National autonomy and democratic standardization: Should popular votes on European integration be regulated by the European Union?

• Published date: 01 November 2017
• Date: 01 November 2017
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/eulj.12272
• Author: Joseph Lacey

ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT

National autonomy and democratic

standardization: Should popular votes on European

integration be regulated by the European Union?

Joseph Lacey*

Abstract

Given the increasing use of direct democratic devices on questions of European integration, this paper explores

whether or not Member States may have good reason to agree on common regulations for popular votes of this

nature. Conceiving of the European Union as a political system designed to serve the interests of states and

citizens, it is argued that where direct votes have the potential to undermine the territorial, functional,

normative or existential integrity of the EU, then states may have good reason to sacrifice a degree of national

autonomy to adopt common regulations for certain uses of direct democracy. This leads to a case for

democratic standardization across Member States when it comes to withdrawal, accession, Treaty ratification

and opt‐in decisions.

1|INTRODUCTION

The European Union is a scheme of cooperation based on the normative commitment to accommodate the diversity

of legal regimes, while nevertheless maintaining a common framework for cooperation between them. On this view,

the central question of European integration is as follows: when do Member States have good or sufficient reason

to constrain their national autonomy in an area by developing uniform principles and regulations at the suprana-

tional level? Put differently, when should Member States seek to overcome their diversity to pursue deeper unity,

becoming less foreign to one another, and ultimately more tolerant of common rules that constrain sovereign

expression?

This paper relates this fundamental question to the issue of democratic standardization in the EU. Democratic

standardization may be defined as the extent to which Member States decide to constrain or regulate their respective

domestic decision‐making processes in common at the supranational level. Treatment of this issue is relatively rare in

legal and political theory, but is not without precedent. In particular, normative reflection on democratic standardiza-

tion has been provoked by the issue of democratic backsliding in Central and Eastern Europe, on the one hand,

1

and

*

Junior Research Fellow, Politics, University College, Oxford, UK. My thanks to participants of the ACCESS Europe workshop in June

2017 at the University of Amsterdam for their comments on the initial draft of this paper. For thorough feedback on subsequent

drafts, I thank Jan Pieter Beetz, Luigi Corrias, Ben Crum, Mario Mendez and Markus Patberg.

1

B. Bugaric, ‘A Crisis of Constitutional Democracy in Post‐Communist Europe’, (2015) 13 International Journal of Constitutional Law,

219; J‐W. Müller, ‘Should the EU Protect Democracy and the Rule of Law Inside Member States?’, (2015) 21 European Law Journal,

141.

DOI: 10.1111/eulj.12272

Eur Law J. 2017;23:523–535. © 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/eulj 523