Introduction: Reflections on the Place of Democracy in the Process of European Integration
Sara Lorenzini

Chapter 1. European Integration and Democracy: The Complexities of a Relationship
Martin Conway

Chapter 2. Governance versus Democracy: Negotiating Transnational European union during the Cold War
Wolfram Kaiser

Chapter 3. Making a Rod for its own Back: Explaining Commission Support for Increasing European Parliament Power, 1950-2000
Piers N. Ludlow

Chapter 4. Images and Sounds of the "Democratic Deficit": the Italian mass media and European Integration in the 1950s
Gabriele D'Ottavio

Chapter 5. An Unexpected Problem? The Hague Summit and the Democratic Deficit
Umberto Tulli

Chapter 6. A Statement of the Obvious? The European Commission and the Internal Rationale of the Copenhagen Criteria
Benedetto Zaccaria

Chapter 7. The Spitzenkandidaten System and the 'Snakes and Ladders' of EU Parliamentary Democracy
Emanuele Massetti

Chapter 8. The Illiberal Fabric: Mapping the Geoculture of Viktor Orbán's Hungary
Stefano Bottoni

Chapter 9. A Democratic Brexit? Populism and Democracy in the United Kingdom's Withdrawal from the European Union
Russell Foster

Umberto Tulli is Lecturer at the Department of Humanities and at the School of International Studies (SIS) of the University of Trento. He is currently working on the EEC and the human rights breakthrough of the 1970s. His latest book is A Precarious Equilibrium. Human Rights and Détente in Jimmy Carter's Foreign Policy (Manchester University Press, 2020).

The histories of European unification and of West European democracy during the second half of the twentieth century have often been considered as separate or even antagonistic processes with the institutions of European integration being regarded as bastions of bureaucratic rule. A More Democratic Community challenges this assumption and argues that European integration benefited from the democratic accountability of member states while contributing to the validation of national democratic institutions. However, it also unveils a paradox: as integration deepened, it diminished the power of national parliaments, sparking a democratic accountability crisis within the Community.