Palgrave Studies in European Union Politics

Edited by: Michelle Egan, American University USA, Neill Nugent, Visiting
Professor, College of Europe, Bruges and Honorary Professor, University of
Salford, UK and William Paterson OBE, University of Aston, UK.

Editorial Board: Christopher Hill, Cambridge, UK, Simon Hix, London School
of Economics, UK, Mark Pollack, Temple University, USA, Kalypso Nicolaïdis,
Oxford, UK, Morten Egeberg, University of Oslo, Norway, Amy Verdun,
University of Victoria, Canada, Claudio M. Radaelli, University of Exeter, UK,
Frank Schimmelfennig, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Switzerland

Following on the sustained success of the acclaimed European Union Series, which
essentially publishes research-based textbooks, Palgrave Studies in European
Union Politics publishes cutting edge research-driven monographs.

The remit of the series is broadly defined, both in terms of subject and academic
discipline. All topics of significance concerning the nature and operation of the
European Union potentially fall within the scope of the series. The series is multi-
disciplinary to reflect the growing importance of the EU as a political, economic
and social phenomenon.

Titles include:
Carolyn Ban
MANAGEMENT AND CULTURE IN AN ENLARGED EUROPEAN COMMISSION
From Diversity to Unity?
Gijs Jan Brandsma
CONTROLLING COMITOLOGY
Accountability in a Multi-Level System
Theofanis Exadaktylos and Claudio M. Radaelli (editors)
RESEARCH DESIGN IN EUROPEAN STUDIES
Establishing Causality in Europeanization
Jack Hayward and Rüdiger Wurzel (editors)
EUROPEAN DISUNION
Between Sovereignty and Solidarity
Wolfram Kaiser and Jan-Henrik Meyer (editors)
SOCIETAL ACTORS IN EUROPEAN INTEGRATION
Christian Kaunert and Sarah Leonard (editors)
EUROPEAN SECURITY, TERRORISM AND INTELLIGENCE
Tackling New Security Challenges in Europe
Christian Kaunert and Kamil Zwolski
The EU AS A GLOBAL SECURITY ACTOR
A Comprehensive Analysis beyond CFSP and JHA
Marina Kolb
THE EUROPEAN UNION AND THE COUNCIL OF EUROPE
Finn Laursen (editor)
DESIGNING THE EUROPEAN UNION
From Paris to Lisbon
Daniel Naurin and Helen Wallace (editors)
UNVEILING THE COUNCIL OF THE EUROPEAN UNION
Games Governments Play in Brussels
Dimitris Papadimitriou and Paul Copeland (editors)
THE EU’s LISBON STRATEGY
Evaluating Success, Understanding Failure
Claudia Schrag Sternberg
THE STRUGGLE FOR EU LEGITIMACY
Public Contestation, 1950–2005
Yves Tiberghien (editor)
LEADERSHIP IN GLOBAL INSTITUTION BUILDING
Minerva’s Rule
Asle Toje
AFTER THE POST-COLD WAR
The European Union as a Small Power
Liubomir K. Topaloff
POLITICAL PARTIES AND EUROSCEPTICISM
Amy Verdun and Alfred Tovias (editors)
MAPPING EUROPEAN ECONOMIC INEGRATION
Richard G. Whitman and Stefan Wolff (editors)
THE EUROPEAN NEIGHBOURHOOD POLICY IN PERSPECTIVE
Context, Implementation and Impact
Sarah Wolff
THE MEDITERRANEAN DIMENSION OF THE EUROPEAN UNION’S INTERNAL
SECURITY
Jan Wouters, Hans Bruyninckx, Sudeshna Basu and Simon Schunz (editors)
THE EUROPEAN UNION AND MULTILATERAL GOVERNANCE
Assessing EU Participation in United Nations Human Rights and Environmental
Fora

Palgrave Studies in European Union Politics

Series Standing Order ISBN 978–1–4039–9511–7 (hardback) and
ISBN 978 1–4039–9512–4 (paperback)
You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order.
Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with
your name and address, the title of the series and one of the ISBNs quoted above.
Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke,
Hampshire RG21 6XS, UK.
The Struggle for EU
Legitimacy
Public Contestation, 1950–2005

Claudia Schrag Sternberg

Career Development Fellow and Acting Director of Studies,
St Hugh’s College, University of Oxford
© Claudia Schrag Sternberg 2013
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
publication may be made without written permission.
No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted
save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any
licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency,
Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS.
Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2013 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke,
Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries
ISBN: 978–1–137–32783–3
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully
managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing
processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the
country of origin.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
To my grandmothers, Lisa Schrag and Dr Békési Kálmánné
Matus Anna
This page is intentionaly left blank
Contents

Acknowledgements ix

List of Abbreviations x

Introduction: Approaching Legitimacy through

Discursive Meanings 1
Plan of the book 12

1 Peace, Prosperity, and Progress: Early Legitimating

Narratives, 1950s–1970s 14
Indispensability 16
The European common good 22
Enlightened social engineering 30
Legality 39
Conclusion 43

2 Democracy and Other Challenges: Early

Counter-Discourses, 1950s–1970s 45
Democracy 46
Intergovernmentalism 61
Challenges to functional problem-solving 68
Conclusion 73

3 A Europe Closer to its Citizens: The People’s Europe

Project of the 1980s 76
Citizen expectations and the will of the people 80
Communicating with the people and quantifying promises 82
Forging Europeans 89
Subjects into citizens 95
Conclusion 100

4 Maastricht in the French and German Debates: Crumbling

Promises and the Question of Who Might Rule 103
EMU and the crumbling promise of prosperity and peace 106
Whose rule? Citizens, the body politic, and democracy 115
Conclusion 126

vii
viii Contents

5 Discursive Crisis Management: Stressing and Stretching

‘Democracy’, 1990s–2000s 128
Democracy as transparency 135
Subsidiarity as closeness to the citizens 138
Governance and participation 141
Identity- and demos-building 145
Conclusion 151

6 A Constitutional Moment? The Constitution in the

French and German Debates 153
What kind of Europe do we want? The French debate 154
What is wrong with the French? The German debate 166
Comparisons and conclusions 180

7 The Story and the Literature: Democracy, Efficiency,

and the Contested Game of EU Politics 187
The story assembled 188
Government by and for the people 197
Politicization versus de-politicization: EU politics as a
contested game 210
Conclusion 223

Conclusion: EU Legitimacy as a Sisyphean

Aspiration? 225

Notes 231
Bibliography 242

Index 271
Acknowledgements

Several people have generously read parts or even all of the manuscript,
and have provided me with helpful comments: Geoffrey Edwards,
Véronique Mottier, Kalypso Nicolaïdis, Helen Thompson, Virginie Van
Ingelgom, Jonathan White, and several anonymous reviewers. I have
received further feedback, insights, or encouragement from Duncan
Bell, Anne Deighton, Andreas Føllesdal, Michael Freeden, Pasquale
Pasquino, Frances Rosenbluth, and Marc Stears. Finally, I owe a very
special thanks to David Robertson for his trust and inspiration. Rachel
Malkin has provided excellent editorial assistance, and acted as my
imaginary sympathetic reader. Amber Stone-Galilee and Andrew Baird
have been amazingly efficient and supportive editors.
This study has benefited from generous funding by the Deutsche
Forschungsgemeinschaft, the DAAD, Emmanuel College Cambridge, and
the Fondation Wiener-Anspach. I am indebted also to Renaud Dehousse
for hosting me at Sciences Po in Paris during several extended fieldwork
stays, and to Justine Lacroix for welcoming me at the Université libre in
Brussels. St Hugh’s College has since given me a wonderful intellectual
home in Oxford.
This book has been a while in the making, and Europe has faced
changes and challenges in this period. Personally I owe an immense
debt of gratitude to my family and my friends, and to Max.
Thank you all.

ix
List of Abbreviations

BMP Berliner Morgenpost

CAP Common Agricultural Policy
CDU/CSU Christlich Demokratische Union/Christlich Soziale Union
CEC Commission of the European Community/ies
CFSP Common Foreign and Security Policy
DCT Draft Constitutional Treaty
DZ Die Zeit
ECJ European Court of Justice
ECSC European Coal and Steel Community
EEC European Economic Community
EMU Economic and Monetary Union
EP European Parliament
EPA European Parliamentary Assembly
EU European Union
Euratom European Atomic Energy Community
FAZ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
FDP Freie Demokratische Partei
FN Front National
HAB Hamburger Abendblatt
LF Le Figaro
Libé Libération
LM Le Monde
MEP Member of the European Parliament
MPF Mouvement pour la France
PDS Partei des Demokratischen Sozialismus
PS Parti Socialiste
SPD Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands
SZ Süddeutsche Zeitung
TECSC Treaty Establishing the European Coal and Steel
Community
TEEC Treaty Establishing the European Economic Community
TEU Treaty on European Union
UDF Union pour la Démocratie Française
UMP Union pour la majorité présidentielle/Union pour un
mouvement populaire

x
Introduction: Approaching
Legitimacy through Discursive
Meanings

In common with international institutions more broadly, the European

Union (EU) is a relatively recent phenomenon on the stage of world
politics. Still, it has drastically changed the conditions of political life
in Europe. Its significant power has been established and exercised not
least by invoking certain conceptions of which solutions for Europe were
necessary, desirable, and legitimate over others, by rooting certain ideas
more successfully than others in the public imagination. Lately, the
Euro crisis has shaken both the EU and its claims to legitimacy to their
foundations. To be sure, commentators and decision-makers had widely
agreed that the EU’s legitimacy was in crisis ever since the momentous
political and popular resistance to the Maastricht Treaty (which, in the
early 1990s, provided not least for the common currency). Yet current
discursive charges exceed previous challenges in their relentlessness,
seriously undermining claims that the EU is delivering what it was set up
to provide above all: peace and prosperity in Europe, and undercutting
claims that the EU is in touch with what its citizens want. Even if the
EU is likely to survive its possibly most severe crisis to date, it will have
to cope with increased societal concern regarding its legitimacy. That
the future of the EU depends partly on its ability to develop a legitimate
form of political order is a widely shared view, and a large and vibrant
literature scrutinises how far it has come in this direction. This book,
by contrast, is not about determining how legitimate the EU is, be it in
terms of specific normative criteria, or in terms of quantifiable support
from European citizens. It is about a less well-understood aspect of EU
legitimacy. It examines the discursive politics of narrative and argumen-
tative construction regarding what legitimacy (and its lack) might mean
in the case of the EU. These naturally pre-determine any assessment of
its legitimacy, and are a field of fierce contention.

1
2 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

This book traces the struggle for legitimacy in EU politics, moving

from the 1950s to the mid-2000s. It tells a story of how the EU institu-
tions, Europe’s political leaders, and the participants of public debate
in the member-states, fought over what the point of integration was,
what form it should take, and how legitimate it was in the form it was
being given. The book is about their discourses, by which I mean ways
of representing the world. Discourses are ensembles of ideas, concepts,
narratives, or categories through which meaning is given to social as
well as physical phenomena (see Fairclough 2003:124, Hajer 2005:300).
I intertwine two levels of analysis. On the one hand, I analyse long-term
patterns and shifts in the discourses of leading politicians as well as the
European institutions, most prominently the European Commission,
Council, Parliament, and Court of Justice. Here, I look at publicly avail-
able official documents, speeches, press conferences, policy papers,
treaty language, and the like. I combine this, on the other hand, with
short-term case studies that examine how these discourses were received
and contested in national public spheres. In this context, I focus on two
particular member-states – France and Germany – and on two moments
of exceptionally intense public debate on European integration: the
controversies over the Treaty of Maastricht in the early 1990s, and the
failed EU Constitution in 2004–2005. I chose these particular case studies
because these debates featured a wide range of different EU-critical and
favourable discourses, as well as a range of national understandings of
what makes political authority legitimate, with which discourses on the
EU’s legitimacy necessarily interlink. Moreover, these debates reflected,
and spread, discourses that dominated debate in other member-states,
too. For the member-state level, my sources include newspaper articles
and some intellectual essays. I thus concentrate on public discourses,
that is to say, discourses in the public domain (rather than private
popular discourses). They, I understand, are key in shaping how citizens
relate to the EU.1
Overall, the book charts and historically reconstructs changing
discursive landscapes of competing ideas on what constitutes legiti-
macy in the case of the EU. It offers a long-term discourse-historical
narrative of shifts in the topography of what it was generally plausible
to claim in this respect. The questions guiding my analysis are: How
did different discourses represent the EU and its place in the world?
What did ‘legitimacy’ mean in different discourses? Moreover, how
did competing discourses emerge, evolve, and interplay? I investigate
how some discourses gained prominence over others, shaping how we
make sense of the EU. I am especially interested in how far EU-official
 Introduction 3

rhetoric managed to push – and responded to – the ways discourses

in the member-state public spheres represented the EU. The interest
of including both EU-wide official sources and case studies of public
debates in select member-states is to explore in what ways competing
discourses did or did not travel between administrative-political elites
and public-domain debates, as well as between different national (i.e.
the French and German) public spheres. Throughout the book, the focus
is on the content of discourses rather than the actors advancing them
(see similarly Lacroix and Nicolaïdis 2010:3).2
Since discursive contests over what ‘EU legitimacy’ might signify are at
the very heart of this study, it is in the very nature of its approach not to
start from an a priori definition of the concept. Nevertheless, it is neces-
sary to define what kinds of discourses are pertinent to the struggle over
EU legitimacy under investigation in this book. Legitimacy is a ‘layered’
phenomenon, vested (unequally) in multiple political objects (Freeden
2005:78). In the case of the EU, these objects of legitimacy include its
very existence as a polity, its political system, its laws, procedures, poli-
cies, its borders, its decision-makers, and so forth. My primary focus in
this book is narrower, however. It is on discursive representations of
what makes two kinds of objects legitimate: (a) European integration as
such and (b) the EU (and its institutional predecessors) and their specific
political or institutional order.
Notwithstanding this principal focus, both more specific and broader
objects of discursive construction are at play in contests over EU legiti-
macy as vested in these two objects, and are thus also covered here.
On the one hand, contests over ‘EU legitimacy’ often take the form of
contestation over partial facets of this overall issue, or even the two
narrower objects of legitimacy. For example, statements about the
legitimacy and role of a particular institution such as the European
Parliament do have implications for the overall legitimacy of the EU
as a polity as well as a regime. Similarly, the ‘point’ of integration, and
hence certain standards of its legitimacy, can be underlined and circum-
scribed by specific policies such as economic and monetary union or
cultural policies. Justifying European integration as such, moreover,
implies taking a stance on what kind of a polity it does, or should, take
place in. And the nature of the EU as a polity in turn is partly defined
not least by discourses about the meaning of its frontiers (e.g. Balibar
2005). On the other hand, investigating discourses on the legitimacy
of integration and the EU requires analysing how both are represented
in relation to the world at large. How we understand the international
situation or globalisation, for instance, affects how effective we consider
4 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

the solutions supposedly offered by European integration. Moreover,

the history of discursive contests over EU legitimacy needs to be seen
in dialogue with the history of contests over related concepts such
as democracy, citizenship, or identity and over what their relation to
legitimacy consists in. Finally, I seek to situate any statements about
the legitimacy of European integration and its particular institutional
forms in the broader historical and intellectual contexts in which they
are embedded. For these contexts shape what it makes sense to say
about the particular subjects of the EU’s and integration’s legitimacy.
In order to investigate how EU-official, political, and public discourses
constructed and fought over the legitimacy of (a) integration and (b)
the EU and its specific setup, both narrower and broader objects of
discursive construction need to be investigated as well.
The story unfolding over the course of the chapters that follow
draws attention to a particular aspect of the nature of political legiti-
macy: political legitimacy is an ‘essentially contested concept’ if there
ever was one (Gallie 1956, see Collier et al. 2006, Hurrelmann et al.
2007:229–37).3 And this is true not only for the scholarly debate, but
also the discursive practice of the public and political spheres. Political
legitimacy, generally, is an issue that can never be resolved conclusively.
Both its meaning and its relative presence are fragile and contested
states of affairs, which need to be re-established continuously. Never-
ending discursive contests take place over (a) what it takes for political
authority or political order to be legitimate and (b) how to make sense of
the particular instance of political authority at hand.4 Our convictions
about legitimacy are products of an obscure mix of often incompatible
and equally often inconsistent beliefs, narratives, associations, passions,
and so on (see Williams 2005:12–13). In developing and re-adapting
our own personal, fickle mixtures, we draw selectively and (more or
less) critically on the discourses available in the world around us. The
production of meaning is thus an essentially social process (see Milliken
1999). Moreover, the legitimation of political authority and its action is
necessarily slow, messy, and only ever partial.
In case of the European integration project, the specific historical
context of post-war Western Europe posed specific added challenges.
The experience of the World Wars and Fascism had thoroughly shaken
up long-standing traditional conceptions of legitimacy, in particular,
those based on unmediated or unobstructed mass democracy. Any
legitimating strategies or arguments inevitably encountered ‘murky
textures of socially rooted norms and assumptions in which the tradi-
tional and the modern, the anti-democratic and the secular and the
 Introduction 5

