The EU as a democratic polity has been invented: it is a product of creative and innovative
actors and thinkers that conceptualized and by and by helped to realise it from the beginning
up to the present. But the concepts ideas and utopias of a democratic Europe differ
considerably. The processes of inventing and building a democratic EU are marked by conceptual
controversies in both public and academic debates. These are the resource for the present book
which focuses on the concepts actors and controversies related to inventing the EU as a
democratic polity. The chapters study exemplary long-term and detail cases related to inventing
and institutionalizing the decisive elements of representative democracy in the EU-a parliament
citizens that vote for it in universal suffrage and governmental bodies that are linked to
parliament in much the same way as government is in a parliamentary democracy.
