The Crisis and Prospects for Rescuing Democracy in Europe

The crisis entails that member states occupy permanently different roles and statuses in the EU, engendering differentiation. The term encompasses traditional understandings of differentiated integration as mainly consisting of the same integration only at different speeds. Yet it also includes two new differences between member states that are likely to be wider and more lasting: first, cases where some states integrate more closely whilst, at the same time and for connected reasons, others disintegrate from their previous levels of involvement with the Union; and second, cases where even notionally full members come to be regarded as having different membership status. To what extent is that an apt depiction of the EU’s current situation? What does it entail for the prospects of developing a viable European representative democracy? How might today’s EU overcome the destructive mutations wrought by the crisis and the way it has been handled thus far?