Abstract

Chapter 11 relates to the dispute about ‘more or less Europe’ and sets out to ‘justify Europe’. We need a European Union, a common market, a European public authority, a European democracy for reasons of social justice, Van Parijs argues; and we must be prepared to pressure, to protest and to march in the streets for that as we did in our respective nation states. He shows why the European Union suffers at the moment from criticism of a democracy deficit, and gives recommendations of how to transform the EU into a real demos-cracy. The problem for Europeans trying to mobilize across borders is that they do not share a common language. But the spread of English as a lingua franca supports the hope that they will be able to talk to each other, and that the EU is not bound to drift into ever-greater injustice.