After the Double No: The EU's best hope.

This essay informs that the European Union (EU) is in crisis. The crisis was provoked by this past spring's rejection of the European constitution by France and the Netherlands, two of the EU's original members. It employs fewer civil servants than a medium-sized European city; it cannot enforce its decisions and depends on member states to translate them into national law; and its budget is well below two percent of European GDP. Most importantly, its institutions are subject to numerous checks and balances that constrain EU institutions in a way that many citizens accept as the benchmark for legitimacy in their own countries. Moreover, it is not obvious that such non-democratic institutions as expert committees and regulatory agencies, which are viewed as legitimate elements of national administration, have comparable legitimacy at a supranational level. Without a shared political culture, a basic sense of what political institutions should generally accomplish, and, above all, a sense of trust, technocratic arrangements can strike citizens as alien impositions, even if they are very effective and subject to checks and balances.