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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN EUROPEAN POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY
Democracy Without Politics

in EU Citizen Participation
From European Demoi to
Decolonial Multitude
Alvaro Oleart
Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology
Series Editors
Carlo Ruzza, School of International Studies, University of Trento,
Trento, Italy
Hans-Jörg Trenz, Faculty of Political and Social Sciences, Scuola
Normale Superiore, Pisa, Italy
Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology addresses contemporary
themes in the field of Political Sociology. Over recent years, attention has
turned increasingly to processes of Europeanization and globalization and
the social and political spaces that are opened by them. These processes
comprise both institutional-constitutional change and new dynamics of
social transnationalism. Europeanization and globalization are also about
changing power relations as they affect people’s lives, social networks and
forms of mobility.
The Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology series addresses
linkages between regulation, institution building and the full range of
societal repercussions at local, regional, national, European and global
level, and will sharpen understanding of changing patterns of attitudes
and behaviours of individuals and groups, the political use of new rights
and opportunities by citizens, new conflict lines and coalitions, societal
interactions and networking, and shifting loyalties and solidarity within
and across the European space.
We welcome proposals from across the spectrum of Political Sociology
and Political Science, on dimensions of citizenship; political attitudes and
values; political communication and public spheres; states, communities,
governance structure and political institutions; forms of political participa-
tion; populism and the radical right; and democracy and democratization.
Alvaro Oleart
Democracy Without
Politics in EU Citizen
Participation
From European Demoi to Decolonial Multitude
Alvaro Oleart
Department of Political Science
and Institute for European studies
Université Libre de Bruxelles
Brussels, Belgium
Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology

ISBN 978-3-031-38582-7 ISBN 978-3-031-38583-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38583-4
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Acknowledgements
The collective intelligence that emerged through the conversations with a

multitude of friends and colleagues is what has made this book possible. I
am grateful to everyone who I have crossed paths throughout this journey
in Bremen, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Ghent, Madrid, Florence, Brussels,
Paris, Strasbourg, Porto, Toulouse, Vienna, Prague or online. The process
of writing this book and the institutional and activist spaces in which I
am embedded have transformed my own subjectivity and positionality.
While academic work can be an individual process, this book has been an
enriching collective endeavour. The Conference on the Future of Europe
and the new mechanisms of citizen participation in the EU may not signif-
icantly shape the future of European integration, but writing this book has
certainly shaped my life.
Words cannot do real justice to express my profound gratitude to so
many people that have contributed to this adventure. This journey has
shaped my own thinking and trajectory in making sense of European
studies, and I am indebted to the many activists, friends and colleagues
with whom I have shared time, stories and ideas. Many central ideas
developed in this book are inspired by these discussions. In particular,
the insightful exchanges and the political inspiration that emerged within
Citizens Take Over Europe, European Alternatives and the EUROGLOT
networks have been fundamental. It has been a learning (and unlearning)
process of gaining further understanding of my own positionality, and
pushing me to connect closer together my work as an academic with that
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
of an activist. As the popular feminist saying goes, ‘the personal is polit-

ical’. The book’s publication is not the end of this process, but part of a
broader collective reflection that hopefully contributes to building a more
decolonial, democratic, equal and feminist society. This entails knowl-
edge production processes that are sensitive to the material and epistemic
inequalities. Only by engaging closely with activists and movements we
will be able to (un)learn ‘Europe’ (and the world) through a decolo-
nial lens, and advance a transformational democratic project that has the
potential to bring about positive change in society.
I am lucky to have grown as an academic alongside Luis Bouza and
Ben Crum. They have encouraged me to pursue my own intellectual
curiosity, and challenge certain aspects of mainstream European studies
literature in both conceptual, empirical and normative ways. Luis and
Ben have critically engaged with my work, and their careful reading and
constructive feedback have heavily contributed to the improvement of the
book, as well as their personal encouragement and kindness. Similarly,
I thank François Foret for his unwavering support and enthusiastically
welcoming me back to the ULB, where my professional academic career
started. Thanks also to Ambra Finotello, Carlo Ruzza and Hans-Jörg
Trenz for their repeated critical advice and backing from the beginning
of the book project within the Palgrave Studies in European Polit-
ical Sociology series. The personal support and book endorsement by
Vivien Schmidt, Niccolò Milanese and Jan Orbie also mean a lot to
me, as their work has inspired much of my own and heavily contributed
to constructing ideational tools to critically and constructively scrutinise
European politics.
Democracy and decolonisation are collective endeavours that require
strong international solidarity networks. The support and joy brought
about by many friends and colleagues with whom I have shared the partic-
ipant observation and writing process have also inspired the book, and
their feedback has dramatically improved its substance. Many thanks to
Maarten de Groot, Perle Petit and Nicolás Palomo Hernández. I am
also thankful to Juan Domingo Sánchez Estop and Virginia Rodríguez,
who pushed me to be bold enough to engage more closely with political
philosophy, and whose intellectual and emotional support was funda-
mental to kick-start this book. I am also grateful to Astrid Van Weyen-
berg, Niels Gheyle, Tom Theuns and Jorge Tuñón, as our joint work has
been a source of inspiration. In fact, the notion of ‘democracy without
politics’ was first developed in an article with Tom.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vii
Many friends and colleagues have also given their time and energy
to comment and discuss specific chapters, and the book has certainly
improved thanks to them. Thanks to Antonio Salvador M. Alcazar III,
Jan Pieter Beetz, Martin Deleixhe, Antoine Gaboriau, Elena García
Guitián, Taru Haapala, Rasmus Mäemees, Szilvia Nagy, Juan Roch
and Noah Schmitt. Furthermore, the many encounters throughout
the CoFoE have influenced my thinking on it. Thanks to Aliénor
Ballangé, Carsten Berg, Paul Blokker, Alessandra Cardaci, Andrey
Demidov, Kalypso Nicolaidis, Constantin Schäfer and Daniela Vancic,
among many others. I would also like to thank everyone who accepted to
be interviewed, including civil society and trade union members, activists,
citizen panel participants and organisers, elected representatives, EU offi-
cials and journalists, whose input has been precious. This book has not
only improved thanks to all these interactions, but in fact has ended
up being something substantially different. The shortcomings of the
book are my own responsibility.
Institutionally, I’d like to thank Maastricht University’s Studio Europa
Maastricht for supporting me throughout the first year of writing this
book, and was central to my institutional involvement in the Confer-
ence on the Future of Europe. I am also grateful for the support of the
Belgian French-speaking National Fund for Scientific Research (F.R.S.-
FNRS), and the Université Libre de Bruxelles (especially my colleagues
at the Cevipol and the Institute for European Studies) for welcoming me
again as a postdoctoral researcher in 2022.
Last, and most importantly, I am grateful to my family and friends for
putting up with me during this time, filled with many joyful moments,
but also a challenging personal journey. Thanks to Mom, Dad, Nad’ka,
Ilie, Boris, Fran, Dani and Hasan.
Contents
1 Passive Revolutions and the Future of the EU:

Democratic Theorising and the ‘Decolonial Multitude’ 1
1 Introduction 1
2 Gramsci’s Passive Revolution: From the Italian
Risorgimento to Sortition-Based ‘Descriptive
Representation’ in the EU 3
3 A Politically Engaged Conceptual, Normative
and Empirical Perspective: Democratic Theorising
and the ‘Decolonial Multitude’ 10
4 Challenging the “coloniality of power” in mainstream
conceptions of ‘citizen participation’: decolonising
the ‘we’ in democracy 16
5 Summary of the Book Through the Articulation
of the Different Chapters 19
Bibliography 22
2 From European Demoi to the Decolonial Multitude:
Democratising the EU’s Political Imaginary 25
1 EU Democracy, Decolonisation and the Agonistic Public
Sphere 25
1.1 Democratic Legitimacy in the EU: The Opportunity
of Politicisation to Bring Agonism 28
2 Multitude Over Peoplehood: The Tension Between
Sovereignty and Democracy 30
ix
x CONTENTS
2.1 The ‘Decolonial Multitude’ as the ‘We’ of Democracy 33

2.2 Decolonial Multitude vs Sovereignty:
A Non-Contractualist Conception of EU Democracy 38
2.3 The ‘Decolonial Multitude’ in the EU:
Democratising Traditional Notions
of ‘Representation’ Through Mediation 44
2.4 Articulating the Decolonial Multitude
in Opposition to Existing Material Structures
and Coloniality 48
3 Why the Decolonial Multitude Now? New
Intergovernmentalism and Populism in the EU 52
3.1 Democracy, Sovereignty and ‘the People’
in the EU: The Revolution from Above of New
Intergovernmentalism 53
3.2 The Decolonial Multitude as a Transnational
and Pluralist Alternative to Populism 56
4 Conclusion: Stimulating Agonistic EU Politicisation
Through a Decolonial Multitude Perspective 59
Bibliography 61
3 The Genealogy of the ‘Citizen Turn’ in the EU: The
European Citizen Consultations, the Citizen Dialogues
and the Antipolitical Imaginary 69
1 From the ‘Participatory’ to the ‘Citizen Turn’
in the European Union 69
2 The Relationship Between Deliberative and Agonistic
Democracy: The Antipolitical Imaginary vs Mediation 73
3 From the EP agoras, Citizen Dialogues and the European
Citizen Consultations (2008–2018) to the Conference
on the Future of Europe (2019–2022) 75
4 ‘Citizenism’ as an Alternative to an Agonistic European
Public Sphere in the EU’s ‘Citizen Turn’ 79
4.1 The Missing Micro–macro Link: EU ‘Citizen
Participation’ as ‘Democracy Without Politics’ 79
4.2 Disintermediation as Another Form of (Private)
Mediation: The Social Construction of ‘Everyday
People’ and the Commodification of Democracy 82
5 Conclusion: The ‘Citizen Turn’ Reinforces the Preexistent
Depoliticised EU Political Dynamics 85
Bibliography 88
CONTENTS xi
4 Democracy Without Politics in the Conference

on the Future of Europe: The Political Architecture,
Process and Recommendations 93
1 Introduction: An Interpretivist Approach to the CoFoE 93
2 The Conference on the Future of Europe: A Response
to a Legitimacy Gap 95
3 The Political Architecture of the Conference 97
3.1 The Multilingual Digital Platform 98
3.2 Decentralised Events and the European
and National Citizens’ Panels 101
3.3 The CoFoE Plenary and the Working Groups 103
4 Democracy Without Politics in the CoFoE: The Missing
Connection with Mediators and the Public Sphere 106
4.1 Civil Society and Trade Unions 106
4.2 National Parliaments and the Media 111
5 The CoFoE Proposals: A Consensual and Catch-All Wish
List 113
6 Conclusion: The Reproduction of Democracy Without
Politics in the CoFoE 117
Bibliography 118
5 Individualised Technodeliberation in the CoFoE
European Citizens’ Panels: The Presence of the Absence
of the European Demoi 121
1 Introduction: The European Citizens’ Panels in the CoFoE 121
2 Organisation of the European Citizens’ Panels 123
2.1 The Mediators of Disintermediation and Its
Relation to the CoFoE Secretariat 123
2.2 Who is Taking Part in the European Citizens’
Panels? The Individualistic and Antipolitical
Imaginary of ‘Everyday Citizens’ 125
3 The Functioning of the European Citizens’ Panels 127
3.1 Agenda, Framing of the Panels and Information
Background 127
3.2 Mechanics of the Panels 131
3.3 The Role of Facilitators (and Note-Takers):
Technical and Political Challenges 139
3.4 The ‘Neutral’ Role of (Academic) Experts
and Fact-Checkers 142
xii CONTENTS
3.5 ‘Polluting’ the Citizen Deliberations? The CoFoE

Secretariat’s Forceful Control Over ‘Undue
Influence’ 149
3.6 Recommendations and (Non)deliberative Voting:
A Wish List Exercise 152
4 ‘Citizen Ambassadors’ in the Plenary 154
5 A Normative Critique of the European Citizen
Panels: Isolated and Atomised Aggregation
and an Individualised European Demoi 158
6 The Antipolitical Construction of the European Demoi
in the European Citizens’ Panels 160
Bibliography 161
6 The Institutional ‘Success’ of the CoFoE via the ‘New
Generation’ Citizen Panels: The European Commission
Leads the Public-Private ‘Citizen Turn’ 163
1 ‘Citizen Participation’ after the CoFoE 163
2 ‘Lessons Learnt’ and Follow-Up of EU Institutions
to the CoFoE 164
3 The Public-Private Institutionalisation of ‘Citizen
Participation’: Internal Advocacy to Embed Processes
across the European Commission 169
4 Inter-institutional Competition to ‘Own’ Citizen
Participation at the EU Level 172
4.1 The Clash Between Parliament and Commission
to Lead EU ‘Citizen Participation’ 172
4.2 The CoFoE Feedback Event and the Commission’s
‘Global Leadership’: Public Relations
over Contestation in the Public Sphere 175
5 The ‘New Generation’ of European Citizens’ Panels
Organised by the European Commission 178
5.1 The Corporate Framing of ‘Food Waste’
and ‘Virtual Worlds’ 182
5.2 The Lack of a Public Sphere Perspective
and the (Neo)liberal Ideology Embedded
in European Citizens’ Panels 189
6 The Post-CoFoE Logic of ‘Citizen Participation’:
Turning ‘Everyday Citizens’ into EU ‘Technocrats’
Within the Process, and ‘Ambassadors’ Outside of It 193
CONTENTS xiii
7 Conclusion: The Depoliticised ‘Citizen Participation’