religious were intertwined. The fuzziness of the concepts of legitimacy

embedded in twentieth-century Europe’s political cultures militated
against any simple of universal model of what constituted legitimate
government’ (Conway and Romijn 2004:383). The quest for EU legiti-
macy therefore involved a significant amount of re-invention of what
constituted legitimate power. Projections of legitimacy for this supra-,
inter-, or post-national entity took place against the backdrop of a
deep-reaching re-contestation of such criteria even in the nation-state
context. In addition, ‘[l]egitimacy was felt more than it was thought,
and its constituent elements differed considerably within Europe’s
political boundaries’ (Conway and Romijn 2004:383).
The struggle over which perceptions and interpretations of reality
come to be generally accepted as plausible or as common sense, over
which come to ‘function as truth’ (Foucault 1984), is essentially political.
Interests, as well as power relationships, are always at stake. Generally,
conflicts over the definition and representation of political issues struc-
ture the organisation and institutionalisation of political competition.
They empower certain actors over others, and shape which ‘issues
are organized into politics’ and how, ‘while others are organized out’
(Schattschneider 1960:71, see 1957:937). More particularly, promoting
certain understandings specifically of political legitimacy is in the interest
of whoever wants to hold on to, exercise, or challenge and constrain
power – including power over policy and other political outcomes, over
other actors’ behaviour, or over the way people think (see e.g. Birch
2007:201–4, Lukes 2005:20–9). A certain degree of legitimacy in the eyes
of those subjected to political power is indispensable if this power is to
be exercised efficiently and find compliance without coercion, costly
and unsustainable in the long run.5 Legitimacy can be conceived as a
‘social norm that encourages people to support the ruler’ (or polity or
regime), to follow the norms supporting them, and to respond to calls
for action (Horne 2009). This book addresses the discursive production,
contestation and representation of such norms from the perspective of
the underpinning legitimacy ideals.
A political implication specifically of discursive contests over EU
legitimacy concerns the very establishment of the EU polity. The case
of European integration is particular again here in that a brand new
political system was built from scratch. It had to be justified in its very
existence as well as the particular institutional shape it was given, and
at times against significant resistance. Discursive contests between
competing ideas about what constituted legitimate solutions for Europe
played a crucial role in making integration possible and in keeping it
6 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

alive, in buttressing the power of the EU but also in imposing limits

on it.6 In sum, by exploring the ongoing dynamics of contestation and
construction involved in the construction of legitimate authority, in the
exercise, legitimation, and limitation of power as well as in the produc-
tion and contestation of the norms underpinning its exercise and organ-
isation, this book investigates what one might call the discursive politics
of legitimation.
There is a fundamentally communicative element to the matter of
which convictions and beliefs prevail over others, both in the case of an
individual, and in different social contexts. The production, develop-
ment, and negotiation of beliefs regarding legitimacy happen impor-
tantly through language, which not only reflects, but also constitutes,
‘reality’ (e.g. Laclau and Mouffe 1985, Milliken 1999). For this reason, I
tackle them through textual analysis, focusing on dynamics of narrative
and argumentative construction.7 I interpret the ways the sources under
study construct arguments and how they generate meaning, in partic-
ular, by inserting events and abstract concepts into a plot or a storyline,
that is (part of) a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end (see Hajer
2005:301–2). This use of narratives in producing and reproducing
meaning, and the provision of ‘names through which the unknown first
becomes masterable’, has fruitfully been approached in from the angle
of ‘political myth’ (Bottici 2007:13, see della Sala 2010a/b). Myth ‘serves
to flatten the complexity, the nuance, the performative contradictions
of human history’ and political life (Bell 2003:75), and can have the
power to mobilise people around a cause (Eder 1932:1). Note that I use
the terms ‘myth’ or ‘narrative’ not at all to imply that the proposed
content is not true – it may or may not be – but rather to denote that
it is presented in story form. Finally, discursive construction often takes
place on the margins of conscious, rational, and explicit formulations,
in the realms of implicit underlying understandings, of what is taken for
granted, treated as obvious, and routinely fallen into an almost reflex-
like manner. These spheres, too, are of special interest to this study.
Much of the available scholarship neglects the fluid, essentially
contested, socially rooted, and communicative sides of political legiti-
macy. Normative political theory discusses the criteria of legitimacy
as an objective ideal, a quality of political authority (Schaar 1984:108,
Pitkin 1967:280–6, Beetham 1991:8, Geuss 2001:33). Within EU studies,
its concern is specifically with de- and re-constructing the normative
standards of legitimate political order in the multi-level constella-
tion. This inquiry is often combined with an empirical examination of
how much legitimacy the EU actually achieves.8 Most political-science
 Introduction 7

accounts measure reality against such taken-for-granted exogenous

yardsticks – including, in particular, representativeness, accountability,
transparency, and responsiveness. On these basis, they assess the legiti-
macy, for example, of the EU’s decision-making processes, institutional
set-up, problem-solving output, or the way it came about. Political
sociologists and others drawing on Habermasian public sphere theory
also work with a pre-fabricated idea of what constitutes legitimacy, in
their case the premise that a European public sphere or Europeanized
national public spheres are necessary conditions for the EU’s legiti-
macy (Zimmermann and Favell 2010:502).9 The same observation can
be made about much of the literature on European identity (see refer-
ences in footnote 7), which turns on the assumption that some sense of
belonging, founding a common body politic, is a necessary condition
of EU legitimacy. All these types of accounts of legitimacy, as a result,
have in common that they are (relatively) silent about the processes by
which certain criteria rather than others come to be generally accepted
as conditions of legitimacy.
On the other hand, an important empirical tradition going back to Max
Weber treats legitimacy as a popular belief, an attribute in the eye of the
beholder, something people ascribe to a regime (e.g. Lipset 1959:87, see
Weber 2002:514, 682–91, 717–33). Research in this tradition is concerned
with the extent to which people de facto accept political authority as legit-
imate, when and why they do, or what happens when they do or do not.
This is social or empirical legitimacy: legitimacy in the eyes of the people
(see Weiler 1999:80). The comparative politics literature on ‘political
culture’ conceives of legitimacy as general political support for a polit-
ical order as ‘regime support’ or ‘public support’ (Westle 2007, e.g. Gilley
2006a:49). It seeks to explain what favours or determines political support,
and what its consequences are (in particular, as regards regime stability
or democratization), and has been trying to develop appropriate ways to
measure it.10 Within the EU studies fold, an extensive literature on public
opinion towards European integration, as well as popular Euroscepticism,
quantifies, categorises, and causally explains popular attitudes to matters
European (see overviews in Van Ingelgom forthcoming or Hobolt 2012a).
It attributes such attitudes to specific categories of people, defined, say,
by socio-economic bracket, education level, nationality, or partisanship;
or to factors such as material benefits derived from integration, attitudes
towards the political and economic performance of the system, or cues
from the media and/or political parties. The bulk of the work on social
legitimacy (as in regime support) operationalises it in terms of rather
crudely measured popular attitudes. Drawing on opinion surveys, above
8 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

all the Eurobarometer series, this research is fundamentally limited to the

questions asked in the polls. As a result, this type of research, too, has little
to say about what ‘legitimacy’ and ‘European integration’ mean to survey
respondents, and about how such meanings come about.11
In order to explore these very dynamics of contestation and
construction, a different method is needed. This is why I have chosen
to work with a non-quantitative interpretive textual analysis of what
legitimacy meant in a variety of discourses. The approach taken is
‘interpretive’ in the very sense of being concerned, empirically, with
meaning (Yanow 2006:xii). It is necessarily subjective in that at its
heart is the activity of ‘[h]umans making meaning out of the mean-
ing-making of other humans’ (Pachirat 2006:374). Specifically, I scru-
tinise argumentative and narrative patterns, including recurrent lines
of argument, and on what grounds they make their points, what they
take for granted, as well as the explicit and implicit understandings in
which they are embedded. I seek to let the sources speak. My method
is to provide close readings of an eclectic range of sources, selected and
then narrowed down in an iterative process to represent key discursive
positions and patterns at play. This corpus is therefore ‘representa-
tive rather than exhaustive’ (see Mottier 2005:258). From these read-
ings emerges, I hope, an intellectual history of contests over meaning
regarding EU legitimacy.12 It is this method of intuitive interpretation
and qualitative cross-textual analysis that sets my book apart from
existing discourse-analytical studies of European integration, which
tend to rely on quantitative content analysis or frame analysis. I seek
to shed light on the subtle narrative, argumentative, and inter-subjec-
tive dynamics by which meaning is continuously re-created – rather
than tracing, as others do, changes in the relative frequency of specific
discourses over time and across different contests, and correlating this
again, say, to attitudes towards integration or the actual course of
integration.13
Fundamentally, my research aim in this book is exploratory rather
than explanatory. That is to say, the history of discursive contests over
EU legitimacy is not investigated as a dependent or an independent vari-
able in linear cause-and-effect connection. I further do not use the term
‘exploratory’ in the sense of generating testable hypotheses for future
research here. Rather, I investigate this discursive history for its own
sake, in order to explore the ‘conditions of possibility’ for how certain
understandings came to make sense to people at certain points when
they did not before or in different contexts, and how some understand-
ings lost their relative plausibility while others preserved it. The question
 Introduction 9

underlying my analysis is essentially genealogical ‘what happened there

and then that allowed things to be like this?’.14
This exploratory focus on ‘how’ rather than ‘why’ questions also
distinguishes this book from constructivist studies of European integra-
tion that seek to identify causal effects of ideas, norms, and identities
on historical outcomes, often with a focus on preference formation.15
The book’s exploratory-genealogical emphasis, moreover, sets it apart
from the growing policy frame literature in EU studies. This body of
research examines how the definition and framing of political issues
affects the policy-making process, explaining policy change or stasis,
as well as institution-building strategies.16 Both constructivist and the
framing approaches fundamentally aim to ‘explain what happened’
(Fligstein 2001:264). I depart from both of these in that I study social
construction, not in the light of its consequences on ‘hard’ facts (why I
do not deny, of course – after all, I do refer to them in building my case
for the type of work I am proposing), but with a view to how it shaped
the possibilities of claiming legitimacy for the EU and European inte-
gration. In contrast to my concentration on the contents of discourses
(see earlier), moreover, policy frame research is another actor-centred
approach; it explains the preferences, as well as the formation, align-
ment, and relative power of institutional entrepreneurs and organized
interests, with a view to both how these entrepreneurs strategically
manipulate the framing of the issues at stake, and the institutional envi-
ronments in which they operate (Daviter 2007:657–60, 2011, Fligstein
2001:264–6). A typical research question, for example, is that of when
policy framing exerts ‘most leverage’, and a typical place to look for
answers would be ‘when it coincides with a parallel shift of institutional
venues’ (Daviter 2007:657). In terms of methods, some of the framing
literature draws on interviews with actors involved in policy-making,
asking them how policy change came about (e.g. Fligstein 2001:265), or
on quantitative content analysis (e.g. Medrano 2003). Other studies of
this school are based on the textual interpretation of policy documents
and other sources – more akin to the method applied in this book.
What my book importantly shares, however, with the literature
on framing, is a research interest in and sensitivity to the ‘schemata
of interpretation’ (or ‘frames’) that allow people to organize experi-
ence, make sense of occurrences and events, and guide their action
upon it.17 I seek to uncover different modes of representing the world,
in particular, the EU and its legitimacy – in Richard Münch’s termi-
nology; the ‘vocabulary’ and ‘semantics’ of constructions of a legiti-
mate order of society (2010:9). The literature on ‘governmentality’ is a
10 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

major inspiration for this project. This book thus joins it in turning the
focus from legitimacy-in-itself (measured by some exogenous norma-
tive standards) to the discursive problematisation of legitimacy, that
is, to debates about EU legitimacy and the ‘ongoing reproduction of
certain ‘truths’ but not others’ (Zimmermann and Favell 2011:495–6). I
devote my attention to the rhetorical wrapping and meanings given to
‘legitimacy’ in competing discourses, rather than to the essence of the
thing – legitimacy – itself.18 Governmentality refers to the mentalities
or political rationalities of government (such as underlying understand-
ings of who should govern what and why) as well as the technologies
(such as statistics, maps, or censuses) and symbolic means by which
state power is organized.19 A lacuna of studies in this tradition is due to
their usual focus on how those in power shape the mindsets of those
affected, neglecting how the latter respond to, and possibly resist and
subvert, the operation of power (Walters and Haahr 2005b:5–7, Dean
1999:16, Zimmermann and Favell 2011:495–6, 507). I attempt to fill in
this blind spot by including not only top-down legitimation discourses,
but also their resonance, reception, and contestation in the discourses of
their addressees: the member-state publics.
As a whole, finally, the book constitutes a case for bridging the divide
between normative and traditional empirical accounts of legitimacy and
working in the space between them. At a general level, it adds to an
emerging body of empirical studies that look at the relationships between
the EU and its citizens in different member-states, using diverse methods
from anthropology, historiography, sociology, discourse analysis, and
so on.20 This nascent literature complements theoretical accounts of
conceptual issues such as Union citizenship with empirically grounded
insights, and I do so for the issue of political legitimacy. More specifi-
cally, the book takes up the recently revived interest among theorists of
political legitimacy in social legitimacy beliefs and the understandings,
projections, or constructions embedding them.21 This interest goes back
to David Beetham’s and Jürgen Habermas’s notion that something is
legitimate, not ‘because people believe in its legitimacy’, but to the extent
that it can be ‘justified in terms of their beliefs’ (Beetham 1991:11), or
in terms of criteria that are ‘discursively justifiable’ (Habermas 1973:139,
173, see also 1976). In Michael Freeden’s words, ‘acceptability [ ... ] on
the basis of explicit or implicit understandings prevailing in a society’ is
at the heart of legitimacy (2005:79).
The problem with Habermas and Beetham’s accounts (and their
strength, of course) is that they derive the substance of such supposed
social legitimacy beliefs, and of what makes legitimacy discursively
 Introduction 11

justifiable, deductively; by way of systematic rational argument and

drawing on philosophical or constitutional traditions.22 While both
their notions of political legitimacy turn theoretically on historical
social – and therefore empirical – beliefs about legitimacy criteria, both
accounts essentially lack empirical grounding. They make abstract claims
about what hypothetical actors (typical of certain stages in the develop-
ment of mankind across time and space) would have considered criteria
of legitimacy. In contrast, I provide an inductive, empirical analysis of
the legitimacy standards expressed in or underlying actual, particular,
discourses, and focus on inner- and cross-textual dynamics of narrative
and argumentative construction. This seems to me the kind of research
needed if the idea of social beliefs as legitimacy criteria is to be taken all
the way.23 In the concluding chapter, I shall draw the circle back to how
such an inductive discursive history of legitimation and delegitimation
attempts relates to important lines of debate in the academic literature,
both empirical and normative.
In preparation for this, I trace two recurrent themes over the course of
the individual chapters. The first is the shifting balance between forces
actively politicising the stakes of integration and EU action, and forces
working towards placing them beyond the realm of political contesta-
tion or forces de-politicising them. The second is how the complex rela-
tion between input- and output-based claims to EU legitimacy played
out in discursive practice. According to a seminal conceptualisation that
effectively structures much of the academic inquiry into EU legitimacy,
political legitimacy can be claimed both on the grounds of effective
performance and results – of ‘output-efficiency’ or ‘government for the
people’ – and on the grounds of ‘input-authenticity’, or that the object to
be legitimated reflects what the affected citizens want, and is the expres-
sion of some kind of ‘government by the people’ (Scharpf 1999:6–9).
This conceptualisation – which echoes the divide in political philosophy
between utilitarian and consent- or rights-based accounts of legitimacy –
raises a number of issues, including whether the two types of legitimacy
sources are actually separable or mutually exclusive, what kinds of outputs
would generate output-based legitimacy, how outputs can plausibly be
claimed to be in line with authentic citizen preferences, or how to balance
possible trade-offs, as well as the inherent interdependence between
them. Relating my discursive history to these academic literatures, the
concluding chapter explores to what extent and in what ways it is helpful
to think of this web of discourses in terms of the categories of input versus
output legitimacy, and in terms of an increasing politicisation. I investi-
gate what light a narrative of this discursive history can cast on the role of
12 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

political contestation in constructing, creating, and maintaining political

legitimacy, as well as on the nature and relationship of the two types of
legitimacy claims (which, I argue, are inherently interrelated). This discus-
sion illustrates the potential of work in the space in-between empirical
and normative approaches to legitimacy to illuminate particular aspects
of both empirical and normative questions pertaining to political legiti-
macy. It further throws into focus the interactive relationship between
legitimacy constructions in academic, versus official, or public, discourses
about the EU and its legitimacy.
Overall, then, the book is an experiment in approaching political legiti-
macy by looking at consistencies and shifts in different discursive actors’
ways of representing the EU, with a view to the long-term struggle over
what could plausibly be said about the EU’s legitimacy. It unpacks what
we can mean by legitimacy beyond the nation-state (see also Glencross
2011), and how different people at different times have wrapped their
minds around transferring concepts like ‘democracy’ or ‘citizenship’ to a
supra- or post-national scene, as reflected in a wide range of discourses.
By investigating where different blueprints of an ideal EU came from,
and playing them off against each other, I raise awareness of the contin-
gent character of what we may consider a more ideal EU today.

