Europe’s Democratic Deficits through the Looking Glass: The European Union as a Challenge for Democracy

Despite widespread disagreement about democratic deficits in the European Union (EU), most critics begin by conceiving democ-racy as a problem for the EU. Seeing the EU as undemocratic or insufficiently democratic, they devise institutional innovations to democratize it. These innovations seem to require breaking the traditional link between democracy and the nation-state, which in this context appears outmoded or inappropriate.This article challenges that approach, arguing that it gets the relationship between democracy and the sovereign state wrong—or at least, incomplete—by stressing modern democratic theory’s empirical ties to the state while underestimating their normative significance. The complex interdependence of normative and empirical assumptions informingmodern democratic theorymeans that detaching democracy from the state is much less straightforward than critics often imagine.The essay argues instead for conceiving the EU as a problem for democratic theory.Doing so reveals that democratic theory is ill-equipped to address recent changes in the configuration of rule and new structures of governance associated with European-ization, European integration, and globalization more broadly. This change in perspective highlights important limits in recent democratic theorizing about the EU and clarifies the role of European debates in reinterpreting and reconstructing democracy in the age of globalization. T he problem of democracy in the European Union(EU) has occupied scholars from across the disci-pline of political science and beyond. As European-ization and European integration transform structures of governance throughout the continent, questions abou