The European Union and the democratic deficit

Résumé du document

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.

Extraits

[...] We shall now see what the two perspectives of the democratic deficit are. While democratic deficit consists of one concept, it could be explained and analyzed according to two different perspectives: the institutional and the socio-psychological ones. 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. [...]

[...] 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. Thus the European decisions which affected citizens needed to be legitimated through a democratic process. It is advisable to evoke and analyze both the source of the democratic deficit, and its transposition at the institutional level. This concept must be analyzed from two different perspectives. [...]

[...] The different models of democracy applied to the European context are rather connoted, to the extent that each model illustrates a certain vision of the EU. In other words, the issue of how to resolve the democratic deficit amount will brought to the fore by asking whether it must be permitted for the EU to become a real democracy (to recognize it as a supranational state and as a polity) or rather build this democracy through the Member-states. Quermonne tries to synthesize both the arguments for an intergovernmental and a supranational Europe in his model of European democracy. [...]

[...] 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. - An institutional confusion As stated above, the institutional structure of the EU meets the requirements of efficiency but not those of democracy. Thus the decision making price at the European level does not resemble methods of national governance. [...]

[...] Concluding remarks: Is the democratic deficit a real issue? Most specialists of the European integration admit the existence of a democratic deficit, while others suggest that the debate is misleading. Regarding this issue, Meny and Monavcsik (European Studies manager in Harvard) favor another thesis of democratic deficit. Thus it is preferable to talk about the impression of a democratic deficit in the EU. Monavcsik adds that the EU is nothing tangible, because as a supranational ruler (decisions taken by the qualified majority vote), it is not effective in many domains. [...]