How to reconstitute democracy in Europe? Proceedings from the RECON opening conference

On 26 and 27 January 2007 the RECON project was launched. This is a large-scale project on European democracy, with a duration of five years. RECON seeks to clarify whether democracy is confined to the nation state or whether post-national democracy is possible under conditions of diversity and complex multilevel governance? This includes taking heed of the challenges to democracy at EU, national and regional/local levels. RECON spells out three different models for democratic reconstitution - national, federal and cosmopolitan, and assesses which approach to democratic reconstitution is most viable - in empirical and normative terms.
A two-day long conference in Oslo marked the starting point of RECON. On the first day of the conference the theoretical framing paper of the project by Erik O. Eriksen and John Erik Fossum was presented. This was followed by lectures by John Dryzek and James Bohman who were invited keynote speakers. Hauke Brunkhorst and Rainer Forst rounded up the opening session by presenting their prepared comments for the keynote speeches. This report collects the papers and comments from the opening session of the conference.

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