Assembly Required: Institutionalising Representation in the European Communities

The European Union is often said to be run by an unelected elite of technocrats, and to therefore be undemocratic. This criticism is as old as the 1950 Schuman Declaration, which is why the European Communities came with representative institutions: the European Parliament for representing citizens and the Economic and Social Committee for representing organised interests. This book follows the European representatives, the members of these institutions, in their attempts to become a democratising counterforce in the European Communities during the 1950s and 1960s. It shows that they came out as advocates of democratic reform from day one, which culminated in the direct election of the European Parliament in 1979. Furthermore, it shows that even before the first European elections, they succeeded in extending their roles far beyond the limited powers that the European Treaties prescribed for them.

The European representatives pioneered democracy at a European scale. The big question was what it should look like in practice and what their role was in making it happen. Was democracy by definition a grassroots phenomenon or could supranational institutions bring it to life? Were the citizens and interests they represented national or had these citizens and interests, by virtue of the European Communities, become European? In a project that revolved around unification, the European representatives thus faced a real dilemma between fostering European unity and expressing the diversity that characterised the European political landscape.