One of the major aims of the Lisbon Treaty, as set out explicitly in its very short Preamble, is to enhance the ‘democratic legitimacy of the Union’. This has been a leitmotiv since the 1993 Maastricht IGC Declaration no. 13, the 1997 Amsterdam Protocol no. 9 on the role of national parliaments in the EU, the 2000 Nice Declaration (see Box 3), which stressed the importance of giving a role to national parliaments, and the 2001 Declaration of Laeken, which insisted on ‘the democratic challenge facing Europe’ (Box 20).

For the first time, the Lisbon Treaty incorporates in the basic Treaties, right at the beginning of the TEU, a section entitled ‘Provisions on democratic principles’ (Articles 9 to 12), in which Article 10 is particularly relevant (Box 21).

In its judgment of 30 June 2009 (63 pages, 421 paragraphs), the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany found that the Act approving the Lisbon Treaty as well as the Act amending the German Basic Law (i.e. the German Constitution, Grundgesetz – hereinafter GG), are compatible with the GG. However, the Court found that the ‘Act Extending and Strengthening the Rights of the Bundestag and the Bundesrat in EU Matters’ infringes the GG, insofar as those bodies have not been accorded sufficient rights of participation in EU law-making and treaty amendment procedures. Following this judgment, an Act extending the parliament's rights was adopted on 8 (Bundestag) and 18 (Bundesrat) September 2009, which enabled Germany's instrument of ratification of the Lisbon Treaty to be finally signed and deposited on 25 September 2009.

While the Court's judgment opened the way for ratification of the Lisbon Treaty by Germany, the possibility that this judgment might affect the future development of the European integration process cannot be excluded. In any case, the operation of the Treaties' provisions which aim to facilitate and accelerate the work of the EU, such as the ‘flexibility clause’ (Article 352 TFEU), the passerelles and simplified revision procedures, will certainly be slowed down.

A brief summary of the Court's judgment

The main standard of review against which the Court measured the constitutionality of the Act approving the Lisbon Treaty is the relation between the requirements of the GG and the stage of development reached by European integration.

The New International Economic Environment: Technological Revolution

During the last decades of the twentieth century, a new chapter opened in world economic history: the robust new technological revolution, led by information and communication technologies. This was combined with a near-total internationalization of the world economy, or globalization. Internationalization had a long history in Europe, going back to the late nineteenth century and more directly to its reemergence after World War II after the backlash in the interwar decades. However, the transition from the 1970s to the 1980s became the real watershed for its breakthrough. Globalization emerged as a new policy that replaced colonialism for the leading economic powers, but it also had an objective economic base in the new technological and corporative-managerial revolution.

The communication and technological revolution that conquered the advanced world after 1980 like the British industrial revolution had 200 years before, has a history that is several decades long. Its beginning goes back to World War II, when the first mainframe computer, the British “Colossus,” started decoding German military communications at the beginning of 1944. The other most visible invention of the time, which had monstrous worldwide reverberations, was the atomic bomb, or, better put, the path-breaking use of nuclear energy.

Black Prophecies – or the Rise of a European Superpower?

World War II destroyed and weakened most of Europe, and the Cold War soon divided the continent into two separate and hostile halves. The West needed American financial and military assistance to rebuild its economy and to secure itself from outside dangers. A third of a century later, however, Western Europe rose as an economic superpower and the cradle of the welfare state. Besides postwar prosperity and its successful adjustment to globalization after the shock of the 1970s, the most important factor of Europe's rise was its rapid integration process, the foundation and enlargement of the European Union.

However, frightening negative demographic trends accompanied and counterbalanced the main positive trends. Europe's population is decreasing and aging and the ratio of active to inactive people will be 50:50 in a few decades. Rapidly increasing immigrant labor is replacing the inadequate domestic labor force. Immigrant minorities, mostly from non-European Muslim cultures, are rapidly increasing. Integration or assimilation is painfully slow, or non-existent. A part of the immigrant population, especially the illegal ones, form a new underclass. Anti-immigrant hostility and intolerance are fueling extreme right-wing political trends. The minority question became a source of explosive tension on the continent. Quo vadis Europa in the twentyfirst century? What will take over and dominate, positive or negative tendencies?

Dramatic Demographic Changes

Since 1980, a new chapter opened in the demographic history of Europe. As Massimo Livi-Bacci suggests, five main phenomena deserve special attention: the decline of mortality; the decline of birth rates to below replacement levels; the rapid aging of the population; the end of mass emigration and the beginning of immigration; and last, changes in social rules and behavior (marriage customs, family structures).

Indeed, the mortality rate declined to ten deaths per 1,000 at the end of the twentieth century. The decline of infant mortality played an important part in this change. At the turn of the century, only eight to ten infants died per 1,000 live births.

These changes were the culmination of a permanent demographic trend, which gradually accelerated in three distinct, two- to three-decade periods of the twentieth century: the quarter-century interwar period, a quarter-century post-World War II period, and the two to three decades ending at the turn of the twenty-first century. In the end, death rates dropped to one-third and infant mortality to less than one-tenth of the early twentieth-century level. Moreover, the regional differences within Europe, which were significant even in the mid-twentieth century, virtually disappeared.

