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This article critically examines the democratic theory that informs the German Federal Constitutional Court’s Lisbon Treaty ruling. This is needed because the ruling is ambiguous with regard to what democracy for what Union. In order to analyse the ruling we establish three models of what...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10008645011
How can sociology contribute to the understanding of the social and political transformations that are affecting contemporary Europe? The article proposes that sociological accounts of European integration should focus around the basic problem of internal differentiation and external adaptation...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005040207
How can the EU rectify its legitimacy deficit? On the basis of three logics of political integration we identify explicit strategies for how the legitimacy deficit of the EU can be remedied. The first strategy amounts to a scaling down of the ambitions of the polity-makers in the EU. If pursued...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005040208
Why do democracies give birth to bureaucracies and bureaucrats? How and why has a seemingly undesirable and unviable organizational form weathered relentless criticism over many years and is possibly experiencing a renaissance? Normative democratic theory, theories of formal organizations, and...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005040226
‘Rights to solidarity’ is a rather new expression, recently minted in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. In this chapter, the term will be used to refer to social and economic rights ; the basic question that will be posed is what the Charter has to say about the...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005040258
The development of post-national democracy in Europe depends on the development of an overarching communicative space that functions as a public sphere, viz., a common room created by speakers who are discussing common affairs in front of an audience. This is a place where opinions ideally are...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005040263
How can students of the European Union get from describing recent advances, to speculating about what are possible new directions and research agendas? How promising are terms such as “governance” and “the new governance” for improving the understanding how the Union is overned and...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005040269
In democratic societies, legal procedures are to ensure legally correct and rationally acceptable decisions, i.e. decisions that can be defended both in relation to legal statutes and in relation to public criticism. But can the legal system via the discretion of the judges itself really...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005040281
In this paper, the constitution making process in Europe is assessed with emphasis on incorporating the Charter of Fundamental Rights. Is the Charter a means to reduce the democratic deficit even if it does not fully comply with the notion of people-made law? The EU establishes post-national...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005040319
It is a commonplace to argue that democracies require constitutional rules in order to function well; in particular, such rules facilitate conflict resolution and secure a civilized co-existence. Democratic governance signifies an ability to purposefully shape political and social life;...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005040327