The democratic deficit is a concept invoked principally in the argument that the European Union and its various bodies suffer from a lack of democracy and seem inaccessible to the ordinary citizen because their method of operating is so complex.
That’s what the glossary of the website europa.eu itself says about the democratic deficit in the European Union. I do think there’s a democratic deficit in the EU but I don’t think that’s the reason why.
Democracy is not only voting once every four or five years. Democracy is a full process in which every actor in power has to compete openly and can be publicly challenged. In which every actor has to put its cards on the table and therefore is subject to the public scrutiny. Democracy is a place in which every actor may be subject to some kind of public control. And the lack of democracy in the EU comes precisely from a lack of publicity.
The EU as process rarely makes it into the mainstream news, where it is usually depicted as a geopolitical or an economic region or as a closed body struggling to find a single voice in the international arena. But not many words on the building of the EU from a democratic point of view.
The EU politics is indoors politics not subject to the “publicity check”.
Democracy is an aspiration, an ideal, and the EU doesn’t seem to be aspiring to it. And again that’s precisely part of the problem, the perception of the EU by the general public as a Brussels bubble, as an enormous parliament full of overpaid politicians who in the best of the cases are young idealists and in the worse MEPs who are oldies in their golden retirement.
And that’s why initiatives like this one are interesting. And that’s why initiatives like this one risk going unnoticed. It’s up to us and to the organisation to make ourselves heard, to prompt a debate outside this website, to make people think about it, to make others think about the European Union.
And although I have joined very late, from now on I’ll contribute from here discussing the democratic legitimacy of the EU.
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“Democracy is a place in which every actor may be subject to some kind of public control.”
That’s true, but only part of it, I think. Democracy is a place in which a citizen carries the burden of control and scrutiny over his government, and is compelled to exercise that control. As much as we would love to have competent, benevolent and enthusiastic bureaucrats in office, we must acknowledge that reality is imperfect, and that democracy cannot be maintained without the ongoing effort by the people.
As a corollary to that, the European system is subject to so little scrutiny because it has never messed up badly enough. The member states are predominantly, if not universally, free and subject to public scrutiny; their citizens ostensibly do know that an objectionable political force can be ejected through democratic means. If the citizens do not concern themselves with extensive scrutiny of European institutions, it is not because the institutions are byzanthine (although they are), but because they are thought to be functioning acceptably.
I don’t think you can call something a deficit when there is no demand for it.
“I don’t think you can call something a deficit when there is no demand for it.”
Insert the word ‘conscious” in there and you’ll understand that no demand is never a sign there is no problem.