EU Governance: Democracy as a mere Fragment of Political Discourse

A march toward deeper democratic decision-making procedures cannot be combined with the current European strategy, because the EU is not conceived to be a democratic authority, but rather a supranational normative authority whose purpose is to achieve the objectives defined in the treaties and mainly, in accordance with the Monnet method, European integration through the establishment of a single market based on the perfect competition model. In this view, the so called democratic deficit is not an occasional dysfunction of the EU decision-making process, but rather a crucial prerequisite to implement credible commitment for market preservation.For these reasons we argue that democratic legitimacy and economic efficiency are decoupled in the EU integration strategy. It emerges from the existing discrepancy between the treaty’s formulations and the decisional practice of institutions, that democratic and economic goals are separately pursued.