Does the EU need to be democratic?

There has been in recent years a growing concern, reflected in the abundant publication by various academics and scholars, relating to the legitimacy of the European Union (EU) and its alleged ‘democratic deficit’. Many of these publications seem to have taken the democratic deficit as given and concentrated on explaining its causes and characteristics, leading to solutions which could be put in place to resolve it. Few have explicitly identified and questioned the common premise that this emphasis on the democratic deficit implies. Indeed, the recognition of its relevance presupposes the existence of a certain threshold of democratic accountability from which the EU is assumed to be departing from. But does this threshold really exist, and if so, how can it be defined?
In this essay, I take a step back from the mainstream debate and discuss whether the EU should be democratic in the first place. Since ‘democracy’ is such a vague concept with multiple possible interpretations, any analysis in that domain has to be directly related to the sense in which the EU can be democratic. Also, any ‘should’ question implies some goal(s) to be met, which in this case are efficiency and (more importantly for the purpose of this analysis) compliance with citizens’ expectations[1]. As such, the mere fact that the democratic deficit is felt throughout the EU by a significant part of the public[2] (Eurobarometer 2008b, page 57) provides by itself some ground on which to argue for the need of democratic accountability at EU level.
The argument of this essay is articulated in two parts. On the one hand, I shall explain what is meant by democracy at EU level by considering the different models that apply to its system of governance, and examining their related tests of democratic accountability. Parallel to this, I will look at why the EU should conform to any model at all, by taking a closer look at the identity problem, the functions of the EU