Reconstituting democratic taxation in Europe: the conceptual framework

This paper explores how and to what extent it is possible to contribute to the Democratisation of the European political order by means of modifying the ways in which taxes are deliberated upon, decided and collected in the old continent. In the first part, the author elucidates the particular relationship which prevails between the institutional setup and the decision-making processes of the European Union, the structure of the European tax order and democratic legitimacy, and concludes that No European Democracy without European Taxation. In the second part, the three general RECON models are specified by reference to four dimensions of any tax order, and thus the ground is laid to the study of both the emergence of a supranational tax order and the Europeanisation of national tax systems, which will be conducted in coming papers.