gain a secure foothold on the basis of a shared political culture, however fluid it may be. But the more the national populations realise, and the media help them to realise, how deeply the decisions of the European Union pervade their everyday lives, the more interested they will become in making use of their democratic rights as citizens of the union.Moreover, the internet is making all frontiers porous. Within the vast territories of our nation states, the floating horizon of a shared political lifeworld spanning large spaces and complex relations always had to be generated and maintained by mass media, and it had to acquire substance through the abstract flows of ideas circulating through the communication networks of civil society.This impact factor has become palpable during the euro crisis. A reluctant European Council is being forced to take decisions that may have patently unequal impacts on the budgets of the member states. As of 9 May, 2009, the council, with its decisions on rescue packages and possible debt restructurings and with its declarations of intent to bring about harmonisation in all fields of relevance for competition (economic, fiscal, the labour market and social policies), has passed a threshold. Problems of distributive justice arise beyond this threshold, for, with the transition from "negative" to "positive" integration, the balance shifts from output to input legitimation.Thus the logic of this development would also imply that national citizens, who have to accept the redistribution of burdens across national borders, would also want to exercise democratic influence in their role as European citizens over what their heads of government negotiate or agree upon in a legal grey area.Instead of this happening, the governments are engaging in delaying tactics and the populations are being led by populist sentiment to reject the European project as such. This self-destructive behaviour can be explained by the fact that the political elites and the media are reluctant to draw reasonable conclusions from the constitutional project.Under the pressure of the financial markets, the awareness has spread that an essential economic precondition for the constitutional project was neglected when the euro was introduced. Analysts are in agreement that the European Union can withstand the financial speculation only if it acquires the necessary political steering capacities to work towards a convergence of the member states' economic and social development in the medium term at least in core Europe, ie among the members of the European monetary zone.All of those involved are aware that this level of "enhanced co-operation" is impossible within the frame of the existing treaties. The conclusion, that a joint "economic government" is necessary, would mean that European policies for promoting the competitiveness of all economies in the eurozone would extend far beyond the financial sector and affect national budgets as a whole, thus intervening deeply in the budgetary privilege of national parliaments. This long overdue reform is only possible by further transferring competences from the member states to the union, as long as existing law is not to be flagrantly violated.Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy appear to have settled some sort of