In her influential study of political representation, Hanna Pitkin suggested that this was ‘an extraordinarily fragile and demanding human institution’ (1967: 155). As Albert Weale (2007: 153-4) has recently observed, one of Pitkin’s important, though perhaps under-developed, contributions in that work was to suggest that the democratic quality of political representation can emerge as the product of a complex ‘system’ of representation, which ‘must look after the public interest and be responsive to public opinion’ (Pitkin, 1967: 224). No one doubts the complexity of the EU ‘representative system’, yet many have felt that to acquire a democratic character it needs to be simplified in a more supranational direction and be based on supranational institutions and actors, while phasing out or limiting the more or less direct representation of the member states’ interests. In this paper we seek to argue the opposite and to suggest that provisions, such as those strengthening the role of national parliaments in the Lisbon Treaty, that might further develop the inter-national character of the EU’s decision-making offer a more satisfactory way to represent the European demoi. Our argument is that checks and balances and counter-majoritarian devices that protect state interests can be justified within the EU in ways they would not necessarily be within national democracies. That arises because the particular tasks that the EU exists to fulfil that are largely of an inter-national character. However, these still require democratic legitimacy, which an international form of democracy can provide.
