![P1150157[1].jpg](https://cdn2.opendemocracy.net/media/original_images/P11501571_UxKir3W.jpg)
Ada Colau at a public engagement event that took place in Sants-Montjuïc on 18 February 2017. Photo by Bertie Russell. CC BY-NC-SA.DiEM25’s call to ‘constructive disobedience’ is intriguing. It sounds promising, exciting even, but what it might mean is not immediately obvious. The explanatory note that the movement has now published is therefore extremely welcome. It is also rather unenlightening.
DiEM25 laments the fact that “Europe is disintegrating due to the incompetent authoritarianism of its institutions”. A first-stage course of action against this malaise is ‘constructive disobedience’.
This is a call to local institutions to occasionally disobey EU law and policy. Such action, the idea goes, is ‘constructive’ and therefore permissible when the principle on which it is grounded can be ‘universalised’. This is an explicit reference to the Kantian conception of universalisation. What the authors have in mind is something like a contradiction in the will. To oversimplify the idea: if everyone did what you propose to do, would you will the result? If not, you ought not to do it. If so, knock yourself out.
