A Potemkin Democracy?

Abstract

Ever since the 1970s, “parliamentarization” as Europe’s has been conceived as the voie royale to the gradual democratization of EU polity, and reform treaties have attempted to shape and stage Europe as a “representative democracy” comme les autres. Yet, the handling of the recent crisis of the Eurozone over the past six years has highlighted the continued precariousness of democratic legitimacy in the context of the European Union. Drawing on results from the political science literature, this chapter points at the relative failure of this sophisticated institutional engineering of a European “representative democracy,” always at risk of appearing as a mere “Potemkin democracy.” Part of this failure to re-orient Europe’s political trajectory lies, I suggest, in our inability to seize Europe as it really is. Vauchez,