Acceso usuarios
At the end of the 20th century, European legal scholars praised the new model of post-national governance and constitutionalism, which they believed to be practiced in the EU, on the presumption that it would gradually prevail over the hierarchical tradition of government typical of the member states. Attempts at constitutional comparison between the national and the European system concerning, say, separation of powers, or accountability, were left aside from the mainstream scholarly discourses. The political debate on the EU democratic decit, meanwhile, relied on the domestic analogy, namely on the assumption that the imbalance between the increasingly intensive exercise of political power and the low democratic legitimacy aecting the EU could be corrected by making the functions of the European Parliament (EP) similar to those of national representative assemblies. This article intends to demonstrate that, although reecting opposite approaches to the EU institutional system, both these discourses fail to capture the sense of the major events that have occurred in the past decade; namely the cycle of constitutional change that took place from the 2001 Laeken Declaration to the 2009 Lisbon Treaty, the increasing popular rejection of the EU, and the Eurozone crisis.
