Enhancing eSignature Legitimacy for Public Relations in European Union

How to eSign a document: e-signature legitimacy for Public Relations in European Union

so the title of the talk um is the title of my most recent book power and legitimacy reconciling europe and the nation state uh which was thank you published by the oxford university press at the end of 2010 so indeed my principal aim tonight is to give you an overview of the thesis i set out in power and legitimacy which i think is timely in light of recent events in the eu notably the eurozone crisis um as i hope to elaborate a bit toward the end of my uh talk tonight but i'd also like to do a couple other things as well time permitting most importantly i'd like to give you a few hints about the project that i'm working on here at the academy this semester which involves exploring in greater historical depth what i see is the parallel evolution of constitutional democracy and modern administrative governance in the north atlantic world over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries as i hope will become clear in this talk this new project is deeply intertwined with the thesis that i set out in power and legitimacy in my view the eu as ingolf suggested is best understood as an extension of the forms of administrative governance that consolidated themselves on the national level in the decades after 1945 what i call the post-war constitutional settlement of administrative governance this settlement i argue emerged out of growing tensions between two countervailing historical trends over the late 19th and early 20th centuries on the one hand there was the increased centralization of governing legitimacy in elected bodies and other nationally constituted institutions publicitarian chief executives as well as growing court systems on the other hand there was the diffusion and fragmentation of normative power away from these centralized constitutional bodies into an increasingly variegated administrative sphere operating at multiple levels the growth of the modern administrative state in the uh 19th and 20th century was driven by functional demands for regulation across a whole range of domains relating to urbanization industrialization as well as the movement of goods labor and capital both within and beyond the nation-state thus despite our conventional images of national consolidation during this period one could just as easily conclude based on these countervailing pressures that the late 19th and early 20th century european nation state indeed the nation-state throughout the north atlantic world was very much a leaky and porous vessel to use the words of my fellow fellows michael guyer and charlie bright in a piece that they published together in 2002 it is precisely because of this administrative leakiness if you will that we should probably resist the temptation which might be especially strong here in germany to equate administration with rigid hierarchies and bureaucratic centralization within the state perhaps in a vaberian sense as well as as well as with some kind of public or moral authority above social divisions perhaps in the sense of a hegelian general estate indeed when i speak of administrative governance wherever located i am referring to the manifold instances of regulatory power that today reach well beyond the political summit of any state that is the legislature or the executive in their highest constitutional forms in my view the administrative realm today not only encompasses the state bureaucracy at all its levels but it also stretches well beyond the boundaries of the state itself to international organizations like the wto or to regional entities like the eu or nafta thus in my mind european governance as a whole including the seemingly legislative european parliament and the seemingly judicial european court of justice are best understood as an extension of the diffusion and fragmentation of regulatory power that has been the defining characteristic of the leaky container of the modern state and thus a central goal of european public law has been in keeping with again what i call the post-war constitutional settlement to reconcile the functional demands of integration which has entailed the extensive migration of regulatory power to the supernational level with the continued cultural attachment to ideals of representative government and constitutional democracy on the national level as they as they were inherited from the 19th century and reinvigorated after 1945. as a point of entry in into my discussion of power and legitimacy however i'd like to begin by talking a bit about a speech i attended two nights ago at humboldt university which was given by hermann van rompuy the president of the european council that is obviously the eu's assemblage of national heads of state and government engulfed pernici in fact presided there as well which is simply an indication of the fact that he moderates the talks of all the most important speakers who come through berlin it was indeed a fascinating talk as much for what president van wampuy did not say as for what he in fact did say abraham one queen noted uh how the eurozone crisis over the last two years had seemingly forced the member states and national leaders to take the center stage as he put it and that for many observers this raised fears of of a re-nationalization of european politics he was referring of course to the marginalization in the efforts to resolve the eurozone crisis of the key supernational political institutions in the eu the european commission and the european parliament in favor of direct negotiations between national governments within the european council in which of course germany as europe's pay master necessarily has played a major some might even say hegemonic role van rompuy preferred to look on the brighter side of these developments rather than all this being a sign of the renationalization of european politics he argued that it was in fact indicative of the deepening of what he called the europeanization of national political life he quoted chancellor merkel on in this regard when she said two weeks ago in this crisis we have reached a whole new level of cooperation we have arrived at a sort of european home affairs europa ist europe is domestic politics there can be no doubt that europe has indeed become domestic politics in the member states although i