Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-mlc7c Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-14T04:12:46.308Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

23 - Ideologies of EU Democracy since 1950

from Democracy and Legitimacy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 October 2023

By
Claudia Sternberg
Edited by
Mathieu Segers  and
Steven Van Hecke
Mathieu Segers
Affiliation:
Universiteit Maastricht, Netherlands
Steven Van Hecke
Affiliation:
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
Get access

Summary

How democratic were the European Communities, and later the European Union (EU), how democratic did they need to be, and what would this mean in the first place? Throughout the course of European integration, none of the answers was self-evident, and all were the stuff of continuous discursive construction, reconstruction and contestation. In this chapter I trace shifts and clashes in collective imaginations of EU democracy since 1950, exploring how what it made sense to say about EU democracy changed over time. I analyse discourses, or ensembles of ideas, concepts, narratives or categories, through which meaning was given to ‘democracy’, for the case of the EU and its institutional predecessors (for the sake of better readability, I sometimes use the label ‘EU’ to refer both to the EU as such and to its institutional predecessors in this chapter).

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of the European Union , pp. 652 - 672
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Recommended Reading

Bang, H., Jensen, M. D. and Nedergaard, P.. ‘“We the People” versus “We the Heads of States”: The Debate on the Democratic Deficit of the European Union’, Policy Studies 36, no. 2 (2015): 196–216.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kohler-Koch, B. and Rittberger, B. (eds.). Debating the Democratic Legitimacy of the European Union (Lanham, MD, Rowman & Littlefield, 2007).Google Scholar
Piattoni, S. (ed.). The European Union: Democratic Principles and Institutional Architectures in Times of Crisis (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2015).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sternberg, C. S. The Struggle for EU Legitimacy: Public Contestation, 1950–2005 (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×