ABSTRACT
This chapter considers governance at the centre of European constitutionalism. It illustrates the shortcomings of both the political and the academic debate on European constitutionalism in its relation to European governance. Taking systems theory as a starting point and using reflexivity as a normative device in addition to deliberation, reflexive deliberative polyarchy (RDP) is proposed as a normative framework for European governance. The strength of directly deliberative polyarchy (DDP) is that it combines a normative proposal with an attempt to take the empirical reality and complexity of European governance seriously. The authors of DDP themselves appear to be increasingly aware of the huge gap between their normative model and the practice of European governance in relation to the criterion of direct citizen deliberation. The example of the European Employment Strategy (EES), as part of the Lisbon Strategy, has been used to rethink the normative framework in relation to European governance.
