Panel statement on "Democracy Without ‘A People’"

Stein, Eric. (1999) Panel statement on "Democracy Without ‘A People’". In: UNSPECIFIED, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

I want to speak briefly about the criticism directed at the European Union not only by the usual Euroskeptics and Cassandras but also by presumably objective, friendly observers. The core of the criticism is the insufficient citizen participation in, and control over, policy that has resulted from moving political authority from the national to the supranational Community level. The various strains of this criticism are subsumed under the heading of “democratic deficit,” a series of discrete but related concepts such as lack of popular representation, lack of legitimacy and transparency, lack of accountability, and distance between the decision-making institutions and the citizens. The public debate over this issue gained in intensity in the early 1990s; as it expanded to include the more general issue of the Union’s future shape, other concepts such as solidarity and identity came to the fore.

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