Republican intergovernmentalism as a realistic utopia

Richard Bellamy’s A Republican Europe of States offers a major contribution to the debate on the future of Europe by exending important democratic concerns beyond state borders without conflating into an overly demanding cosmopolitan account. Key to Bellamy’s normative proposal are the two ideas of realistic utopia and ‘freedom as non-domination’. Inspired by Rawls’s political philosophy, the idea of realistic utopia helps to understand the proper relationships between facts and principles and ideal and non-ideal theory. Petitt’s idea of “freedom as-non domination”, in turn, provides the foundation for the ideal of democratic legitimacy presented in the book. This paper critically examines Bellamy’s republican intergovernmentalism in light of these two features. It ultimately seeks to show that these two ideas are in tension with one each other and seem to lead to two contrasting models of normative political theorizing.