The Proto-Democrats: Restoring the Constitutional Idea of Europe
A Legal, Political, and Philosophical Position Paper
Abstract
This paper examines the structural erosion of democratic legitimacy in contemporary Europe, drawing a sharp distinction between legality (the formal validity of institutions and procedures) and legitimacy (the normative justification of authority through the consent of the people).
Through supranational institutions, technocratic networks, and legal mechanisms, elections and representation are increasingly transformed into ritual confirmations of predetermined outcomes. Political plurality is marginalised, and citizens are progressively treated as objects of policy rather than as actors in the political process.
The concept of the Proto-Democrats is introduced as both an analytical and normative instrument: actors who ground democratic legitimacy in constitutional principles prior to the state (principia antecedentia). The paper argues for the restoration of the moral individual as the cornerstone of democracy, the safeguarding of freedom of expression, self-determination and privacy, and the creation of structures in which power is continuously tested against consent.
As a practical instrument, the idea of a Proto-Democratic Covenant is presented: a voluntary network of thinkers, jurists, legislators and citizens committed to restoring lawful governance and moral responsibility, and to reclaiming the practical and moral foundations of democratic power.
This analysis combines historical, legal and philosophical insights with contemporary observations of political practice and offers a roadmap for re-founding European democracies on their original grounds of legitimacy.
I. Introduction: Democracy Before the State
The term Proto-Democrats (Proto-Democratici) was introduced by me, as founder of the World Alliance of Independent Thinkers (WAIT), to designate an emerging European intellectual movement focused on restoring the original principles of constitutional democracy: individual sovereignty, limitation of power, and political legitimacy through free consent.
In academic terms, Proto-Democratici refers to actors who ground democratic legitimacy in antecedent constitutional principles (principia antecedentia), rather than in positive law, institutional continuity, or technocratic necessity. The prefix proto does not denote an embryonic form of democracy, but its normative precedence: democracy is the condition of the state, not its derivative.
The choice of the term Proto-Democrats is deliberate. It functions as an alternative to the commonly used label patriots, which in contemporary political discourse has become both historically burdened and conceptually insufficient. Whereas patriotism inevitably refers to national identity, territorial loyalty, or cultural sentiment, Proto-Democracy refers to something more fundamental: the constitutional conditions that precede any legitimate democratic order, regardless of geographic or cultural context.
In the current European context, political conflict is often described as a confrontation between globalists and patriots, replacing the traditional left–right divide. This diagnosis is descriptively plausible but normatively inadequate. The core of this conflict is not national preference but democratic legitimacy itself. Proto-Democrats therefore do not represent an ideological current, but a reorientation towards the foundations of constitutional self-government upon which Western constitutional states were historically built.
The Proto-Democrat does not stand for the nation against the world, but for the individual against every form of unchecked power—national, supranational, or technocratic. In this respect, Proto-Democracy is not a regression into the past, but a correction to institutional expansion that has lost sight of its source of legitimacy.
This shift is no longer a merely theoretical risk. It manifests as an observable political reality: European democracies increasingly function not on the basis of free and revocable consent, but on conditional obedience to normative frameworks and institutional structures that are chronically placed beyond the reach of the electorate.
Europe’s Proto-Democrats proceed from a simple yet neglected conviction: democracy precedes the state. The people are not an administrative category nor a policy variable, but the primary source of political legitimacy. When institutions cease to serve the people and instead proclaim themselves bearers of moral or historical necessity, democratic order degenerates into a system of manufactured consent.
Across Europe, this distinction is fading. Bureaucratic centralisation, judicial activism, and the fusion of governance with moral tutelage have gradually redefined democracy as obedience to procedures rather than consent to authority. In this process, the individual—the moral actor of history—is displaced by a technocratic ideal of the “collective good” that no longer requires explicit legitimation.
The purpose of this memorandum and the broader analysis of which it forms part is not to design a new political system, but to rediscover an old constitutional truth: power must remain limited precisely because human beings are fallible. Freedom, not regulation, constitutes the primary foundation of political legitimacy. Where this premise is abandoned, what remains is not democracy, but governance without a people.
II. Legitimacy and Legality: The Forgotten Distinction
A constitutional democracy rests on two distinct yet interrelated pillars: legality (legalitas) and legitimacy (legitimitas). In classical constitutional theory, these concepts function complementarily; in contemporary European practice, however, they have increasingly collapsed into one another. This conflation lies at the heart of today’s democratic erosion.
