on the other hand that the state should provide assistance to those associations when such assistance is necessary. Rather than using the language of "positive" and "negative" subsidiarity (which, it is argued, is not especially helpful because it perpetuates the sovereigntist tendency to see the state as the locus of all authority), this chapter focuses on how the encyclicals illuminate (1) the nature of subsidiarity, as neither freestanding nor abstract; (2) subsidiarity’s political purposes (increased participation in decision making by actors who are more proximate to need and therefore better placed to reach good outcomes more efficiently), moral purposes (protection of associational freedom and avoidance of totalitarianism), and final purposes (protection of that charity which can never be mediated through bureaucracies); and (3) the operationalisation of subsidiarity, which can be promoted or inhibited through the action of law.