IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/erp/arenax/p0299.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Bringing European Democracy Back In. Or how to read the German Constitutional Court's Lisbon Treaty ruling

Author

Listed:
  • Erik Oddvar Eriksen
  • John Erik Fossum

Abstract

This article critically examines the democratic theory that informs the German Federal Constitutional Court’s Lisbon Treaty ruling. This is needed because the ruling is ambiguous with regard to what democracy for what Union. In order to analyse the ruling we establish three models of what European democracy possibly can amount to: Audit democracy based on the EU as a derivative of the member states, a multinational federal state, or a regionalcosmopolitan polity? The Court’s depiction of the EU does not fit as well as we should expect with the label derivative entity due to the important legislative role of the European Parliament. EU’s legal supranationalism points in the direction of a federation, but the Court’s argumentation does not lend support to this notion. The Court models democracy on a rather specific set of institutional presuppositions that are derived from the parliamentary model of democracy associated with the sovereign nation state. At the same time, the Court operates with a conception of a changing state sovereignty that unfolds more in line with cosmopolitan than with classical Westphalian statist principles.

Suggested Citation

  • Erik Oddvar Eriksen & John Erik Fossum, 2010. "Bringing European Democracy Back In. Or how to read the German Constitutional Court's Lisbon Treaty ruling," ARENA Working Papers 10, ARENA.
  • Handle: RePEc:erp:arenax:p0299
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sv.uio.no/arena/english/research/publications/arena-publications/workingpapers/working-papers2010/wp_09_10.xml
    File Function: Full text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:erp:arenax:p0299. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sindre Eikrem Hervig (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.arena.uio.no/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.