How democratic were the European Communities, and later the European Union (EU), how democratic did they need to be, and what would this mean in the first place? Throughout the course of European integration, none of the answers was self-evident, and all were the stuff of continuous discursive construction, reconstruction and contestation. In this chapter I trace shifts and clashes in collective imaginations of EU democracy since 1950, exploring how what it made sense to say about EU democracy changed over time. I analyse discourses, or ensembles of ideas, concepts, narratives or categories, through which meaning was given to ‘democracy’, for the case of the EU and its institutional predecessors (for the sake of better readability, I sometimes use the label ‘EU’ to refer both to the EU as such and to its institutional predecessors in this chapter).