Le istituzioni europee: carenza di legittimazione o superamento del principio rappresentativo?

The goal of this article is to analyse the legitimation of European institutions and their democratic deficit. This deficit cannot be solved with the system of legitimation of national States: first, national States themselves lack of legitimation, a deficit that the representative system cannot resolve. Second, with respect to the national State, the EU is a new and still unfinished institution; therefore we cannot use the traditional political and juridical concepts to understand it and resolve its problems. In the last section, the article analyses the role that the representation of interests, the subsidiarity and the European citizenship can play to help to manage the problems of legitimation and of credibility that lie heavily on European institutions.