Conventional Wisdoms under Challenge: Reviewing the EU’s Democratic Deficit in Times of Crisis
International Workshop, 3-4 October 2013, Edmundsburg
Five years after its outbreak in 2008, the financial, economic and sovereign debt crisis has become omnipresent in EU research. Our workshop aims at adding to this by focusing specifically on the crisis’ implications for democracy in the EU and by adopting a particular perspective, i.e. taking as our points of departure some of the most popular “commonplaces” on the EU’s democratic deficit. Against this background, we want to revisit five commonplaces on the EU’s democratic deficit and ask: What does the crisis tell us about our established accounts of the EU’s democratic deficit(s)? Do we witness an aggravation of previous deficits, largely confirming existing normative and analytical accounts – or, alternatively, does the crisis constitute a fundamental challenge to how we perceive of and theorize about EU democratic politics? If the latter is the case, did we get things already wrong before the outbreak of the crisis – or should we better wait for the crisis to wither and, afterwards, return to the textbooks dating from “normal” times?
