Legitimacy and Governance Beyond the European Nation State: Conceptualising Governance in the European Union

Abstract

In this paper, we examine a number of related themes that have emerged in the literature concerning the legitimacy problems confronting the European Union as it evolves as an arrangement for governance that resides at a level 'beyond' the nation state. We take as our starting point the legitimacy crisis that became such a prominent feature of the EU in the aftermath of the signing of the TEU, and which continues to obstruct moves towards closer European integration. We locate this crisis within a broader constitutional deficit in the arrangements that mediate relations between each of the EU, the Member State and the individual citizen. We argue that to understand the emergence of the legitimacy crisis-manifest in a dramatic shift in popular opinion vis-à-vis the construction of 'an ever closer Union' at the end of the 1980s, signalling the onset of a legitimacy crisis within (and of) the EU-it is necessary to reflect not only on the evolving constitutional architecture of the EU and associated policy developments, but also the modalities whereby such changes are transposed to Member State constitutional and political arenas, and to the policy processes within those states impacted upon by European integration. For it is still the case that, despite the Treaty reforms of the 1980s and 1990s, it is the Member State which remains the dominant participant in European integration; a situation that is unlikely to change over the foreseeable future. And while it has been the leadership of Member States which has given European integration its principal driving force, equally, the centrality of the Member State to the enterprise has restricted the capacity of the EU to adjust or police common policies, or respond to emerging problems in ways which satisfy the explicit and implicit objectives of European integration. In this paper we develop an approach in which constitutionalism is regarded as being more than simply the constitutional architecture of the EU Treaties. We augment the orthodox approach by focusing on the (legitimating) modalities which are necessary to facilitate the constitutional development of the EU, and argue that the legitimacy crisis reflects a failure in the operation of these modalities.The remainder of this paper is organised into five sections. In the next section we identify the core problematic of the EU as the legitimacy crisis, and consider some of the responses that have been proposed to deal with this. In section III we consider the

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