The Eurozone crisis, particularly as it has manifested in Greece, has challenged the representative capacity of European institutions as never before. It is not that formal democratic procedures have been eliminated - indeed, in some senses they have proliferated, as evidenced by the two general elections and one referendum held in Greece in 2015. Nevertheless, voters in Greece and other euro area states are increasingly presented with formally democratic systems that lack substantive choice.
This situation is a result of the failure of the EU’s constitutional framework to get the balance right between the competing imperatives of democracy and technocratic governance, as well as between the needs of individual citizens, national citizenries, and states in a highly diverse supranational polity. Fritz Scharpf famously asked 16 years ago whether EU governance could be both ‘effective and democratic’? Right now, it appears to be neither.
Thus, this paper uses the Greek case to illustrate the EU’s democratic deficit across three dimensions: within member states; between member states; and at the supranational level. I argue that, in all three dimensions, official responses to the crisis have exacerbated the EU’s pre-existing problems and that major reform is needed if eurozone governance is to be democratised.