Led by the European Commission and Its Underlying
Ideology 199
Bibliography 200
7 “The Lost Art of Organising Solidarity”: Articulating
the Decolonial Multitude in the EU (and Beyond) 205
1 A Politically Engaged Perspective: Theorising
with and as Activists 205
2 The Decolonial Multitude Imaginary in Ongoing
Transnational Struggles: Infrastructures of Dissent
to Build a ‘Movement of Movements’ 209
2.1 The Construction of Transnational Political Action
by European Alternatives 212
3 “The Lost Art of Organising Solidarity”: Embracing
the Differences but Also the Shared Purposes 215
3.1 The 2022 TransEuropa Festival: Decolonize!
Decarbonize! Democratize! 215
3.2 The Transnational Workers’ Organizing Summit
in Bremen 217
3.3 The Decolonial Multitude and the Case
Against Class Reductionism: The Long Road
to Decolonisation Within Social Movements 220
4 The Challenges to Articulate the Decolonial Multitude
in the EU 224
4.1 Beyond the Social Forum and Project-based
Cooperation: Building Transnational, Decolonial,
Feminist and Democratic Movement Structures 227
5 Conclusion 230
Bibliography 232
8 The Contrast Between the EU’s Technocratic
Conception of ‘Citizen Participation’
and the Democratic Pluralism of the Decolonial
Multitude 235
1 The European Citizens’ Panels and the ‘Passive
Revolution’: The EU’s Technocratic ‘Citizen Turn’ 235
2 Fostering the Intersectional Power of the Multitude:
Reframing the Democracy Debate from a Decolonial
Perspective 242
xiv CONTENTS
3 The Political Implications of the Decolonial Multitude:

The EU as a Political Playing Field 245
3.1 Changing the Organisational Rules of the Game
in the EU: Filling the Void with (Transnational)
Mass Organisations 248
3.2 Embedding Democratic and Deliberative
Innovations to Foster Mass Politics
and a Transnational Agonistic Public
Sphere 251
4 Contribution to the Literature, Shortcomings of the Book
and Avenues for Future Political Action and Research 256
5 The Democratisation and Decolonisation of Academia:
Shifting the Ideological Borders of European Studies 259
Bibliography 261
Index 265
List of Figures
Chapter 5
Fig. 1 Breakdown of Session 2 of the ECPs (Source CoFoE [2022:
16]) 133
Fig. 2 Breakdown of Session 3 of the ECPs (Source CoFoE [2022:
17]) 134
xv
List of Tables
Chapter 4
Table 1 Members of the CoFoE plenary by institution 104
Table 2 List of the seven CoFoE plenary sessions and the dates
in which they took place 105
Table 3 Selected final proposals from the CoFoE 114
Chapter 5
Table 1 Dates of the three sessions of the four ECPs of the CoFoE 122
Table 2 Agenda of Session 1 of Panel 2 132
Table 3 Background of the experts during the first session
of the four CoFoE European citizen panels 143
Table 4 Background of the experts during the second session
Table 5 Background of the experts during the third session
Chapter 6
Table 1 Dates of the three sessions of the three ‘new generation’
of European Citizens’ panels 178
xvii
CHAPTER 1
Passive Revolutions and the Future

of the EU: Democratic Theorising
and the ‘Decolonial Multitude’
1 Introduction
History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce, Marx argued in
‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’. When Garibaldi’s ‘Red-
shirts’ were threatening the Italian peninsula states’ aristocracy in Italy’s
post-1848 revolutionary scenario, there was a politically skilled move by
the dominant aristocratic groups to unify Italy politically through a coali-
tion between Garibaldi and the then King of Sardinia, and later first king
of Italy, Vittorio Emanuele II. The outcome of such an arrangement
was the foundation of the Italian Kingdom in 1861. This is well repre-
sented in the Italian town of Fiesole, in the outskirts of Florence,1 where
a statue commemorates the encounter between Garibaldi and Vittorio
Emmanuelle II on 26 October 1860 in Teano (Campania, Southern
Italy), shortly before the latter became officially King of Italy in March
1861. After such meeting, the leader of the ‘Redshirts’ supported Vittorio
Emanuele II as king of a unified Italy that would extend from the Alps
1 Florence also partially defines the conceptual and historical perspective upon which
this book departs from. Intellectually, much of the book departs from Florentine Niccolò
Machiavelli, who put forward the concept of the ‘multitude’. Furthermore, the European
University Institute’s Badia Fiesolana hosted one of the key events of the Conference on
the Future of Europe, the final session of the European citizen panel on EU Democracy.
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2023
A. Oleart, Democracy Without Politics in EU Citizen Participation,
Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38583-4_1
2 A. OLEART
all the way down to Sicily, providing the new Italian kingdom with
its symbolic revolutionary capital and popular legitimacy. Giuseppe di
Lampedusa best conceptualised this process in his novel ‘Il Gattopardo’.
Focused on the Italian aristocracy, Lampedusa describes how Prince of
Salina’s nephew, Tancredi Falconieri, warned his uncle that “if we want
things to stay as they are, everything has to change”. After Garibaldi’s
military and popular success, the support given to the new Italian
kingdom only reinforced the existing power structures (in which the
Italian aristocracy remained untouched), but added a layer of democratic
legitimacy. A passive revolution was underway.
How is the Italian unification process related to the recent ‘citizen
participation’ processes organised by the European Union? In short,
while there is an increasingly dominant discourse around ‘citizen partic-
ipation’ accompanied by ‘innovative’ political practices, this process is
not matched with an actual democratisation. In consequence, there is
a risk that new forms of sortition-based representation ultimately might
operate as a passive revolution. This dynamic is best illustrated by the
inclusion of a ‘descriptive representation’ of the ‘European people(s)’
in the CoFoE (and beyond) that cuts the traditional intermediation of
civil society actors by establishing a more ‘direct’, ‘pure’ and ‘unfiltered’
relation with EU citizens through the European citizen panels. In this
legitimation process, the already dominant (depoliticised) dynamics of the
EU have been reinforced, yet with a shifting claim for a citizens-centred
legitimacy.
The book advances a critical analysis of the ongoing ‘citizen partici-
pation’ innovations in the EU, and strives to open up ideational avenues
for the democratisation of the EU. Additionally, the book provides an
agonistic alternative to ‘the people’ as the ‘we’ of democracy in the EU,
which is based on the idea of the ‘decolonial multitude’, an account that
detaches ‘sovereignty’ from democracy in the EU. This dual message
is precisely what the cover image of the book illustrates: a European
Union flag with a lock. The Conference on the Future of Europe was
designed and implemented in a way that primarily reproduced the already
hegemonic dynamics conceived as ‘democracy without politics’ through
‘innovative citizen participation’ processes. In doing so, it largely made
invisible the postcolonial material and ideological structures upon which
the EU is built and sidelined activist organisations, while appearing to
‘open up’ to ‘everyday citizens’. This type of sortition-based processes,
1 PASSIVE REVOLUTIONS AND THE FUTURE OF THE EU … 3
conceived recently by Landemore (2020) as a new “paradigm of democ-

racy”, reflects more continuity than change in its understanding of
democracy and representation in the EU context. In this way, the book
argues that the EU is ‘locking in’ the status quo by creating new mech-
anisms that fail to meaningfully accommodate agonistic conflict and a
decolonial multitude perspective. At the same time, the book puts forward
conceptual tools to imagine how to open the lock and democratise the
EU from a transnational democracy and decolonial perspective.
More concretely, the book addresses two research questions. First, how
does the dominant understanding(s) of the demo(i)cratic subject in the EU,
and of democracy more broadly, shape the EU’s democratic innovations on
‘citizen participation’? Second, what are the politically and normatively
preferable alternatives, both in terms of the conceptualisation of the demo-
cratic subject in the EU and in the ensuing political practices? These two
research questions will allow to both develop a theory-driven alternative
to the traditional understanding of demo(i)cracy in the EU context based
on the idea of the ‘decolonial multitude’, as well as an empirical applica-
tion of the way in which the different understandings of EU democracy
are reflected in concrete political practices. Thus, the book puts forward
a diagnosis of current debates on EU democratic legitimacy as well as
proposing an alternative.
2 Gramsci’s Passive Revolution: From

the Italian Risorgimento to Sortition-Based
‘Descriptive Representation’ in the EU
Bringing a parallel between the post-1848 revolutionary moment in
Europe with the post-2008 context, the book’s argument builds on
Antonio Gramsci’s interpretation of the Italian Risorgimento and unifi-
cation during the second half of the nineteenth century, which he
interpreted as a ‘passive revolution’. This term is originally coined by
the Neapolitan conservative thinker Vincenzo Cuoco in his 1799 Saggio
storico sulla Rivoluzione di Napoli. Resignified and given a negative
meaning by Gramsci, a passive revolution is a top-down process by which
a political system appears to change by shifting its democratic legitimacy
claims, while maintaining intact its existing power structures. In doing so,
the passive revolution only reinforces and preserves the preexistent power
dynamics, yet with a renewed sense of democratic legitimacy. This is best
4 A. OLEART
represented by Gramsci when describing the Italian unification during the

early 1860s, in which an elite-driven ‘revolution without a revolution’
took place to form the Italian kingdom, bringing together the different
kingdoms within the Italian peninsula but without questioning the deeper
power structures of the Italian peninsula aristocracies.
While Gramsci uses the term “passive revolution” in a variety of
contexts with slightly different meanings, the primary usage is to contrast
the passive transformation of bourgeois society in nineteenth-century
Italy with the active revolutionary process of the bourgeoisie in France
post-1789. Whereas the French case is seen by Gramsci as an authentic
revolution guided by diverse social forces, the Italian case was a ‘non-
change’, insofar it meant elites disrupted the institutions only to enable
an alternative social arrangement that preserved their own position in it.
Thus, while there are multiple interpretations of the meaning of a ‘passive
revolution’, the book conceives it as a way “to capture how a revolu-
tionary form of political transformation is pressed into a conservative
project of restoration while lacking a radical national–popular ‘Jacobin’
moment” (Morton, 2010: 317). More concretely, a passive revolution is
a transformation of the political and institutional structures that preserves
the preexisting power relations, yet with a renewed sense of popular legiti-
macy.2 This process requires the social skill of elite actors to manoeuvre in
such a way that there is an appearance of change, given that the legitimacy
of the new structure largely depends on it. Facing winds of change, polit-
ical elites have agency to shape the way in which such change takes place.
As described by Gramsci, a ‘passive revolution’ is a moderate transforma-
tion of the political system in order to maintain the structural foundations
of such system. In Gramsci’s own words:
Indeed one might say that the entire State life of Italy from 1848 onwards
has been characterised by transformism—in other words by the formation
of an ever more extensive ruling class, within the framework established by
the Moderates after 1848 and the collapse of the neo-Guelph and federalist
utopias.3 The formation of this class involved the gradual but continuous
2 Italian fascism was also interpreted by Gramsci as a ‘passive revolution’, in the sense
that there was an ‘appearance of change’, yet the fundamental power structures that
organised society remained in place. However, the use of this concept in this book is
specifically targeted to the Italian Risorgimento historical context.
3 Neo-Guelphism was an Italian catholic movement during the nineteenth century that
aimed at uniting Italy under the leadership of the Papacy. The Italian federalists were
absorption, achieved by methods which varied in their effectiveness, of

the active elements produced by allied groups— and even of those which
came from antagonistic groups and seemed irreconcilably hostile. In this
sense political leadership became merely an aspect of the function of domi-
nation—in as much as the absorption of the enemies’ élite means their
decapitation, and annihilation often for a very long time. It seems clear
from the policies of the Moderates that there can, and indeed must, be
hegemonic activity even before the rise to power, and that one should
not count only on the material force which power gives in order to exer-
cise an effective leadership. It was precisely the brilliant solution of these
problems which made the Risorgimento possible, in the form in which it
was achieved (and with its limitations)—as “revolution” without a “rev-
olution”, or as “passive revolution” to use an expression of Cuoco’s in
a slightly different sense from that which Cuoco intended. (in Hoare &
Nowell-Smith, 1999: 214–215)
The concept of the ‘passive revolution’ is particularly useful when the

focus is situated on the agency of powerful political actors in relation to
an increasingly dissatisfied population. While structures remain an impor-
tant factor, agency and structure are in constant interaction. As argued by
Thomas, a
passive revolution had not been necessitated by this economic structure

or inscribed in modernity as its telos. Rather, its successful imposition had
involved conscious, political choices: on the one hand, the choice of the
ruling classes to develop strategies to disaggregate those working classes
and confine them to an economic-corporative level within the existing
society; on the other, the political choices of the subaltern classes that had
resulted in a failure to elaborate their own hegemonic apparatuses capable
of resisting the absorptive logic of the passive revolution. (Thomas, 2006:
74–75)
Gramsci used the ‘passive revolution’ framework to make sense of the

Italian Risorgimento, and this book will argue that new notions of ‘rep-
resentation’ via minipublics may represent a ‘passive revolution’. This
newly emerging logic of ‘descriptive representation’ replaces mass politics
with minipublics, and has recently been integrated by some entrepreneurs
in favour of a decentralised unification, in opposition to the centralisation advocated by

actors such as Garibaldi or Mazzini on the popular front, and Cavour and the Kingdom
of Sardinia on the monarchical side.
6 A. OLEART
within the EU in the recent Conference on the Future of Europe

