Suchergebnisse

With the promised return of Parliamentary powers, Brexit is supposed to be a fillip for representative democracy. There is a significant danger that will not be so. EU membership weakened the conditions for representative democracy within those fields governed by the EU. Whitehall will almost be the central player in the reform of EU-derived law. And policy styles are being developed which marginalise rather than consolidate UK legislatures in these fields. Restoration of representative democracy will require a realistic re-evaluation of its virtues so that these can be protected and a re-imagination of the possibilities and limits of parliaments within such a landscape.

AbstractThe domestic scenario following a Brexit vote is likely to be characterised by high stakes, uncertainty and fissile political debate. No off‐the‐peg arrangement touted for Brexit—be it Norwegian, Swiss, Turkish or Canadian—was designed to engage with such a context. Nor does it seem wise to rush to medium‐term commitments which might pre‐empt democratic politics and wise choices. Far more important will be the legitimacy of any institutional settlement governing this arrangement, which will provide the context for its revision and development and the space for democratic reflection over how these policies are to be governed. It will be suggested that here there is much insight to be gained from looking at regional arrangements beyond the EU.

Certain features condition when most EU law comes into being. EU laws must compete with other laws for authority. They form part of legal regimes which are partial in scope and can cut across national legal regimes. They justify themselves by reference to a vision of political com-munity which values what individuals do together more than simply their living together. These features act as a source of conflict in two ways. They, first, endow EU law with certain qualities which act as a source of stress. These include over-responsibilisation, destabilisation and function-alism. Secondly, the concern to secure authority by legislating better to realise certain shared activ-ities leads to expertise heavily influencing both the content and incidence of EU law and to a disre-gard of those activities which link daily life experiences to wider processes of identity formation. The failure to address these features is central to the malaise and antipathy currently confronting the European Union.

European union law is currently undergoing a transformation as profound as that forged by the '1992' project which prompted the article by Joseph Weiler of that name. If that project was an intensification and broadening of EC law making, this new transformation is altogether of a more subtle nature. On the one hand, there is a commitment to a drastic reduction in the number of EU laws on the statute book. About one third of Union legislation is to be repealed, recast, modified or simplified. Alongside this, one finds an expansion of pan–European norms. In 2003, the main European standardisation body, CEN, adopted 888 standards. This one year's work equated to more than were adopted in the whole period prior to the end of 1992. One view might be that this is some 'retreat by the state'. These types of norms are developed by private actors, and maybe a simple privatisation of the legislative process is taking place. This explanation is unconvincing, however. Studies in other fields have found private law making to be accompanied by more pervasive and further reaching forms of administrative intervention.