would argue that the eurozone crisis has merely accelerated a trend that began at least 25 years ago with the single european act of 1986 followed by the treaty of maastricht in 1992. it is no coincidence as my book power and legitimacy points out that concerns over europe's purported democratic deficit began to intensify around this time it was precisely in the late 1980s and then over the course of the 1990s that increasing numbers of europeans became aware of how much regulatory power had in fact migrated to the supernatural level in domains reaching well beyond market integration such as in environmental policy or consumer protection even though the eu's annual budget has remained minuscule no more than one percent of total eu gdp the european union has become a prodigious producer of regulatory norms now the estimates on this point uh range wildly uh from as low as 20 to as high as 80 percent of the norms now being applicable within the member states being of purportedly being of eu origin it really depends on who you ask regardless of the total however the point is clear europe has long been a part of major domestic policy making if not also of domestic headline politics there is however a problem with this so-called europeanization of national political life which was identified by joshua fisher then germany's joshua fisher excuse me then germany's foreign minister in his own speech at humboldt in two thousand in two thousand which is remembered for kicking off the debate over whether the eu needed a written constitution an effort which ultimately failed at least formally although some might argue that elements of the goal were realized in the treaty of lisbon of 2009. ing to fisher in 2000 european governance has long had long been afflicted and arguably still is afflicted by the broadly held sense that integration is largely quote a bureaucratic affair run by a faceless soulless bureaucracy in brussels close quote that is no matter how much european elites had struggled against this perception european citizens continued and arguably still continue to experience the increasing europeanization of domestic politics if not precisely as a negation of democracy on the national level then certainly as the transfer of regulatory power to an unaccountable distant and ultimately foreign bureaucratic elite which goes simply by the name brussels or as the german writer hans magnus ensensberger put it in an essay last year the santis monsta the gentle monster that is brussels the official response to this broad political perception toward the eu beginning with the single european act in 1986 and continuing with every subsequent treaty up to lisbon in 2009 has been to increase the role of the european parliament in the supranational policy process to the point that today the european parliament enjoys the right of co-decision in nearly all regulatory domains within the legal competence of the european union this effort in fact built on decisions of the european court of justice in the 1980s which very much in keeping with the constitutionalist mindset the court had established since the early 1960s viewed the european parliament as the expression of quote the fundamental democratic principle that the peoples of europe should take part in the exercise of supernational power through the intermediary of a representative assembly close quote but this formal parliamentary democratization strategy as i called it in an article i published in 1999 has ultimately failed to stem the negative perception of the eu as fundamentally bureaucratic and distant as reflected in so-called euro barometer surveys as well as low turnouts in european parliamentary elections this is due i would suggest to the fact that the parliamentary democratization strategy is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what democracy is as well as how true democratic legitimacy is in fact realized over time to frame the discussion and i'm not being particularly innovative here consider lincoln's classic formulation in the gettysburg address democracy is government of the people by the people and for the people now i'm going to take these elements out of order discussing the second and third ones first for reasons that i hope will become clear in a moment to begin with to be democratically legitimate one must have government by the people that is government that involves popular participation most importantly via elections we could call this as many have input legitimacy and the european parliament clearly meets this criterion because it is in fact elected it does in fact play a major role in legislation and indeed it also plays a key role in approving and supervising the european commission the eu supernational executive and also the body charged with formulating legislative proposals moreover the treaty of lisbon attempted to increase the input legitimacy uh in the eu by establishing a citizens initiative designed to augment participatory democracy whereby groups of citizens could petition the european commission to consider a particular legislative proposal thus given the extensive powers of the european parliament as well as the citizens initiative i would say there is little grounds to criticize the eu in terms of input legitimacy and one could add of course obviously that the heads of state and government sitting in the european council and the council of ministers are also strongly legitimated albeit on a national level but in addition to input legitimacy we must have government for the people that is what the german political scientist for charf has famously called output legitimacy it exists where there is a sense that governing bodies promote with some reasonable degree of success the security and prosperity of their population european elites have traditionally justified integration on this basis indeed herman van rompuy did so in his humble speech two nights ago and i quote legitimacy arises when people see hear and feel that a political order benefits their prosperity their freedom and security and it safeguards their future close quote although it should be added that he readily admitted that the eurozone crisis was sorely testing this basis of legitimacy at least in an economic sense my own view is that european integration over time has rightly earned a good deal of output legitimacy this can be measured not merely an additional points added to