Legality refers to the formal validity of power: whether decisions, rules and institutions have been established according to recognised procedures and existing law. Legality is procedural, institutional, and reproducible. It answers the question of how power is exercised.
Legitimacy, by contrast, refers to the normative justification of power: why authority deserves obedience. In a constitutional democracy, this justification is always traceable to the free and revocable consent of the people (consensus populi), mediated—but never replaced—by institutions.
Historically, legitimacy precedes legality. No law is binding merely because it exists; it is binding because it is recognised as rightful by those over whom it claims authority. Legality without legitimacy reduces law to technique and power to administration.
It is precisely this distinction that has gradually eroded in the modern European legal order. Under the influence of supranational governance, permanent crisis logic, and technocratic rationalisation, legality has increasingly been treated as an autonomous source of legitimacy. What is procedurally correct is assumed to be normatively justified. Legitimacy is no longer presupposed; it is substituted.
This shift has profound consequences. When legitimacy is derived from procedure rather than consent, the people lose their constitutional position as the source of authority. Democracy is transformed from self-government into a system of regulated compliance. The citizen is no longer addressed as co-legislator, but as an object of policy.
In this context emerges what may be described as post-democratic legality: a legal order in which decisions are legally valid yet structurally insulated from effective democratic correction. Elections persist, but their scope is curtailed; dissenting political currents are not refuted but neutralised through legal, procedural, or moral exclusion.
For the Proto-Democrats, this is the core of the conflict. Their critique is not primarily directed against legislation, institutions, or international cooperation as such, but against the idea that legality alone suffices to justify authority. They restore the classical constitutional insight that no form of power—however legal—can legitimise itself.
Legitimacy is not a static attribute but an ongoing relationship between authority and consent. It presupposes not only elections, but open debate, political equality, and the real possibility of a change of power. Where these conditions are absent or hollowed out, legality remains as an empty form.
The distinction between legitimacy and legality is therefore not an academic nuance but a political necessity. When a legal order fails to safeguard this distinction, it loses its democratic character without losing its legal façade. This is precisely the situation in which Europe now finds itself.
From this follows the central thesis of this work: restoring constitutional democracy does not require more rules, but the restoration of legitimacy as the primary measure of authority. Without this reordering, the rule of law degenerates into a self-referential system—legal, but no longer democratic.
III. The Crisis of Representation
Contemporary Europe is confronted with a fundamental rupture in its representative order. Formally, elections, parliaments and parties persist; materially, their constitutive function has been hollowed out. Power is increasingly exercised at supranational and technocratic levels, while democratic consent is reduced to a confirmatory condition.
Institutions that claim to protect democracy routinely override the democratic will of individual nations. Electoral outcomes are no longer unconditionally recognised as sources of authority, but accepted only insofar as they align with pre-established policy and value frameworks. Where these frameworks are challenged, correction follows—not through political debate, but through legal, administrative, or moral intervention.
Under such conditions, elections lose their constitutive character. They no longer authorise power but serve as ritual confirmations of decisions already taken elsewhere. Representation degenerates from a mechanism of delegation into an instrument of ex post legitimation. The voter no longer chooses who governs, but tacitly affirms that governance is taking place.
This shift is reinforced by media systems structurally intertwined with state funding, regulation, and platform dependency. Political plurality is formally acknowledged but practically constrained. Divergent positions are not rebutted on substance but marginalised through access barriers, reputational mechanisms, and asymmetrical enforcement of norms. The spectrum of permissible debate narrows while the appearance of openness is maintained.
The result is a form of post-democratic governance: rule by coordination rather than by consent. Decision-making occurs within networks of institutions that mutually legitimise one another while accounting only indirectly or conditionally to the electorate. The representative chain—from citizen to mandate, from mandate to power—is structurally severed.
This crisis is not an expression of populism, nationalism, or transient dissatisfaction. It is constitutional in nature. The central question is not who is represented, but whether representation still functions as a source of authority.
Where representation loses legitimacy, legality remains as a substitute. It is precisely in this shift—from consent to procedure—that the structural vulnerability of the current European democratic order reveals itself.
IV. Institutional Enforcement of the Crisis of Representation
The crisis of representation no longer manifests implicitly or exceptionally; it is actively institutionalised. What began as an administrative emergency measure has evolved into a structural mechanism through which democratic outcomes are filtered, corrected, or neutralised by non-elected bodies.
This enforcement proceeds along several mutually reinforcing lines: judicial interpretation, administrative conditionality, supranational coordination, and—ever more explicitly—political exclusion.
