Comparing Rights and Legitimacy in EU Market Governance to the United States

Session Submission Type: Featured Paper Panel: 30-minute Paper Presentations

Session Description

The European Union is often described as a sui generis political system: too powerful to be understood as an international organization, too decentralized and selective in its policy competences to be understood as a federal state. Classic normative critiques of the EU effectively start from this observation—setting out normative models premised on a national-state framework, and finding the EU to fall short of fulfilling them. Recent scholarship raises questions about this line of argument, however, in either of two ways. One is to argue that the EU is not actually that different from federal states, and so can be analyzed normatively with classic theories and tools. This is especially plausible within the policy areas where EU authority is strongest, notably within the “single market” project at its core. A growing literature compares the EU Single Market to the other continental advanced-economy market—-the United States—-and even often emphasizes that some EU single-market powers exceed those of the U.S. federal government. The other move is to challenge classic normative theories of governance, suggesting that they overly reify or wrongly conceptualize national-level governance and its legitimacy, and that better conceptualization leads to approaches that treat the EU and federal states like the U.S. more similarly. This panel includes four papers that combine normative theory and empirical comparison of the EU to the U.S., all of which are part of an ongoing journal special issue proposal. Our discussant, Michelle Egan of American University, is one of the leading experts on comparing the EU and U.S. single markets.

Sub Unit

• Division 15: European Politics and Society

Individual Presentations

• Legitimacy of Non-majoritarianism in EU and US Single-Market Governance - Trym Nohr Fjørtoft, University of Oslo

• Markets and Challenges of De-federalization in Europe and the United States - John Erik Fossum, University of Oslo; Craig A. Parsons, University of Oregon

• Sovereign Authority as Assemblage: Processes of Federalism in the EU and the US - Nicolas Jabko, Johns Hopkins University; Gerald Berk, University of Oregon

Chair

• Craig A. Parsons University of Oregon

Discussant

• Michelle Egan