The Politics of Legitimation in the European Union

Legitimacy Recovered?

Christopher Lord, Peter Bursens, Dirk De Bièvre, Jarle Trondal, Ramses A. Wessel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000528572
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

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.

Part 1

Theoretical Framework: The Politics of Legitimation

DOI: 10.4324/9781003217756-1

1 Introduction

Christopher Lord, Peter Bursens, Dirk De Bièvre, Ramses A. Wessel and Jarle Trondal

DOI: 10.4324/9781003217756-2

This book is about the politics of legitimating the European Union (EU). It investigates the claims, discourses, behaviours and processes by which justifications for the powers, policies and institutions of the Union are articulated, accepted, rejected or revised by different actors. Different actors experience, understand, justify or contest the Union in different ways. As we will see, many arguments about how to legitimate the Union are really arguments about the actors with whom the Union needs to be legitimate. Hence, this book includes studies of actors in EU institutions, governments, parliaments, courts, and the media, as well as chapters on citizens, stakeholder interests and actors outside the Union. How have those different actors responded to recent problems of European integration? And what does that tell us about the politics of legitimating the Union?

One well known difficulty is that actors do not always form fully explicit views on what they think about the legitimacy of a particular form of political power (see Melman in this volume). Shortcomings in legitimacy can remain latent until a political system is tested in moments of difficulty that make it hard for actors to avoid taking positions on whether the powers of that polity are justified. Perhaps only then are actors minded to weigh the rights, values and needs that are secured by a political order against any rights, values or choices they may need to forego or constrain if they are to sustain that order. A further challenge is that, in an ideal world, we would not just have means of investigating what actors think about the legitimacy of a political order. We would also have means of investigating circumstances, trade-offs and predicaments that shape what actors are prepared to do about the legitimacy of a political order. When do they contest? When do they (re)-commit? When do they construct new solutions?

Investigating what different actors think and do about a problem they do not always make fully explicit is quite a methodological challenge. Hence, this book also aims to contribute to the wider development of methods of investigating discourses, behaviours and processes by which various actors understand, shape, contest or construct justifications for powers, policies and political orders. Some chapters in this volume build their arguments from studies of individual actors (citizens, officials); others, from studies of collective actors (EU institutions). Some chapters draw conclusions from behavioural studies (what actors do); others from attitudinal studies (what actors think). All are case studies of what responses by specific actors to the European Union’s recent troubles tell us about its legitimacy.

It is an open question whether the Union has suffered a legitimacy crisis, defined as a crisis that calls into question its very rightfulness as a justified form of political power. But the Union has plainly suffered multiple cumulative difficulties, several of which have been widely understood as crises. Future historians will probably amuse themselves by debating just how many challenges the Union experienced during its time of troubles. Yet it is a fair bet they will make their selection from the following. First, a financial crisis after 2008 that threatened the Union’s banking system, the solvency of some of its member states and the survival of the EU’s single currency. Second, a migration crisis after 2015 that threatened both the Union’s ability to defend its external boundaries and its almost existential commitment to softening its internal borders. Third, strains in the Union’s relationship with Russia whose pressures on the Ukraine and invasion of the Crimea in 2014 unsettled the assumption that European political order rests on a consensual state system with borders that could not be changed by force or annexation. Fourth, a period of turbulence in the EU’s relationship with the United States following the election in 2016 of an administration hostile to multilateralism and even the EU itself, as well as questioning of security guarantees on which Europe depends. Fifth, a membership crisis with the Brexit referendum of 2016, and, to a lesser extent, disagreements with Hungary and Poland over freedom of the media and the rule of law. Sixth, a crisis in the representative process itself as populists gained support – and sometimes even power – by claiming that, by turning representatives into elites, representation makes representatives unrepresentative through the very process of representation. That can only be threatening to the European Union. The Union claims to be based on the principles of representative democracy (Article 10 of Lisbon Treaty). It has arguably staked its legitimacy on its ability to operate as a representation of other forms of representation: on its ability to represent governments, parliaments, parties and stakeholders – all themselves representatives – in its decisions. Finally, there is the Coronavirus. Might it begin a retreat from an interconnected world? Or might it prompt a rethink and redesign of the institutional means of managing interconnectedness, the European Union included?

The book is based on doctoral research for the PLATO network funded by the European Commission’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie Programme. PLATO investigates how far the financial crisis has also been a legitimacy crisis for the European Union. Still, the chapters in this book touch on several other recent problems in European integration. One chapter deals with migration pressures; another with attempts to justify austerity in pre-Brexit UK; another with civil society actors beyond the EU and their assessments, in times of geopolitical tension, of the legitimacy of attempts by the Union to promote norms and even forms of rule beyond the Union itself. Another chapter discusses emotions of anger, sympathy, solidarity and identity provoked by European integration, including in times of recent difficulty.

