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The Future of the European Community: Two Models of Democracy1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Vernon Bogdanor
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Extract

THE CONFERENCE OF THE EUROPEAN COUNCIL AT LUXEMBOURG in December 1985 was a considerable disappointment to advocates of European Union. Instead, as was once hoped, of proposing wide-ranging amendments to the Treaty of Rome, the Council contented itself with a rag-bag of minor changes. For the time being, therefore, the prospect of any fundamental reform in the working of the European Community should probably be ruled out.

Nevertheless, it is unlikely that the pressure for reform – fuelled as it is by a directly elected Parliament which feels itself excluded from the decision-making process in the Community – will disappear. The reformers will, no doubt, pause to regroup their forces so as to apply pressure more effectively when the issue returns once more to the agenda of European politics.

Type
Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 21 , Issue 2 , 01 April 1986 , pp. 161 - 176
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1986

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Footnotes

1

Some of the themes of this paper are based on Britain and European Union (June 1985), the report of a study group established by the European Centre for Political Studies, Policy Studies Institute and the Federal Trust for Education and Research. The author was rapporteur for this study group. He would like to thank Dr Roger Morgan and Mr John Pinder for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

References

2 The report of the Dooge Committee can be conveniently found in Roland Bieber, Jean‐Paul Jacqué and Joseph H.H. Weiler: An Ever Closer Union: A Critical Analysis of the Draft Treaty establishing the European Union, Commission of the European Communities, Brussels, 1985, p. 330 ff.

3 Steed, Michael, ‘Failure or Long‐haul? European Elections and European Integration’, Electoral Studies, 1984, Vol. 3 No. 3, p. 228 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Both this article and also Steed, Michael, ‘The European Parliament’, ch. 12 of Bogdanor, Vernon and Butler, David (eds), Democracy and Elections: Electoral Systems and their Political Consequences, Cambridge University Press, 1983 Google Scholar, explain why direct elections have failed to fulfil the hopes of their advocates.

4 Niedermayer, Oskar, ‘The Transnational Dimension of the Election’, Electoral Studies, 1984, Vol. 3 No. 3, p. 240 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Niedermayer, , ibid; and Reif, Karheinz, ‘National Electoral Cycles and European Elections 1979 and 1984’, Electoral Studies, 1984, Vol. 3. No. 3, p. 244 Google Scholar. (Emphasis in original.)

6 Lipset, Seymour M. and Rokkan, Stein, ‘Cleavage Structures, Party Systems and Voter Alignments: An Introduction’, in Lipset and Rokkan (eds), Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Cross‐National Perspectives, Free Press, New York, 1967 Google Scholar.

7 Hogan, Willard N., Representative Government and European Integration, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1967, p. 209 Google Scholar.

8 Steed, ‘Failure or Long‐haul?’, op. cit., p. 226.

9 Monnet, Jean, Memoirs, London, Collins, 1978, p. 513 Google Scholar.

10 See, for example, David Goldey and Philip Williams, ‘France’, ch. 4 of Bogdanor and Butler (eds), Democracy and Electiom.