Eric Stein

International Integration and Democracy: No Love at First Sight

In this essay I suggest a correlation between the integration level of an international institution and the public discourse about the lack of democracy and legitimacy in the institution’s structure and functioning. This discourse includes ideas for remedial action at both the national and international levels; it also becomes inevitably intertwined with other reform proposals that may call for an incremental or—particularly in the case of a more integrated organization—a radical restructuring. Having originated in the highly integrated European Community, the debate on the “democracy-legitimacy deficit” has reached other institutions, particularly the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the international financial bodies, and has become one component of the backlash rhetoric against “globalization.”

The European Parliamentary Assembly: Techniques of Emerging “Political Control”

The English parliamentary system emerged from the dramatic struggle between the English Parliament and the Crown over the principle of political or “democratic” control. For leaders of the Commons such as Edward Coke a single false step beyond the line of the sovereigns endurance meant the Tower of London. Another struggle in a different key and on a different level has begun with little publicity on the Continent. The European Parliamentary Assembly in the newly established European Communities is seeking to assert some degree of control and influence not only over the mushrooming Commissions, but also over the powerful Councils of Ministers. Obviously, there is no danger of an irate Council of Ministers confining the obstreperous parliamentarians to the dungeons of Strasbourg. Moreover, the European Parliamentary Assembly is far from being a parliament. Members of the Community “executive” such as Jean Monnet have encouraged rather than fought the Assembly. In these as in other respects the analogy with the development of the English parliamentary system must not be pressed too far. But the broad contours of the contest, the pressures and counter-pressures, the use and abuse of legal argument, and the reliance on genuine and fabricated precedent offer an interesting study in the development of a parliamentary body.

Harmonization of European Company Laws

May I begin with a statement of confession and avoidance: I am not and never have been an expert in corporation law of any kind-European or American-and I shall therefore avoid any discussion of technical corporation law questions. I am, however, interested in the corporation as an institution that plays a role in the process of integration of states. Arthur S. Miller wrote once that going national by American corporations was one of the principal reasons for the American economys becoming national, and for the changes in the nature of the federal system that have taken place since I787. Once the economy became national, it meant that a continental economic system was superimposed on what was then a decentralized political order. This released powerful impulses toward centralization in the federal political system. The analogy between the evolution in the United States and that in contemporary Western Europe is alluring, but it is, of course, dangerous as all such analogies are. Yet it is a fact that business in a politically decentralized Europe is going European, that the corporation is the principal instrumentality in this Europeanization process, and that the Common Market Treaty provides an institutional framework for a new economic system and perhaps for a new political order as well. It is proper for us lawyers to realize that the law plays a part in this development as it did in the United States. But it is the better part of wisdom to keep in mind that in this complex process the law plays only the role-to paraphrase George Kennan-of a gentle fertilizer.