Plan of the book

This book investigates discursive developments in the struggle for

EU legitimacy from the foundation of the European Communities in
the 1950s to the failure of the constitutional treaty in 2005. The first
couple of chapters set the stage. Here, I discuss a number of narra-
tives and discursive techniques pivotal in establishing the European
Communities (the EU’s predecessors) and their legitimacy from their
foundation in the 1950s to roughly the end of the 1970s (Chapter 1),
also considering competing visions, and the active contestation, of what
Europe’s political setup should look like and why (Chapter 2). Chapter 3
explores how the European institutions’ responded to these mounting
challenges to the European Communities’ legitimacy by re-inventing
them as a ‘People’s Europe’ over the course of the 1980s. It investigates
how material benefits, symbols, cultural and communication policies,
and the re-constitution of the Communities’ subjects as Union citizens,
were used to this end.
Chapter 4 turns to the EU’s much-diagnosed ‘crisis of legitimacy’,
underway ever since the fierce popular and political resistance to the
1992 Treaty of Maastricht, looking at the angle of the French and
 Introduction 13

German ratification debates. Tracing how new critiques of integration

moved to the discursive mainstream, I explore in what ways the tradi-
tional official legitimation techniques had failed to engage with rooted
national ideas about what would make the EU more legitimate. Chapter
5 swings back to the EU-official level. It maps how the European institu-
tions subsequently tried to promote particular interpretations of what
was at fault with the EU’s legitimacy, highlighting the issue of democ-
racy, and stretching what ‘democracy’ should mean in the EU context.
In Chapter 6, finally, I investigate how the 2005 French and German
debates on the constitutional draft treaty again re-contested previously
developed representations of the EU and its legitimacy, and in what
ways they did or did not respond to the official-discursive crisis manage-
ment of the 1990s and early 2000s.
Chapter 7 weaves the episodes of the individual chapters together
into one story and relates them to two important controversies in the
academic literature on political and EU legitimacy, namely over input
versus output legitimacy and over the politicisation of EU politics. A
brief conclusion ends on what my discursive history might imply for
the future of the EU and its legitimacy. As to their chronological struc-
ture and level of analysis, Chapters 1 and 2 refer to both EU-wide offi-
cial discourses and the French and German public debates in the same,
relative large time frame, from the 1950s to the late 1970s. The subse-
quent chapters proceed chronologically and alternate in their focus on
top-down EU versus member-state specific discourses. With this setup I
hope to explore how the EU level and the member-state levels, and the
different national public spheres, interacted with each other in spin-
ning the webs of discourses and counter-discourses that shaped, and still
shape, what it makes sense to say about the EU and its legitimacy.
1
Peace, Prosperity, and Progress:
Early Legitimating Narratives,
1950s–1970s

Resolved to substitute for historic rivalries a fusion of their essen-

tial interests, to establish, by creating an economic community, the
foundations of a broader and deeper community among people long
divided by bloody conflicts and to lay the bases of institutions capable
of guiding their common destiny. (Treaty Constituting the European
Coal and Steel Community, Preamble)

The foundation of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC)

in 1951 and, in 1957, of the European Economic Community (EEC)
and the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom) was by no
means uncontroversial. The eventual institutional solutions negoti-
ated were highly contingent, and in no way the only possible outcome
(e.g. Gillingham 1991, see Gilbert 2008). In the early years of the
European Communities, the challenge was hence to justify them in their
existence, as well as in the particular form they were given. According
to the standard narrative in the literature, this was done with reasonable
success as far as public opinion was concerned; the first few decades of
integration, it says, were marked by a popular ‘permissive consensus’,
which enabled elites to go about establishing the integration project
undisturbed. This, the story goes, lasted until the late 1980s or early
1990s, when it was replaced by a ‘constraining dissensus’ (Hooghe
and Marks 2009). Most academic accounts either refer explicitly to
this permissive consensus or take it for granted. Yet the public opinion
data on which Lindberg and Scheingold built their seminal permissive-
consensus thesis gave ‘no clues at as to what it [was] about the system
that [was] attractive or why’ (1970:39).

14
 Peace, Prosperity, and Progress 15

This chapter addresses the puzzle of how a narrative that European

integration’s being essentially uncontroversial and uncontested could
be built and upheld at the time. It explores the meanings and (implicit
or explicit) understandings embedding the attitudes measurable in
public opinion surveys, and the discursive offer available to citizens.
On what grounds were integration and its institutions established as
legitimate, desirable, and necessary? Which key arguments, images,
and storylines underpinned the supposed permissive consensus, and in
which broader intellectual backgrounds and beliefs and ideas were they
embedded? The next chapter, in turn, will explore the critical counter-
discourses they were up against. These two chapters form a unit with
a view to the logic of the book as a whole. They give an overview of
central legitimacy-related arguments and storylines of the early years of
integration, from the foundation of the Communities up until the late
1970s. Chapter 1 concentrates on discourses aimed at establishing that
European integration, and European integration as it was happening,
were desirable and justifiable. I suggest that, contrary to a dominant
view in political science, there were normative justifications at work
in the post-war integration project. Chapter 2 plays such legitimation
patterns off against important critical counter-discourses about why the
project was not what was needed and was not legitimate, and about
how it could be more legitimate. It underlines the fact that, whether
or not a permissive consensus prevailed overall, it was not unanimous.
Dissenting and critical voices formed part of the public, political, and
official debates.
Many of the discursive patterns central to early justifications or
critiques of integration and its legitimacy continue to structure the ways
in which it is plausible to talk about the EU and its legitimacy today. In
this sense, the purpose of these opening chapters in the context of the
entire book is to erect a scaffold against which the subsequent case studies
assess later discursive shifts. To this end, they exceptionally cover both
top-down official and national public sphere levels (whereas the rest of
my chapters focus more clearly on either one or the other). The sources
I draw on in both chapters include official statements, such as speeches
and interviews by representatives of the member-state governments and
of the Commission or the European Parliament, official reports, and
treaty preambles, as well as newspaper articles, in particular, from Der
Spiegel, Die Zeit (DZ), and Le Monde, with a focus on periods around
key events in integration history such as the signature or ratification of
the treaties, the empty chair crisis, important intergovernmental confer-
ences and summits, and so on.
16 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

Early discursive constructions of legitimacy for the emerging new

European order clustered around the techniques of laying emphasis on
common grounds, and glossing over controversial issues to the greatest
extent possible. This chapter is organised around a number of discourses
or discursive patterns that contributed to de-politicising the stakes of
integration politics.1 First, I discuss the discourse that integration was
indispensable to safeguarding peace and prosperity. Second, I examine
the related claim that there was such a thing as a common European
good or common interest, to be furthered by European integration. In a
third step, I interpret the discourse of hope, progress, and rising above
circumstance through enlightened planning and expert knowledge.
Finally, I reflect on efforts to appeal to legality and constitutionalism as
a source of legitimacy for the Communities. All these de-politicisation
tendencies were challenged by discourses and developments that under-
lined the essentially controversial and contested nature of what the
Communities were doing, and how. I turn to these in the next chapter.

Indispensability

Peace and prosperity were the central promises of those trying to gather
support for the emerging European Communities. The award of the
Nobel Peace Prize to the European Union in 2012 commemorated the
centrality of effective peace-making in driving as well as in justifica-
tions of early integration. The memory and threat of war was fresh and
present in everyone’s mind in the 1950s. Jean Monnet reminisces in
his memoirs that an anxiety ‘weighed on Europe five years after the
war: the fear that if we did nothing we should soon face war again’
(1978:289). Security concerns were indeed a principal motivation
behind the foundation of all three of the European Communities, and
those advocating, celebrating, or trying to justify them did not tire of
repeating that peace was what European integration was all about. The
preamble to the EEC Treaty declared the signatories’ resolve ‘to preserve
and strengthen peace and liberty’ by pooling their resources. The ECSC
Treaty Preamble pledged to lay the foundations of a ‘broader and deeper
community between peoples long divided by bloody conflicts’.2 Overall,
the key discourse about why the ECSC, the EEC, and the Euratom were
legitimate was that they were necessary because they were indispensable
for safeguarding peace across Europe.
This indispensability-to-peace discourse rested on four interrelated
pillars. First and most importantly, the project was almost ritually cast
against the ‘bloodshed of two world wars’ (e.g. Marjolin 1958:5). For
 Peace, Prosperity, and Progress 17

instance, all the foreign ministers (and the German chancellor) speaking
on the occasion of the signature of the Rome Treaties referred promi-
nently to Europe’s history of centuries of war, conflict, and rivalry
(see www.cvce.eu). The prospective horrors of this alternative framed
European integration – by virtue of it being indispensable to achieving
peace – as indispensable as such (see e.g. Monnet 1962). This discourse
had integration as a matter of survival: a ‘necessary effort to secure the
future of our peoples’ (Martino 1957). The necessity to ‘unite in order
to survive’ was a recurring motif (e.g. Marjolin 1958:5). A closely related
second reason given for why the European Communities were neces-
sary was the containment of Germany. The 1950 Schuman Declaration
canvassed pooling the coal and steel industries on the grounds that this
would make ‘any war between France and Germany [ ... ] not merely
unthinkable, but materially impossible’ – and that only the ‘elimina-
tion’ of their ‘age-old opposition’ would enable the nations of Europe
to come together, preserve peace between them, and work towards safe-
guarding world peace. A third supporting pillar of the indispensabil-
ity-to-peace discourse was rooted in the broader context of the Cold
War. Walter Hallstein (President of the Commission from 1958 to 1967
and at the time German Permanent Secretary for Foreign Affairs), for
example, conjured up the spectre of Soviet intervention in a radio
address: ‘As long as this [united] Europe does not exist, Europe’s disu-
nity bears a constant incentive for the Eastern powers to strive, not for
a peaceful coexistence, but the control of Europe and the continua-
tion of the world revolution’ (Hallstein 1955, see also 1959a:2). French
philosopher-sociologist Raymond Aron agreed in Le Figaro: ‘Perhaps the
Soviet bear is less famished in 1955 than it was in 1945. Nevertheless,
it is hard to imagine that, if given the opportunity, it would hold back
swallowing another piece of Europe’ (31/08/1955, see 02/08/1955, and
de Lapparent 2010:51). A Member of the Bundestag and the European
Parliament, Joachim Schöne (SPD), conjectured in a Spiegel interview: ‘If
one considers the situation of the countries of the Eastern block and the
concentrated political power radiating from the Eastern block, one does
ask oneself if we can afford to leave the Occident divided up into indi-
vidual sovereign states with their own little back yard and church tower –
politically as well as economically’ (10/07/1957:32). A final, and again
directly related pattern in legitimating discourses, was to link references
to the task of protecting peace with the task of strengthening ‘freedom’
or ‘liberty’, as the EEC Treaty Preamble cited earlier did. This was to be
done both within the member-states and beyond their borders. In this
image, Europe emerged as a ‘force for freedom and peace’, contributing
18 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

‘not only to the strength of the Free World but also to the furtherance
of the peace and well-being of all mankind’ (Marjolin 1958:5, 11; see
Hallstein 1960a:13, Hallstein 1959c:1).
In addition to peace, moreover, the legitimating argument that
European integration was necessary had a further basis: its indispen-
sability to achieving prosperity in Europe. If peace was necessary for
survival in post-war Europe, it was not sufficient in itself. Economic
recovery, a better material life, or even economic miracles, were what
the people desired once the conditions for mere survival seemed
provided for. Discourses legitimating the Communities fully tapped into
these needs. They centrally pointed to the ‘new prospects of progress
and prosperity for the peoples of the six States’ opened up, and made
attainable, by the creation of the EEC (CEC 1958:9). Advocates of the
European Communities conjured up tangible promises of the Common
Market and presumed policies of economic integration from the macr-
oeconomic as well as the individual perspectives, and bundled them
in the emblem of a ‘higher standard of living’ or ‘improved living
conditions’. This emblem remained a key theme in pro-Community
discourses throughout the 1950s and 1960s (e.g. Messina Declaration
1955, Marjolin 1958:4, Armand 1958, van der Stoel 1976). Der Spiegel
commented ironically: ‘It says in all preambles that a thriving economy,
cheaper consumption, and a higher standard of living is expected from
this endeavour’ (10/07/1957:32). Indeed, the EEC Treaty vowed to bring
about ‘economic and social progress’ as well as the ‘constant improve-
ment of the living and working conditions’ (preamble), and the ECSC
Treaty, too, declared its aim to contribute, through the common market
for coal and steel, to economic expansion, growth of employment, and
a rising standard of living (Art. 2; on the label and promise of ‘social
progress’ through integration, see further CEC 1960a:22, Spaak 1957).
Commission Vice-President Sicco Mansholt summed up the EEC’s
policy objectives at a GATT session: ‘an expansive economy, industri-
alisation, and an increase in the standard of living – this will be our
policy’ (1958a:2). Besides better living conditions, the expected benefits
from European integration that Commission representatives, Europhile
parliamentarians (national and European), and supporters across the
member-states enumerated, included greater markets and a European-
wide division of labour resulting in economies of scale, rationalisation
effects, and mass production leading in turn to increased productivity
and production, economic growth and lower unemployment.3
The Europeans’ quest for economic recovery was often framed as a
matter of catching-up with more fortunate nations, above all the United
 Peace, Prosperity, and Progress 19

States of America. In 1951, Hallstein, for instance, presented the whole

integration project as prompted by the resolution to ‘rectify’ a constantly
growing European economic ‘performance deficit’, whereby Europe and
its basic industries ‘have lost ground in relation to the overall develop-
ment process at world level’ in terms of ‘total industrial output and also
for output per capita, the consequence being lower real wages and a lower
standard of living’ (Hallstein 1951:3, see equally 1955). Schöne (SPD)
in the mentioned interview, for example, made the promise of better
living conditions tangible by referring to the number of cars per head in
the USA as opposed to in Europe, and to income per head as indicators
(Spiegel 10/07/1957:27–8). A German parliamentarian, too, connected
the catching-up with the improved-standard-of-living themes in plenary
debate: ‘Does it have to be [ ... ] that the current average standard of living
in the European countries which want to sign up to the Coal and Steel
Community amounts to exactly 33 per cent of the average American,
of the average American worker? No!’ Abandoning economic bounda-
ries in a common market, he argued, offered a way out (Viktor-Emanuel
Preusker, FDP, quoted after Hörber 2006:216, my translation). However,
not only the USA, but also the Soviet Union and China gave Europe (as
well as North America) reasons to shape up and ‘develop its production
and productivity with a compelling sense of urgency if we are to meet
the common menace of Communism’ (Hallstein 1959c:4). For example,
even an otherwise cautious article about the Common Market’s effects
on the French economy conceded that ‘[i]n a world of industrial and
nuclear colossi, where the United States and the USSR dominate the
world’s other countries with all their power, it is essential Europe gets
organised in order to gain on their level’ (L’Aurore 04/04/1957:1–2).
This quote further exemplifies another argument that often under-
pinned the indispensability discourse with regard to the world stage;
namely that jointly the member-states would have greater economic
weight, leverage, and influence internationally, including in trade
negotiations (e.g. CEC 1960a:11). Only united could Europe ‘preserve
the standing which she has in the world’ (Messina Declaration, 1955).
Moreover, especially in the early years, leaders of the Six and of the
Commission furthermore carefully repeated that the Community was
‘directed against no one’ (Adenauer 1957), that it was not intended to
‘isolate [the member-states] from the rest of the world and build up
insurmountable barriers around them’ (Pineau 1957), but rather to
be ‘a contribution to the safety, the pacification, the progress and the
economic wellbeing of the entire world’ (Hallstein 1951:3). The common
refutations of the accusation of protectionism (e.g. Hallstein 1959b:2,
20 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