All chapters provide important insights to the difficulties of representation in the contemporary Union. One chapter investigates the relationship between trust in the EU and trust in representative government at the national and local levels; another discusses the perennial difficulties of stakeholder representation; another shows how the competitive representation of claims in the public sphere can develop through the politicisation of a Union policy (on state aids). Two further chapters deal with collective action and co-ordination problems national parliaments can experience in operating as representative bodies with roles in legitimating Union policies. As well, then, as including studies of very different actors, the book also includes variation in the kinds of problems that might challenge actors to form or reform their evaluations of the legitimacy of the powers, policies or institutions of the Union; and of any (re)-legitimation that may then be needed.

Here, the title of our book deliberately plays on the interaction, or even co-construction, of legitimacy and legitimation. Legitimacy, of course, is a quality, a condition, or a state of affairs, defined as justified political power (Beetham 2013: 3). Legitimation, no less obviously, is a process or a becoming, or even an adaptation or a recovery. By asking whether the Union has recovered legitimacy we hope to do more than contribute to enquiry into whether there was a problem or a crisis in the first place. We hope also to ask whether problems of legitimacy prompted a politics of (re)-legitimation. If the Union is to have legitimacy at all, it might seem obvious that it would at some point need to undergo a politics of legitimation; and if it is to recover legitimacy it might seem no less obvious that it would need to experience a politics of relegitimation. Yet neither of those things are self-evident. Only by anticipating and answering reasons for doubting the value of studying the legitimacy and (re)legitimation of the Union can we fully identify just why we need to investigate those things through the evaluations and behaviours of different actors.

All appearances to the contrary, politics and other social reality could develop behind the backs of actors. We might be able to abstract from the analysis of individual actors and concentrate instead on studying the structures which eventually make fools of us all. It could be that all that counts in shaping politics and government are the hard material systems of economic and security competition rather than ideational considerations of legitimacy (Parsons 2007). Even, indeed, if ideas of legitimacy matter, it could be that they consist of ‘categorical imperatives’ that significantly limit what we can believe about the justification of political power. For example, it might be that once we believe that individuals should be autonomous we cannot much help also believing that the only legitimate forms of rule are those that treat individuals as free and equal in autonomously determining their own laws; and, once we believe all that, we cannot much help believing that some form of democracy is the only form of legitimate rule in spite of occasional illusions otherwise. Put another way, there may be some core principles and values that most people would agree are important in some way to the justification of political power in liberal democratic political orders: respect for rights, justice, fairness and democracy itself would probably be amongst them. So probably would be core standards in meeting the public’s most basic needs for certain kinds of collective goods (such as security) without which they would struggle to pursue their own life plans or even survive at all. There may then be limits to how far particular actors can differ on any standards of legitimacy or vary in their contributions to any politics of legitimation.

Yet, only where structures completely determine outcomes – or where categorical imperatives completely determine standards of legitimacy – will we be able to avoid any study of actorness and agency. Where, indeed, agency and structure are co-constituted, the study of structure may itself presuppose the study of agency (Giddens 1984). Hence, legitimacy concepts and discourses, legitimacy strategies and legitimacy resources may all structure one another. Moreover, even where actors have little choice over the economic political and security systems within which they live (Dunn 2000: 280) the justification of those structures would still be an important question. Even, or perhaps especially, in the case of constraining systems, legitimacy may, as Bernard Williams (2005: 3) famously put it, be the first question of politics without which other questions of politics cannot even be asked at all. As for any assumption that solutions can follow unproblematically from standards, actors can agree on principles and processes needed to justify political power yet disagree fundamentally about the specification of those things (Miller 2007: 197).

Still, it is possible that we could answer general scepticism about studying the roles of actorness and agency in legitimacy and legitimation only to find that there is little scope for a politics of legitimation in the case of the European Union. The EU could just derive its legitimacy unproblematically from that of its member state democracies (Lindseth 2010); or, if the Union does need to establish its legitimacy in a more direct relationship with the governed, there could be broad agreement on what it needs to do that. Another possibility is that the Union largely ‘operates below the radar’. Its decisions may have low visibility or they may be non-coercive to the point of being an ‘an invitation to obey’ (Weiler 2012). Then again, there may be more indifference than disagreement on what is needed to justify the Union’s powers. As Camille Dobler and Joris Melman discuss in this volume, the full range of possibilities is legitimacy, illegitimacy or alegitimacy: justification, contestation or indifference (Van Ingelgom 2014).

To talk, then, of a politics of legitimation of the European Union is to assume three things. First, that the question of how to legitimate the Union is open: that different solutions are available. Second, that there is disagreement and contestation on those solutions. And third, that any contestation is salient and public (Dewey (1...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• PART 1: Theoretical Framework: The Politics of Legitimation
• PART 2: Legitimation by Individual Citizens and Officials
• PART 3: Legitimation by Media and Parliaments
• PART 4: Legitimation by Governments, Courts and External Actors
• PART 5: Theoretical Conclusions on Legitimation and Legitimacy
• Index