Abstract This article explores the history of democratic problematisation of European integration, rather than taking part in the normative debate on the European Union's democratic legitimacy deficit that emerged in the 1990s. We focus on the narratives of non‐institutional actors who have considered that European integration should be a democratic political entity since the 1950s. We draw on historical archives of constitutionalist/maximalist federalists, highlighting two ways of understanding what European democracy should be: a political union centred around a parliament directly elected by citizens and endowed with constitutional power and a union with social prerogatives. We argue that studying the early narratives of maximalist federalists can shed light on the state of the posterior debate on the EU's democratic legitimacy deficit. Indeed, some academic positions from the 1990s were already well established in the federalist discourses of the 1950s.
Jessy Bailly (Sun,) studied this question.