Beyond The Borders Of Democracy - The Eu's Democratic Research

The issues of the EU's"Democratic deficit"and"legitimacy deficit"have been focused on since the signature of the Maastricht Treaty in 1990s. This thesis discusses mainly three questions: whether the European Union ought to be democratic, how we should treat these issues, and the tendencies of the EU for solving the problem of democracy.Bearing in mind the complexities involved in defining both the terms of democracy and EU, the author tries to carry out his analysis from three perspectives: treating EU as a conventional international organization, a quasi-federal supranational entity, and a governing system, so as to avoid presenting a seemingly convincing but single-dimension image. On examination it is found that, by adopting three standards to look into three facets of EU, the answers could be different: when treated as an international organization, no democratic deficits exist; however, if as a quasi-federal supranational polity, and compared with the so-called"mature democratic states"today, its democracies are far from being sufficient; finally, by a governing system standard, the democratic defects can not be concealed either, as reflected in the low degree of self-identification of the member states'citizens towards EU and the deficiencies of transmitting citizens political opinions.We should be fully aware that, on the one hand, EU is not a state, but a new kind of political system, so that any kind of democratic model developed within a state cannot be transplanted to it directly; on the other hand, born out of the nation-states, the tendencies of democratic development in the EU can not deviate completely from the experiences of the former. In the complex process of European political integration, we can see that both the traditional democratic systems dominating western world today, and the participatory and deliberative democracies newly advocated by western academic circles, are gradually developed within the EU. In short, as an on-going integration process, the EU is still making its way to explore a new balanced democratic form.