The democratic deficit is a concept created by the euro sceptics regarding the European Union and the alleged lack of democracy within its institutions.

Aim of the institutions is to maintain an open, transparent, and regular dialogue with representative associations and civil society.

  Accordingly to the Article 11 of the TEU (Treaty on European Union) not less than one million citizens who are nationals of a significant number of Member States may take the initiative of calling in the European Commission to submit any appropriate proposal on matters where citizens think that a legal act of the EU is required for the purpose of implementing the Treaties.

  To solve the problem of the democratic deficit at last, some of the other changes were implemented also by the Lisbon Treaty.

  Now, after the implementation the Council has to meet in public at all formal meetings. The Treaty also ensures that national parliaments have the power to send any proposal to the European Commission for reconsideration. In other words, member states may review new directives before they become law, and if one third of the parliament votes to do so, they may ask the EU institutions to reconsider a measure.

  The Co decision procedure is now established as normal legislative procedure. It gives the European Parliament the power to adopt legislation together with the Council, requiring two institutions to agree before any proposal can become law.

  The subsidiarity principle  is now a fundamental part of the EU. It states that matters ought to be handled by the smallest and least centralised competent authority. It originally derives from Maastricht Treaty, and was consolidated by the Treaties of Nice and Lisbon.

  In the Protocol annexed to the Treaty of Lisbon it is written that if any draft legislative act does not comply with the principle of subsidiarity and this is the opinion of one third of all votes allocated to the national Parliament the Commission or the institution from which the proposal originates must review it and may decide to withdraw it if they are unable to provide a reasonable justification for the enactment and its future enforcement will depend from the legislator (the Council and the European Parliament) whether the legislative proposal is compatible or not.  

  Nevertheless, some of the certain limitations upon the functioning of the Union should not be surpassed, in order to do not let the Eurosceptics to propagate the opinions criticising the EU.

This is the case in particular the referendums concerning the ratification of the European treaties.

  The way such referendums were organised in the past seems to be undemocratic. Treaties as highly complex legal documents are very difficult to be understood by the ordinary citizen. Hence, it is highly unusual that the treaty is a subject to any referendum. Treaties are negotiated and signed by the governments and they are ratified by them after the consent of their parliaments. The EU treaties not only contain the new elements which are necessary to bring the integration process forward, but also the previous provisions on which the construction of the existing stages of the integration  process was based in example the common market issues, economic and monetary union.

It is rather strange to ask the ordinary citizen to approve or reject a new treaty which is based on older provisions and all the pre-existing measures on which the process of integration has been based since the creation of the European Community Act 1972.

  In my opinion the referendum should concern exclusively the new provisions of this treaty (assuming that all the previous measures are already agreed). If it also concerns the provisions which are already in force it should give the citizens the possibility of voting for the withdrawal from the EU if they are not satisfied with its objectives and legislation.

  If the subject of the referendum is not clear it gives a huge possibility for all the demagogues to deprecate not just the new legislative elements, but also the ones which were discussed thousands of times before, like European social model or the competition rules, which are functioning satisfactorily in the opinion of the majority of Member States.

  Apart from that, referendums can be criticised as populist. As I mentioned before the regular citizens are not able to understand the complexity of the treaties, and the scope of changes they make after the rectification.

The decision whether or not to hold referendum is a decision which is made by the Member State not at the EU level.

Accordingly to this information, I think it would be unfair for some countries to make the decision based on referendum, and for others to just trust their governments and representatives. It might be the violation of the equality principle, which supposed to exist within the EU.

  The Treaty of Lisbon gives much more powers to the European Parliament, thus it makes it more democratic. The well-known co-decision procedure introduced by Maastricht Treaty in 1993, and then 'tightened up' by the Treaty of Amsterdam has been extended to several new fields. Now the Parliament has the same degree of lawmaking power as the Council in some areas where it used to be only consulted, or even not involved at all. Now European Council has to cooperate with European Parliament in making the decisions about matters such as: legal immigration, penal judicial cooperation (crime prevention, alignment of prison standards, offences and penalties), police cooperation and some aspects of trade policy and agriculture. Now Parliament plays an important role in almost every aspect of lawmaking within the EU.

The Treaty of Lisbon confirms the established practice of working with a multiannual financial framework. Every new financial plan has to be approved by the Parliament. The Treaty also abolishes previous distinction between 'compulsory' and 'non-compulsory' expenditure. The result is that Parliament and the Council determines all expenditure together. This change creates a new balance between the two institutions when approving the EU's budget.