Courts and supervisory bodies play a central role. Through open norms, proportionality tests, and morally charged interpretive frameworks, constitutional review shifts from rights protection to policy steering. Judicial review, originally intended to limit power, increasingly functions as a corrective mechanism against democratic choices deemed undesirable.
In parallel, commissions, agencies, and supranational institutions operate through financial and procedural conditionality. Access to funds, programmes, or cooperation is made dependent on ideological conformity with pre-established norms. Deviation does not lead to debate, but to sanction, exclusion, or administrative obstruction.
The most visible—and constitutionally most far-reaching—instrument, however, is the normalisation of political exclusion. Parties that are formally legal, enjoy electoral support, and operate within the law are pre-emptively excluded from governmental responsibility on moral or normative grounds. Behaviour is no longer the criterion; ideas themselves become grounds for disqualification.
The Dutch political situation following the 2025 elections provides a clear illustration. Despite a clear electoral outcome, a minority government was formed that did not reflect the balance of votes. Certain parties were openly and explicitly excluded from coalition negotiations—not due to illegality, but due to substantive incompatibility with dominant normative frameworks. Formally, the process remained legal; materially, the logic of representation was undermined.
This pattern is not unique to the Netherlands. It manifests, in varying degrees, across multiple European states. Precisely for that reason, it is constitutionally relevant. When political participation becomes contingent upon ideological pre-selection, representation ceases to function as a mechanism of delegation and becomes a system of selection.
At this point, it becomes clear that the crisis is no longer a deviation within the democratic order, but a transformation of that order itself. Democracy persists as procedure but loses its foundation as a source of legitimacy. It is here that the need to recalibrate constitutional wisdom becomes unavoidable.
V. Revisiting Constitutional Wisdom
The institutional enforcement of the crisis of representation sharpens a fundamental question: which constitutional principles were designed to limit power when it manifests legally, morally legitimised, and procedurally correct?
The answer lies not in new theories but in old wisdom. Classical constitutional tradition—both Anglo-American and continental—did not arise from optimism about governance but from distrust of power. Its premise was not the benevolence of institutions but the fallibility of human beings.
From John Locke’s doctrine of natural rights (Two Treatises of Government, 1689) to Montesquieu’s separation of powers (De l’Esprit des lois, 1748); from the Federalist Papers to post-war European constitutions, the same axiom recurs: power is legitimate only insofar as it is limited, and limited only insofar as it remains traceable to consent.
This tradition draws a sharp distinction between legality and legitimacy. Lawfulness without consent may be procedurally correct but is constitutionally empty. Constitutions were therefore designed as restraints, not instruments; as shields against concentration, not vehicles for moral homogenisation.
Contemporary European practice reverses this principle. Where constitutional law once served to protect minorities from majorities, it is now used to protect electoral majorities from themselves—or rather, from their own choices. In doing so, law loses its neutral position and becomes normatively directive.
Against this backdrop, the Proto-Democrats reformulate seven constitutional core principles that precede policy, party formation, or administrative preference:
Freedom of expression
Dissent is not a risk to democracy but its condition of existence. Societies that regulate language ultimately regulate thought, thereby undermining any possibility of legitimate consent.The right to self-defence
Political freedom presupposes the capacity for personal and civic resistance. An order that enforces defencelessness institutionalises dependency.Privacy as dignity
Surveillance, regardless of intent, blurs the boundary between person and object. Without a private sphere, there is no autonomous conscience—only observed behaviour.Equal justice and due process
Law ought to protect the citizen against power, not power against criticism. Selective enforcement and normative adjudication erode legal equality.Separation of powers and sovereignty
No court, committee, or council may replace the democratic mandate with its own normative authority. Authority is legitimate only when it remains revocable.Popular sovereignty and electoral integrity
Representation loses validity once participation depends on ideological pre-approval. Democracy without genuine choice is selection, not election.Limited government and economic freedom
Prosperity and autonomy arise from initiative, not permission. A permit-based economy produces obedience, not citizens.
These principles are neither nostalgic, partisan, nor cultural statements. They constitute the minimum framework within which democratic diversity can exist at all.
Revisiting constitutional wisdom therefore does not mean returning to the past but restoring distinctions: between law and power, between consent and obedience, between democracy as procedure and democracy as a system of legitimacy. Without these distinctions, every election may be formally correct yet materially meaningless.
VI. The European Inversion: Law Without Consent
The European project began as a legal experiment in cooperation: a voluntary order of states retaining sovereignty while sharing certain competences for the sake of peace, trade, and legal certainty. Law functioned as a coordinating mechanism, not as a substitute source of political legitimacy.
