The European Union as a model of transnational democracy : an analysis of three policy sectors

This thesis’ principal concern is an analysis of the European Union’s (EU’s) experiment in transnational democracy. It contends that the distinct but related processes of globalisation and European integration, or Europeanisation, are restricting the autonomy and diffusing the sovereign authority of the state. Traditionally the legitimacy of sovereign states has been anchored to the popular sovereignty of their citizens but a dispersal of the sovereign authority of the state raises the issue of how democratic legitimacy can be rearticulated in order to sustain a correspondence between the demos and institutions of governance. Using Fritz Scharpf’s composite typology of input and output-oriented legitimacy the thesis considers the institutional and normative potential of the EU as a site of transnational democracy. Rather than treating the EU as a single entity it is viewed as constituting a series of regimes which regulate diverse policy problems incorporating a range of institutional and individual actors. The thesis analyses three different regimes: The European Central Bank; the EU gender rights regime; and the regulation of agro-food biotechnologies. The regimes are differentiated on the basis of their structural, institutional and ideational characteristics. It is argued that the various regimes call for different qualities of decision-making which reflect different configurations of input and output-oriented legitimacy. Following the contention that the regimes call for different qualities of decision-making, three models of transnational democracy are developed which articulate different ‘ideal’ configurations of input and output legitimacy. Each of these models of transnational democracy is applied to a particular EU policy regime to explicate the democratic practices of the regime and to evaluate the normative purchase of the model. The European Central Bank regime is analysed through the model of democratic intergovernmentalism; the EU gender rights regime through the model of cosmopolitan democracy; and the agro-food biotechnologies regulatory regime through the model of deliberative democracy. The logic of mapping the models and regimes is guided by a prima facie resonance between the models’ normative and institutional prescriptions and the structural, institutional and ideational characteristics displayed by the regimes. The findings of the case studies provide the basis for a focused evaluation of the democratic qualities of the policy regimes and critique of all three models of transnational democracy. This analysis informs a broader evaluation of the democratic predicament and potential of the EU in a globalising world. In conclusion, some final remarks are offered in relation to the future of European transnational democracy with some suggestions for future research possibilities.