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only in a limited sense. Firstly, the practice was already established
by the Council’s Rules of Procedure prior to the Treaty of Lisbon,
albeit applied only to legislation adopted by co-decision (Peers,
2008: 1). With the ordinary legislative procedure becoming the
norm under the Treaty of Lisbon, the Council’s Rules of Procedure
would have had similar effects on Council transparency even in the
absence of the provision in Art. 15 (2). Secondly, improving
nominal transparency is a necessary, yet far from sufficient,
measure for tackling the problem of Council accountability.
Nominal transparency does not alter the fact that domestic voters
have no effective way to influence EU policies. The resulting sense
of frustration and powerlessness has reached a point where it is
difficult to distinguish between “anti-incumbency feeling from
anti-Brussels feeling” (“An ever-deeper,” 2012).
Even without the complication of multilevel governance,
representative democracy in general has been in deep crisis for at
least a decade. Elections are a blunt instrument for rewarding or
punishing a party or a coalition: Voters have only one vote to cast,
yet the target of evaluation consists of thousands of policies made
by the same government (
Manin,
Przeworski, & Stokes, 1999:
49-51). When such a problem-ridden representative system has to
transcend national borders and operate in a multilevel environment,
responsibilities become dispersed or nullified. Under such
circumstances, it is unrealistic to expect voters, via national
elections, to reward or punish national governments on the basis of
decisions made regarding European affairs. In general, ministers
are judged foremost by their ability to deal with domestic issues.
Hence Council members owes their positions to election only at
several removes, and if European affairs are frequently absent from
European elections, they are typically even less significant in
national elections (Katz, 2001: 56). As a result, it is easy for policy
makers to conceal faults and difficult
—
if not impossible
—
for
voters to identify which power holders should be held accountable,
and for what. In fact, as was demonstrated by a recent legal dispute