The Convention of the the European Council of Laeken in 2001, was put in charge of drafting a new treaty for Europe. The main objective of this draft Treaty was to clearly define: "how to bring citizens closer to the European aim, and to European Institutions, by organizing politics in the European arena according to an enlarged Union, and how to develop the Union into a stable entity and a model for the new world order.
The European Union continues to play an important role in traditional domestic areas of policy making, but many people still see the Union as a distant body, and believe that they have little involvement or influence in it. The only body which represents citizens is the European Parliament, which is by far the weakest in the group. This lack of public accountability in the European Union is known as the "democratic deficit". This term refers to, "the idea that decisions in the EU are in some ways insufficiently representative of, or accountable to, the nations and people of Europe" (Lord, 2001). The examination of the deficit does not only involve a discussion of the role of the European Parliament (EP), but also involves the role of the other institutions and the perception of those institutions by the citizens. Though the democratic deficit of the EU goes back a long way, politicians began to take this issue seriously only from 1992. The ambitious "Maastricht Treaty", aimed at achieving the Economic and Monetary Union and also deepening the political integration that appeared to go beyond the European scope of activities. The Danish voters rejected the treaty, causing turmoil on the currency markets. Thus, the EU tried to fulfill the essential requirements of a modern democracy, in order to silence, or atleast subdue the crisis for more than a decade. However, Critics say that this supranational construction is neither democratic nor legitimate. Despite its efforts, the European Union is still unable to correspond to traditional democracies. This leads us to ask what the democratic deficit is and how it may be resolved. However, it must be specified that the EU is not a nation-state. Thus the feasibility and the relevance of a democratic system at the European level will be questioned in this document. Firstly, it explains how the democratic deficit appeared and what its role is in the institutional functioning of the Union, and in the public opinion. Secondly, shows that the democratic deficit tends to weaken the various sets of reforms and sociological evolutions.
[...] The basic idea of the institutional democratic deficit is as follows: transfer of legislative powers from the national to the EU institutions, has not been matched by an equivalent degree of democratic accountability and legislative input on the part of the European Parliament, the only directly elected institution at the EU level.” Thus, the democratic deficit would be due to the weak power of the European Parliament in the decision-making process. The numerous initiatives aiming to strengthen the power of the EU, have failed to transfer the necessary power to this institution. [...]
[...] An obvious democratic deficit In their analysis, Banchoff and Smith highlight that the Maastricht Treaty was the starting point of a new European context: a period of protests. From that moment, European elite could no longer forge ahead as they had in the previous decade”. This statement shows that the European integration took place before the Maastricht Treaty, and was legitimated by an implicit consensus between the citizens of the member states and their elite. This tacit agreement was broken as soon as the EU went beyond its role of economical regulation, and stated to involve the political levels. [...]
[...] All these elements stress that the democratic deficit is due to an initial strategy, which seemed legitimate for the European Union at the beginning of the integration, but, is no longer adapted to the configuration of Europe. The EU has grown, for a long time without any democratic process. The election of the European Parliament by the process of direct suffrage can be considered a manifestation of the realization of the importance of developing a unique method of governance, which does not respond to the basic requirements of modern democracies. [...]
[...] Thus, the priority would be less to reach an institutional functioning, respecting the basic of their requirements of democracy and weakening the democratic deficit. Consequently, a new perspective is opened. Maybe it is not relevant to try to turn the EU into a traditional democracy, but it would be rather useful to develop informal networks of participation instead. Thus, debates which concern the democratic deficit at the European level could be liberated from the national perspective and analysis. References that are used to argue, are either that the EU lacks democratic substance, or related to [...]
[...] This model would help resolve the whole democratic deficit, without the reversal of the European integration; that is to say that the Union would not shift to an intergovernmental direction as is often advocated. Moreover, the federation of nation states defined as a “union of states in a body politic” simplifies the issue of the European identity. In this case, a multi level of identity is sustainable in the federation which would be defined as a “union of people in a body politic”. [...]
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