(CoFoE). The historical parallelism between Italy’s Risorgimento and
the CoFoE has also an important transnational component. Garibaldi’s
Redshirts operated in the post-1848 revolutionary context (a crucial
factor in Gramsci’s eyes), in which revolutionary groups throughout
England, Prussia, France, Italy and Spain were increasingly pressuring
their respective regimes to open up democratically, questioning their legit-
imacy. In this complicated context for the different European kingdoms
and regimes, the interaction between Garibaldi and Vittorio Emmanuele
II would most likely have a transnational effect beyond the Italian penin-
sula. Back then, there was an already rising transnational flow of ideas, as
the well-known 1848 Communist Manifesto illustrates, in which Marx
and Engels argue that ‘a spectre is haunting Europe’ and where they
appealed to ‘workers of the world, unite’. The 1848 revolutions that
exploded throughout Europe had a deep and lasting impact on the
way in which the respective regimes understood that there were revo-
lutionary ideational seeds increasingly spreading transnationally. In this
context, different regimes reacted by tackling those groups and ideas. The
1848 revolutions were transnational in essence, and the evolution of such
processes in one country had an influence in other countries. Starting
in Switzerland, France, Italy, Germany and the UK all saw sparkles of
workers uniting to fight the undemocratic regimes in which they were
living and reclaiming an improvement to their living standards.
Similarly, in 2008, the global financial crisis facilitated that groups
across the world revolted against a system that was systemically biased
towards the wealthy at the expense of the majority—in the words of
Occupy, ‘we are the 99%’. The revolt was initially strong in the United
States (New York), but soon protest movements emerged in the next
months and years in other countries: the Icelandic financial crisis protests
in 2009–2011, the Arab Spring between 2010 and 2012 in Libya, Syria,
Egypt or Tunisia or the Indignados movement in Spain in 2011. These
movements strongly referenced each other (Castells, 2015). In 2011, the
15-M movement in Plaza Catalunya (Barcelona) referred constantly to
Tahrir Square (where the Egypt revolution was based), Iceland (where
bankers were put in jail after the crisis), Puerta del Sol (main square in
Madrid, where the 15-M movement was based) and Liberty Square (the
New York City square where Occupy Wall Street was based). This global-
isation of social movements made each movement stronger, as a renewed
transnational solidarity emerges out of these interactions. The transna-

tional cycle of movements continued (albeit with a different emphasis) a
few years later with #MeToo, #FridaysForFuture or #BlackLivesMatter.
Thus, the historical parallel operates between the period of Italy between
1848 and its 1861 unification, and the European Union between 2008
and 2021–2022 with the Conference on the Future of Europe. Obvi-
ously, the historical parallel has its flaws, given that the current European
society and political system(s) are very different.4
Crucially, passive revolutions play a pivotal role in the reproduction
of the status quo. The stability and continuity of the system, and the
inequalities that exist in it, are largely dependent on the success of passive
revolutions. In a globalised capitalist society in which colonial mate-
rial structures remain strong, and in which white supremacy and sexism
are continuously present, discontent is inherently going to surface. It is
precisely when discontent emerges that the inequalities that are natu-
ralised (such as those based on class, gender or race) in the system
are challenged and come to the fore that people at the top need to
manoeuvre, and realise that “if they want things to stay as they are, every-
thing has to change”. The way in which discontent is channelled and
contained depends on the capacity of economic and political elites to inte-
grate some elements from it, while marginalising the radical voices that
aim for a redistribution of power in society. In other words, the system
needs passive revolutions to protect itself.
The historical comparison is helpful to undertake a Gramscian reading
of current developments in the EU, mainly focused on the CoFoE but
also beyond it. The broader point that the book outlines is that in a post-
revolutionary transnational context (1848–2008), in which transnational
social movements are unable to fundamentally change things while on the
offensive, political elites can manoeuvre to keep future movements at bay
through a ‘revolution without a revolution’ or a ‘passive revolution’. In
the case of the EU, the ‘passive revolution’ relates first to the ‘revolu-
tion from above’ led by the ‘new intergovernmentalist’ turn throughout
the 2010s (Bickerton et al., 2015), which combined a strengthening
of neoliberal governmentality with a reinforcement of executive actors
4 A word of caution is needed in this sense. This is not the book of a historian: it does
not aim to tell the story of Europe from 1848 until 2022. The book rather attempts to
bring forward a historical parallel that helps to make sense of current developments in the
EU. The book’s focus is thus on making sense of the present and future of the EU.
8 A. OLEART
in what has been conceived as ‘intergovernmentality’ (Bouza García &

Oleart, 2023). This process was most visible during the Eurozone crisis,
described in detail by Vivien Schmidt (2020), in which EU institutions
deployed technocratic arguments to push austerity policies and address
its crisis of legitimacy, in spite of the strong anti-austerity movements
that emerged across Europe (Flesher Fominaya & Cox, 2013).
The book5 focuses on the attempt by EU institutions to ‘soften’ its
technocratic political image by appearing to be ‘citizen-friendly’ and open
to integrate ‘everyday citizens’ in its policy-making. To be sure, political
elites in the EU are not a coherent and unified block and certainly there
are divergences among them. In fact, the CoFoE might be conceived as
the result of a series of contingencies that brought together actors with
different (and in some cases contradictory) agendas. The shift towards a
‘citizen’ approach appears a fragile equilibrium that while driven by polit-
ical entrepreneurs mostly within the Commission and in member states
such as France, other actors could also get on board. What all EU actors
involved agreed upon is that bringing mass mobilisation to transnational
politics was not a necessary step towards the democratisation of the EU.
This represents a rather narrow understanding of ‘citizen’ political agency.
The Conference on the Future of Europe might appear as a relatively
irrelevant political process that has not meaningfully impacted European
integration, and is unlikely to do so in the future. However, its relevance
is rooted on the broader pattern of which the Conference is part of, which
is conceptualised in the book as the EU’s ‘citizen turn’.
The adoption of citizen assemblies or panels within the EU can be
interpreted as an attempt to integrate some elements from contesta-
tory movements, while strengthening the status quo. More concretely,
the ‘citizen turn’ breaks away from the ‘participatory turn’ described
by Saurugger (2010) by trying to construct a ‘direct’ relation between
EU institutions and EU citizens through experimental exercises such as
the European citizen panels within the CoFoE and beyond. The EU is
5 A two phases approach to the understanding of a ‘passive revolution’ has been

recently mobilised by Villacañas (2022). Through a Machiavellian-Gramscian framework,
he describes the way in which Franco consolidated its ruling position in Spain after the
Spanish civil war, primarily deploying repression, violence and mass murder in the first
phase, whereas emphasising “coercive consent” towards the Spanish population in the
second.
increasingly absorbing the less politically dangerous dimensions of move-

ments (such as sortition-based ‘citizen participation’ mechanisms), while
sidelining the more contentious and activist ones that would require a
more fundamental questioning of political and societal power structures.
In a quest for relegitimising the European project but in a depoliti-
cised way (what is defined in the book as ‘democracy without politics’),
this process fits with the agreement between Garibaldi and Vittorio
Emmanuele II that facilitated the top-down unification of Italy under
the leadership of the latter as king of Italy. The source of legitimacy of
the political project changed, but the existing power structures remain
unchanged. In this way, the understanding of the ‘citizen turn’ of the
EU as an attempted passive revolution facilitates a break away from EU
studies’ neofunctionalist and postfunctionalist accounts towards a rather
constructivist and historical materialist account of European integration.
In the same way that the Italian aristocracy absorbed the least revo-
lutionary elements of Garibaldi’s movement (the unification of Italy),
the EU is increasingly absorbing the least revolutionary elements of the
contestation of the status quo from the 2008 cycle of social move-
ment mobilisation, and shaped them in the least politically threatening
way. This refers mainly to the disintermediation of politics via delib-
eration (‘they do not represent us’, the Indignados Spanish protesters
claimed, while organising assemblies in occupied public squares) applied
through depoliticised minipublics (the citizen panels in the CoFoE); and
the embrace of digital “technopolitics”. On this latter point, the CoFoE
used the digital platform of ‘Decidim’, created in Barcelona in 2016
by a group of activists coming from the 2011 Indignados movement.
Decidim defines itself as a “technopolitical project”, whose role is to
provide participatory digital platforms for institutions. However, as Chap-
ters 4 and 5 will describe in detail, this transfer from a physical to a digital
space that is broadly detached from the public sphere has a depoliticising
effect, insofar individualises political participation and does not stimulate
public debate beyond the bubble in which it operates. The absorption
of these elements, while excluding the more radical aspects of the 2008
social movement cycle (such as the corporate capture of political insti-
tutions, calls for international solidarity or the lack of agonistic conflict
between mainstream political parties in the EU), is an important reminder
that “the linkages between democracy and deliberation are contingent
rather than necessary” (He & Warren, 2011, 270). As not all forms of
‘citizen deliberation’ have a democratising potential, we should be weary
10 A. OLEART
about these processes, insofar they are likely to be instrumentalised by

institutions in its search for legitimacy, without actually improving the
quality of democracy, the debate in the public sphere nor question existing
power relations.
While the initial tone may lead the reader to think that the book has
been written from a cynical perspective, this is not the case. Rather, this
book departs from hope, a valuable and necessary trait in order to act
politically towards the further democratisation of the political structures
that organise society. Hope requires, first, a critical analysis of the way
in which society and its underlying structures function, and only begin-
ning from such an analysis can one find a path on how to improve it for
the better. This book follows this logic: it first analyses how EU institu-
tions (mis)diagnosed the structural problems with European democracy,
and suggests an alternative way forward to meaningfully address the
underlying deeper democratic issues.
3 A Politically Engaged Conceptual, Normative

and Empirical Perspective: Democratic
Theorising and the ‘Decolonial Multitude’
Beginning with a politically engaged conceptual and empirical perspective,
the book aims at devising conceptual tools to imagine the democratisa-
tion of the EU in a broader process towards transnational democracy and
a decolonial political horizon. In spite of the obvious transnational polit-
ical dimension of the EU, too often in European studies6 the traditional
categories related to democracy, such as ‘sovereignty’ or ‘the people’, have
been accepted as conceptual building blocks. As Chapter 2 will develop,
these categories have been shaped in such a way as to make them fit with
the EU. Sovereignty has been conceptually revised as to mean something
that can be ‘shared’ across levels of government, and the idea of ‘Euro-
pean sovereignty’ has gained traction. Similarly, ‘the people’ has been
constructed as a notion that may describe not only the ‘national people’
6 The field of European studies encompasses not only the research on the evolution of
EU institutions, but also the broader societal processes related to European integration
from diverse perspectives, such as sociology, cultural studies or history.
but also the ‘European people’, and EU democracy has been also imag-
ined as a plural entanglement of ‘European peoples’ as a ‘demoicracy’
(Nicolaïdis, 2013).
These are all valuable conceptual innovations, yet a both materialist and
constructivist perspective may embark us on a different path. Sovereignty
and ‘the people’ are not ‘natural’ categories that simply describe reality.
They are socially constructed artefacts that incorporate normative assess-
ments, and that contribute to legitimising certain political structures and
protecting the position of certain social groups over others. In contrast,
the book begins with a problematisation of both concepts (‘sovereignty’
and ‘the people’) and the resignification of ‘democracy’, which is particu-
larly fitting in light of the acceleration of ongoing globalisation processes.
The idea of the ‘people’ and ‘sovereignty’ has an inherent problematic
aspect that essentialises the relation between the ‘nation’ and ‘democracy’,
even when theorised in a non-conservative way (see Spector, 2021). The
framework of the ‘decolonial multitude’ is put forward as an alternative
to sovereignty and ‘the people’, operating as a class-based political imagi-
nary that is more inclusive of different sensitivities and able to encompass
a critique of the global capitalist and postcolonial material structures that
are in place.
Furthermore, the ‘decolonial multitude’ is a better fit to the political
imaginaries upon which activists construct their own understandings of
democracy, the meaning of which is often drawn from the political context
in the Global North (see Brooks et al., 2020). In addition to its decolonial
dimension, the multitude also allows us to imagine a more intertwined
political world in which transnational coalitions of actors are more easily
constructed, and that also fits better the current material reality of a
globalised world in general, and the European Union in particular. The
concept is broadly inspired by Hardt and Negri’s (2004) work, yet incor-
porates a strong emphasis on the idea of ‘mediation’ and decolonisation.
Chapter 2 will further develop the idea of the ‘decolonial multitude’ as
an alternative conception of the main democratising subject, in contrast
to ‘the people’, in the EU context, and Chapter 7 will attempt to provide
an empirical and alive illustration of it.
The added value of combining a political theory with a political soci-
ology approach in this book is that it allows the concept of the ‘decolonial
multitude’ to come alive, illustrating the sort of coalitions and political
practices that might lead to its articulation in the EU context. In doing
so, this approach facilitates the uncovering of certain (un)democratic
12 A. OLEART
dimensions of European integration that traditional approaches sideline.

