The Place of National Parliaments within the European Constitutional Order

This conceptual introduction to the volume, the author reflects on what way national parliaments fit into the European constitutional order, understood as a composite order encompassing both the EU and national constitutional orders, as a better model of conceiving of constitutional relations within the EU than the now obsolete "supranational paradigm" and the somewhat misleading misleading metaphor of "multi-level" constitutionalism. It reflects on why parliaments do not always reflect either of those models and calls for taking up the challenge of democracy and democratic legitimacy, by reconsidering the continental European manner of conceiving of parliamentary democracy as a mechanical transmission belt of sovereignty of the people to government in its various forms.