Ústava pro Evropu—Komentář– By Jindřiška Syllová Verfassung der Europäischen Union—Kommentar der Grundlagenbestimmungen – Edited by Christian Calliess and Matthiaas Ruffert

• Published date: 01 January 2008
• Author: Jiří Přibáň
• Date: 01 January 2008
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0386.2007.00407_2.x

BOOK REVIEWS

Democracy in Europe. The EU and National Polities. By Vivien A. Schmidt. Oxford and

New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. xv +317pp. Pb. £15.99.

Vivien Schmidt has written an important book. Going by its main title, one might

expect it to analyse the ability of the EU institutions to connect with the people of

Europe. Thus one would expect Schmidt to set up a theory of how EU democracy

ought to work and to assess recent proposals for EU reform in this light. While she does

indeed get round to this in the course of her argument, her main point is a different one,

as is also apparent from her sub-title: she argues that ‘the real problem of democracy in

the EU’ is to be found in the democratic deficit that has emerged at the national level.

This is a very timely and appealing claim, especially if one recognises that—regardless

of what the ill-fated Constitutional Treaty proposed for the EU—it was at the national

level that its fate was eventually decided.

If indeed the real democratic challenge for Europe lies at the national level, then it is

also unlikely to allow for a single solution, since if European integration has critically

affected Europe’s national democracies, obviously it has done so in different ways.

Schmidt’s central argument here relies on the question of ‘fit’: a concept very popular

in the ‘Europeanisation’ literature upon which she draws extensively. Her claim is that

the multilevel or, as she prefers to call it, ‘compound’ polity of the EU poses far more

of a challenge for simple polities in which politics has traditionally been concentrated

in a single, central government, than it does for other compound polities that are

already well used to political power being dispersed across actors, institutions and

levels. More specifically, Schmidt systematically compares the experiences of the simple

polities of Britain and France, marked by unitary states governed by majoritarian

governments with limited societal involvement in policy making, with the compound

polity of Germany and the regionalised polity of Italy.

As a stepping stone to the comparative analyses, in the first chapter of the book

Schmidt outlines her conception of the nature of the EU. This conception underlines

the lack of cohesiveness of the EU compared to any existing nation state, as it empha-

sises as its defining features the variable boundaries of the EU as well as its composite

identity. Still, Schmidt proposes to regard the EU as a state, albeit as a ‘regional state

in the making’, which needs to be strictly distinguished from the notion of the nation

state that has come to dominate our understanding of the state. Moreover, the EU is

characterised by its extremely compound nature in which governing authority is widely

dispersed. A final observation of the EU at large is that institutions at EU level only

partly meet the demands of democratic government. As Schmidt puts it, EU institu-

tions may be effective in governing for and with the people, as they deliver desired

policy outcomes and engage societal interests in the policy-making process. However,

EU institutions fall short in governing of and by the people, since they are lacking in

terms of political representation and citizen participation, for both of which the

national level remains the main locus. As nation states have increasingly come to share

policy competences at the European level, the upshot of this is—as Schmidt puts it in

European Law Journal, Vol. 14, No. 1, January 2008, pp. 138–142.

© 2008 The Authors

Journal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK

and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA