Representing Europeans : a pragmatic approach

Abstract

Representing Europeans makes a fresh assessment of the challenge facing the European Union today: it can no longer carry out integration by stealth. Measures adopted to save the eurozone impose visible political costs without clearly visible benefits. There is a lack of popular commitment to more European integration because EU institutions represent its citizens indirectly or not at all. Reliance on citizenship lite is politically dangerous, since people retain the power to reject their national government because of commitments it makes in Brussels. The book's pragmatic approach recommends that enhanced European integration should be based on coalitions of the willing and accommodation of the unwilling. Federalists and Eurosceptics will alternatively agree and disagree with the argument of this book. But they cannot ignore the challenge it raises for the EU to pay more attention to the half a billion people it claims to represent.