ABSTRACT
Europe seems to be undergoing a democratization process at the moment. The UK has recently reformed the House of Lords. A Scottish referendum regarding independence from the United Kingdom took place on 18 September 2014 and in Catalonia a non-binding vote on the political future of Catalonia took place on 9 November 2014. As this book shows, the people are increasingly involved in constitutional reform. For instance, Iceland, Ireland and Romania have all recently experimented with new democratic processes when reforming their constitutions. In Luxembourg a citizens’ initiative is part of a proposed constitutional amendment which was the object of a consultative referendum in June 2015 and a decisional referendum in 2016. These examples raise the question of what has triggered these initiatives. Other chapters of this book discuss these developments from the perspective of an economic or political crisis. Even though there is no doubt that the fi nancial and political crises have played a direct or in some cases perhaps an indirect role in the democratic developments in some of the European countries, it seems that this is not the only explanation for the recent trend of democratization in Europe. The picture is more complex and more factors seem to be involved. Each country must be viewed in its specifi c context, and it is probably not possible to give one exhaustive explanation for the development. The purpose of this chapter is to discuss whether the strengthened direct democracy trend can also be explained by a factor other than the fi nancial and political crisis, namely one that is related to EU integration 1 and is maybe even part of
a competition between the EU and the nation states for democratic legitimacy among the ‘people’.
