The European project that reconciled battered France with prostrate Germany was its work. Of the four figures who spearheaded the project - Jean Monnet, Alcide de Gasperi, Konrad Adenauer and Robert Schuman - the last three were Christian Dem­ocrats. Their achievement was one dimension of something much greater: a historic reconciliation between the Roman Catholic Church and the ideals of the French Revolution that made possible the collaborative capitalism of postwar Germany and Italy. Even today, it is the ideological bedrock of the European Union.
http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2011/08/germany-europe-democracy-italy



Never again should a parliamentary assembly just cede power to a Hitler or a Pétain. Instead, the architects of post-war European democracy opted for as many checks and balances as possible – and, paradoxically, for empowering unelected institutions to strengthen liberal democracy as a whole.

Importantly, European institutions – especially the European Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights – also fit this understanding of democracy through prima facie undemocratic mechanisms.

Today, many Europeans are clearly dissatisfied with this conception of democracy. Many have the impression that the continent is entering what the political scientist Colin Crouch has called a “post-democratic” era. Citizens increasingly claim that political elites do not properly represent them, and that directly elected institutions – national parliaments in particular – are forced to bow to unelected bodies like central banks. Passionate grassroots protest and surging populist parties across the continent are the result.

Ordinary Europeans long trusted elites with the business of democracy – and often even seemed to prefer unelected elites. If they now want to modify the social contract (and assuming that direct democracy remains impossible), change ought to be based on a clear, historically grounded sense of which innovations European democracy might really need – and of whom Europeans really trust to hold power. That discussion has barely begun.
http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/mueller5/English