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The past 15 years have seen declining public support for European integration, and widespread suggestions that a legitimacy crisis faces the European Union (EU). Many in the EU have believed that this problem could be effectively tackled by vesting greater powers in the European Parliament (EP), the Union's only directly-elected institution. The central argument of this book is that, while considerable efforts have been made to increase the status of the EP, it is in crucial respects a failure as a representative body. This failure is grounded in the manner in which the parliament is elected. The electoral systems used for EP elections in many EU countries are, we argue, actively obstructive of Europe's voters being represented in the way that they are most likely to respond positively towards. While the behaviour of EP members is shaped strongly by the electoral systems under which they are elected (which vary across the 25 member-states of the EU), the electoral systems currently in place push most of them to behave in ways contrary to what citizens desire. Drawing on public opinion data, surveys of MEPs and considerable qualitative interview evidence, we show that the failure of parliamentary representation in the EU has a strong foundation in electoral institutions.
In recent years the financial and economic crisis of 2008–9 has progressed into an equally important political and democratic crisis of the EU. These troubled times have set the framework to re-assess a number of important questions in regard to representative democracy in the EU, such as the normative foundation of political representation, the institutional relationship between representatives and represented, the link between democracy and representation and new arenas and actors. This book examines the diverse avenues through which different sorts of actors have expressed their voices during the Euro crisis and how their various interests are translated into the decision-making process. It offers a state-of- the-art assessment of what political representation means in this context as well as a contribution to the ‘representative turn’ in democratic theory. The authors address three key themes: • The main actors and channels of political representation in the EU. • Interlocking levels of representation in the EU and the way in which national and supranational representation works. • How the European institutional system represents EU citizens through law and administration. Focusing on the importance of representation in the legitimation of democracy, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of European Union politics, European studies, democratic theory, representation studies, civil society and transnational democracy.
How can the European Union engage and connect with the people it aims to represent? What initiatives and schemes have been used to engage EU citizens? To what extent can such procedures be considered a move forward towards a more participative and democratic Europe? This collection of internationally recognised specialists in European integration and innovative democratic practices seek to answer these key questions, explore European citizens’ thoughts and opinions about the EU and evaluate the governing elite’s attempts to engage with the public. It offers critical analysis of EU justifications and strategies for implementing Deliberative Citizens Involvement Projects and focuses on some of the major participative experiences trialled and implemented by EU institutions. By comparing these different attempts to increase and bolster the participation of EU citizens and evaluating their impact the book offers valuable and original material on the civic involvement of EU citizens and the legitimacy of the EU decision making process.
This book is a study of the multiple meanings of European citizenship, which has been represented and publicly communicated by the European Commission in five distinctive ways – Homo Oeconomicus (1951-1972), A People's Europe (1973-1992), Europe of Transparency (1993-2004), Europe of Agorai (2005-2009) and Europe of Rights (2010-2014). The public communication of these five distinct representations of European citizenship reveal how the European Commission conceived of and attempted to facilitate the development of a Civil Europe. Ultimately this history, which is based upon an analysis of public communication policy papers and interviews with senior European Commission officials past and present, tells a story about changing identities and about who we as Europeans might actually be and what kind of Europe we might actually belong to.
Civil, economic, political and social rights are at the centre of the concept of European citizenship. In this volume, the focus is on the political-constitutional dimension of European citizen­ship, which is discussed from the perspective of several disciplines – history, constitutional law and political science. It provides a multi-faceted account of the evolution of European citizenship and its institutionalization, explaining why certain rights came into existence at a certain time and focussing on several key actors involved, such as the European Court of Justice.
This book explores the various ways in which citizens are represented in EU policy-making. Most accounts naturally focus on the European Parliament as the prime source of democratic representation. This collection focuses instead on four other channels that are as and often more important: namely, representation via governments, national parliaments, civil society organisations and directly, via referenda. Based on original research, the book combines democratic theory with detailed empirical analysis to provide an innovative, timely and up-to-date evaluation of the nature of representation in the EU. Policy advisors, practitioners and those scholars interested in democracy and the European Union will find this volume to be a valuable resource. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of European Integration.
Representing Europeans takes a fresh and quizzical look at the problems facing the European Union. Bringing decades of experience to bear on the deep, structural problems currently facing the EU, Richard Rose spells out why it can no longer carry on with integration by stealth. Extraordinary challenges — such as saving the Eurozone and maintaining the free movement of peoples — now impose high-profile economic and political costs. These create huge political strains which EU institutions struggle to cope with. Rose shows the ways in which Europe's institutions do and do not represent its citizens, sometimes equally and sometimes unequally. This threatens worse crises of EU authority because people retain the power as national citizens to protest against their government making commitments in Brussels that they do not accept. The book's pragmatic approach rejects the assumption that more European integration is the solution for all of Europes problems. Likewise, it rejects UK withdrawal from the European Union because Britain cannot stop the world and get off. Instead, it suggests a pragmatic approach that asks about proposals emanating from Brussels: What problem does it address? How will this policy work? What are its visible costs and benefits? Instead of 'one size fits all' policies being imposed on 27 diverse countries, Rose recommends that enhanced European cooperation should be based on coalitions of the willing. Moreover, the active use of pan-European referendums on major reforms can test popular commitment to EU treaties that permanently advance European integration. Both European federalists and diehard Eurosceptics will alternately agree and disagree with the argument of this book. But they cannot ignore the challenge it raises to pay more attention to the concerns of the half a billion Europeans whom they claim to represent. The paperback edition contains a substantial new Preface.
Although great efforts have been made to understand citizenship, it has remained a contested concept, largely because of the problem of the changing relationship between citizens and their community of membership or belonging. The European Union poses the most recent and dramatic change to this definition of citizenship. Arguing that citizenship must be explored from a perspective that takes this continual change into account, Antje Wiener develops the concept of citizenship practice; the process of policymaking and/or political participation which contributes to creating the terms of citizenship. The approach draws on both comparative social, historical literature on the state and the new historical institutionalism in European integration theories. “European” Citizenship Practice advances a discursive analysis of citizenship practice based on these related bodies of literature, which lie at the heart of this important contribution to citizenship studies.
"This book brings together academics as well as practitioners to give a forward-looking, holistic view of the realities of EU citizen participation across the spectrum of participatory opportunities"--
This book provides an original argument that rejects the idea of national MPs having but one ‘standard’ mode of representation. It acknowledges the national electoral connection, but considers representation beyond national borders. The author empirically investigates such patterns of representation in MPs’ parliamentary speech-making behavior and their attitudes in Austria, Germany, Ireland and the UK. The book analyzes representative claims in parliamentary debates on the Constitutional Treaty, the Lisbon Treaty and the Eurozone crisis, and relies on qualitative interviews with members of the European affairs and budget committees. It finds a Eurosceptic Europeanization in that national MPs from the Eurosceptic left particularly represent other EU citizens.