Why we should not believe every lesson Andrew Moravcsik teaches us: A response

This article is a response to Andrew Moravcsik’s “What Can We Learn from the Collapse of the European Constitutional Project?”, published in No. 2, Vol. 47 (2006) of the PVS. In our reply we focus on three main points. First, we argue that Moravcsik’s apologia of the status quo does not convince in light of the challenges that a European Union currently with 27 member states and increasing heterogeneity is facing. Second, we discuss his causal chain model linking participation, deliberation and political legitimacy. We argue that Moravcsik confuses causality with conditionality. By doing so, he exaggerates claims of normative political science about the causal relationship between participation, deliberation and legitimacy, and makes it an unjustifiably easy target for critique. Third, we critically examine Moravcsik’s notion of democracy in order to show that his view of democracy as guaranteeing “certain social goods” brings about the risk of producing a theory of democracy without democracy.