Far from being a “descriptive” and only “empirical” approach, the book
aims to reconceptualise the understanding of the subject of democracy in
the EU, problematise concepts such as “the people” or “sovereignty” in
the EU context, introduce a Gramscian reading of current EU political
dynamics, and doing so through an empirical analysis of the Conference
on the Future of Europe and other transnational, decolonial and activist
democratic alternatives.
This endeavour follows the idea of democratising democracy
(Koelble & Lipuma, 2008) and democratic theorising (Asenbaum, 2022),
in that there is an important democratic theory component that has
been developed through (transnational) activism, in such a way that a
political sociology and political theory perspective are aligned and comple-
ment each other. ‘Democracy’ is a signifier that has different meanings
in different political contexts, and innovations in its practices (such as
citizens’ assemblies) are rooted in particular ways of experiencing and
conceiving democracy. A decolonial approach, however, leads us towards
an interpretivist perspective that does not build democratic theory from
the top-down, but instead is developed alongside activists and social
movements, while in interaction with existing political institutions. The
book thus aims to also contribute to the idea that academic theorising
should be democratised.
I am thus both an observer and an actor in the processes that will be
described in the empirical chapters, and in turn these processes help us
to make sense of broader political patterns. Given the inherently radical
democratic element present in the concept of the ‘decolonial multitude’,
it is of particular relevance that the political theory built upon it is itself
constructed democratically. The methodology, an interaction between
grounded theory, participant observation and semi-structured interviews
anchored in an interpretivist outlook, is a good fit for this perspective.
Grounded theory begins with the idea that one ought to be grounded
in the empirical field in order to develop theories that make sense of
it (Bryant & Charmaz, 2007). The book has been developed through
a constant dialogue and feedback loop between the literature engage-
ment and the fieldwork. Undertaking research on a political object in
movement, such as the CoFoE and the European citizens’ panels, has its
challenges, but overall it is useful to describe and theorise the political
dynamics from the inside.
To be sure, this theoretical-normative point of departure is not

novel, as James Bohman (1999) already criticised critical theory for
the elitist and ‘enlightened’ perspective with which it engaged with its
objects of study. There is a rich and emerging literature that encour-
ages researchers to undertake “collaborative theorizing” with movements
(Gobby, 2019) or “activist theorising” (Cox & Nilsen, 2007), and it
is particularly relevant when beginning with a decolonial perspective of
the existing postcolonial material structures that shape society and in
the EU context. There have long been criticisms towards the remaining
coloniality of mainstream academic research (Bhambra, 2007; Bhambra
et al., 2018; Tuhiwai Smith, 1999), which explains the emphasis of many
researchers in engaging more closely with underrepresented communities
when conducting research (Mignolo, 2021). Grounded theory has great
potential in this sense, “because of its commitment to critical, open-ended
inquiry, can be a decolonizing tool for Indigenous and non-Indigenous
scholars alike” (Denzin, 2007: 456). In other words, democratic theory
must “democratise its own practice towards more self-reflective and open
forms of theory development” (Hammond, 2018: 789) in order to
construct “an alternative democratic theory from the views, contributions,
and experiences of those historically on the margins of society as well as
those with whom they stand in solidarity” (Brettschneider, 2007: 10).
Ultimately, academics are not outside of politics. Much to the contrary,
academic work legitimises particular ways of conceiving democracy, also
in the EU context. This is particularly relevant when making sense
of European studies, as there is a long history of academics in the
field contributing to political, policy and public debates on issues related
to democracy in the EU. Furthermore, academic institutions such as the
European University Institute (EUI) or the College of Europe are central
spaces of socialisation of future EU-related workers—for instance, in EU
institutions, businesses or civil society. Problematically, however, Euro-
pean studies literature is mostly produced and developed by academics
from the Global North and in institutions from the Global North (this
book is no exception). This raises normative questions about the political
direction of this literature, which in many ways reproduces in epis-
temic terms the structural inequalities of our society (Mignolo, 2002).
If academics in general, and European studies in particular, are mostly
coming from a rather privileged class background and the Global North,
it is unsurprising that perspectives from the Global Souths tend to
14 A. OLEART
be sidelined. The positionality of academics reinforces the dominant ideo-

logical streams in the literature and is a major stumbling block for the
democratisation of democratic theory.
The empirical chapters and concluding chapter will provide details
about the specific ways in which the participatory perspective was under-
taken and how it shaped the theory building, but generally the attempt
has been to contribute to the call to “democratize theorizing about
democracy” (Fleuß, 2021: 165). In doing so, the goal is to contribute to
the democratisation and decolonisation of democratic theory (Banerjee,
2021; Singh, 2019) in the EU context. The postcolonial perspective on
the EU is an endeavour that is gaining traction, for instance in relation to
EU trade policy, where a postcolonial and decolonial critique has emerged
in the last years (Orbie, 2021; Orbie et al., 2023), but when it comes to
EU democracy the literature remains largely focused on EU institutions
and legalistic arguments. This is especially the case in relation to demo-
cratic backsliding, a debate in which recently a paper criticised not only
the ‘democracy without politics’ perspective of the European Commis-
sion, but also the ‘political science without politics’ perspective that often
the literature has provided when discussing EU democracy and the ‘rule
of law crisis’ (see Oleart & Theuns, 2022).
Rather than conceiving this book as ‘objective’ or ‘neutral’, it is based
on an activist conception of political philosophy and academic work.
How to make sense of political reality in order to facilitate international
solidarity is thus a central question. Such perspective has the epistemo-
logical advantage of being politically anchored, and thus does not aim
uniquely to describe political reality, but also contribute to changing it.
In doing so, the book fosters emancipatory democratic horizons. Inspired
by Machiavelli, Gramsci argued in The Modern Prince that
it is absurd to think of a purely “objective” foresight. The person who

has foresight in reality has a “program” that he wants to see triumph, and
foresight is precisely an element of this triumph (…) only to the extent to
which the objective aspect of foresight is connected with a program, does
this aspect acquire objectivity: (1) because only passion sharpens the intel-
lect and co-operates in making intuition clearer; (2) because since reality is
the result of the application of human will to the society of things (of the
worker to the machine), to put aside every voluntary element and calculate
only the intervention of other wills as an objective element in the general
game is to mutilate reality itself. Only those who strongly want to do it
identify the necessary elements for the realization of their will. (Gramsci,
2021: 153)
The reader may notice a slight mismatch between the political theory
ambitions of the book and the empirical analysis, focused on the Confer-
ence on the Future of Europe, the European Commission citizens’ panels
and the prefigurative political practices of ongoing social movements in
the EU. This is because the book is written from the perspective of
foresight: the European citizens’ panels by themselves do not constitute
a ‘passive revolution’, but the increasing popularity of minipublics and
‘descriptive representation’ via sortition as a replacement to mass politics
may become one. The book can, therefore, be seen as an innovative and
politically aware attempt to not only critically analyse ongoing dynamics
in the EU, but also envision a transnational, decolonial and democratic
horizon for the EU and beyond, developed itself in close interaction with
activists, social movements as well as institutions. This is an unfinished
process, and as such the book poses some questions that is unable to
answer in full.
In this way, the book calls to elaborate both theory and empirical
analysis with a closer link to activism. The CoFoE is an ideal polit-
ical object of study in this regard, as there has been an interaction
between the institutional events organised by the EU and independent
and rather activist-oriented initiatives, such as the 2022 TransEuropa
Festival (an important part of the fieldwork conducted), the motto of
which was a good match with the perspective outlined in this section:
“Decolonise, Decarbonise, Democratise”. My relation to (transnational)
social movements is thus crucial when building a theory of transna-
tional democracy, which makes the book the outcome of activist research
(Choudry, 2015) in a theory building project. Historically, it is social
movements and activists that have been the main democratising actors,
and thus if transnational democracy is to emerge, it will be primarily
thanks to them.
16 A. OLEART
4 Challenging the “coloniality of power”

in mainstream conceptions of ‘citizen
participation’: decolonising the ‘we’ in democracy
The scholar-activist perspective outlined above emphasises that a relevant
task of democratic theory is to be sensitive to the interaction between
material and epistemic inequalities. In this sense, Aníbal Quijano devel-
oped the notion of “coloniality of power”, which has since been mobilised
by numerous decolonial scholars. Maldonado-Torres (2007: 243) defined
it as the “long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of
colonialism, but that define culture, labour, intersubjective relations, and
knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial admin-
istration”. While colonialism materialised in the subjugation of some
(primarily European) countries over others, the horizon of political inde-
pendence is insufficient to reverse the postcolonial power relations and
practices. Political theory, particularly in the EU context, requires us to
be conscious about our own positionality and the material relations in
which we are situated. It is for this reason that knowledge production
processes in EU democratic theory and European studies more broadly
ought to be more closely linked to the movements that are fighting for a
more equal, feminist, democratic and decolonial society.
This perspective leads us to ask: Who is ‘we’ in EU democracy?
Arguably, the ‘we’ that has been constructed at the European level (both
the demos and demoi versions) in the EU context tends to reproduce
the “coloniality of power”. ‘We’, the ‘Europeans’, are ‘civilised’ and
hold ‘European values’ (among which we find democracy) that are not
necessarily ‘shared’ with ‘non-European’ countries. Unsurprisingly, the
‘non-European’ countries that ‘share the same values’ are often from
the Global North: United States, Canada or Australia. The story that
we tell about ourselves (and who is ‘us’) facilitates particular ways of
establishing bonds of solidarity, and also operates as a way to exclude
‘others’. Looking at democracy in the EU through a decolonial lens
entails opening the European studies literature to knowledge produced
from and by the Global Souths in all its plurality. Following Sabaratnam
(2017: 7), decolonial research’s goal “must be to reject the assumed
ways in which global humanity is intellectually ordered into a hierarchy
of ‘advanced’ and ‘backward’ groups, along lines produced by historic
systems of colonial exploitation and dispossession”.
Terminology is here crucial. Inspired by Alcazar III (2023), the Global

Souths (a slightly revised term compared to Alcazar III’s global souths ) is
the preferred terminology to emphasise the plurality of political spaces
that often encompass the notion of the ‘Global South’, itself constructed
as a less offensive imaginary than the ‘third’ or ‘developing’ world. The
plurality of the Global Souths (in capital rather than lower case letters, to
emphasise both specificity with plurality) is also helpful to conceive the
diverse knowledge production developed by, from and with the Global
Souths, and is entirely in sync with the spirit of the decolonial multi-
tude: embracing differences and the shared purposes by forging ties
of solidarity. Similarly, it could have been the ‘transnational’ multitude,
but the transnational is not necessarily decolonial, whereas the decolo-
nial (from a multitude perspective) is necessarily transnational, as ‘class’ is
not anchored within nation-states. Furthermore, the decolonial multitude
operates as an alternative to European demoi—the decolonial replacing
the ‘European’ and the ‘multitude’ as an alternative to the notion of
‘demoi’. The spirit of the decolonial multitude is thus inherently linked to
conceive EU democracy in a wider context, and oriented towards building
coalitions with actors from the Global Souths. The close relationship and
interaction between colonialism and capitalism is central for the conceptu-
alisation of the ‘decolonial multitude’. Whereas the ‘multitude’ addresses
the global capitalist structures, the ‘decolonial’ emphasises the remaining
colonial relations that still today structure the world. Thus, the evolu-
tion of capitalism cannot be properly understood without an analysis of
colonialism and the coloniality of power. The decolonial multitude is
a conceptual attempt to make sense of the political imaginary of those
actors cooperating intersectionally across different but related struggles.
To define the borders of the ‘people’ is always a political battle
that is in constant negotiation: Who should be included within the
political community? The imaginary of the ‘decolonial multitude’ is a
political attempt to reconceptualise the ways in which we make sense
of EU democracy, and democracy more broadly. There is an evident
tension between the horizon of dismantling the existing capitalist-colonial
system and taking advantage of the institutional opportunities within the
EU. Navigating this tension skilfully will in large part shape the possi-
bilities for success. Redefining our understanding of ‘democracy’ and
opening the epistemic borders of the EU’s political community is a
necessary step towards collective action processes able to meaningfully
shape and democratise the political and material structures of our society.
18 A. OLEART
The notion of ‘decoloniality’ enables “to ethically prioritise situated and

embodied knowledges from the Global Souths whose historical presence
is often elided” (Alcazar III et al., 2023: 188). This entails taking the
agency from the Global Souths seriously, given that the hierarchical rela-
tionship is consolidated by an imaginary that situates ‘underdeveloped’
countries as ‘unable’ to develop by themselves.
The Eurocentric conception of democracy in the EU context explains
that sortition mechanisms, such as citizen assemblies, are understood as
a democratising force. It primarily reinforces the notion that democracy
is about processes and institutions, rather than about conflict and eman-
cipation from oppressive material structures. The Athenian ‘origins’ of
‘democracy’ ought to be challenged not only in light of its reliance of
slavery and the sidelining of women from political life, but also on the
rich egalitarian experiences of societies beyond ‘Europe’ (see Graeber &
Wengrow, 2021). It follows that a decolonial epistemology reframes the
democracy debate in such a way that it questions the existing political
arrangements and facilitates processes of international solidarity, whereby
we conceive the emancipation of subaltern classes in the Global North as
inherently intertwined with the emancipation of subaltern classes in the
Global Souths. The notion of the ‘subaltern’, put forward by Gramsci, has
inspired much of ’subaltern studies’ (see Prakash, 1994), and is aligned
with an activist and decolonial approach to research.
In this way, the book contributes to the already wide literature on
deliberative democracy and ‘citizen participation’ in the EU context from
a critical perspective. However, the book should not be read as a criti-
cism of citizen participation or citizens’ assemblies. Much to the contrary,
citizen participation and assemblies could have a place in modern demo-
cratic systems. However, these processes ought to not only be designed
well in terms of their internal methodology, but, most importantly, in
the way in which they are embedded within the democratic system as a
whole. Otherwise, there is a risk, pointed out by scholars (see Baiochi &
Ganuza, 2014), that they may serve as a communication exercise to
communicate the importance of ‘reaching out’ to (a small group of) citi-
zens, yet without connecting to the public sphere and encouraging a
broader political engagement or ‘empowerment’. These exercises should
not disentangle democracy from mass politics, nor be treated as ‘exper-
iments’, but get integrated in a way that there is a constant political
interaction and dialectical relationship with existing institutions and polit-
ical actors. In other words, citizen participation mechanisms should not
be conceived as a marketing exercise to increase the legitimacy of a polity

without being structurally connected to the public sphere, in such a way
that there are discursive and material tools to question and reshape the
existing power structures.
Rather than intending to propose a concrete set of best practices, the
book aims to show how a different way of conceiving the political subject
in the EU—the decolonial multitude as an alternative to the national
or European ‘people(s)’—leads to a substantially different engagement
between citizens, political parties, civil society and political institutions. In
this way, the activist organising processes described in Chapter 7 reflect
a normatively more desirable way of conceiving ‘citizen participation’.
Ongoing activist movements already share a multitude-like perspective
in terms of who constitutes conceptually and sociologically the political
subject in EU democracy. The book argues that the EU is a promising
terrain of struggle for the decolonial multitude insofar it already has insti-
tutions that operate on a beyond the nation-state basis. This does not
mean that EU institutions are perfect nor that they are the ‘natural’ fit
for democracy beyond the nation-state. On the contrary, the EU repre-
sents a pragmatic opportunity to enhance a vision of democracy beyond
the nation-state in spite of its colonial past and present. The struggle to
democratise the EU ought to connect with broader struggles by building
bridges and connections beyond the EU in an attempt to articulate a
‘movement of movements’ that is both transnational and decolonial.
5 Summary of the Book Through

