Delegation of Powers and the Fiduciary Principle

No more serious pitfall threatens the student of the European Union than the idea of assessing the EU’s institutions and decision processes using the same criteria that are relevant at the national level. For example, in spite of several superficial analogies, one cannot understand the European Parliament using the same conceptual categories which have proved useful in analyzing national parliaments. The EP does not differ from the legislatures of parliamentary democracies only because it lacks their power to tax and spend, to initiate legislation, and to form a government. A more fundamental difference is that the EP is seriously deficient as a representative institution. It cannot represent a (nonexistent) European people in the same sense in which national parliaments represent a historically defined demos, and thus cannot represent, even in theory, a common interest which is more than the sum of the various national interests. Individual interests, on the other hand, are still largely rooted at the national level and hence find their natural expression in national parliaments and political parties All this explains why the real arena of democratic politics continues to be the nation-state, and why European elections are “second order elections”: useful perhaps to gauge the popularity of the incumbent national government, but meaningless as an arena where European issues would be debated and settled. It also explains why popular participation in European elections has been constantly decreasing since the first direct elections in 1979, and why the EP does not enjoy sufficient democratic legitimacy to be able, in turn, to legitimate European policies, or other European institutions such as the Commission. The intrinsic limitations of the EP as a representative institution have been recognized by the new Constitutional Treaty, which assigns an explicit role to national parliaments in the process of European integration. Hence, whatever useful part the EP may play in the institutional architecture of the EU, it cannot be evaluated using the same standards we apply to national legislatures. Similarly, the European Commission is often referred to as “the European executive”, but this label is more misleading than useful. Under the Community method, the Commission enjoys the