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The Conference on the Future of Europe (CoFoE) was the first initiative to include citizens in deliberations about the future of European democracy since the failed Constitutional Convention of 2002/03. Although embedded within broader trends to involve ordinary citizens in the political process, it is of specific relevance in the European context because it raises expectations of democratic catching up and relates to ongoing discussions and struggles about the constitutional character of the European Union. This article argues for a citizen-centred perspective on constitutional renewal in the European Union that places European citizens as constituent subjects at centre stage. It outlines how making the European Union accessible as a political arena allows citizens to regain control over developments that have evolved behind people’s backs. It concludes that deliberative tools of citizen participation should be used to pave the way for a wider reorganization of public authority and a renewal of the European Union’s constitutional basis.

The constituted legal status of “Union citizenship” has added another democratic static to the European Union's institutional architecture but it is not yet a status of full political empowerment. What is missing is a citizen-centered opening-up of the (technocratically disguised) European level as a political arena. This article argues that the idea of European citizenship can function as a normative reference point for struggles of political empowerment and institutional reform. Democratic innovations such as sortition-based citizens’ panels organized within the framework of the Conference on the Future of Europe have a socializing function, paving the way for a European-wide public debate on issues of common concern and opening up a chance of (re)appropriating the European Union's institutional structure as a political space. But in order to support lasting democratic transformations they must be backed up by institutional reforms that make European political rights more effective.

Privacy scholars, advocates, and activists repeatedly emphasize the fact that current measures of privacy protection are insufficient to counter the systemic threats presented by datafication and platformization (van Dijck, de Waal, and Poell 2018: 24). These threats include discrimination against underprivileged groups, monopolization of power and knowledge, as well as manipulation. In this paper, we take that analysis one step further, suggesting that the consequences of inappropriate privacy protection online possibly even run counter to the normative principles that underpinned the standard clause for privacy protection in the first place. We discuss the ways in which attempts at protection run the risk of producing results that not only diverge from but, paradoxically, even distort the normative goals they intended to reach: informational self-determination, empowerment, and personal autonomy. Drawing on the framework of “normative paradoxes,” we argue that the ideals of a normatively increasingly one-sided, liberal individualism create complicities with the structural dynamics of platform capitalism, which in turn promote those material-discursive practices of digital usage that are ultimately extremely privacy-invasive.

In times of digital pervasion of everyday life, the EU has strengthened a normative idea of European fundamental rights, especially by referring to a strong notion of privacy protection. A normative corridor is evolving with the “right to privacy” at its heart, a right that will be instrumental in shaping the European legal architecture’s future structure. In this Article we argue that the constitutional protection of privacy rights is not only of individual relevance but also of major democratic significance: it protects the integrity of the communication structures that underpin democratic self-determination. The debate on privacy protection, however, often lacks a democratic understanding of privacy and misses its public value. Following an interactionist understanding of privacy and a discourse-theoretical model of democracy, our argument puts forward a conceptual link between privacy and the idea of communicative freedom. From this perspective, the substantiation of a European fundamental right to privacy can be seen as a possible contribution to promoting European democracy in general.

The text discusses Donaldson and Kymlicka's approach to citizenship claims for animals in the context of competing conceptions of citizenship in current political theory. It outlines the normative dynamic of inclusion that modern conceptions of citizenship have stimulated and analyses possible tensions for a republican approach to citizenship. These tensions increase, it is argued, when the republican conception of citizenship (which Kymlicka developed in his earlier writings) is shifted towards a more communitarian one in the context of animal rights.

The text discusses Donaldson and Kymlicka's approach to citizenship claims for animals in the context of competing conceptions of citizenship in current political theory. It outlines the normative dynamic of inclusion that modern conceptions of citizenship have stimulated and analyses possible tensions for a republican approach to citizenship. These tensions increase, it is argued, when the republican conception of citizenship (which Kymlicka developed in his earlier writings) is shifted towards a more communitarian one in the context of animal rights.

In the context of current challenges in democratic theory new motives for reconceptualising Rousseau's idea of democratic freedom arise. Processes of transnationalisation have put the question of what constitutes a people urgently on the agenda. Rousseau's 'problem of freedom' will be related to questions of peopleness. It is located on the level of founding as well as on the level of institution-building. The foundation and maintenance of a political order of freedom turns out to be an ambivalent project, especially in the light of cosmopolitan challenges. Adapted from the source document.