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"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 (Unpublished)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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    Item Type: Conference or Workshop Item (UNSPECIFIED)
    Subjects for non-EU documents: EU policies and themes > Policies & related activities > political affairs > governance: EU & national level
    EU policies and themes > Policies & related activities > political affairs > democracy/democratic deficit
    EU policies and themes > EU institutions & developments > institutional development/policy > general
    EU policies and themes > EU institutions & developments > institutional development/policy > historical development of EC (pre-1986)
    Other > integration theory (see also researching and writing the EU in this section)
    Subjects for EU documents: UNSPECIFIED
    EU Series and Periodicals: UNSPECIFIED
    EU Annual Reports: UNSPECIFIED
    Conference: European Union Studies Association (EUSA) > Biennial Conference > 1993 (3rd), May 27-29, 1993
    Depositing User: Phil Wilkin
    Official EU Document: No
    Language: English
    Date Deposited: 05 Jun 2007
    Page Range: p. 31
    Last Modified: 15 Feb 2011 17:46
    URI: http://aei.pitt.edu/id/eprint/7136

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