Trilemma: crisis, democracy and federalism in Europe / transl. from Spanish A. Korotkova, V. Nefedova, N. Fefilova, E. Yakovchik

Abstract

Scotland and Cataluña have been in political and constitutional European current affairs for a few months. Each is a process inspired by self-determination and the elastic „right to decide”. These matters will not be addressed here from a technical aspect, although it is convenient to analyse certain legal and political instruments which deal with the issues raised by Scotland and Cataluña.But this contribution for Sortuz’s new stage has a double structure: the first part analyses the concept of democracy, which is the basis of the European Union, and its modulation according to the circumstances and crisis that it deals with; and the second part addresses this same aspect from a slightly different approach, focussed in the concept of sovereignty and federalism.In his last book, The paradox of globalization, Dani Rodrik (2011) refers to the „political trilema of world economics” between the nation-state, democracy and hiperglobalisation, that makes it impossible to maintain, at the same time, (1) the benefits of globalisation in terms of economic openness and integration, (2) the democratic interaction and (3) the nation state as a sovereign space and locus of politics.This „trilema” makes it necessary to think about the levels of governance in which politics is practiced — posdemocracy and regulation, from the local to the global, as well as the scales in which the market and the economy operate. The nation state questioned from the perspectives that study these levels and scales of governance and market, re-emerge as a political project in the Cataluña and Scotland sovereign vindications and in the discourses that attempt to deny them.