Democracy and the Union: Dressing up Cinderella (editorial)

The functioning of the Union shall be founded on representative democracy.? This the new Union Treaty echoes from the Constitutional Treaty. ?Citizens are directly represented at Union level in the European Parliament.? It means that the Union pretends to be a democracy and challenges the thesis, held by some, that democracy cannot be applied to an international organization. The mere ambition does not, however, answer the Union's shortcomings in terms of democracy.