Book Review: Europe Renaissance. Essaying European Civil Society – Europa-Renaissance. Die europäische Bürgergesellschaft auf dem Prüfstand

The texts of the present volume represent the result of a conference held at Dortmund University of Applied Sciences and Arts in 2014. With their contributions, researchers and students from different fields of investigation from several European countries invite the reader to focus on the perspective of European citizens to which less attention has been paid, compared to the institutional crisis of European Union. In contrast to its increased political and economic power, the EU has not succeeded in incorporating an authority able to communicate to its citizens the feeling of belonging together and to struggle for a common goal. In this sense the title “Europe Renaissance” is meant to push the search for a “good life” back to centre stage. From 2014 to 2016, the situation of the European Union has so clearly deteriorated that a well-known German expert in constitutional and public law Dieter Grimm comes to the result of an alarming democratic failure (Dieter Grimm, 2016, Europa ja – aber welches? Zur Verfassung der europäischen Demokratie, München: C.H. Beck). The political scientist Ulrike Guérot supports this analysis with a fresh manifesto (Ulrike Guérot, 2016, Warum Europa eine Republik warden muss! Eine politische Utopie, Bonn: Dietz).