Video: Schmidt on Democracy in Europe
In a recent discussion on her new book, Democracy in Europe: The EU and National Polities, Vivien Schmidt, the Jean Monnet Professor of European Integration in the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, offered an explanation of the European Union’s oft-cited “democratic deficit.” In establishing a conceptual framework for her analysis, Schmidt distinguished between two types of governance in European states: simple and compound polities. In simple polities, governing authority is channeled through a single authority while in compound polities it is diffused through multiple authorities. France and the United Kingdom, for example, are simple polities while Germany and Italy are compound. The EU, Schmidt asserted, is a compound polity because it has a composite (national and European) identity and only possesses state-like sovereignty in some policy areas. Trade policy, for example, was cited as an area where shared sovereignty is accepted. When it comes to the Common Foreign and Security Policy, however, this is not the case.