The European Union institutions in the draft Constitution for Europe

This paper deals with the Institutions of the European Union in the draft Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe (hereinafter: the draft Constitution ) submitted to the European Council meeting in Thessaloniki on 20 June 2003. It describes these institutions and their task from a perspective of the Union s democratic legitimacy. The paper is based on a book entitled The European Union: a Polity of States and Peoples, which will be published by Stanford University Press and Hart Publishing, Oxford. In this book, I examine the democratic legitimacy of the European Union as a whole. The book parts from the proposition that the Union is a body politic which develops into a federal system, however not a State, with a parliamentary consensual (non-majoritarian) form of government. In the meantime, the draft Treaty has been amended by the Inter-Governmental Conference (IGC) held in Brussels on 17 18 June 2004. In so far as the amendments relate to the subject of this paper, they are mentioned below in the text or the endnotes.