Multilevel Legitimacy: Conceptualizing Legitimacy Relationships between the EU and National Democracies

According to most observers, political globalization — the shift of many of the nation state’s traditional competences to international or supranational regimes or organizations — creates problems of democratic legitimacy for both national and international governance. At the national level, democratic processes are undermined by the growing interdependence of national and international institutions, which results in shrinking capacities of national demoi to exercise full control over political developments affecting their members. At the international or supranational levels, mechanisms of democratic participation and collective self-government are fragmentary compared to the nation state. This deficit cannot be easily remedied as many of the social conditions on which national democracies rely are not met in extrānational contexts. As the nation state’s autonomy dwindles and international or supranational institutions are found wanting in democratic quality, the democratic form of government as a whole seems to be in danger, as the citizens, in R. Dahl’s words, ‘participate extensively in political decisions that do not matter much but cannot participate much in decisions that really matter a great deal’.1