This book focuses on the impact of European integration on national democracies. It argues that the democratic deficit is indeed a problem, but not so much at the level of the European Union per se as at the national level. This is because national leaders and publics have yet to come to terms with the institutional impact of the EU on the traditional workings of their national democracies. The book begins with a discussion of what the EU is — a new form ofregional statein which sovereignty is shared, boundaries are variable, identity composite, and democracy fragmented. But the main focus of ... More

This book focuses on the impact of European integration on national democracies. It argues that the democratic deficit is indeed a problem, but not so much at the level of the European Union per se as at the national level. This is because national leaders and publics have yet to come to terms with the institutional impact of the EU on the traditional workings of their national democracies. The book begins with a discussion of what the EU is — a new form ofregional statein which sovereignty is shared, boundaries are variable, identity composite, and democracy fragmented. But the main focus of the book is on how the EU has altered national governance practices, thereby challenging national ideas about democracy. It finds that the EU’s ‘policy without politics’ has led to ‘politics without policy’ at the national level. The book also shows that institutional ‘fit’ matters. The compound EU, in which governing activity is highly dispersed among multiple authorities, is more disruptive to simple polities like Britain and France, where governing activity has traditionally been more concentrated in a single authority, than to similarly compound polities like Germany and Italy. The book concludes that the real problem for member-states is not so much that their democratic practices have changed as that national ideas and discourse about democracy have not. The failure has been one of the communicative discourse to the general public — a problem which again has been more pronounced for simple polities, despite political leaders’ potentially greater capacity to communicate through a single voice, than for compound polities, where the coordinative discourse among policymakers predominates.