Book Reviews Suski, Birgit. Das Europäische Parlament: Volksvertretung ohne Volk und Macht? Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1996. Pp. 211. DM 84; ÖS 656; sFr 84. Kluth, Winfried. Die demokratische Legitimation der Europäischen Union. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1995. Pp. 157. Index. DM 68; ÖS 531; sFr 68. 'Democratic legitimation' and 'public participation' are two of the key terms in the current debate on the shape and future of the European Union. The frequency of their use is, however, often no proof of the depth of the discussion for which they stand. Going beyond the level of fashionable term-dropping requires a clear and comprehensive analysis. Birgit Suski's Das Europäische Parlament: Volksvertretung ohne Volk und Macht? and Winfried Kluth's Die demokratische Legitimation der Europäischen Union both try to reach this goal - approaching it from two different directions - and both fail to some extent. Suski comes from a rather formalistic school of thought. She sets certain premises - often without giving due reflection to their usefulness and adequacy - and uses them as a comparative standard for an evaluation of the European Parliament's role as defined in the EC Treaty. Her line of reasoning goes as follows. In a first, lengthy part she defines the term 'people' in a legal sense and concludes that there is no single European people. This is certainly not new; more surprising is the reason given for this. Since each Member State still has the competence to restrict temporarily some of the freedoms guaranteed by the Union in order to ensure public order, security or health, the basic equality of all the citizens living within the borders of the Union cannot be assumed. This is certainly one of the oddest and most legalistic arguments that has ever been raised against the notion of a European people. But even more puzzling is the next step, where she somehow comes to the conclusion that the democratic principle is nevertheless fully binding for the Union. If there is no European people, not even in a functional-democratic sense, how then can one, without great effort and without giving any thought to the serious concerns that have been raised against the legitimacy of supranational democratic structures at the current stage of integration (not least by the Bundesverfassungsgericht, even if they might not be convincing in the end) simply postulate that the European Parliament has to replicate the functions of the national parliaments, which it obviously does not? This is not much more than an intellectual ghost-voyage. Kluth, in contrast, starts by developing a general concept of democratic legitimation. He then evaluates the current arrangements in the EU, concluding that there is no democratic deficit. Although Kluth's line of reasoning seems more straightforward than Suski's, some of the same queries remain. The most fundamental is one of methodology. Democracy is by origin not a judicial invention. It was developed as a philosophical, a political, concept. The legal notion of democracy is only its transformation into a workable institutional framework, which had to be adjusted over time according to the development of the idea itself. A major strand of research in political science currently analyses the socio-economic conditions of public participation and the various forms of informal participation. Without taking, just to give one example which is particularly relevant for the EU context, the role and influence of interest groups in the decision-making process into account, any study of democratic legitimacy seems shaky. In the same conceptual vein lays Kluth's neglect of the deliberative element of the democratic process. But public deliberation is impossible if important information is not, or only with great difficulty, accessible for the broader public. Transparency is therefore an important precondition for democracy. How then can one write about democratic legitimacy without mentioning transparency? Another aspect that would have been important to consider, even on the basis of Kluth's own criteria, is the question of democratic legitimacy in the context of the implementation of Community legislation, an issue which has been discussed in the legal literature under the heading 'Comitology' for decades now. Taking all this into account, one may wonder whether there is really no democratic deficit. Alexander Ballmann München
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