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...

Over the past half century, the European Parliament has undergone a remarkable transformation from an assembly endowed with supervisory powers to a directly-elected legislator, co-deciding most secondary legislation on equal footing with the Council. Furthermore, while human rights were not...

The European Union is presently at a major crossroads. The Laeken process which launched the EU onto an explicit constitution-making process, has ground to a halt after the negative referendum results in France and the Netherlands. The European Council at its 16-17 June 2005 meeting decided to...

This article discusses the question of the EU's uniqueness. This issue is of particular importance when considered in relation to the nation-state. Uniqueness can then be considered as a case of departure from or transformation of the nation-state. The EU has emerged with a complex mixture of...

In this paper I relate Europeanisation to the processes of nation states formation and consolidation. The paper first offers a general framework for the historical interpretation of the integration process. It then describes that same process in analytical terms, sketching the implications of...

The EU is often labelled a unique entity. This assertion is more the product of assessments of its institutional character than on the nature of its social constituency, i.e. the structure of demands and expectations that citizens and groups place on the EU. Determining the character of the...

Until the Maastricht Treaty, European governments had long pursued European integration on the working assumption of a "permissive consensus" by the public. The popular and legal challenges to the Maastricht Treaty questioned the legitimacy of further integration.Normative political theory has...