Democracy vs. Demoicracy: A Fundamental Contradiction in European Integration?

Advocates of European integration have long hoped to imbue supranational policy making with democratic legitimacy, in particular through an expanded role for the European Parliament.  The Spitzenkandidaten process in the May 2014 EP elections, leading to the election of Jean-Claude Juncker as Commission President, was a concrete example of this institutional strategy.  Such efforts, however, have arguably failed to develop a broad-based, robust sense of supranational democratic legitimacy among European citizens, at least one commensurate with the regulatory power that supranational bodies now exercise.  How might we account for this seeming contradiction between supranational regulatory power and national democratic legitimacy in the process of European integration?  This roundtable will address the question from the perspective of history, political theory, sociology, and law.  It will explore whether the effort to recreate "democracy" at the supranational level misconceives the nature of the EU as fundamentally a "demoicracy"—that is, a political community in which the experience of self-government remains decentralized among the EU's various national demoi even as power shifts to the supranational level to undertake a number of crucial functions in common.  From this perspective, the persistent weakness in "democracy" in the EU results not from a deficit in supranational democratization (for example, via limitations on the EP) but from an increasing sense of disconnect from the experience of self-government on the national level.  If that is so, what might a "demoicratic" understanding of European governance entail for our theoretical and practical understandings of the integration project going forward?