Democratic Sovereignty in the European Union

These breakthroughs are coming at a time in which the EU is under increased pressure from hostile foreign forces, while it also faces autocratic threats from within. Their common denominator is that they want to undermine if not destroy European democracy. As the EU will only be able to confront these challenges in a convincing manner if it has a clear democratic self-perception, the polity has to overcome the paralysing stalemate in the debate about ‘the nature of the beast’.  

Building a common democratic future

In hindsight, the reason for the intellectual impasse is perplexingly simple. Eye-witness accounts put beyond doubt that the peoples of Europe wanted to avoid the recurrence of war after the Axis-forces had been defeated. Their political leaders wanted to make renewed war between them ‘materially impossible’ and subsequently embarked on the endeavour of creating an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe. In theoretical terms, they replaced the traditional animosity between states with mutual trust. The implication of this revolutionary break with the past was that the founding states of the present European Union substituted a new model of thinking for the traditional Westphalian paradigm in international relations. Fully aware of their capability to destroy each other, they agreed to build a common future. Moreover, they wanted their future to be democratic.

A different concept of sovereignty

Amazing as it may seem from the present perspective, this highly consequential paradigm shift in international relations has neither been noticed by political theorists nor by other scientific researchers of the process of European integration. Actually, academics continued to study the emerging European polity through the lens of a paradigm that the participants in the construction process had wilfully abandoned. Some of them kept on arguing that the relations between states must be seen as a zero-sum game, in which the gains of one party must lead to the comparable losses from the other. Others insisted that the process of European integration had to result in the creation of a federal European state, while their opponent argued with equal passion that it could only end with the establishment of a confederal association of states. As a result, they all failed to see that the EU was in the process of developing an altogether different approach to the concept of sovereignty.     

The democratic principle in International Relations

By default, the academic community decided to close ranks by agreeing to disagree. However, their compromise to describe the Communities and the subsequent EU as an organisation sui generis did nothing to improve their understanding of the ongoing process. Despite the fact that the participating states characterised themselves in the 1973 Declaration on European Identity as a ‘Union of democratic States, adding that they wanted to make their Union democratic too, the academic community persisted in its traditional approaches. Scholars notably overlooked that the process of European integration was triggered from within by the democratic principle in international relations. Invisible for proponents of the Westphalian paradigm, it holds that when democratic states agree to share the exercise of sovereignty in ever wider fields with the aim to attain common goals, the organisation they set up for this must be democratic too!     

A democratic union of democratic states

Seen through the lens of the democratic principle, the evolution of the Communities and the EU can be described as an persistent effort to transform the polity from a Union of democratic States into a democratic union of states and citizens. European democracy is not a replica of a national system of governance but is geared to the needs of the states and peoples of a continent. As the EU has outgrown the Westphalian system, it cannot be defined in terms of that template. Moreover, there was no blueprint or premeditated plan for its development. Distinctive stages in its evolution include a) the transformation of the Parliamentary Assembly into a directly elected European Parliament (1976), b) the introduction of Qualified Majority Voting in a number of areas (1986), the establishment of EU citizenship (1992) and the introduction of the values of the Union (1997) and the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU (2000). Step by step the desire to create an ever closer union and the determination to make the Union as democratic as its Member States has been realised. Consequently, the EU can be identified in its current form as a democratic union of democratic states.  

Defending constitutional achievements

As a result of paradigmatic prejudice, the discussion about sovereignty in the EU continues to be blurred by theories of ‘overconstitutionalisation’ and diminution of national democracy. Prevailing academic theories are notably unable to acknowledge that the exercise of sovereignty in a democratic union of democratic states is due to be shared between the polity and its constituent members. In reality, the EU is already tasked to exercise sovereignty on behalf of the member states in the fields of foreign trade and monetary politics. Moreover, it enjoys sovereignty over its own system of democratic governance. Consequently, the debate about the application of sovereignty in the EU is no longer a matter of principle but rather of efficiency. Faced with unprecedented threats from internal opponents and foreign adversaries -and notably from the combination thereof- the EU should focus on the question as to how the polity can protect its constitutional achievements on behalf of its citizens and member states against demolition and deconstruction. In the present stage of its evolution the EU should notably be encouraged and enabled to defend European values by means of European sovereignty.