net gdp as a consequence of market integration rather it can also be measured by such things as the removal of border controls the broadly shared respect for human rights and the rule of law as well as perhaps most importantly the overall sense of a peaceful coexistence that integration has brought to this historically dark continent peace after all was the stated aim of the schumann declaration in 1950 thus the eu has much to be proud of in terms of output legitimacy as well so what then is the problem with the eu's democratic legitimacy i would say the problem lies precisely in lincoln's threshold criterion government of the people government of the people refers to the historical identity between a population and a set of governing institutions that is it refers to the political cultural perception that the institutions of government are genuinely the people's own which they have historically constituted for the purpose of self-rule over time antecedent to this perception however is the perception of the existence of a people itself that is the sense that there exists a historically cohesive political community shaped by broadly shared historical memories in which it is legitimate for the minority for the majority to rule over the minority subject of course to the protection of human rights this perception of historical cohesion in turn gives rise to the belief that the political community is not merely capable of but indeed entitled to self-rule through institutions that they constitute for this purpose this i would say is the cultural foundation of the ideal of representative government inherited from the 19th century when a political community gains this historically grounded sense of democratic self-consciousness it becomes a deimos in the sense of deimos katya that is democratic or democracy in other words democratic legitimacy in the deepest sense depends not merely on democracy's inputs and outputs rather it ultimately depends on whether there exists this crucial sense of historical identity between the institutions and the people that is the sense that both the people and their institutions are indeed the product of the same common history even a deeply contested history as in for example the united states i would in fact argue that this sense of deimos legitimacy is not merely essential to democracy but also to constitutionalism itself and in this i follow the lead of jed rubenfeld in his 2001 book freedom and time a theory of constitutional self-government it is on the basis of this deimos legitimacy that merely functional institutions of rule are transformed into genuinely constitutional bodies because they have come to be understood as the institutional expressions of the right of the deimos to rule itself the eu today is riddled with multiple demoy across its various member states which of course creates a great deal of democratic and constitutional legitimacy not for the eu but for national constitutional bodies there are exceptions of course such as belgium where the coherence of the national deimos is deeply contested thus undermining the legitimacy and effectiveness frankly of national institutions but as is broadly recognized throughout europe again no news here the eu as yet lacks any single overarching european demos and thus perhaps it also lacks at least for the moment the needed socio-cultural and socio-political foundations for a pan-european democratic constitutionalism without such demos legitimacy that is without the sense that european institutions are genuinely the people's own rather than some distant bureaucratic construct europe will have a great deal of difficulty overcoming its so-called democratic deficit no matter how much input and output legitimacy otherwise exists indeed the very idea of a democratic deficit may reflect an elite misapprehension of the nature of the problem as my book power and legitimacy points out the problem in the eu is not a democratic deficit in the sense of needing increased input legitimacy rather the problem is one of democratic disconnect in the sense that eu institutions are generally perceived as beyond the control of democratic and constitutional bodies in a historically recognizable sense sympathetic european commentators not to mention judges on the on the ecj have struggled mightily to reconceive the nature of democracy and constitutionalism in the european union they have come up with a whole range of network-based theories of transnational or cosmopolitan democratic and constitutional legitimacy in order to dissociate these concepts from the nation-state and thus bring supernational governance within their conceptual ambit and yet the idea of the eu as democratic and constitutional in its own right has remained deeply suspect at least when measured against the perceived legitimacy of institutions on the national level with all their many flaws and there are many the result in my view has been a continuing disconnect and here we get to the title of the book between on the one hand the extensive scope of supernational regulatory power and on the other hand the limited capacity of supernational institutions to legitimize that power in democratic and constitutional terms which is something still demanded by the admittedly evolving ideals of self-government inherited from the 19th century and reinvigorated after 1945. power and legitimacy argues that european public law has quietly and in some sense unconsciously attempted to overcome this disconnect by establishing over time a range of national mechanisms to oversee and legitimize supernational regulatory power in a democratic and constitutional sense these mechanisms challenge the idea widespread among legal scholars of integration that european governance is built on a set of quote institutions constitutionally separated from national legitimation processes unquote as a recent scholarly article put it these national legitimating mechanisms that i highlight in power and legitimacy include of course the well-known collective oversight exercised by national executives via the council of ministers and the european council this mechanism is indicative of the decisive role played by national executives under the post-war constitutional settlement as the book explores in great detail but these national oversight mechanisms also include judicial review by national high courts with respect to certain core democratic