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Democratic Implications of the Treaty of Lisbon
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underlying concern, this article compared the situation before and
after the Treaty of Lisbon and made a critical assessment of the
Treaty. The Treaty, it argues, has failed to address the concern that
dispersing democratic accountability among the European
Parliament (theme of section III), national executives (theme of
section IV), national parliaments (theme of section V), and EU
executives alters
—
often negatively
—
how representative democracy
works.
According to conventional wisdom, the most prominent
legislative reform undertaken in the Treaty of Lisbon, the ordinary
legislative procedure, makes the EP a big winner, and is thus a big
step forward for democratization. This paper expresses
reservations on this view for two reasons. Firstly, the treaty fails to
address the EP’s inherent legitimacy problems, and secondly, the
extension of co-decision has resulted in a change in the EP’s
behavioral and legislative patterns not conducive to legitimating
the only EU institution directly elected by citizens. Changes made
with regards to the Council enhance the autonomous executive
role of national executives, rendering this supposedly purely
intergovernmental institution less intergovernmental and further
complicating the difficulty of holding the Council accountable to
individual member state parliaments or citizens. Similarly, efforts
at better coordinating Member State executives in view of
efficiency in the European Council also ended up eroding the
intergovernmentalist characteristics of the institution, reducing the
gatekeeping function of national executives while undermining the
supervisory capacities of national parliaments. As to national
parliaments, they were “given” the “power” to reclaim their
prerogatives if they could find sufficient support and could make
their claims within a narrow window. As the EPPO proposal has
demonstrated, however, such remarkable collective efforts by
national parliaments remain insufficient to compel a determined
Commission to reconsider a legislative proposal. Taken as a whole,
this article concludes that the Treaty of Lisbon has failed to
improve the Union’s democratic deficit to any significant extent.