The Legacy of an Evolving Polity: Democracy, National Identity, and the Good Functioning of the EU

The overarching research question posed in this volume is whether national parliaments (NPs) exhibit resilience or resignation in the aftermath of the Lisbon Treaty and the euro crisis. To grasp the political and discursive contexts in which the continuous delegation of powers from the Member States and their parliaments to the EU unravelled—one is advised to take a brief look back at the history. This is the topic of the first section. The section after that explicates why the Lisbon Treaty and the euro crisis have been fundamental to NPs’ positioning on the EU’s constitutional map. On that basis, the notions of ‘national identity’ and ‘good functioning of the EU’ are decomposed and reconstructed as core determinants of the permanence of NPs in European public law. The chapter argues that the manner in which NPs shape these two notions constitutes the linchpin of the discursive component of EU democracy, which has been at the heart of the problem of the Union’s legitimacy for decades. This will enable one to understand why EU-related activity of parliaments has grown, despite the modesty in their formal powers. The chapter ends by outlining the structure of the book