Institutional innovations and EU legitimacy after the crisis

The euro crisis has made ever more apparent the need to revise and update the way in which we conceive and communicate democracy in a world of heightened interdependence and has revealed one more time the exceptional nature of EU decision-making. the European Union is an institutional construction like no other international organization and therefore cannot perform as a conventional representative democracy. The chapter offers a slightly more benevolent reading of the EU democratic deficit, but a harsher judgment of the European elites' preparadeness to come to terms with the shfting grounds of democratic legitimacy.