the Articulation of the Different Chapters
After this introductory chapter, the book’s second chapter will make the
case to intellectually transition from the idea of a European demos (or
demoi) towards a ‘decolonial multitude’ perspective when conceiving the
subject of democracy in the EU context. This argument will be connected
to the academic discussion surrounding the EU’s democratic legitimacy in
combination with the increasing politicisation of the EU. I argue that the
academic discussion surrounding the EU’s democratic legitimacy deficit
has often missed the important emphasis on the role of conflict and
agonism, as well as capitalism and colonialism, elements that are relevant
to the idea of the ‘decolonial multitude’.
The third chapter will present the political construction and genealogy
of the ‘citizen’ turn (Oleart, 2023) in the European Union and the
20 A. OLEART
CoFoE. This turn breaks away from the ‘participatory turn’ described
by Saurugger (2010) in that it decouples ‘citizen participation’ from civil
society and the idea of a European public sphere, both in discursive terms
and in the ensuing political practices. The chapter departs from the shift
by the European Commission post-Brexit in order to describe the citizen
dialogues and the European Citizen Consultations (ECCs) as a prelude
to the CoFoE. While there are innovative elements, the chapter argues
that the ‘citizen turn’ does not meaningfully contribute to the emer-
gence of an agonistic European public sphere, as it follows an alternative
legitimacy logic that fundamentally deviates from the traditional concep-
tualisation of the public sphere. The chapter concludes by suggesting that
the disintermediation of European politics is coherent with the preexistent
depoliticised EU political dynamics of ‘democracy without politics’.
The fourth chapter will analyse the CoFoE’s political architecture, the
way in which it unfolded and its recommendations, as well as the insti-
tutional discourse around it and the power relations that shaped it. It
will argue that, behind the rhetoric mobilised by EU institutions of the
CoFoE as an ‘experiment in transnational democracy’ that gives a voice to
‘European citizens’ through its strong and unprecedented involvement,
the CoFoE represented more ‘business as usual’ than a meaningful break
with the established EU policy-making. The chapter will also outline how
the CoFoE structurally excluded organised civil society and trade unions
in an attempt to ‘disintermediate’ the relation between EU institutions
and EU citizens.
The fifth chapter will zoom in on the most innovative aspect of the
CoFoE, namely the European citizen panels. Four panels of 200 randomly
selected citizens (800 citizens in total) were organised in order to delib-
erate on four thematic clusters of EU policy and make recommendations
to the CoFoE plenary. Relatedly, the sixth chapter addresses the after-
math of the CoFoE: What was the tangible outcome of the CoFoE? Did it
advance the cause of EU democracy? In addition, the chapter will describe
the ‘new generation’ European citizens’ panels on food waste, virtual
worlds and learning mobility organised by the European Commission.
Ultimately, this type of ‘citizen participation’ appears to be an attempt
to change something, yet maintain the existing power structures, which
connects closely to the idea of the passive revolution developed in this
chapter.
The seventh chapter will look at alternative ways of organising ‘cit-
izen participation’, illustrating how the decolonial multitude might look
like in practice in the EU context. Is the ‘decolonial multitude’ the

political imaginary upon which transnational social movements construct
their own identity? The chapter, on the basis of participant observa-
tion of transnational activist spaces in prefigurative politics as well as
semi-structured interviews, offers a window of hope in terms of the
way in which they contrast with the EU’s mechanisms of (individualised
and depoliticised) ‘citizen participation’. The dialectics between institu-
tional and non-institutional spaces is, therefore, an innovative perspective
to analyse top-down and bottom-up approaches to citizen and civil
society participation, and provides an insightful angle to illustrate the
‘decolonial multitude’ as the ‘we’ of democracy. It also proposes an
activist and movement-oriented notion of representation that challenges
both its electoral conceptualisation and the ‘descriptive representation’ of
minipublics. The chapter draws on the internal tensions within move-
ments in order to devise the challenges to materialise the ‘decolonial
multitude’ imaginary as a transnational political coalition. The primary
challenges relate to transversal and intersectional solidarity, remaining
coloniality, and construction of permanent political structures. Finally, the
chapter concludes with potential ways forward to address those challenges
anchored in the ongoing practices of transnational activists.
Last, the concluding chapter begins with the initial parallelism between
Gramsci’s Italian Risorgimento reading and ongoing EU ‘citizen partic-
ipation’ dynamics, and reflects upon how the Conference reinforced the
already existing EU power dynamics, while at the same time proposing
ways to democratise transnational ‘citizen participation’. The conclusion
argues that the multitude’s original conception requires a revision from
the organisational point of view, as it will not emerge spontaneously, and
how it may look in the EU context based on the empirical cases analysed
in the previous chapters. The chapter ends with the contribution to the
literature, shortcomings of the book and avenues for future research, as
well as a reflection on the importance of shifting the ideological borders
of European studies academic discourse, and why the book is designed to
provide conceptual tools to not only make sense of the current state of
affairs of the EU, but also transform it.
22 A. OLEART
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CHAPTER 2
From European Demoi to the Decolonial

Multitude: Democratising the EU’s Political
Imaginary
1 EU Democracy, Decolonisation
and the Agonistic Public Sphere
The globalisation of governance through supranational or international
institutions has raised questions on the public sphere’s relationship with
democratic legitimacy. Prominent authors (Calhoun, 1992; Habermas,
1989) have long argued that the increasing importance of political insti-
tutions beyond the nation-state requires, from a deliberative democracy
point of view, a public sphere beyond the nation-state, in such a way that
there are mechanisms to influence those institutions’ policy and decision-
making. However, most of the literature remains state-centric, attempting
to match the ‘administrative power’ of public authorities with a public
sphere able to generate the necessary ‘communicative power’ to shape
those decisions. In this context, this chapter connects the discussions
surrounding the EU’s democratic deficit due to the lack of a Euro-
pean public sphere with broader questions regarding the relationship of
democracy with capitalism and colonial legacies.
While I have developed a both deliberative and agonistic perspective
of a European public sphere in a previous book (see Oleart, 2021),
the democratic legitimacy theoretical framework in this book is focused
primarily on agonism and its relation to the ‘we’ of EU democracy.
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 25

Switzerland AG 2023
A. Oleart, Democracy Without Politics in EU Citizen Participation,
Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38583-4_2
26 A. OLEART
Crucially, Mouffe has made the case for situating conflict at the centre
of democracy, arguing the following:
[b]elief in the possibility of a universal rational consensus has put demo-

cratic thinking on the wrong track. Instead of trying to design the insti-
tutions which, through supposedly ‘impartial’ procedures, would reconcile
all conflicting interests and values, the task for democratic theorists and
politicians should be to envisage the creation of a vibrant ‘agonistic’ public
sphere of contestation where different hegemonic political projects can be
confronted. (Mouffe, 2005: 3)
Mouffe sees agonistic democratic debate as an inherently conflictual

battle between rivals, rather than between enemies (which Mouffe under-
stands as ‘antagonism’), implying a binary logic of inclusion–exclusion
between an ‘us’ and a ‘them’, although both recognise the other’s legit-
imate existence. ‘Agonistic’ democracy is, therefore, a political system
based on conflict rather than on consensus. Mouffe rejects the emphasis
that some deliberative democracy scholars have put on rationality,
consensus and deliberation, because, for her, it neglects the conflictual
dimension inherent to politics. Both Habermas and Mouffe are pluralists
but, as pointed out by Mouffe, “for them (Habermas and its followers),
pluralism goes without antagonism” (Carpentier & Cammaerts, 2006:
972). Plural does not only mean that there are different views, but that
they are in conflict with each other, and cannot be reconciled (see also
Herman, 2017).
Democracy, however, cannot be based only on conflict, but rather
on a particular way of channelling conflict, which Mouffe (2013: XII)
labels ‘agonism’: “a central task of democratic politics is to provide
the institutions which will permit conflicts to take an ‘agonistic’ form,
where the opponents are not enemies but adversaries among whom
exists a conflictual consensus”. The essential difference between antago-
nistic and agonistic conflict is that, in the latter, the opponents recognise
each other as legitimate participants of the same polity, while remaining
adversaries. Following Mouffe, a democratic polity requires more than a
‘public sphere’ of rational deliberation and discussion. Namely, it requires
the outline of different political choices between fundamentally different
alternatives, such as challenging the current neoliberal hegemony. This is
coherent with deliberative democracy theorists such as Chambers (1995),
who argues that the discursive interaction about political issues is a
2 FROM EUROPEAN DEMOI TO THE DECOLONIAL … 27
democratic goal in itself, because it makes people more aware of what

others think and improves their own reasoning given that they have to
defend their positions in the public sphere. In fact, as Blondiaux argues
(2008), conflict enhances deliberation, in that it encourages greater actor
participation.
Therefore, for an agonistic European public sphere to emerge is not
only necessary to have a plurality of views vis-à-vis EU issues, but to have
fundamentally opposing points of view that cannot be reconciled, in such
a way that there is no sense that ‘there is no alternative’. In fact, conflict
can revitalise deliberative democracy and discussions over the ‘democratic
deficit’ of the EU. In the words of Trenz and Eder, “criticising the
democratic deficit means initiating the process of democratising the EU”
(Trenz & Eder, 2004: 7). In a democratic society, pacification should
not be about repressing conflict, but channelling conflict in a legitimate
manner (Carpentier & Cammaerts, 2006: 973). Blocking agonistic debate
might actually have negative consequences for public debate, opening the
door to an antagonistic form of conflict.
The link between agonistic democracy and decolonisation is not
evident, given that Mouffe arguably follows a rather Eurocentric concep-
tion of democracy, largely focused on discourse and detached from
material structures. This partially explains her move away from Marxist
categories such as ‘class’. In consequence, agonistic democracy has
more difficulties to encompass colonial legacies, material relations and
ongoing class struggle. Instead, a historical materialist perspective requires
us to focus on the relationship between the symbolic and the material.
As structural inequalities and class warfare are not national phenomena,
but stem from global dynamics, democracy can only emerge through
the understanding that the struggle of subaltern classes in the Global
North is inherently related to that of subaltern classes in the Global
Souths. Thus, the articulation of international solidarity is a precon-
dition for EU democracy: a real democracy cannot be built on the
basis of capitalist and colonial exploitation. This requires us to move
beyond a ‘national’ understanding of democracy, all the more relevant
in a context of imperialist wars (such as the recent Russian invasion
of Ukraine) and climate emergency. Furthermore, a decolonial under-
standing of democracy entails confronting the “foundational historical
myths in social theory and discourse about Europe itself” (Sabaratnam,
2011: 787), without which we are conceptually trapped in the geopolitics
28 A. OLEART
of capitalism, oriented towards the competition between empires rather

than transnational democratisation through international solidarity.
Beginning with this agonistic and decolonial perspective, the chapter
develops a political theory framework that challenges the mainstream
accounts of democracy in the EU and its relation to the longstanding
idea of its political subject, the ‘demos’ or ‘the people (s)’ (demoi). The
chapter develops an agonistic alternative to ‘the people’ as the political
subject of democracy in the EU, based on the idea of the ‘decolonial
multitude’. The transition from ‘the people’ to the ‘decolonial multitude’
requires us to rethink the ‘we’ of democracy in the EU (and beyond),
and fundamentally detaches democracy from sovereignty, as well as the
idea of ‘demoicracy’, in order to integrate the (capitalist) material struc-
tures within which democratic polities operate. This account may serve as
a useful framework to understand the normatively problematic dynamics
that have been developed throughout the 2010s and ‘new intergovern-
mentalism’, and might be conceived as a pluralist alternative to (left-wing)
populism.
1.1 Democratic Legitimacy in the EU: The Opportunity

of Politicisation to Bring Agonism
There is an academic consensus when understanding the European inte-
gration process until the 1990s as an elite-driven process (Hooghe &
Marks, 2009), where political elites advanced EU integration with the
general public’s ‘permissive consensus’. The implication of the ‘permissive
consensus’ vis-à-vis the EU implies a general lack of popular participation,
given the limited range of actors participating in the process and its strong
intergovernmental component. The ‘permissive consensus’ responds to
a logic of depoliticisation, a concept that has become important in the
political science literature since the 2000s. Burnham portrayed depoliti-
cisation as a process by which political decisions are presented as if they
are unquestionable, removing “the political character of decision-making”
(Burnham, 2001: 128). Buller and Flinders (2005) further developed the
concept, understanding depoliticisation as arena shifting, a mechanism by
which political responsibility is moved away from ‘politics’, as the process
by which a political decision is presented as unchallengeable, technical
and/or apolitical, presenting political decisions as if there is no alternative,
as merely ‘administrative’ decisions (Hay & Rosamond, 2002). Depoliti-
cisation is here defined as the absence of political conflict in a political
2 FROM EUROPEAN DEMOI TO THE DECOLONIAL … 29
process in the public sphere. Instead, politicisation is defined as “making

collectively binding decisions a matter or and object of public discussion”
(Zürn et al., 2012: 74; see also Haapala & Oleart, 2022).
Vivien Schmidt (2013) has conceptualised the democratic legitimacy
of a polity separating three different types: input, throughput and output.
These three dimensions are inspired in Lincoln’s popular quote of a “gov-
ernment of the people, by the people, for the people”. Input legitimacy
refers to the EU’s responsiveness to the concerns of its citizens (govern-
ment of the people). Output legitimacy refers to the effectiveness of the
policies undertaken by the EU and the well-being produced by them
(government for the people). And throughput legitimacy refers to the
transparency, accountability and quality of the governance processes of the
decision and policy-making process (government by or with the people).
As the traditional legitimising concepts, input and output have an inter-
relationship where more output performance could potentially make up
for less political input. The EU has traditionally relied on its output
legitimacy (Scharpf, 1999) (along with a bit of throughput legitimacy),
largely disregarding input legitimacy. Schmidt (2013) defined the EU’s
policy-making process as ‘policy without politics’, precisely for its output-
oriented legitimacy. ‘Politics’ is situated in the input part of the legitimacy
equation. Therefore, by ignoring the popular aspect of legitimisation, the
EU’s policy-making process is being emptied of ‘politics’ (the input), left
alone with (generally technocratic) processes (the throughput) ‘policies’
(the output).
The advent of EU politicisation throughout the 2010s has not only
questioned the output legitimacy, but also made evident the input deficit.
While attempts have been made by EU institutions to bridge the input
legitimacy gap, such as the establishment of the Spitzenkandidaten in the
EU elections, the gap between mainstream political debates, which are
overwhelmingly located at the national level, and EU policy discussions
remains. However, EU politicisation provides opportunities precisely to
bring together heated political debates with the often technical and
depoliticised EU-related discussions. Thus, the increasing politicisation of
the EU has the democratic potential to normalise agonistic conflict and
lead towards an ‘empowering dissensus’ for EU integration (Bouza &
Oleart, 2018). This perspective matches well with a changing perspective
on who ought to be conceptualised as the subject of EU democracy, from
the ‘demos’ or ‘demoi’ towards the decolonial multitude. This transition
challenges traditional accounts of EU studies and shifts the emphasis of
Another random document with
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Sawney, &c.
An’ when he rides Auld Reckie through,