Marjolin 1958:6, Pineau 1957), of course, may be read as an indication

that the criticism of ‘protectionist customs and tariff walls’ around the
Community’s external borders was a force to be reckoned with in the
contemporary debate (e.g. Spiegel 27/03/1957:8).
Even if possible criticisms of European economic integration were
acknowledged in such ways, the indispensability storyline framed it
as a matter of no alternative. Accordingly, integration was an absolute
necessity on account of a fact taken for granted as externally given
the growing interdependence of the world, which was ‘forcing us to
come together’ (Mansholt 1958a). This interdependence discourse was
crucial in discourses legitimating European integration in its founda-
tional years (and has been since, as I discuss in Chapters 4, 5 and 6). It
went as follows: the ‘re-organisation of our continent’ had been ‘made
inevitable by the rapid progress of modern technology and by the added
political and economic global developments’ (Luns 1957). As a result of
these developments, many problems had ‘become insoluble within the
frontiers of a single state’, and it was ‘only in a wider setting than that
of national frontiers that a solution [could] be found’ (Mansholt 1962).
And therefore, the participating governments declared in signing the
Paris Treaty, ‘the countries of free Europe are interdependent and share
a common destiny’ (The Governments of Belgium et al. 1951, see ECSC
Treaty, preamble). Another expression of the interdependence discourse
was the storyline that the West European countries formed a ‘commu-
nity of fate’ (e.g. Monnet 1962; the German debate showed itself partic-
ularly responsive to this motif, see Spiegel 10/07/1957:26).
More specifically, the interdependence discourse referenced techno-
logical, economic, as well as political aspects. Technology was often
attributed almost magical powers to change the preconditions of modern
governance. The German daily Die Welt, for example, identified a trend
in Europe towards ‘technological unions’, which was ‘taking effect as a
matter of course, simply because technological change in recent decades
has overrun our little continent and swept aside the barriers that sepa-
rated nations in the pre-technological age. In other words, we are expe-
riencing the unifying power of technology’ (07/06/1955). Commission
Vice-President Robert Marjolin remarked that ‘in a world of mass produc-
tion’ and the ‘imperatives of modern industrialism’, small national
markets had become an ‘anachronistic form of economic organiza-
tion’ (Marjolin 1958:4). Economically, the interdependence argument
was additionally grounded in the argument that the European nation-
states carried greater economic weight as one larger unit. Politically, the
Cold War situation made West European integration obligatory given
 Peace, Prosperity, and Progress 21

‘the political dangers of a fragmented or “Balkanized” Europe at a time

when the centre of gravity was shifting away from the old world and
becoming more polarized in East and West’ (Hallstein 1959a:2). The Suez
1956 crisis was, according to some, the latest, unmistakeable reminder
that the fates of the West European nations were inextricably entwined
(e.g. Spiegel 10/07/1957:26; see Monnet 1962).
This interweaving of technological, economic, and political dimen-
sions in the interdependence discourse tied up with another link that
characterised many of the early legitimation discourses: the association
they typically made between the indispensability-to-peace and the indis-
pensability-to-prosperity storylines. ‘Peace and prosperity’ were so often
mentioned as an item that they became firmly associated with each
other, indicating how it was silently taken for granted that to achieve
one aim meant achieving the other (e.g. Adenauer 1957, van der Stoel
1976). Prosperity was not to be had without peace, and peace was not
to be had without prosperity. One of the greatest legitimating successes
of supporters of the early Communities was to make trade and economic
integration plausible as obvious and almost natural institutional choices
in seeking to achieve European peace. How was this achieved?
For one thing, the twin objectives of peace and prosperity had in common
that they were indisputably desirable to everyone, at least as an end goal.
Besides, the claim that economic integration was the way to peace rested
on the idea that in ‘the modern world the free exchange of goods is the
safest guarantee for peace’ (Bundesregierung 1957a).4 The widespread asso-
ciation of peace and prosperity as mutually inextricable goals displayed
itself in the common storyline that, while the EEC’s immediate objectives
and means lay in the economic realm, the ‘true nature and purpose of the
Community’ was not economic, but political (Marjolin 1958:5). ‘Political’
in this context would be used in terms of the goal of achieving durable
peace, or in the sense of ‘attaining true political unity’. Political unity
could mean a whole array of things, ranging from a loose cooperation
arrangement to a ‘United States of Europe’.5 References to it used ‘political’
in the sense of imposing human agency on externally given economic
imperatives, as I will explore in the third section of this chapter. This use
of ‘political’ was also to characterise an important discourse in the French
Maastricht and constitutional debates (Chapters 4 and 6). In the early
years, political integration was demanded, moreover, on the grounds that
only by combining economic with political integration would economic
integration be ‘sustainable’ (Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) 02/06/1955; for a
recent vision of ‘sustainable integration’, see Nicolaïdis 2010). Finally, the
economic fruits of integration played an important role in courting, and
22 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

sustaining, the commitment of the people and their leaders to the integra-
tion project – whereas the political motivations might not always suffice
in themselves to keep up the necessary political will (Spiegel 27/03/1957:8).
In the words of the Commission, by contributing to an increase in GNP,
‘the Community could prove to its constituent peoples the advantages
of integration’ (CEC 1960a:20). The emphasis on the expected benefits
of economic integration was crucial in establishing that economic inte-
gration was the way to economic recovery, that it was indispensable to
achieve peace in Europe, and that, given the absolute necessity of these
two objectives, European integration was indispensable as such.
The statement by the Commission was typical, finally, of a general bias
in legitimating patterns of the first few decades of integration: claims to
the legitimacy of the Communities heavily relied on ‘output’-related
or results-orientated arguments (see Chapter 7). Integration, accord-
ingly, was legitimate to the extent that it was necessary and helpful, or
useful; that is, on grounds of the Communities’ effective performance
in meeting the task of providing peace and prosperity. Yet, in making
plausible that European integration was legitimate to the extent that it
efficiently served a purpose, the challenge lay in defining that purpose.
And this proved more problematic than the ‘peace and prosperity’ or the
‘interdependence’ storylines would have people believe.

The European common good

Whereas it did seem intuitive that practically everyone in Europe agreed

they wanted to live in peace and prosperity, it was less uncontrover-
sial how this could be achieved, and how the relative costs and gains
of integration should be divided up. The prominent emphasis on the
incontestable goals and their grounding in the indispensability narrative
effectively served to draw attention away from this essentially contested
nature of European integration. A central effort of the advocates of
European integration and its legitimacy consisted in establishing that a
common European interest or a common good existed. This was of vital
importance given that claims to early integration’s legitimacy impor-
tantly worked on the basis that it promoted such a European common
welfare, good, or interest. Examples of projections abound, and political
and public discourse often referred to a European ‘common interest’
synonymously with a European ‘common good’. Luxembourg’s Prime
Minister and Foreign Minister, for instance, appreciated when signing
the Rome Treaties that the creation of the EEC meant that the peoples of
Europe, for the first time in their history, ‘substituted for their economic
 Peace, Prosperity, and Progress 23

rivalries and antagonisms an organisation founded on their common

interest’ (Bech 1957). The final communiqué of the Hague Summit
(1969) projected a ‘Europe composed of States which, in spite of their
different national characteristics, are united in their essential interests’.
References to the European common good often went in tandem with
calls to leave ‘national thinking’ behind.6 This ‘post-national’ discourse
often associated the new thinking in terms of a shared European interest
with progress towards a better future. Thinking in nation-state categories,
by contrast, indicated a backward-looking attitude, which had become
anachronistic and obsolete (just like small national markets in the earlier
quote by Marjolin 1958:4). In the post-national discourse, ‘the way
in which the European peoples conduct[ed] themselves towards each
other [was] changing’, or should be. The European peoples had ‘begun
to have common interests, a common destiny. While they remain[ed]
attached to their pasts, the future for them [had] become European’
(Monnet 1962). Assessments diverged as to the extent to which post-
national thinking had already taken root in popular and politicians’
mindsets, and national thinking was only flaring up occasionally, or
whether it was the other way round (e.g. Die Welt 07/06/1955, Hallstein
1955, Süddeutsche 1955/06/02). The obvious argument underpinning
the post-national discourse was that European integration constituted
the antithesis to war and to nationalism, which itself had been discred-
ited by the two world wars (e.g. Hallstein 1959a:2). Yet this discourse
associated not only nationalism, but also ‘nation-state thinking’ more
broadly, with ‘terrible excesses’ (Hallstein 1955). Such thinking in
terms of nation-states or the ‘national mindset’ expressed itself in the
ruthless pursuit of national interests (Mansholt 1958c, see Süddeutsche
02/06/1955). The post-national discourse cast European integration
against these dangerous impulses, which had traditionally found their
expression in the quest for national hegemony or superiority – the very
embodiment of nation-state thinking (e.g. Monnet 1962). Integration,
it said, was conceived as a ‘breach upon the national system’ (Hallstein
1955).
The post-national discourse of the common European good some-
times assumed a moralising tone advocating self-improvement, self-
restraint, and a ‘strong awareness of European responsibility’ (Süddeutsche
02/01/1962). Italian Foreign Minister Gaetano Martino, in celebrating
the signature of the Rome Treaties, for example, associated national
thinking – against which ‘we have to fight durably and tenaciously’ –
with ‘the obstacles of the past, which result not so much from things
or institutions but from within ourselves, from our pusillanimity and
24 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

our prejudices’ (1957, see further e.g. CEC 1958:13, Hallstein 1960a:29).
Supporting integration here became a matter of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’,
rather than of choosing between different, equally available courses of
action (see Mouffe 2005 on politics being played out in a moral register
of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ in the post-09/11 world). To some extent, overcoming
nationalism and national thinking featured as an end in and of itself,
beyond instrumental motivations: European unity had to be pursued not
‘as a route to possible dividends, but because the work we have in hand
is part of the continuing ascent of man’ (Hallstein 1951:15). In this line
of argument, the idea that European integration committed the member-
states to departing from thinking and acting in national categories was
a further reason why integration was good and necessary (this was espe-
cially prominent in West Germany, but not exclusive to it).
More typically though, the post-national ideal and the concept of the
European common good were made attractive precisely in appealing
to instrumental reasons, couched in a language of interests, neces-
sities, gains, and payoffs. The emphasis was on the convergence of
national interests into a shared European interest. In these discourses
the European common good was effectively a common interest, consti-
tuted effectively by coinciding national interests. To ‘think in European
terms’ made sense not only morally but also rationally, with a view
to maximising one’s interests (see also Haas 1958: xiv, 448). In estab-
lishing ‘European’ or ‘post-national thinking’ as a rational enterprise,
references to a European shared interest often depicted it, implicitly or
explicitly, an indivisible common good, a common good about which
there were no distributional issues (the message being that European
integration was an endeavour where no one would lose out or be taken
advantage of). Peace was indeed an indivisible common good, and in
fact a public good, even if there were certainly different visions for a
peaceful settlement and how to achieve it. With regard to the costs
and efforts required for achieving peace, however, distribution was an
issue (see Gillingham 2003:23, Rittberger 2005:76). It was an issue, for
instance, in the mentioned debate on seeking superiority as a means
of securing security interests, or in regard of the question of German
reunification or the status of the Saar region, not resolved until in 1957
(see e.g. Süddeutsche 02/01/1962 or Bundesregierung 1957b). Moreover,
economic integration, in particular, undeniably and inevitably implied
divisive inequalities both in relative gains and in relative shares of costs.
Prosperity was a common good solely as a universally shared individual
aspiration – and only in this sense did it lend itself to the storyline that
all Europeans wanted and needed essentially the same thing. That is to
 Peace, Prosperity, and Progress 25

say, European integration was essentially a political, as in controversial,

enterprise, that inevitably created winners and losers (Tsoukalis 2005,
see Chapter 7).7
The challenge of being both costs and benefits of integration to
distribute was met with a motif that urged responsible burden sharing
and moral self-restraint (e.g. Mansholt 1958c). In addition, it was dealt
with in another storyline, which held that short-term sacrifices would
pay off in the future. This equated the common European interest
with the long term, in which the interests of the member-states
converged, and national interests with the short term: ‘the sacrifices
that each of us faces today will be compensated by the shared pros-
perity of tomorrow’ (Martino 1957, see e.g. CEC 1972a:34). Finally,
the common-European-good narrative often glossed over the funda-
mentally distributive nature of integration politics by describing inte-
gration not as a zero-sum game, where someone had to lose out for
someone else to make a gain, but a positive-sum game, where no one
was worse off for cooperating, or even where everyone won. Le Monde
for instance commended the fact that the safeguards incorporated
into the Euratom and Common Market Treaties ‘allow us to hope that
the grand design for Europe will not be a game in which one side
wins and the other loses’ (26/03/1957; this very article, of course, also
illustrated that the positive-sum image could be employed to advo-
cate intergovernmental, Council-focused as well as supranational
solutions). The message behind the image of the European common
good was that integration (of the type rationalised or proposed) was
in everyone’s interest, and that at the least there was no good reason
to be against it. It was supported by all of the above techniques of
arguing that integration was indispensable and a matter of no alterna-
tive, and, in particular, by the survival narrative: ‘Since our future is at
stake, it must be hoped [ ... ] that we can shake off the strictly national
mindset’ (Mansholt 1958c). Or, quite simply: ‘Europe has no future as
a society of old-style nation states’ (Süddeutsche 02/06/1955).
This argumentative momentum was often used to link the attain-
ment of what was in the common European interest with particular
institutional arrangements by those who strove to legitimate these very
arrangements. Advocates of supranational solutions, in particular, asso-
ciated the post-national ideal, or the effective pursuit of common inter-
ests and the European common good, with supranational solutions.
To integration theorist Ernst Haas, the emergence of ‘supranationality’
(with which he equated the European Communities) ‘symbolize[d]
the victory of economics over politics, over that familiar ethnocentric
26 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

nationalism which used to subordinate butter to guns, reason to passion

[ ... ]’ (1968 [1963]:159). The EEC’s founding fathers in turn thus took
advantage of the quest for prosperity and the pursuit of converging
interests to push forward supranationalism, which they rationalised as
necessary to achieving them. As to the benefits of economic integration,
a common legitimating discourse held that only economic integration
of a certain type, rather far beyond mere free trade agreements, would
further the Europeans’ common interests (see Heathcote 1966:142
on Hallstein 1964). To be sure, all this is not to say that opponents of
supranational solutions did not also make their proposals and critiques
in reference to a common good or European interest (e.g. earlier on
Le Monde 26/03/1957).
Two conflicting accounts of the ontological status of the common
European interest co-existed. On the one hand, a convergence of inter-
ests had to be brought about and reinforced actively. Here the founda-
tion of the European Communities meant changing the conditions under
which interests, whether national or otherwise, could be realised. The
preamble to the ECSC Treaty, for example, expressed the signing parties’
resolution to ‘substitute for historic rivalries a fusion of their essential
interests’ (emphasis added). This formulation reflected a deliberate deci-
sion to create, through specifically designed institutions, a situation
where national, sectoral, or other particular interests could only (or
more successfully) be pursued at a European level. The commonality
of interest here had to be created, or reinforced, by manipulating the
works of politics, economics, industry, business, and so on. In this sense,
the member-states’ growing interdependence was not only an externally
given motivating and legitimating reason given for common action, as
I noted earlier, but also a way of indissolubly interlocking the European
nation-states and their capacity for acting upon their interests. After all,
the very point of the European institutions was to ‘lay the bases of insti-
tutions’ that would ensure that the member-states’ future destiny was a
‘future common destiny’ (ECSC Treaty Preamble), and in this way ulti-
mately create a working peace system in which war was made ‘materially
impossible’ (Schuman Declaration 1950, see earlier).
An added benefit of modifying the conditions for the pursuit of inter-
ests, and highlighting or even reinforcing the shared aspects of ‘national’
problems, was that this could help to instil the belief in the very concept
of a European common good in the hearts and minds of the Europeans
as well as in those of their leaders (see similarly Haas 1968a:627). And,
on the grounds that European integration efficiently furthered this
European interest, this could help to enhance its legitimacy in their
 Peace, Prosperity, and Progress 27

eyes: ‘If the citizens of our countries are able to pursue, understand and
support this common interest, we must create the conditions which will
progressively change their attitudes and their conduct towards others;
national problems must be shared. This can be done and achieved only
through the adoption of common laws and institutions’ (Monnet 1962).
Common institutions could help to ‘organise the commonality of inter-
ests’ where it existed, providing favourable incentive structures and
opportunities for realising common interests, making them easier and
more worthwhile to pursue than exclusively national interests, which
would naturally continue to conflict to some extent (e.g. Süddeutsche
02/01/1962, Spiegel 10/07/1957:26). Hallstein explained this strategy:
‘We will, with our Treaty, cause neither the peoples nor their interests to
disappear. But what we can do is organise the commonality of interests,
reconcile opposing interests to the extent possible and, where this is not
possible, devise a dignified, civilised, peaceable means of dealing with
such conflicts’ (Hallstein 1951:13).
The other type of ontological account of the European common
interest simply took for granted that it existed. Especially once the
Community institutional system was in place, most references to the
European common good or common interest began from assuming that
there was such a thing, and that it was reasonably unproblematic. The
final communiqué of the Hague Summit (1969), for instance, spoke of
a ‘Europe composed of States which, in spite of their different national
characteristics, are united in their essential interests’. The challenge
was here not so much to bring about a convergence of interests, but
spread the awareness of it in order to strengthen the ‘common will of
Europe in gestation’ and nurture the political will required for further
integration steps (Bech 1957, see Süddeutsche 02/01/1962). Regardless of
whether this convergence of interests was the outcome of a voluntary
act or part of the nature of political life in twentieth-century Europe – all
that mattered was that the European nation-states did now depend on
each other in delivering efficient policies to their citizens, in achieving
economic growth and keeping up their welfare state systems, as well as
in realising their security interests and ensuring their mere survival (see
also e.g.. Haas 1964:39, Mitrany 1943, Milward 2000). National chal-
lenges could only be met in cooperation; national interests had become
shared interests.
The ‘European-common-good’ discourse further tended to display a
certain hierarchy of interests. Common interests were at the top of this
ladder, and the indispensability storyline helped to shift the spotlight to
what interests the member-states shared. More importantly, some shared
28 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

interests in integration were so vital that they outweighed conflicting

national interests in other spheres. The sources quoted earlier in the
context of the interdependence discourse projected several, parallel,
levels of interdependence. At the most fundamental level, the member-
states depended on each other for their very survival in avoiding future
warfare. This interdependence was the root cause of the absolute
need for integration. In order to achieve survival, the members states
pooled certain sovereignties and thus locked themselves into an indis-
soluble, artificially deepened interdependence in pursuing their inter-
ests (both the vital ones and the more second-order ones). Diverging
national interests were thus subordinated to higher imperative interests.
Commission President Hallstein, for example, addressed a joint session
of the European Parliamentary Assembly and the Consultative Assembly
of the Council of Europe:

