ABSTRACT
The European Union (EU), such as it is, remains the most developed project in transnational democracy. As a polity, it has progressed to the constitutional phase, in the sense that its democratic legitimacy has become an issue for public deliberation and popular ratication. The likely failure of its current constitutional proposal seems to many to be a stunning defeat for those who have taken up the cause of establishing democracy beyond the nation state. However important for emerging polities, constitutionalism is nonetheless only one aspect of democratic legitimacy (albeit one that is particularly important in an institutional structure as complex as the EU, which has grown by layers in different treaties). The need for democratic legitimacy was already explicitly recognized in the Maastricht Treaty, a central purpose of which was already to democratize the EU. However, some treaty provisions with this aim may have had unintended undemocratic consequences, such as making decision-making less transparent. The impasse of the current constitutional convention shows the many difculties and dilemmas that any polity inevitably confronts when creating legitimate institutions of democratic reform, all of which cumulatively lead to a potentially vicious circle: it is not democratic enough to propose the means and ends for achieving its own democratization.
