Power and Legitimacy

Abstract

The implications of European integration for national democracy, representative government, and constitutionalism are well known. Nevertheless, as the events of the first decade of the present century have made clear, the European Union's (EU's) complex system of governance has been unable to achieve a democratic or constitutional legitimacy in its own right. This book traces the roots of this paradox to integration's dependence on the ‘postwar constitutional settlement of administrative governance’ on the national level. Supranational policymaking has relied on various forms of oversight from national constitutional bodies, following models that were first developed in the administrative state and then translated into the European context. These national oversight mechanisms (executive, legislative, and judicial) have developed over the last half-century to address the central disconnect in the integration process: between the need for supranational regulatory power, on the one hand, and the persistence of national democratic and constitutional legitimacy, on the other. In defining the ways European public law has sought to reconcile these two conflicting demands—most importantly, via the concepts of ‘delegation’ and ‘mediated legitimacy’—this book lays the foundation for a better understanding of the administrative, not constitutional nature of European governance going forward.

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