I am firmly convinced that Europe, the whole of Europe, will never

be divided. We have too much in common, not only in the way of
possessions but also in the way of tasks. Those will compel us to act
jointly. This is true of the purely political sphere, where nothing
less than survival is at stake, and it is equally true in the economic
sphere, where two things have to be done: first we must reconcile the
interests and the objectives of all members of the European family –
which in Europe will always be varied and vital in their diversity;
secondly, we must master the enormous task facing this generation in
its endeavour to establish a peaceful system. (1960a:29)

Hallstein here linked the ‘political sphere’ with the question of mere
survival, alluding to the end goal of a durable peace system, but also
claiming the associated indispensability of his idea of political unity.
He used the survival argument, where interests coincided, to offset
competing interests in the (lower) economic sphere, and closed on
the mantra that even economic integration was ultimately about safe-
guarding peace, that is, about politics, too.
Inscribed into the institutional system of the Communities, to
conclude, was the projection of a division of labour with regard to
shared versus national interests. In the classical understanding, still
put forward by today’s textbooks on the politics of the EU, the Council
of Ministers represented the national interests of the member-states
(e.g. CEC 1958:13, Dehousse 1960, Hallstein 1965, see Dimitrakopoulos
2008:291). The Commission, in contrast, represented the common
interest (e.g. Hallstein 1951:10, see Tsakatika 2005). Jean Monnet was
 Peace, Prosperity, and Progress 29

reported to consider the High Authority (the executive branch of the

ECSC and effectively the predecessor of the Commission of the European
Communities) ‘as the repository of the European General Will, with the
evil governments merely the spokesmen for the selfish political wills. The
Treaty, as administered by the High Authority, [was] the basic European
consensus for progress, peace, and federation’ (Haas 1968a:456). It was
thus in the Commission’s particular institutional interest to promote
the image of the European common good, and to project itself as
the ‘initiator, planner and mediator for the common good’ (CEC
1972a:17, see 73). Part of its daily work was actively to develop what
this might consist in for different contexts to ‘provide technically sound
proposals that gave precise meaning to the collective fuite en avant’
(Dimitrakopoulos 2008:291.) Specifically, it defined joint positions that
could be taken up by the member-states after collecting information
from all involved parties (e.g. CEC 1958:10, 1959a:12). It saw itself as
a mediator in the Council (CEC 1959a:9), but claimed that ‘a proposal
made by the Commission is something more than just a compromise of
the sort normally aimed at by an international secretariat; it is an auton-
omous political act by which the Commission, speaking with complete
independence, expresses what it considers to be the general interest of
the Community’ (CEC 1960a:17). The Commission’s proposals thus
claimed to be more than a reflection of the lowest common denominator
between national interests. The Commission aspired to embody the
European common good, resting this claim on its supranational nature,
which made it an ‘independent body capable of taking a broad, objec-
tive view of the Community’s problems’ (CEC 1958:12–3, see Lindberg
1963:210, 78). As a result, the Commission claimed to be especially well
placed to efficiently further the common interest, and assumed a special
responsibility in bringing common action upon it about. Of course,
the claim underlying the Commission’s discourse and action was that
this European common good equalled the ‘Community interest’. That
is, its default assumption was, of course, that the common European
interest was most effectively pursued through action in the Community
framework and ‘a policy consciously intended to be European’ (CEC
1958:12–3). This was not obvious, to be sure, as others contended that
the European common interest was best served by intergovernmental
cooperation. Unlike in Neofunctionalist theory, in public and polit-
ical discourse the notion of ‘upgrading the common interest’ (Haas
1960:368) did not necessarily imply ‘the expansion of the mandate of a
supranational agency’ (Eilstrup-Sangiovanni 2006:95, see e.g. Le Monde
26/03/1957, see Chapter 2). Notwithstanding, the common interest
30 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

that the Commission claimed to represent had an inherent bias towards

supranational action. Overall, the very idea of a European common good
was a foundation stone of the Commission’s role in the Communities’
institutional balance and of its particular claim to legitimacy, which
rested on the claim that it furthered this European interest.
In sum, the projection of a common European interest or common
good, furthered by European integration, was a central basis of early legit-
imating arguments. Both the peace and prosperity and the interdepend-
ence narratives could be subsumed under it. The concept of a common
interest was of crucial importance for all output-related legitimacy claims:
it provided a standard by which efficient output could be assessed and
that was (or at least aspired to be) plausible to all as a measure of success.
Moreover, the claim to a common European interest could also pretend
to provide a direction, ends and goals, for the integration project – if only
some agreement as to what it might consist in could be implied.

Enlightened social engineering

A further important pattern, or sometimes subtext, in early legiti-

mating discourses, was to associate European integration with the
capacity to rise above circumstances, solve problems, and to get things
done. The peace-and-prosperity narrative was intertwined with a
widespread emphasis on hope, agency, courage, and the ability and
determination to impose one’s will on external constraints and bring
about a better future (e.g. Mansholt 1958c, Martino 1957, CEC 1972a).
Permanent Secretary for Foreign Affairs Hallstein, for example, used a
personal anecdote to impart this mindset to his audience at Frankfurt
University:

I spent some time in Switzerland over Christmas and, as I was coming

out of the little church in Arosa on one of the days, I caught sight of
an inscription on one of the austere walls of this diminutive House
of God. The text was by Zwingli [the Swiss reformation leader]: ‘In
Heaven’s name, do something brave!’ That is the spirit in which I
believe this great work should be undertaken, by young people in
particular, for they are to be its recipients. ‘Do something!’ Abjure
shameful passivity! ‘Do something brave’, something which calls
for courage! For it takes more than a little courage to venture into
unknown territory, to place our trust in development, to have faith
too in our own ability to help guide that development in the right
direction. (Hallstein 1951:15)
 Peace, Prosperity, and Progress 31

The motif that the foundation of the European Communities was a

manifestation of voluntarist action upon the world, of deliberate social
engineering, was common in discourses celebrating their foundation.
The Belgian Foreign Minister Paul-Henri Spaak commended the Rome
Treaties as marking the beginning of ‘greatest voluntary and purposeful
transformation in the history of Europe’ (1957). Marjolin called the
EEC a ‘giant step’, by which the member-states ‘have taken a deliberate
political act, perhaps the most important of modern times, to alter the
course of events – an act which will bring about drastic changes in the
economic and social structure and indirectly in the political structure of
Europe’ (1958:1).
Such projections of European integration as the embodiment of agency
and successful human action upon the world built on a general vision of
progress based on the power of reason. Discourses promoting or justifying
European integration and the early European Communities were marked
by a general ‘optimism for enlightened social engineering’ (by which
phrase Ben Rosamond describes David Mitrany’s work; 2000:32). Social
engineering, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is the ‘use of
centralized planning in an attempt to manage social change and regulate
the future development and behaviour of a society’. In this regard, early
European integration has instructively been related to the intellectual
paradigm of modernism (see Walters and Haahr 2005b:21–41, Hansen
and Williams 1999, Foret 2008, and Tully 2008). The ‘myth of moder-
nity’ more particularly hinged on the core rationalisations of ‘rationality
as universal, rational institutions as the embodiment of that rationality,
and rationality as historical progress’; together these core perceptions
interlinked to a form a ‘powerful political mythology’ in which the ‘future
becomes open because the rationality of modernity is able to remake
it [ ... ] on a timeless reason’ (Hansen and Williams 1999:244). James
Scott’s definition of ‘high modernism’, to which William Walters and
Jens Henrik Haahr related Monnet’s plans for integrating the European
coal and steel sectors (Walters and Haahr 2005b:21–41), gives a clue as to
what the appeal of modernist imagery was for rationalising the creation,
form, and development of the European Communities:

[High modernism] is best conceived as a strong (and one might

even say muscle-bound) version of the beliefs in scientific and tech-
nical progress that were associated with industrialization in Western
Europe and in North American from roughly 1830 until World War
I. At its center was a supreme self-confidence about continued linear
progress, the development of scientific and technical knowledge,
32 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

the expansion of production, the rational design of social order, the

growing satisfaction of human needs, and, not least, an increasing
control over nature (including human nature) commensurate with
scientific understanding of natural laws. High modernism is thus a
particularly sweeping vision of how the benefits of technical and
scientific progress might be applied – usually through the state – in
every field of human activity. (Scott 1998:89–90, footnotes omitted)

Hallstein tapped into this mindset in describing the new politics embodied
by European integration as the ‘art of the maximum possible’, drawing on
the full array of available tools of government:

Politics used to be the art of the possible, when one of the main
aims of government was to preserve the status quo. Today, it might
better be described as the art of the maximum possible: for today, most
governments recognize and seek to harness the dynamic elements
involved in their task, supplementing the blind trends and traditions
of history by conscious efforts to think afresh. (Hallstein 1959a:1)

The commitment referred to above to improving living conditions in the

founding treaties and in official discourses by the Commission, Council,
and European Parliament chimed with the high modernist emphasis on
the ‘satisfaction of human needs’. It echoed the classic Functionalist argu-
ment that transnational institutions could provide for essential human
needs and for international peace more effectively than nation-states,
and hence were necessary (see Rosamond 2000:30, Eilstrup-Sangiovanni
2006:26 Mitrany 1933:86–97). The ‘indispensability-to-peace-and-prospe
rity’ and the ‘higher-standard-of-living’ narratives were powerful vulgari-
sations of this argument.
The fact that the efficient delivery of peace, prosperity, and improved
living conditions was the raison d’être of the European Communities
had repercussions for how early legitimation discourses (and critical
counter-discourses) framed what it would mean for the European insti-
tutions to be legitimate. Early legitimation discourses here, too, reflected
an understanding also underlying Functionalist integration theory,
namely the principle of ‘technical self-determination’, in which David
Mitrany saw a ‘cardinal virtue’ of the ‘functional method:’ ‘The func-
tional dimensions [ ... ] determine themselves. In a like manner the func-
tion determines its appropriate organs. It also reveals through practice
the nature of the action required under the given conditions, and in
that way the powers needed by the respective authority’ (1943:72–3). In
 Peace, Prosperity, and Progress 33

other words, ‘Form Followed Function’ (see Rosamond 2000:34). Based

on this, how authority should be organised and allocated was subject to
what was needed to achieve optimal functionality. Functionality, or effi-
ciency, became the principle determining which institutional as well as
policy solutions were legitimate. This understanding shone through, for
example, in the 1972 Vedel Report, which examined the issues connected
with an enlargement of the powers of the EP (CEC 1972a). The mandate
that the Commission gave to the ad hoc working group of ‘independent
experts’ laid down two criteria: ‘democracy’ (discussed later) as well as
‘effectiveness’ (as in ‘with a view to providing the Community with an
effective institutional system’). The report outlined that ‘each institu-
tion must make its own specific contribution’ in the ‘effort to find new
approaches [ ... ] required for progress to be achieved in Community
action’. Specifically, the Commission’s legitimate role was described as
providing ‘creative imagination’ with a view to the long-term European
interest, as discussed earlier, whereas the European Parliament’s func-
tion by contrast lay in being a ‘sounding board and stimulator of [ ... ]
public opinion’ – as discussed later, and the Council’s responsibility was
to make sure that Community actions were acceptable to, and effectively
implemented by, national political authorities (CEC 1972a:1, 8, 11, 34).
In other words, every institution’s legitimate role was circumscribed by
the most effective contribution it could make to the overall task.
The understanding that functional effectiveness determined what
kind of institutions and cooperation arrangements were justified and
legitimate extended also to statements about which policy domains
should fall under European cooperation, and how far European inte-
gration should go, and based on which justifications (see later on how
this understanding was institutionalised in Art. 95/ECSC Treaty and
the ECJ’s doctrine of ‘implied powers’). Here one legitimating storyline
was that specific integration steps or policy decisions were necessary for
consolidating the successes of integration so far. For instance, Marjolin
contended that ‘The success of the Common Market will depend upon
the adoption of a vast body of common policy which will cut across
all aspects of national government’ (1958:4, see also CEC 1958:13, or
Die Welt 07/06/1955). The image was prominent in official, political,
and public discourses legitimating or explaining European integration
in its first couple of decades that integration was spreading gradually
from initially limited sectors to further domains according to some
‘inner logic’ or ‘motor’ built in to the founding treaties. ‘[H]aving started
down the road towards economic integration, there can be no holding
back’, Marjolin explained (1958:4). Hallstein, too, saw in integration a
34 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

‘quality through which the work once begun moves forward to its full
fruition under the impetus of its own inherent logic’ (1960a:9–10). As
the Commission put it, the treaties had set up an ‘automatic machinery’,
from which the progressive ‘establishment of the Community’ resulted
primarily (CEC 1960a:19). Research on governmentality has shown how
one way in which the Treaties rooted this principle of ‘automaticity’ as
an actual regime in the integration process was through pre-agreed time-
tables that set out a sequence of stages each detailing a catalogue of steps
to be taken without further political negotiation.8 To be sure, stalling
the fulfilment of certain assigned tasks could work not only as a way
of ‘political responsibilisation’ and a commitment instrument (Walters
and Haahr, 2005b:52–3, see Moravcsik 1998:4 and passim), but also as
an argument for blocking succession to the next stage (e.g. Le Monde
20/12/1961).
The inner-logic topos paralleled or anticipated the Neofunctionalist
notion of ‘spillover,’ according to which original steps of integration
would produce functional, political, and administrative momentum for
more and more integration (e.g. Haas 1968a:283–317, Lindberg 1963:10,
see Rosamond 2000:59, or 58–68, Eilstrup-Sangiovanni 2006:94–5).
In the political and public spheres, the concept of spillover was also
discussed under the label of ‘partial integration,’ which was typically
used to imply a teleology whereby integration would eventually spread
from the initial limited policy domain to other domains (e.g. Die Welt
07/06/1955). (This notion was important especially in the context of the
plan for a European Defence Community and its failure in 1954.) The
idea of ‘functional’ spillovers was the most prominent one in official as
well as press discourses. Given the interdependence of different sectors,
problems in one sector could not possibly be solved by addressing only
that sector, but required integration in other, related sectors. Integration
in one sector, say agriculture, was likely to create problems that could
only be addressed by further integration in other sectors, including prac-
tically the entire spheres of economic and social policies, as it was ‘not
possible to try to resolve those problems in the agricultural sector alone’
(Mansholt 1958c). A Spiegel interviewer reminisced in 1957 how Jean
Monnet had explained to them four years earlier:

If European integration begins with coal, the practical work of

the Council of Ministers of the ECSC and the debates of the ECSC
Parliaments will continue to touch upon new problems. They will,
he told us, when they consider European prices, get to the question
of the costs of production and of taxation. There will inexorably
 Peace, Prosperity, and Progress 35

be an approximation of social security and social benefits. (Spiegel

10/07/1957:28)