That relationship has fundamentally shifted. An increasing form of law without consent has emerged, in which legal and administrative obligations prevail over democratic authorisation, and compliance is enforced without functional reliance on actual consent. Legality persists; legitimacy erodes.
Treaties originally intended to facilitate mutual benefit have evolved into instruments of political and cultural homogenisation—not through explicit legislation backed by democratic mandate, but through conditionality, directives, judicial interpretation, and financial pressure. The result is a governing order in which norm-setting occurs without direct political responsibility.
This inversion is constitutionally profound. Where law once served to limit power, it now increasingly stabilises it. Where integration rested on voluntary transfer, it now rests on structural dependency. And where deviation was once recognised as democratic variation, it is increasingly classified as normative transgression.
The outcome is not overt authoritarianism but a post-democratic legal order: procedurally correct, legally sophisticated, yet detached from consent. Citizens no longer obey because they feel represented, but because alternatives have been institutionally excluded.
Against this development, the Proto-Democrats do not reject Europe; they seek to re-found it. Europe can endure only as a union of free nations, bound by choice rather than coercion; by mutual recognition of sovereignty rather than hierarchical norm imposition. Integration is not the enemy. Coercion is.
When law derives legitimacy from enforcement rather than consent, the political order becomes not merely post-democratic; it deprives the individual of the possibility of authentic sovereignty. The moral and political subject—the traditional cornerstone of democracy—risks being reduced to a mere object of regulation and surveillance. Restoring the democratic core therefore requires, above all, reclaiming the individual as moral and political actor.
VII. Reclaiming the Individual
Every legitimate political order begins with the moral individual. Speaking, believing, creating, and dissenting are not privileges of citizenship; they are expressions of human sovereignty and the foundation of democratic legitimacy.
When institutions act as custodians of norms and values, and participation is filtered through algorithms, permits, or moral vetting, the individual is not protected but marginalised. Freedom is replaced by obedience, and citizens become subjects.
The Proto-Democratic premise is clear and immutable: the state is the servant of conscience, not its master.
Three core implications follow:
Freedom of expression
Not optional, but fundamental. A society that censors language and ideas extinguishes thought and restricts citizens’ capacity for political action.Self-determination and autonomy
Essential to democratic legitimacy. Without the possibility of critical resistance—personal or collective—the citizen becomes an instrument of a technocratic ideal.Protection against surveillance and unnecessary regulation
The boundary of personal dignity. Privacy, self-governance, and protection against bureaucratic arbitrariness are prerequisites of a living democracy.
Reclaiming the individual is not an abstract ideal; it is the condition for any legitimate and sustainable governance. Without citizens who can speak, think, and act in full sovereignty, democratic order degenerates into a formality—a hollow ritual that legitimises power without consent.
The restoration of individual sovereignty must therefore coincide with the collective construction of structures that actively protect freedom. It is the task of citizens, legislators, and legal institutions to create forums, media, and rules in which the individual stands central, and where power is never self-evident but continuously tested against the foundations of legitimacy.
The Proto-Democratic project thus moves from critique to action: from diagnosing decay to building a network that restores democracy as an active practice. This marks the natural transition towards the establishment of a Proto-Democratic Covenant.
VIII. Towards a Proto-Democratic Covenant
The renewal of Europe will not arise from confrontation alone, nor from the multiplication of rules, procedures, or organisational forms. It emerges through construction: the cultivation of thought, the careful shaping of discourse, and the formation of structures that honour constitutional restraint and moral responsibility.
The Proto-Democratic Covenant is not a movement, nor a platform, nor a programme. It prescribes no actions, confers no membership, and mobilises no constituency. This is intentional. Legitimacy cannot be commanded; it must be recognised. Authority must be measured, not assumed. The Covenant is, above all, an orientation — a posture of conscience in relation to power.
It asserts that legitimacy, not legality, not expediency, not the moral certainty of institutions, is the proper measure of political authority. Those who recognise themselves in this posture are invited to examine their place within existing structures: to ask how power is exercised, justified, or normalised; to resist, quietly yet deliberately, the substitution of procedure for consent.
This responsibility extends across professions and civic roles. Judges are reminded of law’s purpose to restrain power; legislators of the revocability of their mandate; journalists of the distinction between critique and moral gatekeeping; citizens of the irreducible sovereignty of the individual. It is not a programme for action, but a standard for judgement — an enduring criterion against which all authority must be measured.
