Public opinion in the EU institutions’ discourses on EU legitimacy from the beginnings of integration to today

Abstract

Public opinion in the EU institutions' discourses on EU legitimacy from the beginnings of integration to today This article offers a long-term historical account of changing and competing references to public opinion and "what the people want", and of the projected relationship between the two, in legitimation discourses by EU or Community institutions from the 1950s to today. It describes shifts from taking a generally permissive public opinion for granted, over an increased emphasis on the need to act upon and shape it, to a distinct turn, starting in the mid-1970s and in full swing by the 1980s, towards centring any claims regarding Community legitimacy on citizen expectations. The next chapter in the history of discourses around public opinion was marked by the growing and incontrovertible politicization and polarization of public opinion. This came to a head in the context of the constitutional, euro, refugee, and most recently Brexit crises, but was already beginning to show at the times of the Maastricht and constitutional treaties. By now the discursive balance of plausibility has irrevocably been tilted in favour of discourses acknowledging the political nature of the stakes of EU politics, as opposed to de-politicising them. The challenge is to develop mechanisms of channelling and reconciling clashing preferences, interests, and identities, recognising differences without claiming to harmonise them.

Crisis of democratic legitimacy of the decision-making process of the Union and the role of the European Parliament

“…Therefore, the open debate to which the participants of the Conference also challenge each other, is the identification of the relative mechanisms for the realization of the more democratic process that is valued through the two components of the relative model (Magnette, 2003;Sternberg, 2016) 17 and to determine the measures that these mechanisms can transform/modify/amend the current balance of powers that 16This dimension of democracy in the TEU emphasizes the (dynamic) process of participation of citizens or associations that represent them (art. 10, par.…”

Agenda‐setting under pressure: Does domestic politics influence the European Commission?

“…The Commission is acutely aware of the degree of domestic contestation, of being its prime target, and of the need to be seen to ‘listen’ (cf. Rauh 2016: 27; Sternberg 2016). The legislative agenda is one strategic ‘tool’ to react, and the Commission has been shown to use this tool in response to Euroscepticism (Reh et al.…”

Selling TTIP: The European Commission’s information policy and the spectre of public opinion

“…The first point to emphasise, following Baisnée’s (2007) perceptive reading of the debate, is that ‘most of the research designs have been the “victims” of a definition of the European public sphere that is directly inspired by the EU’ (p. 495). Indeed, the view that the EU’s legitimation crisis is driven by the ‘insufficient and ineffective provision of information, as well as a lack of transparent policy-making processes’ (Thiel, 2008: 343) chimes neatly with long-running institutional efforts to manufacture consent for the European project (Sternberg, 2016). For example, the European Commission (EC, 2018) continually affirms its commitment ‘to ensuring trade policy is transparent and inclusive in order to enhance legitimacy and public trust’.…”

“…Such a reading, however, glosses over how EU institutions have historically played an active role in minimising publicity – the central principle of public sphere theory (Splichal, 2006). Stenberg’s (2016) insightful survey of the EU’s shifting discourses of legitimacy traces this ambivalence to the very origins of the integration project. Her work shows that the EU’s political leadership has since the 1950s framed ‘public opinion as a “problem” .…”

“…The analysis of internal deliberation reveals a predominant ‘antipublic’ discourse (Kantola, 2001), where civil society mobilisation needs to be carefully monitored and contained; a problem to be solved through strategic public relations (PR). This, I argue, is reflective of the historically engrained institutional ambivalence towards public-political participation in EU affairs – a tension between seeing citizens as both ‘an object of manipulation and an independent source of legitimacy’ (Sternberg, 2016: 47) – as well as the decay of ‘representative structures and processes’ at both national and EU levels that characterises the current ‘post-democratic’ condition (Fenton and Titley, 2015).…”