Saturday, December 2
9:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m.
Indiana Memorial Union, Oak Room

This symposium will focus on the challenges globalization poses to both the legitimacy and efficacy of nation-state based democracy. It will bring together scholars working on the EU to address issues of both immediate topical and broader theoretical interests. 

Symposium Program

Symposium Participant Profiles

Paper Presenters

• Jim Bohman holds the Danforth I Chair in the Humanities and is Professor of Philosophy and Professor of International Studies at St. Louis University. He is one of North America’s leading Habermasian critical theorists and a leading scholar of “deliberative democracy” as a way to understand democracy at the supranational level. He also has done work in German philosophy (Critical Theory and German Idealism). Professor Bohman is director of the annual Critical Theory Roundtable and co-director of the annual Philosophy of Social Science Roundtable. His recent publications include Democracy Across Borders: From Demos to Demoi (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007) and an article entitled “Constitution Making and Institutional Innovation: The European Union and Transnational Governance” (European Journal of Political Theory, Vol. 3, 2004).
  

• Dario Castiglione is Professor of Political Theory at Exeter University, UK. He is one of the foremost defenders of a republican model of Europe as a “mixed polity” involving multi-levels of governance and has argued forcefully against attempts to extend traditional ideas about unitary sovereignty to a democratic EU. His main areas of research comprise theories of democracy, constitutionalism and civil society, also with application to the development of the European Union; and, from a more historical perspective, seventeenth and eighteenth-century political philosophy, with particular reference to the Scottish Enlightenment and the work of David Hume. Professor Castiglione is the author of numerous articles, books and edited volumes, including Democracy and Constitutional Culture in the Union of Europe (London: Lothian Foundation Press, 1995).
  

• Alessandro Ferrara, Professor of Political Philosophy, University of Rome “Tor Vergata,” is a leading social philosopher who has published widely and whose work has been translated into many languages. Professor Ferrara’s interests also include the grounding of human rights in a multicultural perspective, the reconstruction of the normativity inherent in Rawls’s notion of the reasonable, and the contemporary meaning of liberal neutrality and toleration. His most important book in English is Justice and Judgment: The Rise and the Prospect of the Judgment Model in Contemporary Political Philosophy (London: Sage Publications, 1999).
  

• Glyn Morgan is Associate Professor of Government and Social Studies at Harvard University. A leading political theorist working on the EU, Professor Morgan, in his book The Idea of the European Superstate: Public Justification and European Integration (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), offers a political and legal justification, from a liberal democratic standpoint, of a sovereign European “superstate.” His interests include contemporary political philosophy, modern social theory, the philosophy of the social sciences, and theories of international relations, nationalism, federalism, and European integration. 
  
  

Roundtable Discussants

• Nadia Urbinati, the Nell and Herbert M. Singer Associate Professor of Contemporary Civilization at Columbia University, is a political theorist who specializes in modern political thought and in the democratic and republican traditions from the eighteenth century to the present. Her research interests also include democratic and anti-democratic theories, theories of representation and sovereignty, modern political thought, and ideology and theories of consent. Professor Urbinati is the author Representative Democracy: Principles and Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006) and Mill on Democracy: from the Athenian Polis to Representative Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), which received the David and Elaine Spitz Prize as the best book in liberal and democratic theory published in 2002.
  

• Jeff Isaac has research interests that center around political theory, broadly understood. His most recent book, The Poverty of Progressivism (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), is an interpretive essay on the decline of liberal progressive politics in the United States. Democracy in Dark Times (Ithica: Cornell, 1998) offers an interpretation-- influenced significantly by the writings of Hannah Arendt-- of the fate of democratic impulses in the wake of the Eastern European revolutions of 1989. Arendt, Camus and Modern Rebellion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992) is a comparison of the writings of Hannah Arendt and Albert Camus, which seeks to read these authors in light of their historical contexts and to underscore their contemporary relevance. In these books, Professor Isaac explores the possibilities and limits of radical democratic political agency in the contemporary world.
  

• Beate Sissenich studies regional integration with a focus on the European Union and its eastward enlargement. Her work looks at how international and domestic politics interact. In particular, she investigates whether and how rules spread across national borders and what role nonstate actors play in this process. Professor Sissenich uses network analysis to trace the cross-border links of nonstate actors. She has a chapter, “The Diffusion of EU Social Policy in Poland and Hungary,” in Ronald Linden, ed., Norms and Nannies: The Impact of International Organizations on Central and East European States (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002) and another chapter in The Europeanization of Central and Eastern Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), edited by Ulrich Sedelmeier and Frank Schimmelfennig. Professor Sissenich's current projects deal with mechanisms of rule transfer, EU state-building in Central and Eastern Europe, and transnational networks and the state.