EIRP Proceedings, Vol 9 (2014)

Abstract

European Union is not a state and is becoming more than just one intergovernmental actor. Its formal commitment to promote democracy has grown. European Union has had a strong dynamic of its own; the increase in membership potentially helped it to become a more powerful actor. Democracy is a core European Union value and through our analysis we will try to find out how much of this value is promoted by its institutions. The hypothesis that led us to this research was that ‘European Union is not a state’. In order to find what it is, if not a state, we reviewed the development of the European Union, its basic principles and values and analysed them thorough the confederate state lens. By summing up the comparative studies and based on qualitative methods we tried to establish what kind of foundation European Union has and if democracy is really its core value. And the conclusion is that result, European Union is a political system which cannot (yet) be analysed as a state, but rather as a distinctive hybrid.