Issues of Democracy and Legitimacy: Obstacles to European Integration?

It is quite hard to call European integration as a democratic process, because it actually have no deal with democracy, rather with a making some new kind of polity. Of course, developed democracy is one of the main criteria of becoming a member state of the EU, but at the same time, the EU can not be through and through democratic, just because usually we speak about democracy in scope of nation state level. However with every new step of integration, especially if we consider its deepening side, the EU becomes more alike the state, which means, that democracy in the union is necessary and strongly required from the member states. These circumstances and processes together had caused a lot of discussions about democratic deficit in the EU.
To realize, what the democratic deficit is, it is necessary to define it, and here we can meet the first challenge. It is quite impossible to draw an exact definition of democratic deficit first because there contend very different interpretations, what the democracy is and how it must be expressed institutionally in terms of the EU.1 But mainly democratic deficit is considered to occur, when thought democratic organizations or institutions fail fulfilling the democratic principles in their practices or operations.
Those who argue that the European Union suffers from a democratic deficit often attribute this to a number of factors. First, the Council of the European Union, which is one half of the EU's bicameral legislature (the other half being the European Parliament), is made up of national ministers and meets in secret when agreeing legislation. As such, there is no parliamentary scrutiny of the Council's legislative decisions at EU level, and many last-minute negotiations are conducted by diplomats. …