The Democratic Welfare State: A European Regime Under the Strain of European Integration

Abstract: States are organizations of governance that apply to the people living in a defined territory. But in order to sustain such governance, the people must not just individually obey the law, but also collectively conceive of themselves as "We, the People..", with whom the law originates. For only if I, the individual citizen, have reasons to trust that, they, my fellow citizens, are actually willing to also obey the law, I'll do so myself. This indispensible sense of belonging to a civiccommunity can be based upon a variety of factors: ethno-cultural, linguistic, civic republican (as in "constitutional patriotism") or social justice. Applying this notion of an indispensible civic infrastructure to the case of European integration, the author discusses a number of potential sources from which the view might be derived that what happens in Europe is a matter of "us, the Europeans". In the absence of a democratic regime in Europe, as well as a European welfare state (to say nothing about a strictly "European culture"), it is not easy to find out possible foundations of European "identity".