constitution democratic and constitutional commitments the so-called competence competence jurisprudence for example which also reflects the critical role of courts under the post-war constitutional settlement and finally these mechanisms include the recourse to national parliamentary scrutiny of supernational action particularly over the last two decades whether of national executives individually that is by committees within national parliaments or of supernational bodies more generally culminating in the new subsidiary early warning mechanism of the treaty of lisbon these national mechanisms exist i would argue to attempt to strike a balance whether they do so is another question they attempt to strike a balance between the evident functional and political demands for supernational regulatory solutions and the continued attachment to the nation-state as the primary locus of democratic and constitutional legitimacy in europe put another way these national legitimating mechanisms establish a framework within which the otherwise undoubted complexity of europe's policy-making processes distributed across multiple levels of governance can operate without evident democratic and constitutional legitimacy of their own at least as classically understood so how then should we interpret these national legitimating mechanisms in legal and historical terms this is the central question motivating my book and i hope it is the principal value added of the book as well my aim in power and legitimacy in some sense was to offer a legal historical theory to to to better understand the development of these national legitimating mechanisms as an integrated whole and as a response to the lack of demos legitimacy in the european union the traditional debate about the legal character of european integration has operated along a dimension stretching from international organizations at one end to a kind of quasi-constitutional federalism at the other end the consensus view is that european supernationalism is suey generous in some respects it operates like a traditional international organization in which the sovereign equality of member states is respected and intergovernmental decision making prevails but in other respects it behaves like a quasi-federal constitutional entity in which supernational legal discipline greatly limits the sovereign prerogatives of member states and in certain domains at least and frankly most domains now majority voting is used to produce norms for the eu as a whole power and legitimacy argues by contrast that the eu should be analyzed along a different interpretive dimension precisely as a consequence of this disconnect between regulatory power and democratic legitimacy that i discern that my dimension or the dimension that i propose stretches from the strongly legitimated constitutional bodies on the national level whether legislative executive or judicial to the diffuse and fragmented forms of delegated regulatory power whether located at the sub-national national supernational or even international levels in this framework therefore both the eu and traditional international organizations are manifestations of the same phenomenon that is the diffusion and fragmentation of normative power away from the strongly legitimated bodies of the nation-state over the course of the 20th century from this perspective the challenge of legitimizing eu governance is simply a new manifestation of an old problem that of legitimizing administrative governance more generally albeit now in a supernatural rather than national forum it is for this reason that i argue that european public law is best understood in terms of what i call the post-war constitutional settlement of administrative governance the key to understanding the legitimation of administrative governance in whatever form is as ingolf properly said in my view the concept of delegation although now obscured behind the language of conferral in the european treaties the role of delegation is increasingly hard to ignore as a foundation normative principle in european public law in which democratic and constitutional legitimacy remains fundamentally national even as regulatory power is transferred to the european union delegation however does not refer to some immutable rational choice regime in which constitutional principles and here i'm using p-a-l-s not p-l-e-s in which i'm talking in principal agent terms we have karen alter here she can educate you all on that that's it's in vogue within the social sciences it's an interesting and helpful uh analytical framework in which constitutional principles somehow control administrative agents i challenge this view we should not understand delegation in this sense unfortunately some parts of the integration literature when they see principal agent theory they assume that the person is asserting that principles control agents and that is wrong if you know anything about administrative law you would never make that assertion it is a normative principle to understand the relationship of delegation to modern administrative governance we must dispense with an idealized understanding of a westfalian constitutional principle a westphalian sovereign with unbridled power to direct regulatory outcomes within a particular territory which is an a historic reading of state sovereignty if there ever was one this caricature of the principal agent relationship is far from the actual historical reality not just supernationally but also nationally indeed one of the most fascinating elements of the post-war constitutional settlement explored in detail and power and legitimacy has been the constitutional redefinition of a constitutional redefinition of the power which must be retained in the legislature and the power which may be lawfully delegated to the executive and administrative spheres in this sense delegation has evolved as a highly flexible normative legal principle in which the power to control whether de facto or deore is often greatly diminished if not nearly relinquished entirely legitimized by the belief that some matters are left to the autonomous decision-making of administrative actors now central banks are probably the most extreme example of this faith in the autonomous expertise of administrative actors but we don't have to go into that constitutional principles even at the state level and again i'm using it in the sense of p-a-l-s