The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

Ideologies and Imaginaries of Legitimacy from the 1950S to Today: Trajectories of EU-Official Discourses Read against Rosanvallon’sDemocratic Legitimacy

“…50 Together, they de-politicised innately and undeniably political institutional and policy choices, taking many of them out of the more politicised realms of political will formation grounded in the electoral process and wider public debate. 51 Electoral legitimacy after all?…”

“…The electoral legitimacy and accountability of nationally elected representatives, and an association of 'the political' with intergovernmentalism and domestic political processes, were important tropes in justifications of the Communities' strong intergovernmental elements. 52 Charles de Gaulle staked out in the mid-1960s that 'nothing which is important [ … ] should be decided and, even more, applied, by anyone but the responsible public authorities in the six States, that is, the governments controlled by the parliaments'. 53 Beyond French Presidential rhetoric, the 'establishment of national-executive leadership over the integration process' could be mapped from the creation of the Council of Ministers in the 1951 ECSC Treaty, over the strengthening of its institutional role in the 1957 EEC Treaty, to the creation of the European Council in 1974.…”

“…"Eurocracy" became a dominant emblem in depictions of European integration in the 1970s, the fiction of the EU bureaucracy and its policies being apolitical, technical, or politically neutral unravelling. 71 How dire the situation had become by the late 1970s and early 1980s was encapsulated in an Economist cover in March 1980 depicting the Community's gravestone.…”

Culture and the EU's Struggle for Legitimacy

“…My underlying philosophical notion of legitimacy is that something is legitimate not to the extent that it meets some abstract ideal criteria, nor to the extent that people believe that it is -but rather to the extent that it can be justified in terms of their beliefs about what constitutes legitimacy, in terms of what seems plausible to them. 2 But what are people's beliefs about legitimacy? They change over time, are essentially contested, and embedded in deeper cultural, ideological, or cognitive conditions that circumscribe what it is plausible to say in a given context.…”

The Maastricht Treaty and public debates about European integration: the emergence of a European public sphere?

“…It has been over 25 years since European leaders signed the Treaty on European Union, better known as the Maastricht Treaty. This treaty represented a significant deepening of the integration process, but also stimulated more critical public engagement with European integration and debates about the European Union's (EU) democratic nature (Schrag Sternberg 2013). One topic of debate has been the necessity of a European public sphere-a publicly accessible communicative space in which European affairs can be critically discussed-for a democratic European polity.…”