Original scientific paper
DEMOCRACY: NEITHER THE RULE OF THE PEOPLE NOR THE RULE OVER THE PEOPLE?
Davor Rodin
; Faculty of Political Science, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
The author argues that democracy is not appropriate for the resolution of the relationship between law and the democratically conditioned state authority in the multinational Europe. The so-called democratic deficit should be understood not only as the empirical fact
of a multinational Europe, but also as a paradoxical structural attribute of modern political thought from Kant until today. The author
claims that the people should not rule as they might violate all the
laws they enacted themselves. Thus the question of the equality of
citizens cannot be a democratic one but legal and constitutional. Democracy cannot lay claim to be the sole provider of the legal equality of citizens just as law cannot be the only arbiter in making democratic distinctions among them. Since democracy should be understood as an independent autopoietic and autoimmune medium relatively independent of political power and legal constraints as its setting, the author concludes that the existing forms of immediate and
representative democracy, as well as of the traditional form of democratic decision/making represent a risk of regressive progress in
Europe in the direction of democracy limited by nation, religion or by
class.
Keywords
democracy; Kant; Hegel; Luhmann; Derrida; European Union
Hrčak ID:
20435
URI
Publication date:
2.2.2007.
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