Notre Europe's viewpoint | 18/03/2011 

From popular uprisings in the Arab world to catastrophe triggered by nature in Japan, today's news reminds us that we share our fate with others. The EU, already afflicted by financial and economic crisis, faces even more uncertain times in the months to come.

Confronted by these events beyond our control, the only effective way to recover influence over the situation is to act collectively. This is exactly the aim of the European project. By building shared institutions, Europeans gain a handle on problems for which national policy alone no longer suffices (relating to the economy, finance, trade, climate change, security and other issues).

But constructing democracy is a slow process, even if it is often punctuated by periods of acceleration. This is particularly true for Europe, where shared institutions must find their place within a Westphalian system in which the state is the central reference point for theorising democracy and its features – citizenship, constitutional law, the balance of powers. The community method, a young component of a long-term project, has allowed Europeans to build their institutions along original lines: the EU has no central government but (according to Jean Monnet's definition) “creates permanent dialogue between a European institution responsible for proposing solutions to shared problems [i.e., the Commission] and national governments which express national points of view”. As is shown by Paolo Ponzano's analysis and the “soap opera” of the Pact for the Euro (a Franco-German initiative which was “communitarised” in extremis), this community method is struggling to assert itself in a climate favourable to intergovernmentalism. The community method (involving the Commission, Council and Parliament) is the institutional mainstay of European integration, but it remains a work in progress. Olivier Costa, Renaud Dehousse and Aneta Trakalovà shed light on this unceasing search for institutional balance in their instructive look at the institution which has most changed over the last decade: the European Parliament. Notre Europe thus publishes the first analysis of a series on the institutional triangle. In parallel to this research on European representative democracy, we also publish the first assessment of the tools of participatory democracy used at EU level in the last decade. The analysis offers answers to questions over the reliability of participatory democracy in the EU.