The European Union's 'phantom menaces': What can the European political system learn from the institutional design and the fall of Star Wars' Old Galactic Republic?

How do you do comparative politics with the European Union? The EU is such a unique political system that it is sometimes difficult to compare it to any other. So why not compare it with a fictional one? In this article, we took the political system of Star Wars' Old Galactic Republic and compared it to the EU. Both the Old Galactic Republic and the EU are hybrid systems mixing elements of intergovernmental and supragovernmental governance. More importantly, they both share similar institutional weaknesses: the lack of capacity to accommodate the demands of the opposition within the system, the excessive weight of actors with little democratic legitimacy, and a technocratic permissive consensus. While a takeover of the EU by the dark side of the force as in Star Wars seems unlikely, we explore if its institutional weaknesses hide any phantom menaces.