“ Say” And “Pay”: The Impact Of European Union On German And Austrian Lander.

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governments acquired more power vis-a- vis national parliament and regions as the result of integration into European Union. The national parliaments of member states were already losing their powers due to the process of modernization and increasing workload and the integration into the European Union speed up this process. One could suggest that regions were facing similar problems, underwent the same process and were also losing their powers due to the processes identified above (modernization, international interdepence and increasing workload).
The process of strengthening central government against regions and parliaments lead to
the number of voices raised that bring up the problem of the “ democratic deficit” of European Union. They suggest that member states are governed by the institutions and individuals that are not popularly elected and therefore the problem of accountability could arise in future. These critics do have their point. The main European level actors are representatives of central government whether de jure or de facto. They are appointed by and are reporting to their governments. Very often we can see that member states are willing to sacrifice some of their regions’ benefits on the altar of united Europe. The questions of democracy institutions in European Union will not be given further consideration in this paper however.

European integration affected each member state in a different way due to specialties of their local political culture. Managing EU machinery would be much easier if the components (member states) would be more or less similar to each other.
There is however a number of significant differences in political and social structure between member states. Although all of them are liberal democracies, some of the member states are constitutional monarchies (UK, Sweden, Denmark, Spain) and some are presidential republics (France). Some have strong parliaments (Austria, Denmark) and...