Democratic legitimacy in the era of fiscal integration

Abstract:

While several countries still struggle to return to sustainable growth and Euroscepticism has shown growing strength ever since the 2014 European Elections, Europe is slowly advancing on the path of fiscal integration.

This paper reassesses how legitimacy is provided and why the advancing economic and fiscal integration constitutes a ‘genetic change’ of the Union. The second section discusses the functional deadlock emerging from the interaction between demos democracy and redistribution, which invites the EMU to make a fundamental choice between ‘convergence of the identities’ and ‘convergence of the economies’.