Ideas of EU Democracy Across Time and Space: The Contributions of the Commission and the Court of Justice

This chapter engages with the ideas of democracy promoted by the EU, and their historical and spatial evolution. It does so under the assumption that there is no unique and monolithic understanding of democracy at the supranational level, but that there are slightly different visions depending on the institution at stake. While representative institutions like the European Parliament, the Council and the European Council have already been the object of in-depth investigations from the standpoint of both their democratic underpinnings and their impact on EU democratic decision-making, other key actors within the EU institutional system, notably the European Commission and the Court of Justice, have rarely been analysed from this perspective. The chapter aims to fill this gap and to unpack and compare the visions of democracy portrayed by the latter two institutions. Additionally, attention is devoted to ascertaining whether the EU enlargement process has triggered a shift in the democratic visions of the Commission and the Court of Justice and their roles in portraying a certain vision of democracy to the candidate countries.