Despite widespread disagreement about democratic deficits in the
European Union (EU), most critics begin by conceiving democracy as a
problem for the EU. Seeing the EU as undemocratic or insufficiently
democratic, they devise institutional innovations to democratize it. These
innovations seem to require breaking the traditional link between
democracy and the nation-state, which in this context appears outmoded or
inappropriate. This article challenges that approach, arguing that it gets
the relationship between democracy and the sovereign state wrong—or
at least, incomplete—by stressing modern democratic theory's
empirical ties to the state while underestimating their normative
significance. The complex interdependence of normative and empirical
assumptions informing modern democratic theory means that detaching
democracy from the state is much less straightforward than critics often
imagine. The essay argues instead for conceiving the EU as a problem for
democratic theory. Doing so reveals that democratic theory is ill-equipped
to address recent changes in the configuration of rule and new structures
of governance associated with Europeanization, European integration, and
globalization more broadly. This change in perspective highlights
important limits in recent democratic theorizing about the EU and
clarifies the role of European debates in reinterpreting and
reconstructing democracy in the age of globalization.Michael Goodhart is Associate Professor of Political Science
at the University of Pittsburgh, where he holds a secondary appointment in
Women's Studies (goodhart@pitt.edu). He is grateful to
Chris Bonneau, Mark Hallerberg, Andrew Lotz, John Markoff, Guy Peters,
Alberta Sbragia, Dan Thomas, and to anonymous reviewers of this essay for
their kind help and advice. He is also grateful to the European Union
Center of Excellence at the University of Pittsburgh for the chance to
present an earlier version of this essay and appreciates the suggestions
he received at that time.