Democracia e União Europeia: a resposta à crise da zona do Euro e o déficit democrático (2008 a 2014)

Abstract

The main goal of this dissertation is to demonstrate how the decision making process of the European Union during the eurozone crisis has deepened its democratic deficit between 2008 and 2014. The historical and institutional evolution of the EU together w ith the gradual transfer of competences from the domestic sphere to the supranacional one have raised academic and popular suspicion (HIX e FØLLESDAL, 2006; AZMAN, 2001; JOLLY, 2013) about how democratic and legitimate were the decisions taken by the EU. In the context of the global financial turmoil initiated in 2008 with the Lehman Brothers ‟ s declaration of bankruptcy , it did not take long until the European Union started to feel the effects of this major financial crisis, which shed light into an even d eeper problem: the crisis of the eurodemocracy. In this sense, this dissertation aims to analyze how the EU‘s decision making to refrain the crisis has deepened its democratic d e ficit between 2008 and 2014. The hypothesis is that the EU, during the eurozon e crisis, concentrated its decision making process in the hands of indirectly elected political actors and of the wealthiest member states. In order confirm that, it will briefly present the institucional setup and the decision ma k ing process of the EU, as well as the academic debate regarding the existence of such demoratic d e ficit. The second section will cover the global financial crisis and how it affected Europe, leading to the emergence of the so called european sovereign debt crisis. The third sectio n will present the new architecture of the EU emerged to contain the crisis, especially the new fiscal transfers mechanisms, the new institutional framework and the European Central Bank‘s new role. The fourth and final section will aggregate the previousl y presented data and analyze them in the light of Føllesdal and Hix‘s (2006) systematization of the democratic deficit. Th is dissertation will delineate the causal pathway that led the EU to use technocratic resources to adopt crisis contention policies an d to concentrate its decision making processes in unelected Executive and suprana tional actors. It will also demonstrate how the EU lost its legitimacy and democratic accountability, both in relation to the (lack of) popular participation, the (poor) polit ical outcomes and also in relation to the very political process who lead to the adoption of all these measures.