18
Joseph H. H. Weiler
Introduction générale
You might think that since those early days the European Parliament
is a very different body, hugely increased in powers and a veritable Co-
Legislator with the Council. And yet there is the persistent, chronic, trou-
bling Democracy Deficit, which cannot be talked away. The manifestations
of the so-called democracy deficit are persistent and no endless repetition of
the powers of the European Parliament will remove them. In essence it is the
inability of the Union to develop structures and processes which adequately
replicate or, ‘translate’, at the Union level even the imperfect habits of govern-
mental control, parliamentary accountability and administrative responsibil-
ity that are practiced with different modalities in the various Member States.
Make no mistake: it is perfectly understood that the Union is not a State. But it
is in the business of governance and has taken over extensive areas previously
in the hands of the Member States. In some critical areas, such as the interface
of the Union with the international trading system, the competences of the
Union are exclusive. In others they are dominant. Democracy is not about
States. Democracy is about the exercise of public power – and the Union ex-
ercises a huge amount of public power. We live by the credo that any exercise
of public power has to be legitimated democratically and it is exactly here that
process legitimacy fails.
In essence, the two primordial features of any functioning democracy are
missing – the grand principles of accountability and representation.
As regards accountability, even the basic condition of representative demo
cracy that at election time the citizens ‘…can throw the scoundrels out’ – that
is replace the Government – does not operate in Europe. The form of European
governance, governance without Government, is, and will remain for consid-
erable time, perhaps forever such that there is no ‘Government’ to throw out.
Dismissing the Commission by Parliament (or approving the appointment of
the Commission President) is not quite the same, not even remotely so.
Startlingly, but not surprisingly, political accountability of Europe is
remarkably weak. There have been some spectacular political failures of
European governance. The embarrassing Copenhagen climate fiasco; the
weak (at best) realisation of the much touted Lisbon Agenda (aka Lisbon
Strategy or Lisbon Process), the very story of the defunct ‘Constitution’ to
mention but three. It is hard to point in these instances to any measure of
political accountability, of someone paying a political price as would be the
case in national politics. In fact it is difficult to point to a single instance of
accountability for political failure as distinct from personal accountability for