The Covenant’s strength lies not in coordination but in convergence. Even in isolated conduct, where adherence to this posture prevails, the dormant authority of legitimacy is reasserted. Where it is absent, governance degenerates into administration; where it is present, even the smallest acts regain constitutional significance.
Thus, the Proto-Democratic Covenant is neither instrument nor campaign, but condition and compass: it restores the primacy of consent over procedure, of democracy over administration, and of the moral actor over the institution. It calls for a Europe in which legitimacy is lived, practiced, and embodied — before laws, before states, before any claim of authority.
IX. Conclusion: The European Republic of Conscience
Europe does not require a new revolution. It requires remembrance: remembrance of the principle that governance is justified only by consent, that sovereignty begins with the individual, and that no institution — however well-intentioned — may transgress human dignity.
The Proto-Democrats seek to restore constitutional memory: a conscious return to the foundations of Western democracies, where individual freedom and collective legitimacy are held in balance. Our mission is restorative, not reactionary: to bring Europe back to its democratic soul, so that institutions may once again serve rather than rule.
In that spirit, we affirm a timeless truth:
Freedom is not granted by governments; it is the condition under which governments may legitimately exist.
Yet this truth now confronts a hardened reality. Across Europe, political authority has increasingly migrated from representative institutions to a self-referential executive and technocratic class — insulated from electoral consequence, shielded by procedural complexity, and sustained by moral self-assurance rather than democratic consent. Power is exercised through regulation, emergency framing, and administrative decree, while responsibility disperses into committees, agencies, and mandates no citizen can meaningfully revoke.
This class does not merely govern differently; it governs above. It presumes epistemic superiority over the populations it administers and interprets dissent not as democratic signal but as cognitive failure, misinformation, or moral defect. When confronted with the undemocratic or irrational effects of its decisions, it responds not with accountability, but with further abstraction — more rules, more experts, more distance from the citizenry whose consent once justified its authority.
Most critically, consequence has vanished. Errors no longer exact a political price; overreach no longer triggers correction. In this environment, legitimacy decays silently while power consolidates openly. The executive class now operates in a league of its own — one in which failure carries no penalty and authority no longer requires renewal.
The European Republic of Conscience arises precisely here. Not as a rival power, but as a moral boundary. It insists that no degree of expertise absolves authority from consent; that no emergency suspends human dignity; and that no system, however vast, nullifies the sovereign responsibility of the individual.
To embrace the Proto-Democratic Covenant under such conditions requires courage. It is easier to comply, to adapt, to remain silent within a system that rewards acquiescence and penalises moral clarity. Yet democratic legitimacy has never been preserved by comfort. It survives only where individuals refuse to internalise illegitimate authority — and choose, instead, to remember what governance is for.
About the Author
Jeroen J.J. Sluiter (56) is the founder of the World Alliance of Independent Thinkers (WAIT), a niche think tank focused on the protection of sovereignty, democratic governance, and fundamental rights from a legal-philosophical and constitutional perspective. He is an independent thinker with over 25 years of experience in business development, sales and marketing strategy, and commercial optimisation.
As a founder, he has practical experience in product development, strategic positioning, and public communication. He is the originator of the Praetari Principle, a formally registered intellectual framework for the valuation and economic settlement of human attention in digital ecosystems.
Sluiter is an autodidact and considers himself a lifelong student of philosophy, psychology, and legal philosophy. He applies these disciplines to analyse and reformulate issues of culture and social relations, democratic legitimacy, constitutional limitation of power, and individual sovereignty.
This memorandum and its accompanying analysis were prepared by Sluiter, with support from AI technology by OpenAI for refinement, editorial structuring, and linguistic optimisation. All conceptual premises, argumentative choices, and conclusions—as well as any inaccuracies—remain solely the responsibility of the author.
WAIT previously published Sluiter’s essay on ‘Oikophobia and the Woke Condition - How the West Learned to Despise Itself, and How We Can Reclaim Its Promise’
Indicative References
Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government. 1689.
Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat. De l’Esprit des lois. 1748.
Hamilton, Alexander; Madison, James; Jay, John. The Federalist Papers. 1787–1788.
European Convention on Human Rights, 1950.
European Union: Treaty on European Union (Maastricht, 1992); Treaty of Lisbon, 2007.
Dahl, Robert A. On Democracy. Yale University Press, 1998.
Schmitter, Philippe C.; Karl, Terry L. “What Democracy Is… and Is Not.” Journal of Democracy, 1991.