If anything, the exclusion of citizens from European governance, compounded by their lack of effective civic competence, is at the expense of popular fragmentation itself. But it is also against the interests of better equipping citizens to become agents of civic change: namely, a system-steering agency within a nascent pluralist order.

Title Polity Dynamics in the European Union: Setting a Normative Framework
Author Dimitris N. Chryssochoou
Edition WP01.003, 2001