EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Democracy and Governance in the European Union

Markus Jachtenfuchs

European Integration online Papers (EIoP), 1997, vol. 1

Abstract: It is generally believed that internationalization undermines governance and democracy. This phenomenon has two dimensions. On the one hand, it is a real process which has to be understood. On the other hand, it constitutes a challenge for a number of concepts and theories in the social sciences as well as in law. These concepts and theories are often implicitly based on the idea of a sovereign nation-state. In consequence, it is difficult to conceptualize even the possibility of the transformation of the state as a result of internationalization. This general problematique is most strongly visible in the European Union which over time has developed into a political system of a new type. This system has enormous consequences on democracy and governance in its member states. The first part of the paper presents a view on the EU's political system which does not preclude the possibility of a fundamental transformation of governance and democracy in the EU by the choice of its basic concepts. The second part presents those features of the EU's political system which are most important for the future of democracy and governance. They are uneven Europeanization, permanent institutional change and new patterns of legitimation. The third part discusses two models of the European Union which might be the result of these processes. They represent two different mixtures of the institutionalization of governance and democracy. Both seem to be at least potentially stable forms of political organization but none of them can be reduced to the traditional forms of'state' and 'international organization'. The final part contains an assessment of the prospective development of the EU in the light of the central features of the EU and the system models discussed in the two previous section.

Keywords: governance; democracy; legitimacy; polity building; political science (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1997-04-10
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://eiop.or.at/eiop/texte/1997-002a.htm Abstract (text/html)
http://eiop.or.at/eiop/texte/1997-002.htm Full text (text/html)
http://eiop.or.at/eiop/pdf/1997-002.pdf Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:erp:eiopxx:p0003

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://eiop.or.at/eiop/

Access Statistics for this article

European Integration online Papers (EIoP) is currently edited by Gerda Falkner

More articles in European Integration online Papers (EIoP) from European Community Studies Association Austria (ECSA-A) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Editorial Assistant (eiop@eiop.or.at this e-mail address is bad, please contact repec@repec.org).

 
Page updated 2024-12-28
Handle: RePEc:erp:eiopxx:p0003