Stefan Auer: European Disunion: Democracy, Sovereignty and the Politics of Emergency.: London: Hurst, 2022, 288 pages, ISBN: 978-1-78738-684-6

Abstract

Jana Vargovčíková reviews Stefan Auer's new book. According to Vargovčíková, Auer brings a timely, elegantly written, and engaging critique of the many deficits and overstretches of the EU´s technocratic integration and its impact on democracy in Europe. He also provides a refreshing appreciation of the contradictory relationship between CEE experience and EU membership to point out these overstretches.  However, Auer's polemical and provocative style risks falling into interpretative traps, including creating a caricature of the EU as a monolithic bloc and relativizing the CEE radical conservative autocrats at the expense of truly democratic and plural politics in the region. First, his critique rests on a reductionist caricature of the EU as a homogeneous project on its way to becoming a superstate and moving away from a Europe of nation states. Second, his rightful critique of the EU asymmetries makes him underestimate Central European radical conservatives' antidemocratic tendencies that are manifested through their own extraordinary politics in the manner of culture wars. Finally, Auer's admiration for political sovereignists makes him mistakenly view popular sovereignty as the only expression of national democracy rather than seeing the other EU-friendly democratic claims and actors of democratic politics in the region.