It is rarely questioned that the European Union can be considered a model for other world regions. Comparable initiatives elsewhere are much less integrated, and up until now less successful, even if like Mercosur they are based on the European model. Although elements of the democratic rule of law in the EU are more developed than in all comparable projects and organisations, the model character of the EU is highly questionable in terms of democratic theory, and we should ask what scholars concerned with the European Union can learn from similar experiments in other world regions. Perhaps experience from the Mercosur countries with deliberative citizen democracy at the local level, the double perspective of the still ongoing transition from a ‘nominalistic’ to a ‘normative’ constitutional regime within nation states, and the simultaneous continental networking of law, economics, and policy could also be instructive for the current EU with its new problems in the realm of democracy and rights. Transcontinental social capital can only build-up if the learning processes are opened in both directions. The individual contributions to this volume move between the poles ‘effectiveness’ and ‘democracy’. It is the result of an international workshop organized by scholars from Flensburg University and from the Fundação Getúlio Vargas in São Paulo.