This book examines and investigates the legitimacy of the European Union by acknowledging the importance of variation across actors, institutions, audiences, and context. Case studies reveal how different actors have contributed to the politics of (re)legitimating the European Union in response to multiple recent problems in European integration. The case studies look specifically at stakeholder interests, social groups, officials, judges, the media and other actors external to the Union. With this, the book develops a better understanding of how the politics of legitimating the Union are actor-dependent, context-dependent and problem-dependent. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of European integration, as well as those interested in legitimacy and democracy beyond the state from a point of view of political science, political sociology and the social sciences more broadly.

Since the Maastricht ratification debate of the early 1990s, the legitimacy of the European Union has become a subject of controversy. With unprecedented force, Europeans have begun to question the need for deeper integration. Some fear threats to established national identities, while others perceive the emergence of a distant but powerful Brussels, beyond the reach of democratic control. Legitimacy and the European Union breaks with established approaches to the problem of the legitimacy of the European Union by focusing on the recent trend towards reconceptualization of the EU not as a superstate or an organization of states, but as a multi-level, contested polity without precedent. The book examines the implications of this reconceptualization for the problem of legitimacy. Individual chapters focus on policy areas, institutions and identity politics. Taken together, they reach two main conclusions. While Europeans do not strongly identify with the EU, they increasingly recognize it as a framework for politics alongside existing national and subnational structures. And while the EU lacks central democratic institutions, the integration process has spawned significant informal and pluralist forms of representation. Rethinking recognition and representation ouside the context of the nation state points to important, if little understood, actual and potential sources of EU legitimacy.

This book offers a transdisciplinary perspective on the question of how political legitimacy is constructed in the increasingly contested postnational setting of the European Union. Drawing on the example of the controversy about the EU constitution and the use of ‘EU constitution speak’ in commentaries published by Polish and French broadsheets, it reveals the transformation that constructions of political authority and association undergo when they are being transposed from the discourse field of multilateral negotiation to that of national news media. Through an original combination of the linguistic theory of discourse developed in Critical Discourse Analysis, Bourdieu’s field theory and notion of symbolic power, and political thought on polity-building, it develops a framework for the discourse study of legitimation and Europeanisation, and proposes applications beyond the case studies in the book.To students of European integration, it demonstrates the potential these concepts have for unravelling the implicit practices of postnational polity building. Discourse researchers, on the other hand, will discover how detailed text analyses gain significance in debates related to the macro level of political organisation when guided by sociological and political theory.

How severe a problem is what may be called the democratic deficit of the European Union? This volume elaborates a conceptual framework for the empirical analysis of the alleged democratic deficit.

In European societies social differentiation, value pluralism and international integration have brought about a condition of previously unknown complexity. Citizens’ expectations regarding political participation and the legitimization of government policy are rising, yet the capacities for social integration and political consensus formation may be in decline. This volume investigates how political actors and institutions in established European democracies are seeing to manage the condition of complexity and how this condition reconfigures the foundations of democratic politics. From the Contents: Legitimacy Crises, Efficiency Gaps, Democratic Deficits Efficiency versus Democracy: Conceptual Reconciliation of a Troubled Relationship? Citizens’ Expectations: Is what matters only what works? Re-engaging Citizens: Institutional Responses to Political Disengagement Informal Government Delegated Authority: Legitimizing Independent Regulatory Agencies Delegation to the EU The Open Method of Co-ordination (OMC) and The European Employment Strategy Committee Governance in EU Agricultural Policy Efficiency versus Legitimacy: The Governance of Technology Does citizen involvement improve the quality, legitimacy and implementability of environmental policy? The Allocation of Health Care The Post-democratic Turn: Complexity and the Reconfiguration of Democratic Politics

"This book shows how the EU's dual sovereignty-legitimacy problem can be resolved through the political concept of European citizenship, which can serve both to define the scope of European sovereignty and to justify EU power beyond national democracy. It reconceptualizes the EU's legitimacy problem and demonstrates how sources of legitimacy can be identified and give rise to European sovereignty. It argues that sovereignty should be based on the will of citizens acting through various political bodies within the EU: city halls, regional entities, national governments, and EU institutions, and develops a general theory, arguably applicable to any political order. The EU is an unprecedented political project that is in tension with traditional forms of state legitimation based on national democracy, as nationalist and populists throughout Europe often make clear. Against this backdrop, the book fully articulates the notion of European sovereignty and argues that the EU's sources of legitimacy are based on European citizenship and national democracy. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of European Union politics, European integration, international institutions and more broadly to international relations"--

Recoge: 1. Democracy. -- 2. What future for parliamentary democracy in the EU. -- 3. The public sphere and civil society: prerequisites for democratically legitimate rule making. -- 4. Democracy and political participation. -- 5. Deliberative democracy.

How can we conceptualize identity and legitimacy in the context of the European union? What is the role of narratives, political symbols, public debate and institutional practices in the process of identity formation and legitimacy consolidation? Debating Political Identity and Legitimacy in the European Union addresses these questions and brings together high profile scholars from various disciplinary backgrounds to debate the ontological and epistemological aspects of research on identity and legitimacy formation in the EU. Part I investigates key elements such as the relationship between ‘Europeanization’ of the EU member states and its effect on the political identity of their citizens; the relationship between the politicization of the EU and processes of identity and legitimacy formation; and the indispensability of European identity for legitimizing the EU. Part II looks at pathways to identity formation and legitimacy construction in the EU by considering alternative types of constitutional legitimacy; political symbolism; Europeanization and politicization of the debate on EU focusing on the foreign policy domain. Bringing together a wide but coherent range of high profile perspectives, this book will of interest to students and scholars of European studies, Political Science, Philosophy, Sociology and Law.

The contributors to this book examine the issues of constitutional choice that face the governments and citizens of today's Europe. Divided into three sections this study addresses: questions of political legitimacy and the meaning of democratic deficit in the EU; the reality of what institutional reforms and decision making processes are possible; and the rights of citizenship and values that should be protected.

Most of the contemporary debates about the European Union - about its role, its institutional arrangements, its development dynamic, its expansion and possible futures - revolve around the issue of political legitimacy. Legitimacy and the European Union addresses the fundamental issues at the heart of the debates on Europe and examines such key questions as:- -What is the scope of the EU's authority -Is there a legitimacy deficit? If so, how much does it matter -Does political legitimacy only reside in the nation state? Using a multi-dimensional conception of political legitimacy, the text analyses the character and problems of the European Union's authority in respect of democracy, political identity and governmental performance. Its distinctive claim is that political legitimacy can now only be understood as a process of interaction between the state and EU levels, and that this interaction impacts differentially on different member states.