The EU and Democratic Theory: Conceptual and Institucional Innovations

The institutional architecture of the European Union (EU) poses significant challenges to political theory. On the one hand, basic democratic categories –such as representation, democracy, parliamentarism and citizenship– are being reappraised and redefined in the EU context. On the other hand, new terms –such as demoicracy, multilevel and multicentric decision-making system, technocracy, post-democracy, post-national, cosmopolitanism– reflect the conceptual paradigm-shift that is taking place in the post-Westphalian era, which the EU embodies. The EU has given rise to a quasi-federal decision making system which combines supranational (the European Parliament) and intergovernmental (the European Council and the Council) bodies and dimensions. The Maastricht Treaty did also enshrine a dual form of citizenship, national and supranational, which has not equivalent worldwide. Taking into account the effects of the Lisbon Treaty, the aim of my paper is to discuss the challenges that the European multilevel and multicentric decision making configuration poses to democratic theory. Democratizing the EU is, indeed, an urgent task in light of ethnic-nationalist and anti-European populist discourses that are proliferating all across Europe. My aim is, then, to discuss how representative democracy can be (re)thought and (re)conceptualized in a cosmopolitan multilevel polity such as the EU, lacking a single (European) demos.