"Democracy, sovereignty, and supernationality: institution-building and European Union in a neofunctionalist perspective"

Saeter, Martin. (1993) "Democracy, sovereignty, and supernationality: institution-building and European Union in a neofunctionalist perspective". In: UNSPECIFIED, Washington, DC. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

[From the Introduction]. In the middle of the 1960s, European integration was in a state of crisis, not least because of governmental - i.e. French - opposition against the proposed expansion of the supranational powers of the Community institutions, which was felt as a threat to national sovereignty. It took two decades to reach - in the framework of the Single European Act (SEA) - a kind of institutional balance between supranational Community competences and procedures on the one hand and formalized intergovernmental guidance of the integration process as a whole on the other. The new dynamic development which the SEA of 1985 gave rise to was, however, soon to make another serious imbalance more acute, this time between the combination of supranational and intergovernmental Community competence on the one hand and demands for more democratic influence and control on the other. This “democratic deficit" imbalance gave rise to broad popular resistance in certain member countries against the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty of 1991, the seemingly logical and important follow-up of the SEA. Now the protest was against what to many people seemed to be a too great increase in the combined strength of governments and supranational Community institutions at the expense of the powers of national parliaments and other democratically elected organs (Williams 1991).

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