and nationality altogether, giving rights of free movement to all. Voting and
taxation would depend on residence alone (Soysal 1994 ; Kostakopoulou 2001 ).
Yet, within this camp too there are signiWcant diVerences over how far or
deep this transformation of political community has gone or could go. Some
suggest the EU is only an adaptation of national politics to globalization. The
policies concerned are regulatory rather than distributive and the main
requirement is for independent monitoring mechanisms that can ensure all
comply with the relevant agreements and neither the policies nor their mode
of implementation infringe certain basic rights (Majone 1998 ; Moravscik
2002 ). Because democratic majorities can threaten rights or the public inter-
est, delegated agencies often handle such regulatory tasks within national
democracies. No democratic deWcit exists, because in these areas democracy
need not, and even should not, be authorial. People need only have the
possibility of contesting or ‘‘editing’’ agreements for bias or maladministra-
tion (Pettit 2006 ). This purpose is served by the ECJ upholding the rule of law
and the possibility of appealing to it and the European Ombudsman. Yet,
some instrumentalists follow those in the intrinsic camp who believe inter-
national agencies can never be fully democratized and so contend their scope
should be limited. They maintain that, beyond a certain size, a citizen’s vote
becomes worth so little, and the center so distant, that a global or even a
European democracy could never work eVectively (Dahl 1999 ).
Once again, debate within and between the two camps turns to some
degree on one’s reading of the empirical evidence. Unfortunately, the avail-
able facts do not clearly support one side or the other. Eurobarometer polls
consistently show that citizens identify themselves as national Wrst and
European second, while turnout in elections to the European Parliament
(EP) is lower than in national (if not necessarily local) ones and getting
lower (although this is a common trend for all elections). However, the polls
also reveal that most citizens regard the EU as beneWcial, while many view the
EP and the Commission more favorably than their national parliaments and
governments. Although people vote for national parties in European elec-
tions, these are aligned on a similar left–right spectrum in all member states
and have no diYculty re-forming as European party blocs within the EP.
Ultimately, it is hard to resist the conclusion that we have neither a European
demos nor merely national demoi, but rather a series of relations that place
people betwixt and between various subnational, national, international,
transnational, and supranational allegiances, with diVering degrees of instru-
mental and intrinsic motivations operating at all these levels. As a result, EU
the challenge of european union 255