Third Scholarly Panel : The New EU: Implications for Social Theory
Chair : Dr. Joseph Drew

The Emergence of a European Political Class: Sociological Career Paths and Identity Profiles
Elise Féron
Research Fellow, The Interdisciplinary Centre for Comparative Research in the Social Sciences (CIR-Paris), Paris, France

The sociological character of the public sphere has received comparatively little attention in recent literature. Normative analysis has tended to concentrate on the public sphere in the abstract, or at best at its institutional aspects as a requirement for a more democratic Europe. The key hypothesis of this paper is that the public sphere corresponds to a political field of a certain kind - one that is structurally open and, therefore, in Bourdieu's terms, “heteronomous”, and in which the inevitable specialisation of political functions within a complex society does not entail a monopoly of participation, problem definition and style in the hands of the professionals. Subject to certain conditions, such a political field can contribute directly to the emergence of a public sphere.
This paper will thus examine the extent to which there is, or is tending to emerge, a genuinely European ‘political class' in Europe, under the impact of new career structures, new relations between parties, new modes of media activity, and emerging processes within the policy arena and civil society. The research reported in this paper will rely on interviews conducted with MEPs and other major European political actors (such as members of the Committee of the Regions or policy advisers of the European Commission), as well as on a Europe-wide survey on career paths, identities and attitudes, which targeted persons holding political office or related functions.
The picture that emerges from our research is not that of a European political class that would be intrinsically different from the national political classes, and that would stand above or on top of them. Of course, this does not mean that career paths at the European level are easy to trace and categorise. On the contrary, because opportunity structures at the European level seem quite open, there is a great diversity of career paths, but no evidence of the widespread idea according to which European commitment could be explained by difficulties encountered by some politicians at national level.

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The State and the Challenges of Modernity
Christina Maria Gheorghe
European Studies Faculty, Babes-Bolyai University, Romania

The fall of the communism demonstrated that Romanian society is not a uniform one, despite the homogenizing efforts of the system. After the end of the totalitarian regime the people was often astonished seeing the differences between them. Very surprising was the existence of regional disparities, necessities and aspirations. For this reason pointing out of all these created always a negative opinion against the group which showed its differences. This study intends to present the principal moments and groups which tried to manifest their different opinions, needs and aspirations, and the reactions towards them. The reactions of political class were preferred because especially the political forces refuse to recognize the regionally different needs and aspirations and also refuse to accept the necessity of decentralization.
Anywhere in the world the differents groups are in search of their identity, the solution of this problem beeing a great decentralisation of the unitary and uniformising state. That is why the main intention of the article is to stress the difficulties of the Romanian post-communist, still centralized and self-called unitary State, to accept the new realities of democracy, of european integration and of globalization too, to accept that in the actual European and international system context is necessary to rapidly decentralize itself. But the challenge is internal and external in the same time. And if external provocation is sometimes accepted, the internal is very difficult to support by the post-communist officials, because is expression of identity crise. The difficulty to accept is due to a double fear: of minority, to be not assimiled and to rest differents, and of majority, to be not separated (is not only an ethnical question).
The need to self-determination of different romanian communities begin to the fact that sometimes certain problems can not be solved by local administration and is necessary to contact or to wait the answers of national authorities.
Because Romania is a young democracy and has not the experience of decontration, decentralisation, devolution, delegation or subsidiarity, I began with a short historical approach of the federal idea in Romanian area. This idea has not continuity. But, in the communist period Romania knew a simulacrum of regional autonomy, ethnically based, when was created the Magyar Autonomous Region, after the sovietic model of organisation and following the marxist-leninist idea of national mynorities autodetermination.
But the main aim of this is to stress the efforts of a part of civil post-communist Romanian society to press the political class to realize the administrative and political changes necessary for the economic progress and mentalities change too. Some civil movements for decentralisation / regionalisation appeared in the last years, left-handed expressed some-times. They was considered as reactionary movements by a big part of political class, media or people and obliged to keep silence . The specialists will be interested by these movements and their discours and about official or no official reactions specially because officials adopted the regional and decentralisation discours when the EU ask it to procede at these politics, by economic reason.

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Debating the Democratic Deficit: the Question of Legitimacy in the EU
Olivier Ruchet
Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris, France and Lecturer, Southern Methodist University - Paris program

In a recent series of articles, Harvard University professor Andrew Moravcsik argues against the idea that the European Union suffers from a problem of legitimacy. Arguing that the EU is not 'a superstate in the making,' Moravcsik claims that the lack of forums where citizens can directly participate in majority decision-making does not inherently signify that the EU lacks legitimacy. Indeed, describing the Union as an idiosyncratic limited multi-level polity, Moravcsik claims that its institutions do not need to meet any particular level of participation in order to be fair, legitimate, and democratic.
Embedded in Moravcsik's argument are simultaneously a theory about European integration and a theory about democracy. On the one hand, Moravcsik defends a liberal intergovernmentalist view according to which European integration reflects interstate bargaining, and where institutional delegation only follows the wishes of national governments - in a framework where their respective wishes are compounded by their relative bargaining power. On the other hand, Moravcsik proposes a specific reading of the link between representation and legitimacy, which belongs to the terrain of democratic theory. This second element rests on the claims that indirect democratic control is sufficient to vindicate the legitimacy of the EU, and that the absence of direct participation might prove to better defend the long-term interests of median voters than a majoritarian system might offer. Moravcsik accordingly postulates that political institutions resting solely on delegated power might well be just as representative as elected ones, and offer voters the same levels of influence over policy outcomes.
This paper will depart from the already abundant commentary on the credibility of liberal intergovernmentalism as a framework for understanding European integration.  Rather, it will assess the validity of the second part of Moravcsik's argument. It will first evaluate the way in which Moravcsik understands the link between modes of representation and their outcomes. It will postulate that Moravcsik relies too heavily on consequentialist ideas about the promotion of voters' interests, and fails to devote enough attention to elucidating the link between representation and legitimacy. The paper will then examine the possibility of founding legitimacy on indirect democratic control, and the political fruitfulness of such a foundation, against the backdrop of an ever-elusive European public sphere and debates on the very meaning of European citizenship. Finally, the paper will provide a different response to the question of whether and how democratic legitimacy can be attained in the European Union, regardless of whether the Union is conceived of as a federation, a consociation, or as a limited multi-level polity. 

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Alms Giving in Modern Urban Society: Beggars Givers Interactions in Two Post-socialist Societies
Prof. Marina Butovskaya, Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, Moscow State University, Russia, and Prof. Marina Vancatova, Faculty of Humanities, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic