Democracy between States: Popular Sovereignty and the Hierarchy of Democratic Legitimacy in the US and EU States Unions.

This paper treats democracy as a problematic yet under-theorised feature of the relations between states, as shown by the US and EU understood as "states unions". In such systems, the retention of the units' sovereign status is fundamental to their anti-hierarchical design yet subject to ongoing contestation, leading to ambiguity over the nature and extent of units' sovereign status. Given this context, the paper analyses how democratization - the process of appealing directly or indirectly to the people to settle political conflict - brings to the fore the question of the hierarchical relationship between the system and the units in the US and EU. In the antebellum US, the original settlement for preventing hierarchy broke down as both the Union and the units sought to justify their positions in an appeal to the people to settle political conflict. Similar appeals by EU member states and European institutions during treaty re-negotiations have likewise led to a clash over the proper locus of popular sovereignty. Hence the US and EU experiences serve to expose the potentially adverse consequences of democratizing relations between states. Consequently, the paper suggests that whereas democracy within states is associated with the improvement of relations between such states, the extension of democratic practices beyond the state poses profound difficulties for political organization. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]