På väg mot ett mer demokratiskt EU? : - en studie av Lissabonfördraget

Abstract Since democracy was developed in the ancient Greece it has come to be used within a small city state, within the national state and as today used within a bigger perspective. After the end of the second world war political leaders wanted to make sure that there would never be a war between European countries again. Now, about 60 years later this type of cooperation now involves 27 of the European countries and goes under the name of the Euroapean Union. This means that democracy is no longer used just within the nation state, but within a big organisation that is responsible for almost 500 million Europeans lives. This also means that the European Union need to make some institutional reforms to be able to handle all the future challenges. The European Union is often accused of not being democratic enough and in my thesis I wanted to see what if there were any suggestions for a more democratic union within the new Lisbon treaty. The aim with this thesis has been to investigate if the European Union can be more democratic in the futher according to those changes that is listed in the Lisbon treaty. My comprehensive objective is: does the European Union have any intentions of making the democratic bas within the union more democratic in the new Lisbon treaty? My other objectives are: How democratic is the EU today? How does the democratic base within the EU look like today? How does the democratic base change in the new Lisbon treaty? I have used a qualitative text analysis as a method to answer my questions because it’s a good method to use when we want to investigate organisational changes for example. The result of my thesis has shown that some democratic changes are expressed in the Lisbon treaty and that they will make the EU a little bit more democratic in the future