Ben Jaffel, Hager

In search of European democracy. The Treaty on the Democratization of the Governance of the Euro Area (T-DEM) as an experience of interdisciplinary engagement and transnational reflexivity. Interview by Hager Ben Jaffel with Antoine Vauchez - 2021.


21

This interview documents the experience of an interdisciplinary team of four social science researchers— Stéphanie Hennette, Thomas Piketty, Guillaume Sacriste, and Antoine Vauchez—who, in the context of the 2017 French Presidential elections and the 2019 European elections, wrote and diffused a treaty proposal to democratize the European Union. Shedding light on the conditions of intervening in public debates (in this case European) and repertoires of intervention used by researchers, this interview addresses what it means to produce a “treaty” and the implications of navigating through the confluence of research, expertise, and civic engagement. The discussion insists on the knowledge effected of an experience that generated new empirical curiosities and research hypotheses while also pointing to the risks, tensions, and misunderstandings that result from being both “outside” and “inside” one’s research object. Overall, the interviewee insists on the usefulness of experimenting with these “frontier” encounters, provided that a form of collective reflexivity on how the social sciences can effectively “infuse” public debate is able to emerge.