Democratic Europe in the Narrow
Between Populism and Technocracy
While examining the striking bottleneck between populism and
technocracy affecting representative democracy in Europe, the Author
argues that both the scholarly discourse on ‘postnational’ governance
and the political debate on the EU democratic deficit that took place
in the past decade fail to capture the nature of the crisis affecting the
EU. In particular, the contribution tends to demonstrate that both these
discourses neglect the mechanisms governing the Member States-EU
relationship, that have gradually perverted the ‘output’ not less than
the ‘input legitimacy’ of the EU, whose whole project is thus under
deep stress. Against such a background, changes of these mechanisms
are here suggested that seek to adapt some acquisition of comparative
constitutionalism out of the traditional state’s realm.