Democracy in the European Union
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Book Review Democracy in the European Union Alex Warleigh Sage Publications Ltd, London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi, 2003, 156pp. Paperback, ISBN 0: 7619 7281. Acta Politica (2005) 40, 480–481. doi:10.1057/palgrave.ap.5500084
The central argument of this excellent book is that the European Union (EU) needs democratizing in order to minimize the ‘democratic deficit’ whose main components are deficit in legitimacy and participation (pp. 6 and 2, respectively). As all students of democratic politics know, democracy suffers from a deficit of the clarity of definition. All these deficits add up to a surplus of interpretations of the concept of democracy, but legitimacy and participation are indisputable and necessary (even if not sufficient) characteristics of a democratic polity. One thing we can all agree on is that legitimacy and participation are tightly connected to a form of identity — citizenship — which in all its democratic thrust is, rather undemocratically, an exclusionary form of modern identity, connected to the nation-state. The EU is, at this stage, a league of democratic nation-states, making a unique attempt at democratic politics beyond the nation-state and at the creation of a European transnational (depending on one’s view of the nuances, possibly a postnational) democratic polity. However, at the risk of stating the obvious: citizens in whose name this polity seeks to democratize do not identify with the polity nor engage with its political processes sufficiently to make these reforms practicable. How else can we explain the pathetically low turnout in the last European elections in 2004? The EU fails on account of accountability, therefore legitimacy, even if not necessarily the effectiveness (see Fritz Scharf, Beetham and Lord). The public policy maybe well served by the EU, but in terms of transparency and methods we do not like its decision-making processes. Warleigh’s well-structured, wellresearched and well-written book provides some well-thought out suggestions for improvement. In seven clearly identified chapters, we are taken step by step through every concept, question and debate relevant to the current academic thinking about the EU. Following an overview of the EU–democracy relationship, the second chapter sets out the case for the solution to the problem: critical deliberativist approach. This approach is based on the acknowledgement that Monnet’s ‘fusion of functionalism and federalism was miscalculated’ (p. 30); moreover, that the perception that integration should follow a federal model, based on
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‘liberal democracy blueprint’ (LDB) increases rather than decreases the EU’s problems of democratic legitimacy. Instead, it is necessary ‘to return to the functionalist view of integration as a set of functionally and territorially diverse ‘clusters of cooperation’’ (p. 31). In deliberative democracy, then, divergent views about how integration should proceed and indeed, what the integration process should create can be accommodated. It allows for many goods, now lacking in
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