Conceptualizing Transnational Democracy Properly: Granting Fellow Europeans Voting Rights and Representatives in National Parliaments

Jean-Claude Junker and Emmanuel Macron have recently taken up the idea to establish a pan-European electoral district for the European Parliament. In the proposed paper, I will argue that this would be an important step for the transnationalization of the supranational voting space, but it aims at the wrong level. Instead, I propose that the national parliaments of EU member states establish electoral districts for the representatives of their fellow Europeans. The proposal draws on existing trends within nation states to expand voting rights beyond nationality (the EU demands that the local franchise includes all EU citizens) and residency (many countries grant voting rights to their emigrants/expatriates and some of them established special seats for them in their national assembly). I argue that a further transnationalization of national parliaments would be much more helpful than transnationalizing the EU parliament or granting national parliaments a larger role in EU politics since it promises to bring politics back closer to the people (embeds politics better in established/national structures of will-formation and decision-making) and to overcome national parochialism/populism at the same time. Based on experiences with the extension of voting rights beyond nationality and residency, I will lay out the institutional details of an electoral system in which EU members states reciprocally grant citizens of other member states the right to vote in their national elections. The rules have to be tailor-made in order to balance the goals of national self-determination and of an empowered inclusion of all affected interests.