The Question of Deliberative Supranationalism in the EU

The democratic deficit of the EU, it is often contended, is due to the lack of European political parties, representative accountability and a properly functioning public sphere. However, it may be argued that the underlying evaluative scheme which this diagnosis rests on, is based either on liberal aggregative or civic-republican assumptions about democracy. These perspectives offer a pessimistic assessment of the EU project and one that is premised on an overly confined notion of legitimacy. In this paper I try to show that discourse theory represents a promising theoretical alternative to liberal and republican theories of democracy and the standards associated with these because it conceives of the public sphere as a pluralistic institution for opinion formation and conceives of representative bodies not only as bargaining 'markets' but also as deliberating 'fora'.