In the current debate on the future European order, the European Union is often described as an emerging federation. The paper claims that federalism is not only useful in deliberating about the future of the European Union. It provides a better understanding of the current structure and...

The most urgent problem facing the European Union is to develop the best approach to conflicts over integration in the fields of culture, economics and foreign policy. The paper argues that a particular form of democratic integration is better than the two predominant approaches. This approach...

In democratic theory it goes without saying that people should establish their own politicalorders.1 Perhaps the most famous expression of this moral intuition is found in the preambleof the American constitution. By the opening phrase ‘we the people … establish thisconstitution’ the...

This paper pursues two objectives, one theoretical the other empirical. First, by keeping separate two grand strands in the EU studies literature, one on the design and reform of EU institutions and the other on the EU’s ‘democratic deficit’, EU scholars are foreclosing the opportunity to...

The authors discuss potential sources of legitimacy of the EU, i. e. of the normative bindingness of its decisions. After rejecting the views that such legitimacy is either not needed, not feasible, or provided for already, they focus upon the corrosive impact of the EU upon democratic...

The Convention appears to many as both a confirmation of the thesis of the new institutionalism on the value of institutions for shaping the outcome of constitutional politics (the politics of creating EU fundamental rules) and a new model for democratic deliberative politics. From this second...