L’Europa democratica nella strettoia fra populismo e tecnocrazia

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.