To bless you wi’ a kingly view,
Let him smell your ‘Gardy Loo’ (peculiar to the Old Town),
Sawney, &c.
The successful royal visit to Scotland led to some REVERSAL OF

happy results. On Monday, May 24th, 1824, the Earl ATTAINDERS.
of Liverpool rose to inform the House of Lords that he had the king’s
command to present bills for restoring the honours of several
families which had been forfeited by attainder. The royal visit to
Scotland, the first which any king had made since the Revolution,
had led certain persons of undoubted loyalty to be relieved from the
effects of the attainder which, he would not dispute, had been justly
levelled against their disloyal ancestors. The king was gracious, the
Crown was discreet. Four peerages had been selected for
restoration, viz., the Earldom of Mar, in the person of John Erskine;
the Viscountship of Kenmure (John Gordon); the Earldom of Perth
and Viscountship of Strathallan to James Drummond; and the title of
Lord Nairn to William Nairn. It was also proposed to reverse the
attainder of Lord Stafford.
The Earl of Lauderdale warned the Government to be quite sure
that James Drummond had any claims, before they restored the
above two titles. The Earl of Radnor thought the proceeding a very
extraordinary one. Ultimately the Bill was read a first time.
On June 4th, the Commons agreed to a DEBATE IN
proposition from the Lords that, considering Mr. THE
Erskine’s age and infirmity, the Bill to restore him to COMMONS.
the forfeited earldom should be proceeded with. Mr.
Erskine was unable to come up to London to take the indispensable
preparatory oaths. He found ready grace from an unanimous House.
When, ten days later, the Bills were read a second time in the
Commons, the restoration of the blood of Stafford (attainted in 1680)
was recognised as an act of justice; that of the Jacobite peers as
one of grace and favour. Captain Bruce expressed the pain he felt
that while this grace and favour cleared the taint in the blood of the
lineal descendants of those who had forfeited title and estates, such
grace was kept from descendants of collaterals; and but for this
prohibition he himself would now be Lord Burleigh. To which Lord
Binning added the remark that, by old Scottish law, the claims of a
collateral branch were not estreated by forfeiture.
Mr. Peel rejoined that there were only two courses—
indiscriminate reversal of all the attainders, or impartial selection. As
to the first, some of the lineal descendants did not desire restoration,
on considerations of property. Government, he said, had selected
those respecting whom no doubt existed with regard to the original
patent; and he spoke with reverence of the earldom of Mar, which
existed prior to any records of parliament.
The result was that king and parliament at Westminster, in this
year 1824, restored the following forfeited titles:—Erskine, Lord
Erskine, Earl of Mar; Gordon, Lord Lochinvar and Viscount Kenmure;
Nairn, Lord Nairn; and Drummond, Lord Maderty, Drummond of
Cromlix, and Viscount Strathallan. The Viscount Strathallan restored
this year was a descendant of the viscount who was slain at
Culloden, but who was styled in the Whig London papers as ‘Mr.
Drummond.’
A minor incident, yet a characteristic one, may A
here be mentioned. The power which in 1808 had TRANSPONTIN
prohibited the counterfeit presentment on the stage of E PLAY.
Charles Edward, could not obstruct those of George
III. and all his family, in 1824, at the ‘Coburg.’ This house, being in
Surrey, was beyond the jurisdiction of the Lord Chamberlain’s office.
The drama, acted in defiance of him and of good taste, was called
‘George the Third, the Father of his People.’ The defunct king (acted
by Bengough, who singularly resembled him), and the deceased
Queen Charlotte, with her inseparable snuff-box, next delighted the
Transpontines with their gracious presence; but tenfold more delight
and amusement were caused by the presence of all the living
members of the royal family. In noticing this singular piece, the
‘Morning Chronicle’ gave a Jacobite (or perhaps a Jacobin) flavour to
its criticism. The title, it argued, was disrespectful to George IV. It is
always the king on the throne who is the Father of his People.
George III., therefore, should have been styled the Grandfather of
his People! Again, in the drama, the latter is called ‘the best of kings,’
a designation which is the right of the king in possession; therefore,
said the ‘Chronicle,’ George III. was ‘the second best,’ or the author
might have called him ‘the best but one.’
It is a singular coincidence that the same year in
THE BODY OF
which four Jacobite peerages were relieved from JAMES THE
attainder, the remains of James II. were discovered at SECOND.
St. Germain. The body was for many years
‘deposited’ in the chapel of the English Benedictines, Paris—body,
minus heart, brains, and bowels, entombed in various places, to
which places English Jacobites used to resort as to holy shrines. The
leaders of civilisation, at the outbreak of the Revolution, smashed the
urns containing brains, &c., and scattered the contents. The body at
the Benedictines was treated with similar indignity; but, in a mutilated
form, it was privately interred at St. Germain. No mark was set on
the place, and it was forgotten, but was discovered this year in the
course of rebuilding a part of the church. Information of this
discovery was sent to London by our ambassador, to whom orders
were sent from Downing Street to see the remains re-interred with
every religious ceremony that could manifest respect.
On the 7th of September, the Paris papers CEREMONY
announced that a solemn mass would be celebrated AT ST.
on the 9th, and invited the attendance of all British GERMAIN.
subjects on this solemn occasion. Now, this invitation
of the Paris authorities to British subjects to attend the funeral
service in honour of the re-depositing of what remained of the body
of James II., puzzled rather than excited the London journals. Writers
therein protested against this service, if thereby the legitimate right of
the Stuarts was recognised, or confession was made that service for
the dead could get a soul in or out of purgatory. Sly hits were made
against Lord Eldon, the keeper of the king’s conscience, for ordering
such a mass at a period when he was in the habit of toasting the
Protestant ascendency. Many persons—the most of them, it is to be
hoped, moved by praiseworthy sympathies—went from London to be
present at the ceremony. It was solemn and dignified. Distinguished
persons, bearing familiar names of the old Jacobite times, were
present. Marshal Macdonald and the Duke of Fitz-James were
amongst them. By a curious coincidence, the British ambassador in
France was then a Stuart—Sir Charles Stuart, afterwards Lord Stuart
de Rothesay. He placed a royal diadem of gold beneath a black
crape veil, on the coffin, and this graceful act of homage was in
appropriate harmony with the restoration, as far as it could be
effected, of the descendants of those who had suffered in the
Jacobite cause, to the long forfeited titles of their ancestors.
It really now seemed as if the curtain had fallen on SOMETHING
the great Jacobite drama, and that it would not be NEW.
possible to cause it to rise again for an additional act
or for a farce succeeding to the tragic drama. In the year 1826,
indeed, there was a little graceful episode, namely, the restoration of
the titles of Ogilvie, Lord Ogilvie and Earl of Airly; of Dalzell, Lord
Dalzell and Earl of Carnwath; and of Sutherland, Lord Duffus. But,
not only while these acts of grace were being enacted, but for many
years before and many years afterwards, a course of action was
being taken which was intended to revive the whole question, and to
put on the stage the old Jacobite play, with alterations,
improvements, new actors, and an entirely new dénouement.
London did not become aware of this till about the year 1847. In
Scotland, however, there had long been expectancy raised of
‘something new,’ which will appear in Jacobite incidents under
Queen Victoria.
CHAPTER XVII.
VICTORIA.
eorge Selwyn excused himself for going to see Simon
Fraser Lord Lovat lose his head at the block, by going
to see it sewn on again. That last head sacrificed wore
a title which was the first restored by Her Majesty after
her accession. Old Lovat’s son, whom his father forced
into rebellion, and whom that exemplary parent would have hanged,
if he could have saved his own life by it, became a distinguished
General in the British service. General Fraser and his half-brother
Archibald died, without surviving heirs. Old Lovat was the thirteenth
lord, leaving a title under attainder. As early as 1825, Sir Thomas
Fraser of Lovat and Strichen claimed the ancient barony as a son of
the sixth lord, who died in 1557. Their Lordships at Westminster had
made no progress towards making the claimant a Baron, when Her
Majesty ascended the throne. The Queen settled the claim at once
by creating Sir Thomas Fraser, Baron Lovat in the United Kingdom.
The new Lord Lovat, however, still coveted the older and therefore
grander dignity. He persisted in asserting his right to possess the
Scottish title, in spite of the attainder which smote the lord who was
beheaded on Tower Hill. After twenty years’ consideration, the Peers
at Westminster were advised that the assertion was a correct one;
and, in 1857, they acceded to his demand. That was exactly three
hundred years after the death of the sixth lord, through whom the
claimant asserted his right to the title.
In a way something similar was another restoration
OLD
of a Jacobite title effected in London. Of all the lords JACOBITE
who were tried for their lives (1716 and 1746 TITLES.
included), there was not one who bore himself so
gallantly as the son of the illustrious House of Seton, the Earl of
Wintoun. All the Jacobite peers who pleaded guilty, petitioned for
mercy, and returned to a treasonable outspokenness, when they
failed to obtain forgiveness for an avowed crime. Even brave
Balmerino cried peccavi! and got nothing by it. But noble Wintoun
pleaded that he was not guilty in fighting on what he considered the
just side; when he was condemned to death he refused to beg for his
life; and he showed his contempt for the Act of Grace, by anticipating
it in an act of his own,—escaping from the Tower to the continent. He
was the fifth earl, and his attainder barred the way to any heir of his
own. But, in 1840, the fifteenth Earl of Eglinton proved his descent
from a preceding earl, of whom he was forthwith served heir male
general, and a new dignity was added to the roll of Lord Eglinton’s
titles.
In the following year, the Committee of Privileges
MORE
went to the work of restoration of Jacobite forfeitures RESTORATION
with unusual alacrity. On their advice, an Act of S.
Parliament was passed which declared that Mr.
William Constable Maxwell, of Nithsdale and Everingham, and all the
other descendants of William Maxwell, Earl of Nithsdale and Lord
Herries, were restored in blood. There the Act left them. As far as
they were of the blood of Winifred Herbert, noble daughter of the
House of Pembroke, the ill-requited wife of the puling peer whom
she rescued from death, their blood was free from all taint, in spite of
any Act. Mr. Maxwell could not claim the earldom, but the way was
open for him to the barony once held by the unworthy earl, and in
1850, he was the acknowledged Lord Herries.
Three years later, Her Majesty despatched a ‘special command
and recommendation’ to Parliament, which was speedily obeyed. It
was to the effect that the Parliament should restore George
Drummond to the forfeited Jacobite titles of Earl of Perth and
Viscount Melfort the dignities of Lord Drummond of Stobhall, Lord
Drummond of Montifex, and Lord Drummond of Bickerton,
Castlemaine, and Galstoun, and to the exercise of the hereditary
offices of Thane of Lennox and Steward of Strathearn. The peer who
in 1824 advised Lord Liverpool to be sure he had got hold of the right
Mr. Drummond, when recommending one for restoration to the
peerage, had some reason for the course taken by him. However, in
this case, where there are so many Drummonds, Parliament could
hardly have been mistaken. That body having fulfilled the Queen’s
‘command and recommendation,’ Her Majesty gave her assent; and
then, as if the better to identify the Drummond who was restored to
so many titles, record was gravely made that ‘born in 1807, he was
baptised at St. Marylebone Church,’ Hogarth’s church, of course.
In 1855 the act of attainder which had struck the Earl of Southesk
(Lord Carnegie) for the share he took in the little affair (which
intended a good deal) in 1718, was quietly reversed, at Westminster,
where it had been originally passed.
Not so quietly was effected the next business THE
entailed on Parliament, by the Jacobite rebellion,—or, CROMARTIE
rather, the business was assumed by Her Majesty TITLE.
herself, if any business can be assumed by an
irresponsible sovereign whose ministers have to answer for
everything done in that sovereign’s name. The title of Earl of
Cromartie (with its inferior titles once worn by the head of the house
of Mackenzie) was, and still is, under attainder. But there was a great
heiress, Miss Annie Hay Mackenzie, who, in 1849, married the Duke
of Sutherland. In 1861, the queen created this lady Countess of
Cromartie, Viscountess Tarbat of Tarbat, Baroness Castlehaven, and
Baroness Macleod of Castle Leod, in her own right, with limitation of
succession to her second son Francis and his heirs;—the elder
succeeding to the Dukedom.
The latest restoration was by legal process. Among the minor
unfortunates whose Jacobitism was punished by forfeiture, was a
Lord Balfour of Burleigh. In 1869, Mr. Bruce, of Kennett,
Clackmannan, gained his suit to Parliament, and recovered that
resonant title; and it is said that the modern Balfour of Burleigh has
in his veins the blood of Bruce;—which, after all, is not so honest or
so legitimately royal as that of Baliol.
With regard to Jacobite peerages, ‘Experience has TITLES
shown that in the absence of a Resolution and UNDER
Judgment of the House of Lords, it is a dangerous ATTAINDER.
thing to say, without qualification, who represents a
Peerage. The Duchess of Sutherland is Countess of Cromartie, as
the Earl of Errol is Baron Kilmarnock, not in the Peerage of Scotland,
but that of the United Kingdom, in virtue of a recent creation. Each of
the Scottish Peerages held by the three Jacobite Noblemen is still
open to any Nobleman who can establish a right thereto, and obtain
a reversal of the Attainder.’ (‘Notes and Queries,’ Jan. 11, 1873, p.
45.) As to the heir to the title of Balmerino, we find that Captain John
Elphinstone, R.N. (Admiral Elphinstone of the Russian Navy,—the
hero of Tchesme), left a son, William, also a captain in the Czar’s
navy, whose son, Alexander Francis, Captain R.N., and a noble of
Livonia (born 1799), claimed to be heir to the title of Balmerino, were
the attainder removed. All his sons were in the British naval or
military service, in which they and other members of the baronial
house greatly distinguished themselves.
While some of the above titles were being relieved FITZ-
from the obloquy which had been brought upon them PRETENDERS.
by the Jacobitism of former wearers, and no one was
dreaming, except in some out-of-the-way corner of the Scottish
highlands, that the Jacobites had still, and had never ceased to
have, a king of their own, a strange, wild, story was developing itself,
which had a remarkably ridiculous, not to say impudent, object for its
motive. To make it understandable, the reader is asked to go a few
years back, in order to comprehend a mystery, in which the
‘Quarterly Review’ of June, 1847, in an article sometimes attributed
to the Rt. Hon. John Wilson Croker, but more correctly to Mr.
Lockhart, smashed all that was mysterious.
In the year 1800 (October 2nd), Admiral John Carter Allen (or
Allan), Admiral of the White, died at his house in Devonshire Place,
London. Such is the record in the ‘Gentleman’s Magazine.’ In the
succeeding number, a correspondent describes him as an old
Westminster scholar, a brave sailor, a Whig well looked upon by the
Rockingham party, and of such good blood as to induce Lord
Hillsborough to believe that he was the legal male heir to the
earldom of Errol.
The admiral was twice married and had two sons. By his will,
dated February, 1800, he bequeathed to the elder, ‘Captain John
Allen, of His Majesty’s navy,’ 2,200l.; to the younger, ‘Thomas Allen,
third Lieutenant in His Majesty’s navy,’ 100l. The reader is
respectfully requested to keep this lieutenant, Thomas Allen, alone in
view. He may turn out to be a very unexpected personage.
Lieutenant Thomas, in 1792, married, at ADMIRAL
Godalming, Katherine Manning, the second daughter ALLEN’S SON
of the vicar. This would seem to have been a suitable AND
marriage; but it has been suggested that it may have GRANDSONS.
appeared unsuitable in the eyes of the admiral, and that, for this
reason, he bequeathed his younger son only 100l. But whatever the
reason for such disproportion may have been, the lieutenant’s
marriage produced two sons, John Hay Allen and Charles Stuart
Allen. The younger gentleman married, in November, 1822, in
London, Anne, daughter of the late John Beresford, Esq., M.P. In the
record of this marriage, the bridegroom is styled ‘youngest son of
Thomas Hay Allen.’ In the same year, the lieutenant’s elder son
published a volume of poems (Hookham), which, however, excited
no attention, though it contained dark allusions to some romantic
history. The father, Thomas, the lieutenant, seems to have been
much on and about the Western isles of Scotland, as well as on the
mainland. There existed there a fond superstition that Charles
Edward would appear in some representative of his race, very near
akin to himself. The lieutenant must have been an impressionable
man. He died about the year 1831, and he must have revealed
previously a secret to his sons, who, in such case, kept it long under
consideration, till, probably out of filial respect for his veracity, they
manifested their belief in the revelation, and, in 1847, declared
themselves to be, the elder, John Sobieski Stolberg Stuart; the
younger, Charles Edward Stuart. Their father, Lieutenant Thomas
Allen, son of the old Admiral of the White, must have imparted to
them the not uninteresting circumstance, that he was the legitimate
son of the young Chevalier, and that all faithful Scots and Jacobites
had yet a king. Long after the lieutenant’s death, a book was
published in London (1847), by Dolman, the Roman Catholic
publisher, of Bond Street, of which the two brothers were joint
authors, in which the words you have yet a king, implied that John
Sobieski S. Stuart was the individual who had sole right to wear the
crown of his ancestors. But this momentous book was preceded by
others.
Mr. John Hay Allen, as before stated, first
WORKING
appeared in literature in 1822. His volume of poems THROUGH
bore those names. Twenty years later, in 1842, the LITERATURE.
same gentleman edited, under the assumed name of
John Sobieski Stolberg Stuart, the ‘Vestiarium Scoticum,’ the
transcript from a MS. alleged to have been formerly in the Scots
College at Douay; with a learned introduction and illustrative notes.
This folio, at the time, made no particular sensation. It was followed,
in 1845, by a work, in which the elder brother was assisted by the
younger, namely, ‘Costume and History of the Clans,’ with three
dozen lithographs, in imperial folio; the cheapest edition was priced
at six guineas. Some were much dearer. Two years later, a work very
different in intention, was published by the Roman Catholic publisher
Dolman, of Bond Street, who had Blackwood of Edinburgh and
London as his colleague. The title of this book was ‘Tales of the Last
Century, or Sketches of the Romance of History between the years
1746 and 1846,’ by John Sobieski and Charles Edward Stuart. There
is a dedication ‘To Marie Stuart, by her father and uncle.’
As Sketches of the Romance of History, the writers
THE
might have meant that they were not dealing with ROMANCE OF
reality. But such seemingly was not their meaning. THE STORY.
They made a serious step towards asserting that the
elder brother was rightful heir to the throne of the Stuarts; and that if
Jacobites and Ultramontanists should ever be in search of such an
heir, after upsetting the present ‘happy establishment,’ he was to be
found at his lodgings, prepared to wear the crown, with Jacobite
instincts and Ultramontane ferocity. Of course, this was not said in
words. It is rather implied in the three sketches which make up the
