Skip to list of Journals

Political ReviewNet
First for Politics and International Relations Book Reviews

Review of:

Democracy in Europe: The EU and National Polities by V.A. Schmidt
Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006
Pages: xv+317. £15.99

Reviewed By: Stanisaw Konopacki
Reviewed in: Journal of Common Market Studies
Date accepted online: 02/11/2007
Published in print: Volume 45, Issue 03, Pages 745-769
See all reviews for this journal

Book Reviews

Schmidt's book is a valuable and well-written contribution to the analysis of the impact of European integration on national democracies. According to the author, democracy has become an issue for Europe and the suspension of the ratification process on the Constitutional Treaty, following the failures of the referendums in France and the Netherlands, shows that it will remain a problematic issue in the near future. The institutional reforms envisaged in the Constitutional Treaty may reduce the problem of EU democracy, but they would not solve the democratic deficit at the national level. The problem at stake refers to Europeanization, which means that national conceptions of democratic power and authority, access and influence, vote and voice remain mostly unchanged. National leaders have failed to initiate ideas and discourse that would engage national publics in the discourse about the EU-related changes to national democracy. Therefore, a key question here is 'how should national leaders proceed in such a discourse?' Firstly, they should decide what the EU is, in order to assess what their countries are becoming.

Thus, the fundamental assumption of Schmidt's book is the idea of the EU conceived as a regional state. It is a regional union of nation states, where sovereignty is shared with Member States, boundaries are not fixed, identity is understood in terms of 'being' and 'doing', governance is dispersed. Schmidt argues that in such a fragmented democracy, the EU's legitimacy is in question because it is compared to the ideal of the nation state. However, if it is conceived as a regional state, the democratic deficit would not be so great. But the problem is much more significant in relation to national democracy. The author convincingly argues that this is because while the EU makes policy without politics, its Member States realize politics without policy. National citizens have little direct input into the EU policies that affect them. This results in the problems of voter disaffection and political extremism characterizing the EU Member States nowadays.

To solve this problem, Member States have to come up with new national ideas and discourse in order to adjust the EU-related changes to the traditional performance of their national democracies. But firstly it is necessary to conceive how institutions affect European democracy at EU and national levels. Thus, Schmidt's book is about the nature of the EU governance system and its impact on national democracies. In Chapters 2-4, the author examines the impact of the EU upon national institutions, taking into account in turn the policy-making processes and the representative politics of the EU and the Member States. A special merit of Schmidt's work is that the author illustrates her argument with examples of four countries: Britain and France, as representing simple polities, Germany and Italy, as compound polities. They not only account for over half the population of the EU, but also can be compared and contrasted as matched pairs of cases concerning governance practices.

Concluding on the prospects for democracy in Europe, Schmidt argues that today Europe requires greater clarity of purpose and better understanding on the part of its citizens. More democracy needs more avenues for interest consultation with the people as well as further efforts to increase transparency and accountability in governing for the people. National interest and movements focused at the national level need to learn to organize, pressure and protest at the EU level. On the other hand, the EU itself would need to develop a more communicative voice to the European public. Schmidt notices that the task is not so easy. 'But no one ever said that building Europe would be easy'.