The spillover image thus served to found the legitimacy of additional

transfers of national sovereignties to the Communities upon their func-
tional necessity. In this discourse, too, the principle of technical self-
determination was the source of legitimacy for the system capable of
providing the desired ends in the sources making reference to the image.
To be sure, the dynamic of functional spillover due to practical tech-
nical necessities would be supplemented, in the official discourses (as in
Neofunctionalist theory), by political spillovers whereby domestic polit-
ical actors, industrial interests, business circles, or workers’ associations
would organise across borders because they would realize that this serves
their interests better than focussing their action merely on the national
level (e.g. Die Welt 07/06/1966, CEC 1960a:16). The Commission, in
particular, emphasised the need to encourage such political spillover and
foster an ‘unflinching political will, backed by the European Parliament
and the national Parliaments, and borne forward by the approval of
the public and the action of business circles, [which alone] can make it
possible to transforms the national policies in such a way as to define
and apply a joint policy’ (CEC 1960a:24). Such rallying calls for polit-
ical commitment readily acknowledged the inherent tension between
the image of integration following an evolutionary logic built into the
founding treaties and its nature as a voluntarist action on the world.
‘Human effort’ was needed in order to keep up its momentum and to
overcome collective action problems and conflicts of interests.9 Early
critical discourses of course made a meal of the fact that the supposed
inbuilt teleological evolution was not happening as predicted, and
underlined the existence of disagreements as to how integration could
be achieved and what kind of integration was desirable (e.g. Spiegel
10/07/1957:28, Die Welt 07/06/1955). Still, both such critical remarks
and rallying calls like the Commission’s tended to be in essence about
the sustainability and feasibility of integration rather than its legitimacy.
The approval of the public and of domestic political actors often featured
not so much as a condition of integration’s legitimacy as a requirement
for the advancement of integration.
On a more general level, the optimism for enlightened social engi-
neering in early legitimation discourses was embedded, like modernism,
in a general confidence in expert knowledge, technology, and science. This
connection favoured an understanding of legitimacy that drew on ideas on
good governance as efficient, impartial, predictable, and helpful in solving
36 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

concrete problems. It saw expert rationality and technocratic planning as

promising better results than mass politics and political passions, and the
Functionalist vision had integration as facilitating the ‘gradual triumph of
the rational and the technocratic over the political’ (Pentland 1981:551,
cited after Rosamond 2000:43). This view of technocracy as apolitical was
of course problematic (see Rosamond 2000:40, Haas 1964:23). Hallstein
acknowledged this in stating that a ‘Commission proposal, however, is not
only the end-product of the expertise of a ‘technocratic’ administration;
much more, it is an eminently political act’. It was political with regard to
the choice not only of its overall objectives but also of ‘one of a number of
possible measures’, to its timing or potential linkage with other proposals,
as well as in relation ‘to what, on a realistic view, is likely to obtain the
Council majority required by the Treaty’ (1965).
Economic expertise played a central role in discourses legitimating
the early EEC of course, unsurprisingly perhaps given the support for
Keynesianism in the member-states in the 1950s and 1960s (Hall 1989,
see Rosamond 2000:32). Ernst Haas’s notion of a ‘victory of economics
over politics’ was based on the triumph of sound ‘statistical bargaining,’
calm rationality, and the efficient provision of people’s livelihoods over
‘excited demands’, passions, nationalist impulses, and warfare (Haas
1968 [1963]:159).
A related factor supporting the belief in progress underlying many
justifications of the early Communities was a general confidence in
government intervention and an active state. This was particularly
strong in France (see Featherstone 1994:153, Howarth and Varouxakis
2003:160). But it was also characteristic of Western Europe more broadly,
where a ‘caring state’ was generally conceived to be the ‘most suitable
means for the promotion of ‘the good’ of both the individual and the
collective’ (Held 2006:186, see Hall 1989) and where technocratic poli-
cy-making enjoyed a much better image than today or in the 1990s (see
Conway et al. 2008, Chapters 4 and 6). John Gillingham has identi-
fied a major ‘inspiration’ for Monnet’s integration program in the 1950s
in the American New Deal (1991:232, 368, Leucht 2011b, Lindseth
2010:95–107). More broadly, early legitimation discourses represented
the Communities as the apex and ‘the natural extension of the proc-
esses of social and political rationalization already well advanced in the
historical evolution of modern states’ (Hansen and Williams 1999:243).
One of the reasons for the success of this strategy in the first decades
after the Paris and Rome Treaties lay in the limitation of integration
to specific sectors and policy tasks, primarily economics, agriculture,
and specific industries – all of which were areas particularly suited to
 Peace, Prosperity, and Progress 37

the technocratic, bureaucratic, elitist, and administrative rationalities

underlying much of the Communities’ institutional setup, actions, and
rhetoric. That integration was strictly limited to these specific sectors
was a ubiquitous motif in early defences of supranational integration.10
Kevin Featherstone locates Jean Monnet’s legacy, in particular, in his
having imbibed ‘the European integration process with a particular
character – which was marked by technocracy and elitism’. Output-
based legitimacy claims, including the peace and prosperity narratives,
linked the Communities’ and, in particular, the Commission’s capacity
optimally to deliver on the expectations invested in them with their
modus operandi defined by a ‘technocratic approach: government action
following the advice of experts’ (Featherstone 1994:150, 154; see Radaelli
1999, Haas 1968, Wallace 1993:300). In particular, the Commission’ claim
to legitimacy and to representing the European interest rested centrally
on its technocratic expertise and ‘technical capacity’ (CEC 1972a:34).
The image of the Communities as a capable technocracy effectively
rested on this pars pro toto; the Commission. The Commission’s profes-
sional civil service, recruited through merit-based competitive exams,
was at the centre of Monnet’s motivating ‘vision of Europe united by
a bureaucracy’ (Burgess 1989:59, see 2000). It was a constitutive prop
of representations highlighting the Commission’s impartiality and
establishing it as a supposedly ‘politically neutral’ body transcending
interstate, ideological, political, and other cleavages (Tsakatika 2005,
Dimitrakopoulos 2008:291). This was connected to a certain under-
standing of the integration process as involving ‘political steps’ on one
hand and technocratic elaboration on the other. Monnet, for instance,
described in his memoirs how Adenauer and Schuman agreed with him
that a quick accord on creating the High Authority (the Commission’s
predecessor) was critical for the launch of the ECSC: ‘Once the insti-
tution is in place and the breakthrough consolidated, the moment of
the technicians arrives’ (Monnet 1978:321). UK Prime Minister Edward
Heath commented in a 1972 BBC interview that ‘Monnet operated on
the basis of governments giving a remit to experts and for them to get
on with it’ (Featherstone 1994:160). The Commission identified scope
for expanding this remit, or using it so as to advance European integra-
tion: ‘The progress of European integration does not depend entirely on
the conclusion of new Treaties, but should come from the daily work of
applying the Treaty of Rome, from the task of formulating the regula-
tions, the decisions, and the common policy which must stem from the
European concept’ (CEC 1958:15). In all these tasks, the Commission
played a key role.
38 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

In addition to its own expertise, the Commission early on claimed to

ensure technocratic, impartial, and responsible decision-making through
the involvement of stakeholders and consultation of interest groups,
in particular, subnational economic interests (Tsakatika 2005:199). This
practice was to become central in post-Maastricht discourses around the
non-majoritarian modes of governance and participation analysed in
Chapter 5. But already in its early decades, the integration process was
marked by a focus on decision-makers or ‘the men who exercise leading
functions in all fields’, that is, on political, economic, social, as well as
technocratic elites (CEC 1958:14). According to Featherstone, the ‘mode
of operation by the planning authority: a corporatist style, a process
marked by engrenage, involving networks of outside producer and
interest groups’ was a key component of the elitist bias of early integra-
tion. The integration process overall depended ‘crucially on a process of
elite capture: the ability of the EC Commission to engage key economic
elites and to help them recognize their self-interest in supporting greater
unity’ (1994: 155, 150). As Commission President Jacques Delors would
conclude in hindsight, at the time of the Maastricht crisis (Chapter 4),
‘Europe began as an elitist project’ structured by the assumption that
‘all that was required was to convince the decision-makers’ (Independent,
26/07/1993, cited in Featherstone 1994:151). If this was the case, its
implication for the quest for the legitimacy of integration and its institu-
tions might have been that it, too, focused mainly on decision-making
elites.
The Communities’ technocratic bias and elitist predisposition, and
related understandings of its legitimacy, were founded to an impor-
tant degree on the concentration of Community action on what Peter
Lindseth has analysed under the label of administrative governance,
ruled and legitimated by the ‘normative-legal principle’ of delegation
(2010:2):

In the aftermath of World War II, the legitimacy of administrative

action depended, in the first instance, on a lawful legislative enact-
ment – a loi-cadre, if you will. In the case of the ECSC, that loi-cadre
took the form of a treaty (a traité-cadre as Giandomenico Majone puts it
[2005:7]), a novel form of enabling legislation to be sure, but one which
had the same legal effect as traditional forms of enabling legislation on
the national level: the delegation of regulatory power. The fact that this
enabling legislation – the treaty – was drafted by governmental and
technocratic representatives for subsequent parliamentary approval is
hardly surprising: The same officials played a similarly predominant
 Peace, Prosperity, and Progress 39

role in legislative drafting on the national level in the postwar decades.

(Lindseth 2010:104, see his references to Chapus 1953)

This administrative logic of delegation by national executives (subject

to parliamentary approval) to bureaucratic bodies made the focus on
decision-makers a viable strategy both in making integration happen
and in constructing arguments about its legitimacy. Hallstein explicitly
referred to the EEC Treaty as an ‘outline-treaty’ (1965).
Together, the technocratic, bureaucratic, elitist, and administrative
logics underlying early integration, and many discourses constructing
legitimacy for it, essentially worked towards de-politicising the stakes of
European integration, in that they emphasised expertise and rational
planning over the rationalities, say, of deliberation or negotiation. The
main task of politics and government in this vision was not to mediate
between conflicting interests and find solutions acceptable to all, or at
least to majorities, but rather to determine which arrangement would
be optimally functional, and then delivering on this. Moreover, such
instrumental considerations of how to achieve peace and prosperity were
delegated to qualified elites. All this contributed to a general tendency
in early integration for decision-making about economic, political, as
well as institutional matters to happen beyond the political realm of
public political will-formation.

Legality

The use of ‘the law’ and of legality as a tool of integration and Community
governance, finally, was another means of de-politicising the politics,
practice, and rhetoric of early integration. After all, accepted law solidi-
fies certain rules as beyond contestation. It demands a commitment to
these rules of the game as a precondition of entering it – the ‘game’
in this instance being the Community enterprise (Grimm 1994:289–90,
Elster and Slagstad 1988). From the voluntary entry of a country
onwards, the integration process and Community action could be legiti-
mated on the grounds that they were in line with and constrained by
the rules of the game agreed at the time. Accordance with laws that were
generally accepted as legitimate was a source of legitimacy, according to
deeply rooted social beliefs in all member-states. The discourse that the
Communities were legitimate because and in that they were founded
and operated in accordance with the law appealed to the legitimating
power of notions and institutions such as the rule of law, constitutions,
and high courts. This discourse, and the Communities’ institutional
40 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

structure, was thus embedded into beliefs and norms on political legiti-
macy as in the member-states’ national contexts.
The European Court of Justice (ECJ) assumed a prominent place in the
imagery of a community of law, governed by and through laws set by
the member-states when creating the Communities. When discussing
the Communities’ legitimacy, the Commission regularly nodded to the
role of the European Court of Justice in making and keeping the integra-
tion process and the European institutional fabric legitimate. It appreci-
ated the installation of the Court, ‘whose jurisdictional control will give
to the Institutions and Governments, and to all citizens of the member
countries, the highest assurance that the Treaty will be interpreted and
applied in conformity with the law’ (CEC 1959a:9). The Court’s ‘very
existence is a permanent assurance for the citizens of the Community
and a reminder to the Institutions that they must conform strictly to
what is legal under the Treaty’ (CEC 1960a:17). It ‘ensures respect for
the law in the interpretation and implementation of the Treaty’ (CEC
1961a:19). Interestingly, Hallstein gave as the main reason for the crea-
tion of the Court of Justice in the Paris Treaty a fundamental mistrust in
the persisting lure of nation-state, partisan, or self-interested thinking
even within the High Authority, whose members the Court tied to ‘the
path of virtue’ and their ‘collective European responsibility’. In this line
of reasoning, the Court was the guardian of the common European
interest or the supranational element in the Communities (Hallstein
1951:11). To be sure, many of the negotiators of the treaties, quite on
the contrary, saw the Court as a check on the Commission’s out-stepping
the boundaries set by the treaty, and a control on supranational action
by the national executives. These rationales referred to the conse-
quences or implications of such a court for the nature and action of the
Communities. In addition, however, in the earlier references to the role
of the Court in the institutional fabric, the main significance of the ECJ
was to give credibility to the argument that the Communities’ existence,
regime, and actions were founded on the rule of law – and to appeal to it
as a source of legitimacy (see Ipsen 1972:196, Obradovic 1996:196).
Hallstein, in particular, promoted the idea of the member-states as
a ‘Rechtsgemeinschaft’, that is, a community of law.11 The rule of law
implies, in jurisprudence as well as in educated popular belief, rule
through and by the law; the carriers of political authority can rule exclu-
sively through laws and change the law only in accordance with recog-
nised procedures and, in addition, can rule exclusively by the law, which
means that are subject to it as their subjects are (Preuß 1996:15–6). Claims
to Community legitimacy had everything to gain by establishing that
 Peace, Prosperity, and Progress 41

integration and the actions of the European institutions were lawful,

and that their legality would be controlled and enforced. The message
was that the power of the European institutions, including that of the
Commission’s technocrats, but also of the power of the member-state
governments to obstruct integration, would not be left unchecked.
However, in thus basing claims to the legitimacy of the Communities
on the legitimating power of ‘the law’ and of courts, the question was
of course which law applied and which courts were its guardians. For
the ECJ and EC law to have any direct legitimation potential (going
beyond the argument that the legality and constitutionality of inte-
gration was being safeguarded by national or international courts and
norms), they had to be established as attached, in their own right, to
that ‘deep-seated legitimacy that derives from the mythical neutrality
and religious-like authority with which we invest our supreme courts’
as well as constitutions.12 The earlier references effectively did just that.
From the very beginning, some political actors moreover referred to
the founding treaties as the main source of legitimacy-through-law,
and even used the explicit language of a ‘constitution’ (Weiler 1999:36,
see e.g. Hallstein 1951:8, 1965). In a paradigm example of judicial
activism, the ECJ moreover ‘constitutionalised’ Community law
through a sequence of landmark decisions from 1963 into the early
1970s, giving the founding treaty constitutional quality (Weiler 1999).
Central to this were a number of doctrines and methods of jurispru-
dence, including the doctrine of supremacy that held that EC law was
supreme to national law in cases of conflict (ECJ 1964). The doctrine
of ‘direct effect’ stated that EC law not only created obligations for the
member-states, but also rights for individual citizens (both towards the
State and towards other individuals). EC law thus became the law of
the land in the member-states, meaning that individual citizens had
rights under Community law that national courts had to uphold (ECJ
1963). This potentially gave individuals a role as ‘guardians’ of the legal
integrity of EC law, since they could invoke it in domestic as well as
European courts (Weiler 1999:20). Together with the ECJ’s human rights
doctrine, ‘a “constitution-building” exercise’ with significant ‘symbolic
significance’ (Weiler 1999:24), this anticipated patterns of legitimacy
construction that referred to the individual citizens rather than their
intermediary member-states as authors of legitimation, authorisation,
or control. I shall discuss these later in Chapters 3, 4, and 5.
The doctrine of ‘implied powers’ (‘effet utile’), finally, stated that if the
Treaty assigned a specific task to the Community, the Community must
be granted the powers necessary to deliver it. Moreover, ECJ case law
42 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

was influenced by the ‘teleological method’ of interpreting the Treaty

in ways most conducive to the achievement of the telos set out in the
preamble to the Treaty of Rome, namely the creation of ‘an ever closer
union among the peoples of Europe’ (Lindseth 2010:137, see Davies
2012:29–30). Together, effet utile and teleological jurisprudence arguably
amounted to ‘judicially sanctioned spill–over’ (Lindseth 2010:137–52).
The Court thus became an ally of the Commission in making enlight-
ened problem-solving possible and in progressively integrating Europe.
Through its constitutionalisation of the Community legal system, that is,
the development referred to as ‘legal integration’ (the gradual penetration
of EC law into the domestic law of its members), as well as its ‘integration
through law’ (the use of the law to further supranational integration),
the Court used the authority of ‘the law’ and the EC ‘constitution’ to
enable and create legal legitimacy for supranational action.13
The reception of the constitutionalisation of EC law in the member-
state public spheres was mixed and complex (Davies 2008, 2011, 2012).
As to the general appeal to the rule of Community law as a source of
legitimacy, the media (or in fact national parliamentary debates) did not
usually refer much to the issue of legality when covering major steps in
the integration process, such as the signature and ratification of treaties
or enlargements. This did not mean, of course, that they did not take
for granted that legality and accordance with the law were conditions
of the Communities legitimacy, but might rather have indicated that
their legality was widely accepted (see e.g. Deringer 1962:8). An excep-
tion to this relative silence on the question of the Communities’ legality
was the issue of whether or not it was constitutional for the national
governments to transfer national sovereignties to a supranational body,
but this was more typically debated under the lens of democracy and
popular sovereignty, as I will argue later.
What is more, the French and German presses seemed to tend to
consider the legitimating power of the founding treaties and Community
law inferior to that of national constitutions or laws. Le Monde for
instance judged that ‘From an intellectual point of view, the Euratom
and Common Market Treaties cannot compete with the Civil Code’
(26/03/1957). Bill Davies argues that the reception in Germany of the
ECJ’s establishment of direct effect and supremacy in the mid-1960s
was ‘highly controversial’. In addition to the comment, ‘typical of both
the academia and media reception of the ECJ’s doctrines’, that that ‘in
a direct comparison, the Basic Law came out on top against the EC’s
legal system’, there was the fear that, in particular, ‘the rights-protection
and legal recourse offered by this new system was barely comparable
 Peace, Prosperity, and Progress 43

to that offered by the national constitution’ so that the level of protec-

tion guaranteed nationally came under threat from Europe. Davies finds
this ‘awakening trepidation’ encapsulated in headlines in West German
newspaper such as ‘Here is where the national cow is slaughtered’ in the
otherwise pro-European Rheinische Post (31/05/1974, Davies 2008:59–60,
2012:126–7). These discourses illustrated not least the prominent role of
the Basic Law in founding the legitimacy of the Federal Republic. By
comparison, the constitutional imagery was much less persuasive in the
French case, due not least to the lower profile of the Conseil constitu-
tionel, of judicial review, and the fact that France has had fifteen different
written constitutions since 1791.
In sum, while Community law and the ECJ did play the leading part
in constructing legality-based discourses on integration’s legitimacy,
the echo these discourses found in the public sphere was limited, and
often critical. Legal integration and integration through law drew
on the legitimacy of the law and of courts in advancing integration,
de-politicising the process in certain ways. Both, however, were politi-
cised and contested. The appeal to distinctive Community law as a source
of legitimacy proved divisive in the case of the European construct, at
least initially. In the case of the German academic and media debates
analysed by Bill Davies, recourse to Community law in claims to the
Communities’ legitimacy could actually discredit rather than buffer their
legitimacy. On the whole, in the context of the European Communities,
legitimation discourses centred on law dramatised a certain ambiguity
between politicising and de-politicising tendencies. The ECJ’s doctrines,
and, in particular, its attack on national sovereignty, had implications
for how one could plausibly frame the Communities as legitimate. The
constitutionalisation of EU law was a highly controversial and contested
process.

