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proposal complies with the principle of subsidiarity . . . and that a
withdrawal or an amendment of that proposal is not required
(European Commission, 2013b: 13), the Commission went on to
press ahead with the EPPO proposal with enhanced cooperation in
mind. This reaction came
after
a very public statement by Dutch
Foreign Minister Frans Timmermans in the newspaper
Financial
Times
that “if one-third of national parliaments raise subsidiarity
objections to a legislative proposal (the yellow card procedure), the
commission should not just reconsider, it should use its discretion
to take the disputed proposal off the table, turning the yellow card
into a red” (Timmermans, 2013). Unhindered by the “early warning,”
the proposal is currently before the Council and under consideration
by Member States (Council of the European Union, 2014).
VI. Conclusion
The demise of the permissive consensus heralded the
emergence of an ever growing number of visions of democracy for
Europe: Representative, regulatory, deliberative, cosmopolitan,
rights-based, etc. Alongside the development of these competing
and often incompatible models of European democracy are the
recurrent treaty reforms incorporating elements of different
models of democratic governance, making the Union a true
hodgepodge. It would be unrealistic to expect the Europeans to
ever agree upon one model of European democracy and adopt that
model via a treaty. The Treaty of Lisbon, even though explicitly
mandated to straighten out the democracy issue, is not an
exception. As a result, to assess the democratic implications of the
treaty, one can only adhere to somewhat fragmented criteria for
democracy. Stressing that the democratic deficit must be
understood from a perspective that takes into account the effects of
altered inter-institutional dynamics resulted from treaty reforms
and taking the contradiction between the reality and the belief that
double-representation will result in better representation as the