romance of ‘Tales of the Last Century.’
The Tales illustrate the claims of the Chevalier John Sobieski
Stuart, after this fashion.—The ‘young Pretender’ married in 1772,
Louise, Princess of Stolberg Gœdern, and grand-daughter of the
Jacobite Earl of Aylesbury, who after his liberation from the Tower, in
1688, for his political principles, settled in Brussels, and there
married (his second wife) a lady of the ancient family of Argentain.
The daughter and only child of this marriage wedded with the Prince
of Horne. Louisa of Stolberg, the youngest child of the last named
union, married Charles Edward in 1772, when she was not yet
twenty, and he was fifty-two. According to the ‘Tales of the Last
Century,’ Louisa became the mother of a son, in 1773. The alleged
event was kept a profound secret, and the child was as secretly
carried on board an English man of war! commanded by
Commodore O’Halleran, who, if he had his rights, was not only
foster-father to the mysterious infant, but also Earl of Strathgowrie!
Admiral Allen, it will be remembered, was thought to be heir to the
earldom of Errol.
It may here be observed, by way of recovering
‘RED EAGLE.’
breath, that if there ever had been a son of this
luckless couple, the fact would have been proudly trumpeted to the
world. The event the most eagerly desired by the Jacobites was the
birth of an heir to the Stuarts. Had such an heir been born, to
conceal the fact from the adherents of the House of Stuart would
have been an act of stark madness. Such insanity would have simply
authorised the House of Hanover to repudiate the claimant, if he
ever should assume that character.—To return to the romance of
history:—
The infant prince received by the commodore was brought up by
him as his own son. The young adventurer was trained to the sea,
and he cruised among the western isles of Scotland. He appears in
the romance as the Red Eagle; by those who know him he is treated
with ‘Your Highness’ and ‘My Lord;’ and, like Lieut. Thomas Allen
himself, he contracts a marriage with a lady, which is reckoned as a
misalliance by those who are acquainted with his real history. He
drops mysterious hints that the Stuart line is not so near extinction as
it was generally thought to be. The better to carry the race on, the
Red Eagle left, in 1831, two sons, the Chevaliers John and Charles
Stuart, the former being also known as the Comte d’Albanie; and
both, no doubt, sincerely believing in the rigmarole story of Lieut.
Thomas Allen, alias Red Eagle, alias legitimate son of Charles
Edward, the young Chevalier!
The ‘Tales of the Last Century’ do not say this in as
‘TALES OF
many words. The book leaves a good deal to the THE LAST
imagination. The hero fades out of the romance CENTURY.’
something like Hiawatha, sailing into the mist after the
setting sun. There is abundance of melodramatic business and
properties throughout. There is mysterious scenery, appropriate
music, serious and comic actors, complex machinery, ships of war
sailing over impossible waters and looking as spectral as
Vanderdecken’s ghastly vessel,—with booming of guns, harmonised
voices of choristers, cheers of supers, and numerous other
attractions in a dramatic way. There is nothing ‘dangerous’ in the
book, though one gentleman does venture on the following Jacobite
outburst:—‘Oh! if I had lived when you did—or yet, if he who is gone
should rise again from the marble of St. Peter’s,—I am a Highlander
and my father’s son,—I would have no king but Tearlach Righ nan
Gael,’—no other king but Charlie.
In another page, one of the actors puts a sensible query, and
adds a silly remark on the present condition of the Stuart cause:
—‘Wonderful!—but why such mystery?—why?—for what should the
birth of an heir to the House of Stuart be thus concealed? It had—it
yet has friends (in Europe), and its interests must ever be identified
with those of France, Spain, and Rome.’ Of this sort of thing, though
there be little, there is more than enough; but the reader, as he
proceeds, has an opportunity of conceiving a high opinion of Red
Eagle’s common sense, and of fully agreeing with him at least in one
observation which is put in the following form: ‘Woman!’ said the
Tolair, ‘this is no time for bombast and juggling!’ The old Admiral
Carter Allen never indulged in either. In his will the gallant sailor calls
John and Thomas Allen his sons. He does not call Thomas his foster
son. Prince Charles Edward spoke of no child in his will but his
illegitimate daughter, the Duchess of Albany. The Cardinal of York
took the nominal title of king at his brother’s death; and received the
duchess into his house. At her death, in 1789, the Crown jewels,
which James II. had carried off from England, came into the
cardinal’s possession; and these, at the beginning of the present
century, he generously surrendered to George III. The cardinal was
well assured that no legitimate heir of his brother had ever existed.
The assurance that there was one, however,
continued to be made, and that the sons of Tolair THE LEVER
OF POETRY.
were as poetical as they were princely was next
asserted.
In 1848, Mr. Dolman, of London (conjointly with POETICAL
Blackwood), published a poetical manifestation by the POLITICS.
Count, John Sobieski Stuart, and his brother, Charles
Edward. It had an innocent look, but a mysterious purpose. Its title is,
‘Lays of the Deer Forest.’ The Lays are dedicated to Louisa
Sobieska Stuart, by her father and uncle. The second volume,
consisting of ‘Notes,’ is dedicated to a Charles Edward Stuart, by his
father and uncle. There is something of a poetical fire in the Lays;
and much interesting matter on deer-stalking and other sporting
subjects in the Notes. The spirit is thoroughly anti-English; very
‘Papistical’ in the odour of its heavily-charged atmosphere, but
betraying the combined silliness and ferocity which distinguished the
Stuarts themselves, in a hero-worship for the most cruel enemies of
England. For instance, in the poem called ‘Blot of Chivalry,’ Charles
Edward Stuart, the author, deifies Napoleon, and, if there be any
meaning at all to be attached to the words, execrates England. In the
‘Appeal of the Faithful,’ there is a mysterious declaration that the
writer, or the faithful few, will not bow the head to Somebody, and
there are as mysterious references to things which might have been,
only that they happened to be otherwise.
There is a little more outspokenness in ‘The Exile’s THE BLACK
Farewell,’ which heartily curses the often-cursed but COCKADE.
singularly successful Saxon, and still more heartily
vituperates the sensible Scots who stuck to the Brunswick family and
the happy establishment. The writer sarcastically describes
Scotland, for the exasperation of those judicious Scots, in the words:
—‘The abject realm, a Saxon province made! and the Stuart heaps
fire on the heads of Scottish Whigs by accusing them of common-
place venality, and charging them with selling ‘Their mother’s glory
for base Saxon gold!’ The figure the nobles from Scotland made at
the Court of London in 1848, is thus smartly sketched:—
While in the Saxon capital enthralled,
Eclipsed in lustre, though in senses palled,
The planet nobles, alien to their own,
Circle, dim satellites, the distant throne:
Saxons themselves in heart, use, tongue disguised,
Their own despising, by the world despised,
While those for whom they yield their country’s pride,
Their name, their nation, and their speech deride.
The above figures of speech are admissible in poetry, but in truth
and plain prose they are ‘palabras.’ The two authors are as
crushingly severe on the English cockade as on the anti-Jacobite
Scottish nobles. The cockade is shown to be altogether an
imposture. The words in which the demonstration is made have,
however, left her Majesty’s throne unshaken. ‘At this moment, most
persons imagine that black is’ (the colour of) ‘the English cockade,
ignorant that it was that of the Elector of Hanover, and only
introduced into England with George I., who bore it as a vassal of the
Empire; and it may be little flattering to the amour-propre of the
British people to know that the cockade which they wear as national
is the badge of a petty fief, the palatinate of a foreign empire.’ On
this matter it is certain that the national withers are unwrung. The
black cockade won glory at Dettingen, lost no honour at Fontenoy,
and was worn by gallant men whom ‘John Sobieski Stuart’ could not
overcome when his sword was (if report be true) unsheathed against
English, Irish, and Scots, on the field of Waterloo.
Let us now turn to a minor Jacobite episode.—A THE ALLENS
correspondent of ‘Notes and Queries,’ M. H. R. IN
(August 1st, 1857, p. 95), refers to an account the EDINBURGH.
writer had from an informant, who was accustomed to
meet John and Charles Allen in Edinburgh society. ‘I find however
that their claims to legitimate descent from the Royal Stuarts were
treated in such society quite as a joke, though the claimants were
fêted and lionised, as might be expected in such a case, in
fashionable circles. They usually appeared in full Highland costume,
in Royal Tartan. The likeness to the Stuart family, I am told, was
striking, and may have been without improving their claim a whit.’
The writer then alludes to the number of young ladies who, at Her
Majesty’s accession, were thought to bear a great resemblance to
the Queen. But accidental resemblance is worthless as proof of
consanguinity. ‘If,’ the writer continues, ‘the two claimaints have no
better foundation to rest upon, their cause is but weak, for it is
obvious there may be likeness without legitimate descent; and I
fancy, if the real history is gone into, that is the point to be decided
here.’
The writer goes on to traduce the character of the
THE
wife of Charles Edward. It must, indeed, be allowed SUCCESSION
that from the year 1778, when she was twenty-six TO THE
years of age, and she first became acquainted with CROWN.
Alfieri, the lover with whom she lived from 1780, with some intervals,
till his death in 1803, her character was under a shade, and yet, in
1791, the Countess of Albany was received at Court, in London, by
so very scrupulous a sovereign lady as Queen Charlotte. So
scrupulous was the queen, that her reception of the widow of
Charles Edward seemed to disperse the breath of suspicion that
rested on her. Another circumstance in her favour is the fact of
George III. having settled a pension upon her. The Countess of
Albany died at Montpellier plain Madame Fabre, in 1824, leaving all
she possessed to her husband, the historical painter. It will be seen
from the last-named date, that Queen Victoria and the wife of
Charles Edward were for a few years contemporaries.
But the countess is out of the question in this matter of John and
Charles Allen. The correspondent of ‘Notes and Queries’ has
something more to the point when he says:—‘The question is not of
any importance as a matter of state. The succession to the English
crown is secured by parliament, and is not affected by a descent
from the young Pretender; but as an historical fact, it is desirable that
the truth of the story, apparently set afloat by the father of these two
gentlemen, should be settled at once and for ever.’ That has been
effectually settled in the 81st volume of the ‘Quarterly,’ so far as the
development from Allen to Allan, and this to Stuart, is made out,
without leaving a link unsevered in the chain of testimony.
In the year 1868, the Ministry and the Lords of the
A
Admiralty, and the Commissioners of Greenwich DERWENTWAT
Hospital estates, were amused rather than alarmed ER AT
by a claim made to the forfeited earldom of DILSTON.
Derwentwater, and also to the confiscated estates. A sort of action
was added to the latter claim, by taking possession of a portion of
them, in the North. The claimant is an accomplished lady who has
been long known by sympathising northern friends as Amelia
Matilda, Countess of Derwentwater. She backed the assumption of
such title by installing herself in one of the ruined chambers of the
castle in ruins—Dilston. Her servants roofed the apartment with
canvas, covered the bare earthen floor with carpeting, made the best
apologies they could for doors and windows, hung some ‘family
portraits’ on the damp walls, spread a table with relics, documents,
&c., relating to the Derwentwater persons and property: they hoisted
the Derwentwater flag on the old tower, and then opened the place
to visitors who sympathised with the countess in the way in which
she supported her dignity and its attendant rheumatism.
The Lords of the Admiralty and the Commissioners DESCENT OF
of Greenwich Hospital speedily bestirred themselves. THE
They sent their representatives from London with due CLAIMANT.
authority to eject the lady, if they could not persuade
her to leave. The countess received them with mingled courtesy and
outspoken defiance. Her manners seem to have resembled her
costume, which consisted of a foreign military upper coat, with a
sword by her side, and a white satin bonnet on her head. She
appeared to be between fifty and sixty years of age, but owned only
to forty. The countess made a stout fight for it, and when she was
compulsorily put out of the castle, she pitched a camp and dwelt in a
tent on the adjacent highway. Her effects and family relics, portraits,
plate, &c., were announced for sale, under a sheriff’s seizure. The
announcement attracted many buyers from London, their motive
being less Jacobitism than curiosity-dealing. The liberality of
personal friends satisfied the sheriff’s claims, by their bidding, and
the ‘relics’ were removed to Newcastle for public exhibition;
admission, 1s. The countess now attired in her Stuart tartan, with a
shoulder-scarf of silk of the same pattern, and with a black plume in
her bonnet, attended, as the local advertisements said, ‘between two
and four, to explain several of the curiosities.’
The question remains as to identity. The Lords of
the Admiralty in London, when those relics of the OBSTACLES
IN
Jacobite time came up to trouble them, naturally PEDIGREES.
asked, but in more profuse and much more legal
language, ‘Who are you?’ The reply was not satisfactory. There has
already been recorded in these pages, under the dates 1731 and
1732, the coming of John Radcliffe to Poland Street, London, to
consult Cheselden, and the death and funeral of the great surgeon’s
patient—sole son of the beheaded earl. The present countess, if
understood rightly, denies that the above John, ‘Earl of
Derwentwater,’ died childless, as he undoubtedly did, in 1732. She
states that he married in 1740 a certain Elizabeth Amelia Maria,
Countess of Waldsteinwaters (which is a sort of translation of
Derwentwater); that he lived till 1798, when he must have been
within hail of centenarianism, and that he was succeeded by his two
sons in order of age, the first, Earl John, the second, Earl John
James. The last-named coronetted shadow is described as dying in
1833, leaving his only child, the present Amelia Matilda, Countess of
Derwentwater, who took possession of Dilston Castle, &c., under the
delusion that she had hereditary right to both land and dignity. She
accounts for John, the son of the beheaded earl, by saying that he
lived till 1798 in the utmost secrecy, under fear of being murdered by
the British Government! As he really died in 1732, unmarried, and
that the Government knew very well that he was carried from London
to be buried in his mother’s grave in Brussels, one may be allowed to
suspect that there is some mistake in the pedigree to which the
Countess Amelia pins her faith.
With regard to the descendants of the Earl of Derwentwater, in a
line not yet considered, Mr. H. T. Riley (in ‘Notes and Queries,’
October 25th, 1856, p. 336), says: ‘I remember being pointed out,
some time since, a person who bears the family name and is
generally reputed to be a descendant, through an illegitimate son, of
the unfortunate Earl of Derwentwater. I have little doubt there are
several other persons similarly connected with him, to be found in
the neighbourhood of North or South Shields.’ A lady correspondent,
‘Hermentrude,’ says (‘Notes and Queries,’ November 16th, 1861), ‘I
have been applied to, through a friend, to communicate some
genealogical particulars for their (living descendants of the
Radcliffes) benefit, which, I am sorry to say, I was not able to
ascertain. I do not know through what branch they descend, but I
was told they still entertain hopes of a reversion of the attainder and
restoration of the title.’
After this romance, the chief actor in another made his quiet exit
from the stage.
In 1872, the most eminent personage of this latest JOHN
Jacobite time, disappeared from the scene. The tall, SOBIESKI
gaunt, slightly bent figure of the gentleman, who once STUART.
believed himself to be plain John Allen, till his father
imparted to him a story that he, the sire, was the legitimate son of
Charles Edward, and that plain John Allen was John Sobieski
Stolberg Stuart, was missed from the Reading Room of the British
Museum. There he used to enter, cloaked and spurred like an old
warrior, with a sort of haughty resignation. Yet there was an air about
him which seemed as a command to all spectators to look at him
well, and to acknowledge that the character he had inherited from his
father the lieutenant, who fancied he was the rightful King of
England, was patent in him, as clearly as if he had been born in the
purple. Some few people, of those whose idiosyncracy it is to lend
ready faith to the romantic impossible, believed in the genuineness
of the character, and held the pretensions it interpreted to be as well-
founded as those of either of ‘the Pretenders.’ This Chevalier Stuart,
or Comte d’Albanie, mixed a flavour of the scholar with that of the
warrior. He and his brother sat together apart from unprincely folk in
the Reading Room. Books, papers, documents, and all the
paraphernalia of study and research were scattered about them.
Quietly unobtrusive, yet with a ‘keep your distance’
THE ELDER
manner about them, they were to be seen poring over SON OF ‘RED
volumes and manuscripts as if in search of proofs of EAGLE.’
their vicinity to the throne, and found gratification in
the non-discovery of anything to the contrary. Looking at the elder
gentleman who was often alone, the spectator could not help
wondering at the assiduous pertinacity of the Chevalier’s labour.
Nothing seemed to weary him, not even the wearisome making of
extracts, the result of which has not been revealed. Perhaps it was
the vainly attempted refutation of the plain, logical, consequential,
irrefutable statements made in Volume 81 of the ‘Quarterly,’ by Mr.
Lockhart, who, courteously cruel, smashed to atoms the fanciful idea
which had entered Lieutenant Allen’s brains, and from which idea
was evolved the perplexing conclusion that he, the ex-lieutenant,
was Tolair Deargh, the Red Eagle, and by divine grace, obstructed
by human obstinacy, king of three realms! The elder son of the Red
Eagle was as familiar a figure in the streets of London as he was in
the Museum; and wayfarers who had no thought as to his
individuality, must have felt that the cloaked and spurred personage
was certainly a gentleman who wore his three score years and ten
with a worthiness exacting respect. The same may be said of his
sorrowing surviving brother, ‘Le Comte d’Albanie’ (Charles Edward),
as his card proclaims him. In this ‘Chevalier,’ whose figure is well
known to most Londoners, the chivalrous spirit survives. The last
record of him in this character is in the year 1875, when he knocked
down Donald Alison for violently assaulting the Comte’s landlady in a
Pimlico lodging house!
A year previously, the Lady Alice Mary Emily Hay, STUART
daughter of the 17th Earl of Errol, and therefore of the ALLIANCES.
blood of Kilmarnock, did Colonel the Count Edward
Stuart d’Albanie the honour to become his wife. The Colonel is the
son of ‘The Count d’Albanie.’
This marriage is thus chronicled in Lodge’s Peerage (1877, p.
238), ‘Lady Alice Mary Emily (Hay) b. 6th July, 1835, m. 1st May,
1874, Colonel the Count Charles Edward d’Albanie, only son of
Charles Edward Stuart, Count d’Albanie, and Anne Beresford,
daughter of the Hon. John de la Poer Beresford, brother of the 1st
Marquis of Waterford.’ Anne Beresford—widow Gardiner,—is
variously described as marrying, in 1822, ‘C. E. Stuart, Esq.,’ and
‘Charles Stuart Allen, younger son of Thomas Hay Allen.’
The Colonel Count d’Albanie who married Lady Alice Hay is said
to have been in the service of Don Carlos, than which nothing could
so little recommend him to a humane, right-thinking, liberal, peace-
loving, blood-odour-hating world. There is, however, manifestly,

