The Concept Of New Democratic Legitimacy And The Future Of The European Union

Both academic research and political debate have focused on the European Union’s much-mentioned but little-understood ‘democratic deficit’. By contrast, this article shifts the emphasis to the issue of the EU’s crisis of legitimacy. It begins by suggesting that neither the process nor the outcomes of EU-wide decision-making appears to command majority support. Is this lack of democratic legitimacy merely the result of institutional ‘design faults’ or does it reflect a wider and deeper crisis underpinning the EU’s entire political project? My argument is that the dominant models of integration – neo-functional supranationalism and liberal intergovernmentalism – rest on three errors: (1) the primacy of economic integration over political union, which has led to a marketstate that is disembedded from society and a citizenry that is subordinated to the joint rule of the economic and the political; (2) a premature process of constitutionalisation that culminated in the rejection of the 2005 Constitutional Treaty and the flawed Lisbon Treaty; (3) the current institutional arrangements that concentrate power in the hands of supranational institutions and national governments at the expense of the Union’s citizenry. The first section puts the question of democratic legitimacy in the context of the EU’s current slide towards disintegration. Section two provides an account of the EU’s crisis of legitimacy and explores the main causes that have led to this predicament. Section three suggests that some of the origins can be traced to the inception of the European project in the post-1945 era. Section four argues that the prospect for a core EU (around the Eurozone countries) is rapidly receding. Section five outlines a new settlement that focuses on the idea of a Europe of nations, while the final section develops this thinking in the direction of a civic commonwealth that is grounded in the shared culture of European countries.