Power and Legitimacy: Reconciling Europe and the Nation-State

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Don't have an account? Sign in via your Institution Sign in. Purchase Subscription prices and ordering Short-term Access To purchase short term access, please sign in to your Oxford Academic account above. This article is also available for rental through DeepDyve. In that spirit, this piece seeks respond to certain points made in Dr.

Rather, it concerns his critique of the court for relying on understandings of democracy centered on the nation-state, and, by implication, for being insufficiently imaginative about the possibilities of a new kind of democracy at the EU level. The suggestion, which we have seen made before by others, is that the German Constitutional Court should recognize, as so many sophisticated theorists have done, that new, non-hierarchical forms of democracy are possible in the EU, ones not necessarily tied to representative government on the national level.

If the German court were only to appreciate these conceptual possibilities, the argument seems to go, then it could become an imaginative force for rethinking the nature of democracy in the European context, while also allowing the EU to address the number of serious crises confronting it. This is all fine and good on a theoretical level.

And this political-cultural hesitancy on the part of Europeans, if that is what it is, finds expression in judicial decision making.

The problem with the EU is two-fold. On the one hand, it purports to be based on representative democracy on the national level see Article 10 TEU post-Lisbon ; but on the other, with ever increasing delegations of authority, it threatens to empty national democracy of its historical and culturally recognizable content, without replacing it with forms of governance that are themselves experienced as democratic.

They see the legitimacy of the EU is derivative, delegated, and essentially that of a large-scale administrative agent, which should be constitutionally judged accordingly. European Union Treaty [] 1 CMLR 57 , which are designed to preserve some semblance of constitutional democracy on the national level while still allowing further integration to proceed. But there is a deeper issue here as well, going to the very heart of what Europe stands or wants to stand for: With the border crisis another boundary re-emerged in the political discourse: There are other problems in the East: Do we have German Europe today rather than European Germany?

Is not the Union best understood as a cooperative enterprise among the member states aimed principally at securing economic prosperity through free trade promotion, as many people in the UK seem to believe? All students are expected to produce one 2, word formative essay during the course.