constitutional principles have often settled for something less than actual control perhaps merely supervision coordination or what an american administrative lawyer would call oversight along these lines one could cite the transformation of the old notion of chancellor democracy in germany which has which some theorists now claim is best understood as a coordination democracy in which the chancellor serves only as a policy manager at the center of a highly pluralist institutional network in the case of european integration this sort of coordination or oversight by historically constituted bodies in the nation state most importantly national executives but also by national high courts and increasingly by national parliaments has provided or seeks to provide the necessary legitimating connection between the diffuse and fragmented agents of regulatory power in the european union and the possessors of democratic and constitutional legitimacy in a historically recognizable sense that is in a national sense this in my view is the essence of modern administrative governance the separation of regulatory power from the historically constituted bodies of the nation-state executive legislative and judicial which in turn is legitimized through mechanisms of oversight by these same bodies which thus seeks to reconcile the reality of diffuse and fragmented governance with the conceptions of democratic and constitutional legitimacy we inherit from the past viewing national legitimating mechanisms in european public law in this way is not just an analytical conceit on my part rather as power and legitimacy argues in some detail there is considerable historical evidence that each of the national legitimating mechanisms in the eu executive legislative and judicial were constructed with an eye to similar legitimating mechanisms in the administrative state and under the post-war constitutional settlement in this regard a particular interest to this audience may be the competence competence and constitutional identity jurisprudence of the german bundeswehr's this jurisprudence has drawn directly from its domestic counterpart regarding the constitutionality of delegation to executive administer and administrative bodies under the basic law of 1949 and i'm here speaking here specifically of the jurisprudence interpreting article 80 subsection one the bundesweck has also drawn on the related vasant liquids theory and i'm apologies for my german vision the kites terry or theory of essentialness whereby the court has sought to protect what it believes to be the essential functions of the national parliament in the face of functional demands or political demands for the diffusion and fragmentation of regulatory power finally and perhaps most importantly this jurisprudence reflects elements that are clearly analogous to the so-called fobahats that's gazetsis or the domain reserved to legislation under the constitution which the court has used to ensure the bundestag's position in germany's post-war system of separation of powers this is the constitutional dimension of administrative governance on the national level but it also must be stressed consistent with the judicial role vis-a-vis administrative action under the post-war constitutional settlement that the broader approach of the german high court the broader approach of the german federal constitutional court has been one of strong deference to the political choice in favor of integration as well as to the discretion of decision makers charged with implementing that choice whether national executives or supernational bodies like the european court of justice even where individual rights are at stake if it were not already clear to this point in my talk let me make it as clear as possible now i regard the post-war constitutional settlement of administrative governance as an historic achievement after the catastrophe of 1914-1945 the post-war constitutional settlement sought to define a workable balance between cultural ideals of representative government inherited from the 19th century and the diffuse and fragmented reality of administrative governance in the post-war welfare state thus for me to argue as i do in power and legitimacy that european integration is administrative not constitutional and thus built on the post-war constitutional settlement of the ministry of governance is not to denigrate the process of european integration as some readers might suppose i'm often the caricatural footnote some people argue that the eu is administrative this is a silly position ceg lindsay in any event uh i am not a euro skeptic i am not a euro skeptic which i hope i have made clear through my earlier discussion of the considerable achievements in european integration in terms of output legitimacy with apologies to engulf i am however a skeptic with regard to the so-called constitutional interpretation of integration precisely because i believe such interpretations often wrongly bracket out the no demos problem and thus effectively assume at least terminologically and maybe even substantively a degree of autonomous legitimacy in the eu that is in fact fundamentally lacking or at least is still fundamentally in dispute if in describing the eu we are using the term constitution in a purely descriptive sense to refer to the sort of organic statutes or bylaws that all organizations need to operate with some degree of legal certainty then of course the eu has a constitution but what the eu lacks and what the careless use of the term constitution in relation to the eu elides is the broadly shared sense that its institutions embody or express the capacity of a historically cohesive political community a european deimos to rule itself through institutions historically constituted for that purpose assuming a degree of autonomous legitimacy in the eu by describing it as constitutional i believe is not merely to make a mistake as a matter of scholarly analysis rather it is also potentially very risky because it invites profound errors of institutional and policy design as the eurozone crisis i believe is sadly proving the events of the last two years suggest that the common currency was not just flawed economically although economists never tire of pointing out that countries that the countries of the eurozone certainly germany and greece do not constitute what they call an optimal currency area rather my perspective is