An Unfinished Polity

Abstract

The European Union is an unfinished polity. The single market has been completed, although free movement still works better for goods and capital than for services and people. At the same time, the four freedoms are protected by an imperative legal system. But the polity lags behind. Decisions bearing on the market are taken at Union level, whereas most decisions on fiscal policy – taxes and public expenditures – are taken at national level. Moreover, political decisions regarding the market are weakly anchored among European citizens. As a political system, the Union thus suffers from both a “social” and a “democratic” deficit. Is this a sustainable solution in the long run? That is the question of this chapter.

The point of departure is that the Union is now at a crossroads. However, it is not the protracted nature of the ratification process for the Lisbon Treaty that is the main cause for this. The Irish rejection of the new treaty in a 2008 referendum may have spread gloom amongst proponents of European integration, but the problem is more fundamental than that. The atmosphere this time is marked by a spreading awareness that the Union is not fully legitimate in the eyes of European citizens. European citizens seem to be alienated from decision-making in Brussels. They are hardly involved in European politics at all. At the same time, the imbalance between the polity, the market, and the legal order is increasingly apparent.