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Democracy Without Politics in EU

Citizen Participation Alvaro Oleart

Democracy Without Politics

Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology

The collective intelligence that emerged through the conversations with a

of an activist. As the popular feminist saying goes, ‘the personal is polit-

1 Passive Revolutions and the Future of the EU:

2.1 The ‘Decolonial Multitude’ as the ‘We’ of Democracy 33

4 Democracy Without Politics in the Conference

3.5 ‘Polluting’ the Citizen Deliberations? The CoFoE

7 Conclusion: The Depoliticised ‘Citizen Participation’

3 The Political Implications of the Decolonial Multitude:

Passive Revolutions and the Future

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

conceived recently by Landemore (2020) as a new “paradigm of democ-

2 Gramsci’s Passive Revolution: From

represented by Gramsci when describing the Italian unification during the

absorption, achieved by methods which varied in their effectiveness, of

The concept of the ‘passive revolution’ is particularly useful when the

passive revolution had not been necessitated by this economic structure

Gramsci used the ‘passive revolution’ framework to make sense of the

in favour of a decentralised unification, in opposition to the centralisation advocated by

within the EU in the recent Conference on the Future of Europe

transnational solidarity emerges out of these interactions. The transna-

in what has been conceived as ‘intergovernmentality’ (Bouza García &

5 A two phases approach to the understanding of a ‘passive revolution’ has been

increasingly absorbing the less politically dangerous dimensions of move-

about these processes, insofar they are likely to be instrumentalised by

3 A Politically Engaged Conceptual, Normative

dimensions of European integration that traditional approaches sideline.

To be sure, this theoretical-normative point of departure is not

be sidelined. The positionality of academics reinforces the dominant ideo-

it is absurd to think of a purely “objective” foresight. The person who

4 Challenging the “coloniality of power”

Terminology is here crucial. Inspired by Alcazar III (2023), the Global

The notion of ‘decoloniality’ enables “to ethically prioritise situated and

be conceived as a marketing exercise to increase the legitimacy of a polity

5 Summary of the Book Through

like in practice in the EU context. Is the ‘decolonial multitude’ the

Nicolaïdis, K. (2013). European demoicracy and its crisis. Journal of Common

From European Demoi to the Decolonial

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 25

[b]elief in the possibility of a universal rational consensus has put demo-

Mouffe sees agonistic democratic debate as an inherently conflictual

democratic goal in itself, because it makes people more aware of what

of capitalism, oriented towards the competition between empires rather

1.1 Democratic Legitimacy in the EU: The Opportunity

process in the public sphere. Instead, politicisation is defined as “making

An’ when he rides Auld Reckie through,

The successful royal visit to Scotland led to some REVERSAL OF

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