1. An earlier version of this paper was given at a Conference on Shifting the Boundaries of Sovereignty: Governance and Legitimacy in the EU and Australasia, organised by the National Europe Centre, ANU, and is based on research undertaken while a Visiting Fellow at the Centre as part of the 'Democracy Task Force' of the EU-funded 6thFramework Integrated Project on New Modes of Governance (Contract No CIT1-CT-2004-506392). Later versions have been delivered to the NoSoPhi seminar at the Universite Paris 1, the Second Annual Conference of the Consortium on Democratic Constitutuionalism at the University of Victoria on 'Supranational Political Community: Substance? Conditions? Pitfalls?' and the Graduate School of Politics and International Studies, Hull University. I am grateful to the other participants at these events for their comments and to Neil Walker, Jo Shaw, Chris Hilson, David Coen, Andrew Moravscik, and Albert Weale for written remarks.
2. It is noticeable, for example, that the White Paper on European Governance explicitly treats the EU's legitimacy problems as symptomatic of various common difficulties confronting advanced democracies more generally (European Governance: A White Paper, Commission of the European Communities, Brussels 25.7.2001, Com (2001) 428, p. 3).
3. Europe's 'Democratic Deficit': The Question of Standards