News on Democracy
Article by Honor Mahony published on the EUObserver, 28 January 2012
With just weeks until to go until the EU dips its toe into the unpredictable world of participatory democracy, internet giants are warning the European Commission it had better be prepared for scrutiny by a critical and highly-wired public.
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Article by Harry McGee , published on The Irish Times,24 January 2012
Former German foreign minister Joschka Fischer has said there would be “extreme consequences” for Ireland should it reject a referendum on the fiscal compact.
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Roundtable, 1st February 2012, 17:00 – 19:00
Location: Committee Rooms, Glamorgan Building, Cardiff University
Since late 2009 the global financial and economic crisis, with its roots in the US sub-prime mortgage crisis, has mutated into a sovereign debt crisis centred on the European Union and its Member States. Concerns regarding the levels of national debt across states [...]
Edited by Sandra Kröger and Dawid Friedrich, Palgrave Macmillan, 30 November 2011
The present book is highly topical and contributes to what may be perceived as the ‘representative turn’ in EU studies.What does political representation in the European Union look like? Which actors claim to act as representatives of which constituency? What role does the EU play in (re)shaping [...]
Author: eudo | Date: 23 January 2012 | Please Comment!Book edited by Grainne de Burca and Joseph H. Weiler, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2012
The idea of the EU as a constitutional order has recently taken on renewed life, as the Court of Justice declared the primacy of EU law not just over national constitutions but also over the international legal order, including the UN [...]
The Lisbon Treaty delivered substantial institutional changes to the EU’s institutional set-up. It decapitated the rotating Council Presidency but at the same time strengthened the legislative role of the Council of Ministers. Two years after its coming into force the time has come to take stock and to evaluate the impact of the EU’s new [...]
Author: eudo | Date: 19 January 2012 | Please Comment!Article by Stephen Castle published on The New York Times, 17 January 2012
Reawakening a debate on what the European Union should do when one of its members threatens its democratic principles, the bloc’s executive arm opened legal proceedings on Tuesday against Hungary, which critics contend is sliding toward authoritarianism.
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Article by Kirsty Hughes published on OpenDemocracy, 16 January 2012
If the heart of the crisis lies in the politics – including in the politics of the economic policy choices being made – then solutions may lie, not in yet more EU institutional changes and the creation of an austerity union, but in the practice and [...]
Article by Adelina Marini, published on Euinside, 13 January 2012
On January 17 the European Parliament will elect its new president. As the institution is big, with over 700 members, the election of a president is being done twice in a 5-year term – each with a mandate of two years and a half. The Pole [...]
Article by Jacqui Hale published on Open Democracy, 13 January 2012
The Arab uprisings of 2011 are provoking the European Union into a rethink of its approach to encouraging democracy in its neighbourhood. A European Endowment for Democracy with a new kind of mandate could be at the centre.
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EUDO Debate
David Farrell
David Farrell summarizes for EUDO Café the core argument of his recent book: Russell J. Dalton, David M. Farrell and Ian McAllister, Political Parties and Democratic Linkage: How Parties Organize Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2011)
In the academic literature on political parties (including important contributions by the late Peter Mair), which argues that political [...]
Marcus Hahn-Lorber
On 9 November 2011, the German Constitutional Court delivered a far-reaching judgment on European electoral law as it has been concretised by German legislation. The Constitutional Court declared the so called “five percent threshold”, which is provided by s. 2(7) Europawahlgesetz unconstitutional and therefore void. In order not to interfere with EU electoral [...]
Author: eudo | Date: 5 December 2011 | Please Comment!Shirley Williams
When George Papandreou, former Prime Minister of Greece, proposed a referendum on the Greek austerity programme, the chanceries of Europe quailed, and the European Union’s leaders collectively denounced the idea. But George Papandreou’s proposal was not absurd. It was rooted in the belief that the Greek people needed to own the painful austerity [...]
Author: eudo | Date: 2 December 2011 | Please Comment!Paolo Ponzano
The Lisbon Treaty has placed a new emphasis on transparency. Transparency is ancillary both to representative and participatory democracy (articles 10(3) and 11(2) TEU) and is, as such, at the democratic foundations of the Union. This has consequences both for the EU legislator and, indeed, for EU administration. By Treaty provisions, the European Parliament [...]
Elaine Fahey
The rising significance of the European Parliament to the post-Lisbon structural landscape of EU-US relations has self-evidently resulted in a new constitutional equilibrium. The European Parliament is now involved increasingly in global affairs and international agreements now require the consent of the European Parliament, pursuant to Article 218 TFEU, as outlined above. Thus [...]
Author: eudo | Date: 8 September 2011 | Please Comment!Marie Vincent
How can the trend of “Euro-estrangement” that seems to be affecting most citizens today be reversed? For all the progress achieved with the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty, European decision-making has appeared ever more obscure, with a confusion of roles between the Presidents of the European Council and Commission, a chaotic start [...]
Author: eudo | Date: 31 August 2011 | Please Comment!Yuksel Alper Ecevit
‘Who has the right to vote?’ is an essential question for democracy. The history of democratic regimes provides a complexity. Gender, class, age and citizenship status have been the primary barriers for voting qualification over time across regions. Suffragist movements seem to have partially succeeded in abolishing these barriers. However, increasing mobility [...]
Author: eudo | Date: 3 August 2011 | Please Comment!Paolo Ponzano
The Treaty of Lisbon has introduced into the primary law of the European Union for the first time a mechanism of participatory democracy : the right of any one million European citizens, providing they represent at least seven of EU Member States, to ask the European Commission to submit a proposal for European legislation [...]
Martin Westlake
It is worthwhile recalling where ‘Lisbon’ began; not in Portugal, but in Laeken, in December 2001. Following the ill-tempered Nice Inter-Governmental Conference, a collective cry of ‘never again!’ went up. It was decided that Europe had to decide its future differently. Hence, in their Laeken Declaration of December 2001, the Heads of State or [...]
Author: eudo | Date: 30 November 2010 | Please Comment!Graham Watson
Little has been written about political parties and ideology at EU level. Why?
Because the formation of EU-wide political parties, in any real sense, is so recent. Though transnational federations of parties in Europe’s (and indeed latterly, the democratic world’s) main political families existed for most of the twentieth century, these parties had little real [...]
