Recent interventions in the democratic deficit debate have presented the EU as an original attempt at circumscribing the power of majorities within representative democratic states. The EU is, in the words of three Princeton-based scholars, an example of “democracy-enhancing multilateralism” (Keohane, Macedo and Moravcsik, 2009). Taking on these claims, this paper looks in detail at the concept of limitation and constraint in political theories of the modern state. It argues that whilst the idea of limited power is central to liberal and republican theories of democratic government, the EU presents us with something more than just a sophisticated version of Madison’s separation of powers. The distinctive feature of the EU is that it involves national executives imposing upon themselves limits and constraints that cannot be derived from any active political subject. Whilst constitutions can be seen as the act of self-limitation by a people, and thus legitimized through the principle of popular sovereignty (e.g. Holmes, 1988), the EU is a case of self-limitation without a self. Joseph Weiler has celebrated this as the EU’s principle of “constitutional tolerance”: European states are limited not by their own demos but by the will of a “community of others” (Weiler, 2003). This understanding of limitations in the absence of a national self is central to the notion of “member state” that underpins the contemporary EU. However, it presents us with many problems in terms of democracy and representation, not least the fact that democracy relies on one’s ability to identity responsibility within a political system. In a Europe of member states, where limits and constraints are derived from the will of an elliptical “community of others”, this kind of responsibility is very difficult to establish. This results in the feelings of political powerlessness and cynicism about the efficacy of political institutions that prevail across contemporary Europe.
