What Should Be Democratized? The Peculiarity of Democracy in Europe

Abstract

What are the criteria to judge the democratic quality of the European Union? Is it possible to reconcile our democratic criteria with the intense, extensive complexity of a polity such as the European Union? In order to answer these questions appropriately, it is helpful to begin with the acknowledgement that we do not have an acceptable theory of democracy for anything more complex than nation states. That is why we must develop a political taxonomy that does not sacrifice the complexity of the European Union to the comfort of our well-established concepts. If we do not take into account the EU’s principal democratic innovations it is not possible to criticize its democratic weaknesses. As I will show, this lack of attention to the integration process is what makes certain attempts to exert national control over the democraticity of Communitarian decisions questionable.