Sammendrag
The European Union is facing a triple crisis: an institutional crisis, an economic crisis, and a democratic crisis. This thesis takes the democratic crisis and the democratic deficit of the European Union as its starting point.
With the goal of examing what kind of democracy the Members of the European Parliament commit themselves to in the plenary debates end the implications this would have for European integration, I here examine debates on treaty change in the fifth and sixth european parliaments (1999-2009). Using a combination of grounded theory method and quantitative text analysis I conduct an analysis of the discourses on democracy present. The main result of this is that the MEPs in their plenary speeches commit to one of two main models: EU as an intergovernmental orgnaisation or EU as a federal state. In addition to the main dimensions, there are a number of sub-discourses present which have here been used to illustrate the space found between the two end-points of the discursive spectrum.