that of a comparative historian of public law and of administrative governance which inevitably leads me to focus on the question of legitimacy like any form of essentially administrative governance the eu is legitimate for certain purposes but not others indeed the foiba hats that's gazettesis or the theory of essentialness is an effort to define and law what kinds of questions appropriately belong to an administrative body and what appropriately belongs to a strongly legitimated constitutional body so the eu is legitimate for certain purposes but not others unless europeans are prepared to change fundamentally their understanding of what democratic self-government means or where it is located thus whenever we talk about the legitimacy of european integration we must always ask the question legitimate for what legitimate for what purpose the flaw in the european monetary union from this public law perspective may be that given the downside risks that the eurozone crisis is now revealing the adoption of the euro presupposed a degree of centralized political power and legitimacy most importantly relating to shared taxing and borrowing authority euro bonds that the eu or rather the euro zone countries collectively simply lack herman van rompuy in his speech two nights ago continually pointed to the fact that the total debt levels and the general fiscal position of the eurozone as a whole were actually pretty decent at least as compared to the united states or the uk this is undoubtedly true the problem with this claim is that the eurozone as a whole aside from the fact that it shares a common currency along with common institutions like the european system of central banks is otherwise a statistical artifact with no real political existence of its own and certainly no shared taxing or borrowing authority that might be used to take advantage of the overall sound position of the euro zone as a whole indeed the german bundeswafassen select has made it quite clear and at several decisions arising out of the eurozone crisis that euro bonds are out of the question precisely because they will impinge on the historical prerogatives and thus democratic and constitutional identity of the bundestag in short the court believes that the removal of control over taxing and borrowing power that euro bonds would inevitably entail would impinge on the realm of legislative power that must be reserved to the national parliament akin to the forba hats that's gazettes in the post-war constitutional settlement thus in response to the question of legitimate for what in european integration the eu might be perfectly legitimate as a vehicle to harmonize regulatory standards in various domains numerous domains but it may not be legitimate to assume the power over the national purse in a way demanded for example by the eurozone crisis in other words i think it deeply unlikely that a european alexander hamilton will emerge anytime soon someone able as a means of pulling the euro zone out of its current crisis to engineer an assumption of the debts of the member states on the supernational level as hamilton and the federal government did with state debts in the aftermath of the american revolutionary war why because europe lacks as yet the demos legitimacy the sense of government of the people to undertake such an extraordinary step to close i ask your indulgence by letting me read from the final paragraphs of power and legitimacy if supernational institutions do eventually attain some autonomous capacity for self-legitimation then europe will have reached a point contemplated by ernest renault in his 1882 excuse me in 1882 in his classic lecture what is a nation although ghana spoke there of nations his meaning clearly extended to nation states which he viewed as quote not something eternal they had their beginnings and they will end a european confederation will probably replace them close quote but as lana continued in terms of undoubtedly true for his era such is not the law of the century in which we are living the surprising lesson of the present study may be that hanal's caveat of 1882 retains more than a residual measure of validity in our own era despite all that has come to pass in the intervening century and a quarter a constitutionally autonomous european polity has not yet eclipsed the nation state at least not in law and almost certainly not in culture or political practice it has been through the adaptation of the legitimating mechanisms and normative principles of the post-war constitutional settlement of administrative governance that europe has arguably found its way pragmatically to an institutional formula that conforms to europe's new slogan united in diversity unity is achieved by way of shared institutions whose character is fundamentally administrative creating nevertheless a deeply political system exercising some measure of delegated normative power on the supernational level operating on behalf of a set of polycentric constitutional bodies on the national level diversity is preserved however precisely because ultimate legitimation if not control remains in the polycentric constituted bodies of self-government executive legislative and judicial of the member states in this way european public law has found a way to maintain the connection to the strong expressions of democratic self-rule on the national level in what is otherwise functionally a multinational multi-level and even polyartical system of governance such is the law of the age in which we are living different from a null no doubt but surprisingly less so than one might suppose after reading the many fascinating but still ultimately doubtful reflections on the possible forms of democracy and constitutionalism beyond the state that have proliferated in europe over the over the last two decades nationally grounded legitimating mechanisms in european public law remind us that constitutional democracy still emanates from the state in crucial respects how long that will last i cannot say but at this point in europe's history these mechanisms are probably best viewed in terms that anesthronol would have well understood they remind us that national institutions are looked upon in terms of political culture as what renault called a guarantee of liberty in a collective constitutional sense something that he said quote would be lost if europe had only one law and one master thank you