ABSTRACT
Democracies are by definition forms of society in which the people are deemed sovereign; but unlike other forms of society democracies have a hard time imagining what its sovereign—the people—looks like. So how, then, can democracies try to convincingly visualise the people, both at a national and a European level? To answer that question I will not only analyse how democracies in their relatively short history have tried to represent the people (in the sense of visualising or creating an image of them) but also see how and to what extent various past modes of representation can still be used today. Inspired by the work of Pierre Rosanvallon and others, I schematically differentiate between three ways of representing the people that have subsequently developed: the people as an abstraction (represented by symbols like a flag), a pluralist vision of the people (through political parties) and, lastly, a “poetic” representation of the people (for example through stories). Although the use of these three modes of representation has varied over time, I believe that, if combined and updated, they all still remain relevant today. This becomes clear when applied to attempts to represent the people at a European level.
