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This chapter argues that it would do better to conceive of the EU as a regional state in the making, and as such as a regional union of nation-states in which the creative tension between the Union and its member-states ensures both ever-increasing regional integration and ever-continuing national differentiation. It considers the EU’s move to regional sovereignty, the variability of the EU’s regional boundaries, the composite character of EU identity, the compound framework, and the fragmented nature of the EU’s democracy. It ends with a discussion of the real sources of the democratic deficit in the EU, linked to the lack of ideas and discourse about national democracy, and how this affects simple and compound national polities.

This chapter opens with a review of the literature on democracy in the European Union. The most commonly raised ‘deficits’ are discussed, including the argument that the EU lacks accountability, the notion that qualified majority voting can be viewed as undemocratic, the alleged problems caused by extensive lobbying, the social critique, and the socio-psychological argument. It is argued that the socio-psychological question is the most fundamental as this underlies all other discussions about the future of the EU and the EU institutions.

Develops a three-staged theory to explain why national governments have created and successively empowered the European Parliament. In a first step, it is argued that attempts by national governments to transfer sovereignty to the EU-level in order to improve the problem-solving capacity of their domestic polities threaten to undermine domestic channels of interest representation and accountability. These challenges are commonly perceived by political elites in the member states as a ‘democratic legitimacy deficit’. In a second step, it is argued that the proposals political elites in different member states advance to alleviate the ‘democratic legitimacy deficit’ vary across and even within member states. In the final step, the chapter inquires how the different concerns about the ‘democratic legitimacy deficit’ affect the interaction among national governments during Treaty amending intergovernmental conferences. For each stage in the development of the theory, the chapter develops a set of hypotheses and observable implications. The hypotheses are subjected to empirical scrutiny in the ensuing chapters.

Democracy is an essential condition of membership in the EU, yet the EU itself is said to suffer from a serious democratic deficit. The paradox is more apparent than real — one cannot safely extrapolate democratic norms from the national to the supranational level. The members of the EU are not individuals but corporate bodies, and democratic principles do not directly apply to such a polity. Arguments about Europe’s democratic deficit implicitly assume that the EU must eventually become a full-fledged federal state, but this is not what the majority of European voters apparently want. At best, federation is only one of several possible outcomes of the integration process. In reality, the democratic deficit is the price we pay for attempting to pursue political objectives by non-political means.

From the viewpoint of stability, the Eurozone needs to be established and maintained within a normative political consensus that provides strong moral grounds for compliance with its directives. This makes it less dependent on specific non‐normative mechanisms, such as the Growth and Stability Pact, and minimizes the ‘Hobbesian’ threat to its stability arising from the political or economic disaffection that attends a ‘democratic deficit’. The consensus also serves to maximize the Lockean and Kantian pro‐integrative pressures based on political trust and morality.

Completes the second part of the book, and relies on the conception of political legitimacy delineated in Ch. 5 to advance a justice‐based, rather than a consent‐based, account of system legitimacy: a set of criteria that the international legal system would have to meet in order to be legitimate. Building on groundwork already laid in Chs 1 and 5, it is shown why, contrary to the dominant view among international lawyers, the consent of states cannot confer legitimacy on the international legal system. In addition, it is argued that it is a mistake to assume that political equality among states is a necessary condition for system legitimacy, and that the international legal system, like any system for the exercise of political power, ought to be democratic. It is also shown that the idea of democratizing the international legal system is an ambiguous one and should not be equated with increasing state majoritarianism in the workings of the system; the charge that the international legal system has a “democratic deficit” is valid, but it is a mistake to assume that the remedy is to make the system conform more closely to the ideal of democracy as state majoritarianism. The eight sections of the chapter are: I. The Question of System Legitimacy; II. The Case for Having an International Legal System; III. A Justice‐Based Conception of System Legitimacy; IV. The Consent Theory of System Legitimacy; I. Moral Minimalism and the Consent Theory of System Legitimacy. VI. The Instrumental Argument for State Consent as a Necessary Condition for System Legitimacy; VII. Is Democracy a Necessary Condition of System Legitimacy?; and VIII. The Pursuit of Justice in an Imperfect System.

Addresses concern over the so‐called ‘democratic deficit’ in the EU in comparison with the USA. The author deduces that there are two reasons for the political salience of this alleged deficit: the pragmatic reason that the EU's institutions are inadequate for a union with fifteen members and an expanded range of competencies (and will become unworkable when it is enlarged by the joining of the Eastern European countries); and the trilemma of the democratic welfare state. This is that EU member states cannot want to shed their welfare‐state obligations without jeopardizing the bases of their democratic legitimacy, they cannot want to reverse the process of economic integration, which exposes national welfare states to regulatory competition, and they cannot want to avoid regulatory competition by shifting welfare‐state responsibilities upward to the European level. The chapter focuses primarily on the third part of this European trilemma. It begins with a brief theoretical discussion of the preconditions of democratic legitimacy, then it explores how these are affected by European integration; it concludes with an examination of European policies that could strengthen national efforts to cope with the constraints of regulatory competition.

This chapter first briefly addresses the legitimation problems of the Union and the concept of legitimacy. What does it mean and what are the implications for the political theory of the Union? On the basis of the contention that citizens must be offered justification for the exercise of political power that has convincing force in light of standards that are accessible to them, a distinction is made between democracy as a legitimation principle and as an organizational principle. The first gives rise to a deliberative concept of democracy, while the latter points us to some institutional prerequisites that constitute the yardstick for addressing the actual democratic deficits of the Union.