The new developments were largely the outcome of improvements in health care, the “therapeutic revolution” of the later part of the century. This was also closely connected to the rise of the welfare state in both halves of the continent, which guaranteed full health insurance for all citizens.

Major political and cultural-intellectual trends and events of historic proportions, most of which were surprising and unpredicted, have characterized Europe during the three decades since 1980. The outcome has been a dramatic transformation of the continent. I am going to discuss those elements of this political transfiguration that were of particular historical importance.

Unquestionably, the number one factor in bringing about these global changes was the collapse of communism and the Soviet superpower. The Cold War division of Europe and the world, which had determined its history since 1945, finally ended. The danger of war was eliminated. A closely related “side effect” of the end of communism was German reunification, a gigantic historical event in itself that nobody wanted to see outside Germany, but which no one was able to stop.

The announced “new world order” became a chaotic disorder. Europe rearranged itself and realized a new European order, though not without huge dramas, including the division of states along ethnic or religious lines, sometimes attended by civil wars, armed struggles, and terrorist methods in fighting for independence. These changes accompanied another equally historic change, a milestone in European history, which was the transformation and elevation of the European Community, both in terms of its expansion and its radically “deepened” integration. It took deep roots during the Cold War. This development began the elevation of Europe as a superpower.

Why write a book called Europe since 1980? What is Europe? And why focus on 1980? Was 1980 a turning point in the history of the old continent? This volume attempts to answer these questions, pointing to both global changes and unique European developments that were the main factors, as manifold as they were interrelated, in the dawning of a new historical period.

The first of these factors in order of importance, though not in chronological order, was the collapse of communism and the Soviet Union, and consequently the division of Europe. This had an overwhelming impact on every aspect of post-1990–1 Europe. Europe became a safer place and more united. A failed system disappeared and half of the continent emerged onto the road of a difficult but promising transformation. However, the western half of Europe also changed. The half-century-long rivalry between capitalism and socialism during the Cold War influenced Western society and politics. Besides the very visible arms race and the sometimes hysterical witch-hunting, the challenge of socialism inspired social awareness as well as a “social market” policy. This political competition had a long history, stemming from Chancellor Otto Bismarck's social insurance policy that he instituted to take the wind out of the sails of the rising social democratic movement in late-nineteenth-century Germany.

World War II, the most shocking historical and demographic catastrophe in European history, undermined Europe's position in the world. About 40 million Europeans perished, and huge parts of the continent were left in ruins. At their postwar nadir, the combined Gross Domestic Product of Austria, Germany, Italy, Belgium, and France had declined to less than half its prewar level. Bombing and street fights fatally destroyed Berlin, Dresden, Hamburg, Leningrad, Warsaw, and Budapest. The population of the Soviet Union, Poland, and Yugoslavia was literally decimated, the European Jewry was nearly eliminated, and tens of millions of people were uprooted. Devastation, inflation, and starvation left Europe on its knees.

Moreover, the clouds of a rising new conflict darkened the horizon at the end of the war. A creeping Cold War, with conflict and confrontation between wartime allies, brought uncertainty and fear to the shocked continent. The Soviet Union occupied and soon sovietized the countries east of the River Elbe that it had liberated from Nazi German and local fascist rule. The Eastern half of the continent was isolated from the West by a Soviet-type economic system and social-political regime and formed separate Soviet-led economic and military arrangements. In terms of trade, travel, and communication, exchange between the two halves of Europe was limited to a minimum. Several people believed that Stalin wanted to enlarge his buffer zone by occupying additional parts of the continent.

The Rise of a New Zeitgeist

Ideological and cultural trends do not know state borders. In the second half of the twentieth century, the “Western world” – meaning Western Europe, North America, and Australia – were more closely connected than ever before. The United States of America, the recognized leader of the Western world, had special influence. The new ideological and cultural trends since the 1970s and 1980s were not narrowly European, nor merely American, but “Western.”

The role of Western Europe was decisive, however. Neo-liberalism, one of the most important new ideological trends, was the child of both the Vienna School of Economics and the Chicago School of Economics. The newly emerging anti-Enlightenment philosophical trend, postmodernism, was strongly French, while neo-conservatism emerged in the United States. Decisive new political trends, such as the dramatic decline of the Left parties, were British and Italian-influenced, while traditional social democracy remained intact in Scandinavia. The rise of single-issue movements and leftover left-wing trends, such as the Green movement, was strongest in Germany. Feminism conquered Scandinavia and had strong roots in the United States as well. New populism emerged in Italy, while extreme right-wing populism was equally strong in France and Austria.

The “dual-crises” of the 1960s and 1970s, together with rising globalization and the transforming world order, generated a major about-face in the cultural-ideological environment of the Western world. The sudden change generated doubts about the policy, and harsh critiques erupted about the unintended negative side effects of postwar policies and institutions.