  Another very important change made by the enactment of the Treaty of Lisbon is the requirement of the European Parliament's assent for all international agreements in fields governed by the ordinary legislative procedure.

  The Treaty of Lisbon also changed the functions and rights of national parliaments. The Treaty gives them grater scope to participate alongside the European institutions in the work of the Union. A new clause sets out rights and duties of the national parliaments within the EU. Now national parliaments have to contribute to the good functioning of the Union through receiving draft EU legislation, seeing it to that the principle of subsidiarity is respected, taking part in the evaluation mechanisms for the implementation of the Union policies in the area of freedom, security and justice, being involved in the political monitoring of Europol, and the evaluation of Eurojust's activities, being notified of applications for EU accession, taking part in the inter-parliamentary cooperation between national parliaments and with the European Parliament.

  The Treaty of Lisbon allows national parliaments to study legislative proposals for eight weeks and decide whether it is compatible or not with the principle of subsidiarity. If one third of the national parliaments are in favour of a review of a legislative document Commission would have to review the measure and if it decided to maintain it must issue a reasoned opinion to the Union legislator as to why it considers the measure to be compatible with the principle of subsidiarity.

In my opinion the new role of national parliaments is a really big step forward towards the process of complete removal of the democratic deficit within the EU.

  There were a lot of complaints about the lack of transparency in the decisions of the Council of Ministers. Now, national parliaments are able to see which decisions been taken by which national ministers in the council.

  One of the most important pillars of the democracy is the opportunity to participate in the political processes for the individual citizens. There are many ways in which European citizens can find out about and take part in the political process of the EU. The newest of these is citizen's initiative created by the Lisbon Treaty. Accordingly to it a million citizens, from any number of member countries, will be able to ask the Commission to present a proposal in any of the EU's areas of responsibility.

  After years of development the EU has developed its own fully-sufficient mechanisms of democratic control. Nevertheless it still faces a lot of problems. The participation of public is still quite small compared to the political European elites, which are engaged and they are fully participating in the EU policies. However it is the case because the EU rarely considers the issues, which are regarding the scope of knowledge of the regular citizen. Most of the issues discussed by the EU are the matters requiring professional level of expertise on the subject.

Secondly despite the fact that democratic powers of the European Parliament were increased it is still unable to influence the political orientation of the Commission, a body which is no longer politically impartial. The role of the European Parliament increases significantly with every Treaty amendment, but some of the areas seem to be left untouched by the legislature even when criticised.

In my opinion the law making process within the EU is transparent enough for the member countries citizens as long as they are truly interested in the topic. Since the enactment of the citizen’s initiative it is easy for interest groups to express the opinions about the legal system, or apply for the consideration of proposed modifications to it. Thanks to the various internet and paper sources it is fast and easy to access all the legislation documents concerned with policy making including the debates of the Council of Ministers. All the actions taken by the EU organisations are under continuous supervision of European Court of Justice and member countries courts to ensure the accountability of policy makers within the EU.

However before trying to solve all of these problems we need to take into attention the fact that EU is “one of a kind” organisation. It has got unique structure and functioning, incomparable to anything which has existed before. Therefore, even though the EU still has to fulfil some of the requirements of the democratic legitimacy, the way they must be applied cannot resemble any classical, both national and international models.

Word Count: 2377

 

Bibliography:

Textbooks:

• Nigel Foster, Blackstone’s Treaties and Legislation 2010-2011 (Blackstone’s Statute Series), (OUP, Oxford, 21 edition, 2010)
• John Fairhurst, Las of the European Union, (Longman, 8th edition, 2010)

• Damian Chalmers, Gareth Davies, Giorgio Monti, European Union Law: Cases and Materials, (Cambridge University Press, 2nd edition, 2010) 

Articles:

• Mihail Milev,  A democratic Deficit in the European Union?’, , last accessed 01/02/2011
• Marcin Górski, ‘The democratic Deficit in the European Union’, , last accessed 01/02/2011

Statutory Provisions:

• European Communities Act 1972
• Treaty of Lisbon 2009
•  Treaty of Nice 2000
• Single European Act 1986
• Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (Treaty of Rome)
• Treaty on European Union (Treaty of Maastricht)

Internet Sources:

• , last accessed 01/02/2011
• , last accessed 01/02/2011

---