What form of democracy is needed in the post‐national configuration? The EU is not a state and its power is limited. However, although the member states hold the means of legitimate violence in reserve, the EU has achieved competences and capabilities similar to authoritative government. The point of government is not state in its collectivistic, nationalistic reading, but democratic institutions. A non‐state entity can amount to government in so far as it performs the functions of authorized jurisdictions. In line with this, the Union can be considered as a state‐less government that finds part of its justification as a regional subset of a larger cosmopolitan order. The legitimacy requirement of such a governmental order must be different from that of a fully authorized power‐wielding polity. Nevertheless, due to the democratic deficit, it is not possible to establish the conditions under which a process of public justification is deemed legitimate.

The democratic legitimation of national governments involves conformity to two generally accepted principles: that legitimation takes place with reference to a national demos, and that both governors and government policy derive transparently from direct elections among coherent political parties. The manifest failure of the EU to satisfy these principles has given rise to the idea of a ‘democratic deficit’. This chapter discusses alternatives to direct legitimation through top‐tier institutions of party government, in particular, through focusing on the role of national parliaments in European governance and on liberal models of democracy. The differences and the more important similarities between the attitudes of survey respondents from national parliaments and the EP are explored in this context.

The institutional frictions between the Parliament and the Commission during the ‘mad cow’ crisis are emblematic of the dynamic, unfinished nature of the federal project for Europe. The EU still retains many of the qualities of an international organization, but has also developed a government-like institutional structure. This government is conventionally described as confederal because it is dominated by its member states, but in some respects, the EU is more federal than confederal. As the complexity of EU food safety regulation illustrates, this amalgam of intergovernmental, confederal, and federal features gives the EU its distinctive character.

Examines the peculiarities of political representation in the EU. Who represents whom in the European Union? Member States are represented via their governments in the Council, the peoples of the same Member States are represented in the directly elected European Parliament, the regions in the Committee of the Regions, and finally various economic and social groups in the Economic and Social Committee. But is there a political representation of the EU as a whole? The article argues that this is not just a purely theoretical question, but has important practical effects, among others in differentiated integration including the Eurozone arrangements. The European Parliament is directly affected by this situation in which several scenarios are possible. A forward EP strategy would consist in defending its right to represent the whole of the EU, not just its composing parts. This would be close to a federal option. Other scenarios include a strengthening of national parliaments, or––in the worst case––a weakening of political representation both in the Member States and the EU with possible substantial damages for the existing democratic systems.

This chapter describes the final element of the convergence of European public law around the legitimating structures and normative principles of the postwar constitutional settlement: national parliamentary scrutiny of European policy making. The chapter begins by describing the pivotal change in European public law—the vast expansion of supranational regulatory power with the Single European Act (SEA) of 1986—as well as the failure of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) to police that expansion through the subsidiarity principle in the 1990s. This policing function thus fell to the Member States themselves, and it is in that regard that national parliamentary scrutiny took on greater importance. European scrutiny mechanisms had existed in certain countries (notably Denmark and the United Kingdom) as early as the 1970s. Nevertheless, it was not until after the vast expansion of supranational regulatory power in 1986, continuing through the effort to reform the democratic foundations of integration into the 2000s, that national parliamentary scrutiny became a significant element of integration law and politics. In the 2000s, moreover, attention to the national parliamentary role translated into significant changes in supranational law. The so-called ‘subsidiarity early-warning mechanism’ of the now-defunct Constitutional Treaty, carried over to the Treaty of Lisbon, built directly on the national developments of the prior two decades. The chapter concludes that national parliamentary scrutiny reflects both the importance of mediated legitimacy in European governance as well as its ‘polycentric’ constitutional character.

This chapter compares the policy and political outcomes that followed from the institutional structures generated by the European Convention, the Treaty of Lisbon, and the default outcome of a failure of negotiations during the process of European integration, the Treaty of Nice. The institutions produced under these different arrangements empowered different actors to create the policies of the EU. The comparison is based on the theory of veto players and is aimed at demonstrating the potential differences in policy outcomes for the EU had future policies been made in each of these institutional settings. In particular, it focuses on the effects of different institutional arrangements on the democratic deficit and the extent to which they strengthen the capacity of the judiciary powers and the bureaucracy to create policies independently from electorally accountable actors.

The “democratic deficit view” of global political justice holds that the existing structure of world political order is insufficiently democratic. Institutions should be reformed or restructured so that individuals whose interests are substantially affected by political decisions are provided with procedural means of exerting leverage over the mechanisms by which these decisions are made. This view rests on the precept that people whose interests are put at risk by the decisions of others should have a share of control over these decisions. But it is a mistake to extract this precept from its place within a broader theory of democracy and to rely on it as if it were a stand-alone principle. In its exclusive focus on the formal relationship between those affected by political decisions and the mechanisms through which these decisions are reached, the democratic deficit view conveys an excessively simple idea of the deficiencies of the existing structure and focuses attention on strategies for reform that do not realistically address the deficiencies. Once we grasp the complexity of these reasons we can see that the range of institutional remedies is broader and perhaps more achievable than it may have appeared.