There was a time not that long ago when serious people entertained the idea that “democracy” might mean something more than a tiny claque of entrenched post–Cold War progressives running the world’s institutions in their own interest. David Marquand, a British academic, coined the term “democratic deficit” in the 1970s to describe the lack of access that citizens had to influencing the European common market (as the European Union was then), either through voting or normal forms of democratic access, despite the immense and invasive regulatory power of that institution.
The European Union’s power is the product of pooled sovereignty — a transfer and diminishment of powers from national parliaments, which are accountable to democratic peoples, to European institutions that are deliberately more remote. European peoples don’t have direct electoral input into the powerful European Commission, the executive body of the EU that also has the sole power to initiate legislation. Often members are brought onto the commission after they have lost elections in their countries. The elected European Parliament is selected in low-turnout, low-information elections, and it does little but debate the merit of the EU itself. There is no real connection between its actions and the sentiment of European citizens that would qualify it as a truly deliberative body, let alone a representative one.
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