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On 1 December 2010 the Lisbon Treaty had been in operation for one year. The new EU foreign affairs service is currently under construction. The EU has an unelected President for the European Council (the meetings of the Heads of State and Government meetings), an unelected foreign minister, and an unelected Commission President. Together, they can travel the world and give lessons to others on the importance of accountable and democratic government.
The Lisbon Treaty establishes the legal base for a new supranational European State. Much EU legislation is already more centralized than legislation in the United States. The EU itself, however, has weak tools of power: Its security service has only 620 policemen, while the FBI has 30,000. The EU has no federal prisons. There is still no joint defense for the largest trading bloc in the world. However, all the instruments of state power can now be established on the basis of the Lisbon Treaty. It is still the case that 56 Treaty articles require unanimity among the EU Member States, but the main legislative procedure is now decision by qualified majority vote among the Member States.
I shall set out here the main powers of the EU and consider how its democratic deficit may be remedied.
When decisions and policy-making areas are moved from the member nation-states to the supranational European Union level, citizens lose the voting influence they previously held at the national level, but are compensated somewhat by gaining influence at the EU level. In what areas have voters lost influence? What have they gained instead? Is the newfound influence at the EU level sufficient compensation for what voters have lost? Andrew Moravcsik has argued that EU membership represents a democratic gain overall, because, at the EU level, voters can have an impact on areas where a small country alone would have little say or influence. 1
The Democratic Deficit
The greater part of the laws and regulations that bind the Danes and other Europeans come now from the EU. Are those laws and rules adopted as democratic as the laws and rules that are made under Denmark's own Constitution? For topics for which Denmark on its own cannot adopt effective regulation, one can argue that there is an effective...