“Democracy and Integration After Amsterdam”

Chryssochoo, Dimitris N. (1999) “Democracy and Integration After Amsterdam”. In European Union Studies Association (EUSA) > Biennial Conference > 1999 (6th), June 2-5, 1999, pages 21, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Abstract

One of the paradoxes about the study of the European Union (EU) is that, although the latter virtually defies any authoritative definition, no other system of governance has been attributed so many different labels. The following neologisms drawn from the acquis académique capture the Union’s ontological complexity: profederation, confederance, concordance system, quasi-state, mixed polity, Staatenverbund, consortio, condominio, sympolity, regulatory state, regional regime, market polity, managed Gesellschaf, cognitive region, joint decision-system, multilevel republic, directly-deliberative polyarchy, stateless market, polycracy, confederal consociation, mixed commonwealth, international state, etc. Whether or not these attributes are indeed “trapped in a state-oriented mode of thinking” (Jachtenfuchs, Diez, and Jung, 1998), they only capture part of a rather more complicated reality. An indication that the Union is, to borrow from a technocrat, an “unidentified political object”? [Jacques Delors, attributed] Whatever the answer, integration scholarship is still in search of a reliable theory as the basis for the future of the EU.