The European institutional crisis. The illusion of supranational representation?

Recent European Union experience is showing us an historical political decline. European institutional weakness in the post-bipolar World invites us as political scholars to engage with a creative reflection on the process of the European unification and its underlying philosophy and method, noted as "Functionalism". In this paper I would like to investigate the actual limits of the European Union from a particular perspective, analyzing one of the main aspects of the institutional and political crisis of the EU: the failure of the representation – accountability circuit, a problem that is at the core of the so called democratic deficit. The great economic crisis that favored the rise of populist and Eurosceptic movements have underlined the structural limits of the European “party politics” and of the representation model via the parliamentary arena. The paper will underline how the European representation circuit - as we know it in the nation state experience (based on the role of parliaments and on the political competition alongside the left/right cleavage) - has left room over the years of crisis to the hegemonic representation of national interests in the intergovernmental arena. The failure of the model of supranational representation lies in the absence of the virtuous relationship between political representation – European elections are still more a national competition than a European one – and policy production – which is even more located in Brussels out of popular scrutiny -. Furthermore the European Parliament, in spite of the strengthening of its legislative powers, still is a weak parliament from the point of view of its representative function. This failure seems to represent the end of the functionalist illusion about a valuable democratic enforcement of the relation between citizens, parties and institutions in the European arena as a final stage of the political spillover effect.