Conclusion

In sum, this chapter has discussed key discourses that established the
foundation and early development of the European Communities as
desirable, necessary, and legitimate. They centred on the narrative that
European integration was indispensable to securing peace and pros-
perity across Europe and beyond. This was grounded firmly in the claim
that the growing interdependence of the individual countries of Europe
made cooperation indispensable. Early legitimating rhetoric, moreover,
tended to take for granted that everyone agreed on this. Emphasising
common grounds and converging interests, it promoted and built on
44 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

the idea that there was such a thing as an unproblematic and gener-
ally agreed European ‘common good’, the lure of which belittled any
potential collective action problems or distributive conflicts involved in
actualising it.
The central reason given for why integration was necessary was that
the European Communities were better placed than the European
nation-states in isolation to deliver security, economic stability, and
improved living conditions for Europe. Many discourses that legiti-
mated early integration were underpinned by a confidence in the
capacity of technocratic and bureaucratic elites to steer social and
economic realities that was embedded in turn in imageries inspired by
Modernism, Keynesianism, the American New Deal, and theories on
how to achieve lasting world peace. The Functionalist thinking under-
lying the Communities’ system as well as official discourses, by which
legitimate ‘Forms followed Function,’ was encapsulated in the notion of
an inner logic of integration inexorably spreading from sector to sector.
The accumulated effect was a tendency to move will-formation about
the action and the development of the Communities beyond the realm
of public and even political deliberation. A final specific technique of
placing certain rules and institutional features beyond contestation,
as I have discussed, was the constitutionalisation of the Community
legal framework and the concurrent appeal to ‘the law’ as a source of
legitimacy for the Communities. Overall, the discourses and patterns
discussed in this chapter effectively worked towards de-politicising, or
glossing over, controversial and contested stakes of integration politics.
The next chapter turns to challenges to this discursive strategy.
2
Democracy and Other Challenges:
Early Counter-Discourses,
1950s–1970s

Unsurprisingly, the de-politicisation patterns I have just discussed

in regard to the first three decades or so of integration were not
without rivals. This chapter acts as a reminder that the narrative
of the existing economic and supranational integration as the way
to peace and prosperity was never uncontested. Neither were ques-
tions of how these objectives should be pursued, or of who should
bear what part of the costs of integration, and reap what share of the
benefits. I discuss three sets of competing discourses that deliberately
politicised the issue of what the European Communities were about.
The first drew on federalist and on specific national traditions that
insisted on democracy as a condition of the Communities’ legitimacy.
In this context, I look specifically at the debate on direct elections
to the European Parliament. A second set of competing discourses
challenged the Communities’ supranational elements in the name of
national sovereignty. It advanced an intergovernmentalist, rather than
supranationalist, counter-vision of integration. Here I look, in partic-
ular, at the discourses surrounding the crises of the 1960s. The final
discursive challenge to the legitimating discursive patterns I analysed
in Chapter 1 arose from difficulties with the member-states’ and the
Communities’ ability to deliver efficient problem-solving and plan-
ning in the context of the financial and economic crises of the 1970s.
This chapter’s source base again includes both official discourses of the
European institutions and the public discourses of national political
and opinion leaders and journalists.

45
46 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

Democracy

Early official legitimation discourses, in particular, the indispensability,

common good, and social engineering discourses discussed earlier, were
dominated by ideas of legitimacy that were not primarily based on how
democratic was the political order of the Communities. Rather, they
showcased rather the new system’s helpfulness and usefulness in safe-
guarding peace and improved living conditions. This needs to be seen in
the broader historical context of social beliefs on legitimacy at the time.
As Martin Conway and Peter Romijn point out, it was a complex ques-
tion ‘whether the democratic nature of the regimes of postwar western
Europe rendered them legitimate in the eyes of their populations’
(2004:380). Given the experience of authoritarianism, many people’s
ideas on democracy were marked by a certain distrust in unobstructed
mass politics. Only gradually, over the course of the 15 years following
the Second World War, did ‘democracy’ emerge as the key element
of political legitimacy in post-war Western Europe (see Conway and
Depkat 2010). This corresponds with the increasing centrality of democ-
racy and the EU’s democratic deficit in legitimacy-related discourses
of later decades, which I discuss in Chapters 3 to 5. In the early days
of the European Communities, official legitimation discourses tended
to highlight the symbolism of meetings, agreements, historic cities,
values or human decency, and the overpowering goal of preserving
non-authoritarianism, rather than referring to democratic authorisa-
tion, control, or representation in the strict sense of those words (Leucht
2011a). Even where representative democracy was held to be a neces-
sary condition of legitimacy, it was not necessarily the parliamentary
element that was attributed this role. In France, in particular, the Fourth
Republic’s difficulties with its own legislature had brought parliamen-
tarianism into some disrepute as a source of legitimacy for any political
order, whether national or supranational. The Gaullist agenda for the
Fifth Republic, in particular, was geared instead towards producing a
strong executive (Shlaim 1973:159, Knapp and Wright 2006:49–66, but
see also 3–4, 61–3, 142).
In any case, how much democracy (of whatever kind) was necessary
to authorise and control specifically the unprecedented enterprise of
European, partly supranational, integration was a matter of disagree-
ment. Jean Monnet for his part did not deem democracy particularly
suited to legitimating the new European regime or bringing it into being
(see e.g. Burgess 1989, 2000:31–36). He was to reminisce in his memoirs:
‘I have never believed that one fine day Europe would be created by some
 Democracy and Other Challenges 47

great political mutation, and I thought it wrong to consult the peoples

of Europe about the structure of a Community of which they had no
practical experience’ (Monnet 1978:93). Tellingly, neither the Paris nor
Rome Treaty even contained the words ‘democracy’ or ‘democratic’; nor
did the 1950 Schuman Declaration. Just how remarkable this is becomes
apparent in comparison to the current Lisbon Treaty’s numerous
and prominent commitments to democracy as a foundational value
(Preamble, Art 1a) as well as a principle of institutional organisation
(Title II) and of the Union’s external action (Arts 10a, 10b). It also stands
in stark contrast to the centrality, in particular, of the promotion of
democracy in more recent projections of the EU’s foreign policy identity
(see e.g. Bickerton 2011a:86–88, Laïdi 2008), as well as, more broadly,
to its later prominent place in discourses around EU legitimacy, as I will
discuss in Chapters 4 to 6.
Another open question was how much supranational democracy,
or direct representative links between the European citizens and the
Community level, there needed to be in order for the system to be
legitimate. The member-state governments negotiating the founding
and successive reform treaties viewed the ‘idea of creating a parlia-
ment with the full panoply of powers (including budgetary, legislative
and control powers) [ ... ] with great scepticism or even outright princi-
pled rejection well into the 1990s’. In 1951, even the principle that a
parliament should be created in the first place was ‘hotly contested’ (as
were the questions of granting it budgetary power in 1970, or legisla-
tive prerogatives in 1986) – even though all delegations accepted that
the delegation of sovereignty ‘posed problems to issues of democratic
legitimacy’. This obviously needed to be seen in the context of common
ideas about what constituted legitimacy in the realm of the nation-state.
Whereas the German delegation evoked the analogy of a federal state
naturally requiring a parliamentary institution representing the citizens
of that polity, the French, Dutch, and Belgian negotiators insisted that
‘sovereignty and democratic legitimacy’ resided in the domestic realm,
in national representative institutions, and that the EP ‘could thus issue
no claim to democratic legitimacy’ (Goetze and Rittberger 2010:37,
44–7, see Rittberger 2006, 2005:98–107). In this line of argument, the
Communities and their action could be claimed to be democratically
legitimate by virtue of their being authorised and controlled by elected
national representatives, in the form of both the national governments
and parliaments.
From this shared starting point, one could still go in different direc-
tions as to what institutional solutions would ensure the emerging
48 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

system’s legitimacy. For the negotiations on the Schuman Plan, a further

clash has been reported between those (including Monnet) who saw the
source of the High Authority’s legitimacy in authorisation and control
by the national parliaments and those (including the representatives of
the Benelux countries) who attributed these roles to the national govern-
ments (see Lindseth 2010:103–4, Rittberger 2005:105–7). Both these
parties, however, put the emphasis on national channels of legitimation.
Their conflicting views had obvious repercussions for who should legiti-
mately be the principal actor in overseeing (and conferring legitimacy
upon) the High Authority’s work: the Assembly composed of national
parliamentarians, or the member-state governments. Moreover, oppo-
sition to strengthening the supranational elements of democracy in
the Communities – in particular to European elections – was ‘usually
justified in terms of emotive arguments imputing losses of sovereignty
by national parliaments’ (Herman and Lodge 1978:226, see e.g. Le Monde
21/04/1972). I shall turn to such discourses prioritising national legiti-
mation mechanisms in greater depth in this chapter’s second section
on intergovernmentalist discourses. For now, I will simply flag as an
important backdrop and as strong counter-positions to the projections
of ‘democracy’ I am investigating in this section.
In the event, the Paris and Rome Treaties gave the European Parliamentary
Assembly (EPA) a relatively peripheral and purely consultative role. The
Assembly was not directly elected, but constituted of delegated national
parliamentarians, and obliged to meet only once a year, and then merely to
hear a report on the Commission’s activities. ‘The basic notion’ behind the
Communities’ institutional architecture’ ‘was one of a dialogue between
Eurocrats who proposed and governments which disposed’. In effect the
‘whole emphasis was on swift action by executive organs’ – and on making
European integration happen in the first place (Shlaim 1973:159, see Spinelli
1966:151–2, EP 1968:9–10). The Vedel Report (referred to in Chapter 1)
provided an example of two justifications recurrent in the sources; namely
(a) a functional apology for the Community system’s meagre democratic
credentials and (b) the idea that parliamentary democracy was something
that would happen later: ‘As the authors of the Treaties were interested
more in the construction than the government of Europe, they did not
give the Parliament a very important place among the Community institu-
tions, no doubt thinking that the matter would have to be reviewed when
the time came’ (CEC 1972a:29).
Rival visions did of course exist, however. In the federalist blueprint
for European union, democratic legitimacy would have flowed from
a directly elected parliament of the European peoples, whose impetus
 Democracy and Other Challenges 49

would play a major part in bringing about European unity.1 The inclu-
sion of a parliamentary organ in the ECSC structure represented a
concession to the advocates of the federalist approach (Shlaim 1973:159,
see Spinelli 1966:151–2, EP 1968:9–10). In addition, representative
democracy, as a general ideal that came in multiple forms, did form
part of broader beliefs and reflexes regarding legitimacy in the different
national traditions. It was to these beliefs and traditions that the advo-
cates of strengthening the European Parliament and of direct European
elections explicitly appealed (e.g. CEC 1972a:12, EPA 1960b, EP 1963a,
1969). The first direct elections to the European Parliament (for which
Art. 138.3 of the EEC Treaty had provided, subject to a unanimous vote
in the Council) were held in 1979. By the 1970s at the latest, the theme
of the ‘democratic legitimacy’ of the institutions and the development
of the Communities appeared in most debates among European politi-
cians, parliamentarians, political elites, and even the media.2 With this
new central theme of democratic legitimacy, questions of what gave the
European institutional order, and which institutions within it, a ‘rightful
claim’ to ‘issue binding commands’ were pushed forcefully onto the
discursive agenda, offsetting the competing emphasis of the discourses
analysed in Chapter 1 on the question of justifying the overall ‘point
and purpose’ of a European polity (Morgan 2005:17).
Regarding the substance of the ideals of democracy that these
debates on ‘democratic legitimacy’ projected, two major themes stood
out. Firstly, they largely treated democracy as ‘synonymous’ with elec-
toral democracy, and more specifically as synonymous with direct
elections for the European Parliament.3 European elections were
argued to ‘reinforce the democratic legitimacy of the whole European
institutional apparatus’ (CEC 1976:29). This framed the European
Parliament as the ‘main repository’ of democratic legitimacy in the
Community structure (Weiler 1999:78). The Assembly for its part was
on a mission to ‘acquire authentic parliamentary value’, and gain the
status and functions of a ‘real parliament’ (EP 1963b:4, EPA 1960a:840,
see Lauring Knudsen 2011). It changed its own name to European
Parliament by resolution (EP 1962), persistently pressed for an expan-
sion of its competences, and tirelessly rallied for direct European elec-
tions (e.g. EPA 1960a, 1960b; EP 1963a, 1969, 1972). The Commission
in turn supported the EP in its cause, not least because it saw in the
House an ally in advancing integration and in strengthening its posi-
tion within the inter-institutional power balance, particularly vis-à-vis
the Council (e.g. CEC 1972a:7, 1976:29–30, see Steed 1971:466–7). A
similar point could be made about the ECJ.
50 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

The cause of EP elections, moreover, was tightly linked with the

cause of increased powers for the Parliament (on the eventual process
of its gradual empowerment, see Rittberger 2003, 2005). Advocates and
opponents of both alike widely took for granted that elections would
legitimate and give leverage to the EP’s claim for greater powers, pres-
tige, and influence (Herman and Lodge 1978:226–7, Steed 1971:466–7).
The Commission, for example, stated that European elections and the
resulting gain in the EP’s legitimacy ‘would undoubtedly be accom-
panied’ by enhanced EP powers (CEC 1961a:19). The Parliament
concurred: ‘If the election makes any sense at all, it is that of giving
the Assembly, through its direct investiture, a legitimacy and a force
from which it can draw political power’ (EP 1963b:19). If it sometimes
strategically separated out the question of elections and greater powers
in their pursuit, this was done in the hope for greater success in ulti-
mately achieving both (EPA 1960b:1–2, 12; see 1963b:4). By definition,
advocates of a strong and directly elected European Parliament fought
to strengthen not only the electoral element of democracy, but also the
elements of supranational democracy over national channels of demo-
cratic legitimation (i.e. national parliaments and governments). This
discourse insisted that democratic legitimacy in the Community system
depended, at least partly, on direct supranational democratic mecha-
nisms. The Vedel Report was thus adamant that ‘the Community needs
to find its own democratic legitimation beyond that which can be trans-
mitted to it by the governments responsible’. Only if ‘more and more
[ ... ] really Community democratic mechanisms’ were developed, could
the ‘requirement of democracy common to the Member States’ be lived
up to. The problem with the governments represented in the Council
and the current Members of the European Parliament with a view to this
requirement of democracy was that their ‘Community powers’ origi-
nated in and rested on ‘a process of democratic legitimacy in the national
framework’. Only a Community system of ‘control by Parliament and the
courts’ could, however, provide democratic legitimacy for Community
powers (CEC 1972a:32, 12, 73).
The second major theme in the campaign for European elections was
its argumentative grounding in a critique of the technocratic approach
(Chapter 1, see later section on Intergovernmentalism). This critique
resonated strongly with and in the French and German public spheres,
as the appeal of technocratic planning and social engineering was fading
by the mid-1970s (see later), and as the promise of top-down interven-
tion in the social and economic realities discussed earlier in Chapter 1
was turning sour. Against this background, EP elections often featured as
 Democracy and Other Challenges 51

a remedy to the increasingly important image of the Communities as a

distant and unaccountable technocracy. The FAZ, for example, celebrated
the finally forthcoming direct EP elections as promising the end of ‘the
reign of the technocrats’ (14/07/1976). Three years later, to be sure, with
hindsight and the disappointing turnouts in the first elections, Le Monde
was more critical about the prospects of the elections mobilising the
Europeans’ desire to build something beyond ‘cathedrals of regulations’,
all the while underlining the need to achieve this (12/06/1979).
The association of European elections with technocracy critique was
made early on in the ‘Dehousse Report’, adopted by the EPA in 1960 and
drafted by a working party within its Political Affairs Committee (EPA
1960b). In its advocacy of direct and universal elections, the report chal-
lenged the Communities from the angle of their reliance on efficient
governance by experts or technocrats who were largely protected from
popular interference. The report’s key argument was that the European
Communities, after all, had put in place an ‘eminently political idea’,
and hence necessitated greater space for truly political rather than tech-
nocratic will-formation. The essentially ‘political’ nature of what the
Communities were doing fundamentally clashed with their technocratic
methods of doing them. ‘The daily experience of the Communities in all
sectors shows that once the experts’ resources are exhausted, the only
way out of dead ends is the recourse to an act of political will’ – and
this act of political could only be generated, and legitimated, by way
of greater elements of parliamentary and supranational democracy in
the Community system (EPA 1960b:16–7). Like many other statements
about the role of democracy in the Communities, the Dehousse Report
built its argument both on claims about the feasibility or sustainability
of integration, and on normative claims about ideal conditions of legiti-
macy. (The Vedel Report, for instance, similarly advocated strengthening
the EP on the grounds that this was the only way in which in particular
economic and monetary union ‘can be justified and have a chance of
succeeding’, CEC 1972a:35.) The following passage encapsulated the
core of the Dehousse Report’s argument, while equally navigating this
tension:

