Deliberation and the problem of democratic legitimacy in the EU: are working agreements the most that can be expected?

Abstract
What kind of democracy does the EU require and what model of deliberative democracy can account for post-national legitimacy? The author contends that democracy can only prevail with egalitarian procedures of law making in place through which the citizens can influence the laws that affect them. A model premised on the presuppositions of an idealized discourse should be confined to some very limited sets of constitutional questions and be supplemented with a variant of democratic discourse modelled on a less demanding concept of democratic legitimacy. The concept of a working agreement is introduced in order to establish such concept legitimacy as well as to account for the constitutional developments of the EU.

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