Law Perspective: Praise Undeserved? The EU as a Democracy Promoter: A Sceptical Account

Abstract

A significant reshuffling of the European Union’s (EU) approaches to national-level democracy in its member states is urgently required.¹ This should be accompanied by a toning down of the EU’s claims externally. Fundamentally, it seems that all the uncertainties and challenges related to the promotion and preservation of democracy internally and externally ultimately relate to the vacuum the Union suffers from at its core (Williams 2010): attempting to construct and enforce an approach to justice which is essentially market-based (for a multi-faceted analysis, see Kochenov et al. 2014a), failing to withstand the scrutiny of the project from outside the market paradigm (for a proposal of how to break this trend, see for example Kochenov 2013a) and making wholehearted democracy-related mobilization of the Union legal system impossible (Weiler 2009: 51). Clarity concerning the substance of EU values, in particular democracy and the rule of law, is lacking (Kochenov et al. 2014b), causing many problems in practice. In this context, democracy largely fails to emerge as a guiding principle of EU law, joining an array of highly imprecise malleable values vaguely indicating the desiderata informing the construction of the internal market. To be very clear, the EU acquis on democracy is simply non-existent.