Democracy in the European Union - 9780415225922

Taylor & Francis

How can we explain the type of cooperation that the EU is based on? What are the integrative forces in the EU? This is a presentation of a theoretical approach which enables us to think of democracy at a supra-national level. > The European Union is widely held to suffer from a democratic deficit, and this raises a wider question: can democracy at all be applied to decision-making bodies beyond the nation state? Today, the EU is a highly complex entity undergoing profound changes. This book asks how the type of cooperation that the EU is based on can be explained; what are the integrative forces in the EU and how can integration at a supra-national level come about?The key thinkers represented in this volume stress that in order to understand integration beyond the nation state, we need new explanatory categories associated with deliberation because a supranational entity as the EU posesses far weaker and less well-developed means of coercion - bargaining resources - than do sta.