The Communities are not a technical enterprise of minor impor-

tance where a handful of good experts can settle all problems
to general satisfaction. The Communities currently embrace the
whole economic life of our six countries. They constitute a gamble
on the future, possibly the only one available to Europe. There are
fundamental choices to make, far-reaching problems to address. In
52 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

all domains the Communities stand for the only policy we believe
possible for our countries. So it is time that the peoples be associated
to this enterprise, that they become conscious of what is at stake and
of its risks, that they express a will. It is time [ ... ] and it is fair that
they do it, for we would not after all conceive for measures so vital
to them to continue indefinitely without their direct participation.
The men of the 20th century are not objects but subjects of the law.
(EPA 1960b:17)

This moved head-on against the de-politicisation techniques discussed

in the previous chapter. It took on the myth that what the Communities
were doing, and how, and why they were doing it, was uncontroversial.
To be sure, even in the discourse on the eminently political nature of
integration, deliberate politicisation had its limits. Whether integration
should take place at all, whether it should take place in a partly supra-
national way, or that its end purpose was the provision of peace, pros-
perity, and a better life, was not usually open to discussion (Chapter 1,
see e.g. van der Stoel 1976). It was in fact precisely because of the exis-
tential nature of the choices at hand and of integration as a whole –
its indispensability and non-negotiability – that the peoples needed to
know and ‘express a will’ about it. That is, they needed to be consulted
somehow, even if not in a fully open-ended way.
Still, it was in acknowledgement of, and in reference to, the funda-
mentally divisive stakes of integration and its policies that the Dehousse
Report proposed turning to supranational electoral democracy for legiti-
mating political choices. The Vedel Report took up this discourse. For
large-scale, costly projects such as the regional policy or economic and
monetary union – and especially when they involved an expansion of
the Communities’ powers, it contended, ‘standards must be fixed within
which the Community can act’. And the ‘Parliament must have its say
when it comes to fixing these normative frameworks’ (CEC 1972a:17).
In this line of reasoning, supranational parliamentary democracy was
necessary due to the very nature of Community action. The ‘need’
for it specifically increased with the ‘scope of the tasks’ at hand (CEC
1972a:32). In direct connection with this reasoning, demands for a
stronger, elected EP often rested on the supporting argument (also
present in the earlier block quote) that the actions of the Communities
were too significant, that they had too ‘profound [an] impact on the life
of the individual in the member states’, to leave them beyond sufficient
parliamentary control (EP 1963b:2). The stakes were too high. In his
speech marking the signing of the act introducing EP elections, Council
 Democracy and Other Challenges 53

President van der Stoel celebrated the fact that the ‘people of Europe
[would finally] be called upon to elect their representatives, to choose
between the different forms of society put before them’ (1976).
Of course, the very same arguments about the essentially political
and existential nature of Community politics also allowed for a very
different possible reaction to it, namely the desire carefully to guard
national sovereignty and the power of national executives and legis-
latures; on which more below. Yet according to the advocates of a
strong and elected European Parliament three things above all distinc-
tively predestined this supranational Assembly to produce the political
will-formation, representation, authorisation, and accountability neces-
sary in the face of the high and contested stakes of integration. One fore-
shadowed the ‘democratic deficit’ critique of the 1990s and 2000s (see
Chapters 4 to 6). Another claimed a particular symbolic or manipulative
capacity of the EP to ‘associate the peoples’ to the Communities. A third
line of reasoning was addressed principally to proponents of further
supranationalism. It appealed to the EP’s particular commitment and
capacity to advance integration. The remainder of this section considers
these three clusters of arguments in turn.
The first analysis was advanced for instance in the Report by Hans
Furler, Vice-President of the EP, on the EP’s Competences and Powers (EP
1963b). It started from the observation that the transfer of powers from
the member-state to the Community level had upset the traditional
balance of the separation of powers in favour of the executive:

When creating the European Communities, the member states have

given up a number of important powers. [ ... ] True, overall the powers
of the governments have moved to the European executive, and
those of the courts to the European Court of Justice. But the powers
that the national parliaments have renounced have notoriously been
conferred upon the European Parliament at an only reduced propor-
tion. They essentially [l’essentiel] moved to the Council of Ministers
and the Commissions, so that the equilibrium between the legislative
power and the executive power is strongly displaced in favour of the
governments and to the detriment of the parliaments. (EP 1963b:2,
see similarly CEC 1972a:36, Le Monde 21/04/1972)

The result of these developments was that legislation in the Community

(even if the Commission had the sole right of initiation) was ‘in the
hands’ of the national ministers assembled in the Council of Ministers;
according to a commonplace in the debate of EC democracy, the ‘centre
54 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

of gravity’ of Community decision-making (still EP 1963b:2, 19). ‘As

regards final decisions’ (and notwithstanding the Commission’s right
of initiative), Hallstein for instance concurred, ‘power’ accordingly lay
‘essentially in the hands of the Council’ (Hallstein 1965, see further e.g.
Le Monde 26/03/1957). In effect, as this critique singled out, binding
laws could be passed ‘without or against the will’ of the EP, as well as the
national parliaments. Both were reduced to making ‘recommendations
to their governments as to the positions they should take in the
Council of Ministers’, but could not ‘reduce or modify Community
law’ (EP 1963b:2).
In face of this state of affairs, the key normative demand was that the
EP be empowered ‘to exercise the principal functions that have been
shifted from the national parliaments to the community’ (EP 1963b:2,
see similarly CEC 1972a:36). The ‘loss of parliamentary power at national
level should be compensated at the European level’ (CEC 1972a:32, see
also e.g. CDU/CSU 1957). Such ‘compensation’ would regularly be stipu-
lated, especially wherever new sovereignty transfers were at stake (e.g.
EP 1970:24, see EP 1983 on a request by the EP in 1963). Note that this
line in official discourses effectively anticipated more than simply the
critiques prominent in national public debates from Maastricht onwards
(Chapters 4 and 6). It also offered a proto-type for the academic ‘classic
democratic deficit theory’ developed from the mid-1980s onwards,
but especially in the early 1990s and early 2000s, in all its constitutive
elements.4 The emergence of the democratic deficit critique is obviously
an interesting case for exploring mutual influences between EU official
and academic discourses (a research focus that is beyond the main scope
of this book).
At the same time, however, even advocates of a strong EP conceded
that the European Parliament never should exercise the full range of func-
tions fulfilled by national parliaments. This was because the Community
political system was ‘of a whole different genre’ from a national political
system (EP 1963b:1). Its own specific ‘original structures’ arose from
the nature of tasks and the strict delimitation of the Communities’
competences by the Treaties. Consequently, the Commission insisted,
even ‘generally accepted’ categories of legitimate political order could
not simply be ‘applied in the Community sphere’. In particular, the
traditional ‘distinction generally made by national constitutions
between the legislature and the executive’ could not simply be repro-
duced at Community level: ‘According to the original constitution of
the Community, the Council is its legislature. We could not substitute
the Parliament for the Council in this role without attacking the very
 Democracy and Other Challenges 55

roots of the Treaties’. At most, the EP could be enabled to ‘participate

in law-making decisions’, not only in a simple consultative role, but
also with a ‘real power of co-decision’, that is, power to accept or reject
Council decisions (CEC 1972a:11–3, 37–8, see also e.g. Hallstein 1965).
To be sure, this discourse of the Commission’s may have reflected not
least that the Commission saw in the EP not only an ally, but also a rival
in the inter-institutional competition for power.
Moreover, advocates of European elections, as well as those defending
the political system of the Communities as already reasonably legiti-
mate, repeatedly contended that the EP did have at least some influ-
ence on legislation (e.g. CEC 1959a:8, EP 1963b:4, Hallstein 1960a:3),
some budgetary powers (e.g. EP 1963b:1, 19), and some control over the
executive (e.g. EP 1963b:4. Hallstein 1959b:4, CEC 1958:15, 1961a:19).
Election advocates were motivated in this by the wish to establish that
the EP was enough of a real parliament to warrant being elected by
universal suffrage, the system’s defenders by the desire to assert at least
some democratic legitimacy for the system that had already been set up.
Both would occasionally point out that even if the EP’s formal compe-
tences were no doubt limited, it used them to the full extent allowed
by the Treaties in practice. They were lucid about the fact that the EP’s
powers were on the whole mainly ‘consultative’ and that ‘Parliament’
mostly did ‘not decide in the last resort’ (EP 1963b:1).
By way of substitute, they often highlighted the more informal ways
in which the EP influenced policy-making and the executive, including
by keeping ‘the Commission in close and permanent touch with polit-
ical and human realities’ (CEC 1961a:19) – thus making its work more
responsive to citizen needs and desires, or by making its opinions weigh
in the power game between the Commission and the Council (CEC
1958:8). Another informal channel of EP influence underlined in the
sources was its role as ‘interlocutor’ of the national parliaments and the
Council (even if the Council was ‘not always subject to [its] control’).
In this role, the EP facilitated a two-way stream of influence. Members
of the EP both uploaded ‘different national ways of thinking and prob-
lems’ to the Community process and downloaded a ‘Community spirit’
to their national colleagues, influencing the attitudes of the national
political parties (EP 1963b:5). The Furler Report, moreover, made early
and explicit reference to the EP’s deliberative function (see Chapters 5
and 7), calling it ‘indispensable that there be public debates and discus-
sions, parliamentary exchanges of viewpoints’. It commended the
fact that the EP could at least in this role ‘on its own initiative delib-
erate on questions that regard[ed] the Community’ (unlike under the
56 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

consultation procedure, where another Community institution had to

ask for its opinion, which it could then ignore; EP 1963b:1).
Probably the most vocal and important argument in favour of European
elections, however – and this is the second central reason advanced that
I referred to earlier – was that elections were the way, finally, ‘directly to
associate the peoples to the building of Europe’ (again, EPA 1960a:834;
see also EPA 1960b:16). By the early 1970s, Le Monde affirmed, supra-
national ‘democratic legitimation’ had become ‘more necessary than
in 1958’. If the EC, having established the customs union, was to
‘accomplish new missions’, and most notably economic and monetary
union, this called for more robust, and more direct, chains of legitima-
tion (21/04/1972). The changing nature of EC action thus made courting
the will of the people, and establishing mechanisms for them to make
it heard, indispensable. The people had to be ‘taken on board’. Now,
elections were claimed to be a suitable means for this task in that they
would make it possible to argue that the peoples were at last given the
opportunity to ‘express a will’ according to the rules of representative
democracy – ‘free elections’ being the only known means for ‘expressing
the will of the people and associating the peoples to public administra-
tion’ (EPA 1960b:16–7). This discourse was a nod to normative ideals of
popular sovereignty and democratic representation, and an attempt to
capitalise on their legitimation potential. In addition, it involved a state-
ment about the political feasibility of future integration projects.
What is more though, much of the elections advocacy maintained
that European elections would link the peoples to the integration project
in even more fundamental (but also more diffuse) ways. European elec-
tions and ‘electoral symbolism’, they contended, would help to make
citizens ‘feel more concerned by the enterprise’, and make them ‘want
to live together’ (Le Monde 12/06/1979). Elections had the power to
‘produce in the peoples of the six countries a salutary shock’ and to forge
a ‘European consciousness’ in them (EPA 1960b:16, 1). Elections were
bound to ‘have an almost revolutionary impact’ on the Communities’
‘popular basis and indeed the entire European edifice’ (CEC 1961a:19).
They would ‘greatly contribute to reinforcing and to making triumph
the European idea in public opinion’ (EP 1963b:25). Here democratic
legitimacy was often equated simply with general popular support.
To be sure, early warnings did exist that elections would fail to attract
high turnouts (as turned out to be the case), and thus to perform
this social legitimacy-boosting magic (e.g. Le Monde 12/06/1979, FAZ
07/06/1979, Spénale 1975, see Steed 1971:466). EP President Georges
Spénale cautioned that in order to realise the groundbreaking effect of
 Democracy and Other Challenges 57

European elections on popular attitudes, significant top-down activism

and a ‘general mobilization of political forces and public opinion in all
the countries concerned’ were necessary (Spénale 1975). The EP featured
crucially as the ‘mediator with regard to public opinion’ in pro-elections
discourses. At some level, certainly, this emblem appealed to the whole
range of ideals defining the concept of political representation (Pitkin
1967): (1) ‘formal representation’ of course, or accountability by virtue
of the MEPs’ regularly being subject to either removal or re-election on
the basis of what the people thought of them, (2) ‘substantive repre-
sentation’ or the Communities’ responsiveness to citizen preferences,
as well as (3) ‘symbolic representation’, whereby a political order or its
elites are representative because the people believe in them and trust
them to stand for them. Chiefly, however, the mediator emblem was
put forward to strengthen particularly the third, symbolic view of repre-
sentation, that focused essentially on an emotive response on the part
of the electorate.
There was much insistence in the discourses around it on how a
strong and directly elected EP would be able to act upon public opinion
(and be subject to it, or ensure responsiveness to it). These discourses
commended the EP as not only the ‘sounding board’ but also the ‘stimu-
lator of this public opinion’ (CEC 1972a:34). Elections advocacy thus
routinely praised the EP’s role in ‘making the facts and the political
objectives of the Community understood and engraving them in the
consciousness of the peoples’, that is, in mobilising and shaping public
opinion (EP 1963b:1, see Steed 1971:468). This discourse was not limited
to the European institutions. The FAZ, for example, held that European
elections would enable the EP to give ‘guidance to the public’ in indi-
vidual European countries (07/06/1979). The Vedel Report had taken
for granted that the EP’s ‘normal tasks’ included both ‘expressing and
shaping political opinion’. It deplored that given its limited powers
and that it was not currently directly elected, the EP fell ‘far short of
fulfilling’ them, and that its debates and arguments had ‘almost no
impact on the press, public opinion and the life of the political parties’
(CEC 1972a:29). Le Monde embraced this argumentation in a comment
on the Report (21/04/1972).
The Commission enthusiastically joined the effort of mobilising the
active support of public opinion, not least by aiming at societal and
economic leaders. The embryonic stages of both its civil society consul-
tation and its communication policies date back as late as the 1950s
(and were already referred to in Chapter 1). Anticipating its later trans-
parency and participatory-democracy discourses (Chapters 3 and 5),
58 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

the Commission’s First General Report professed the decision ‘to let its
actions to be fully known to the public, keeping in the picture the repre-
sentatives of those economic and social groups concerned, consulting
them, advising them, even associating them with the work where
possible’ (CEC 1958:14). Historian Lise Rye holds that the key ‘purpose
of external information’, according to the ‘clear ideas’ developed by the
ECSC Information Service in the 1950s, was ‘not only to inform, but to
contribute to the education of European citizens’, notably by commu-
nicating the ideas projected by the Schuman Declaration and Monnet.
Another main aim was to provide economic and technical information
for concerned interests. Interestingly, Rye found that the ‘emphasis on
the need to change the minds of the people of Europe’ was expressed
in the EP in ‘even stronger terms’ than in the Hallstein Commission
(1958–67). What the Commission and the EP shared was the common
conviction that a ‘new European public opinion would have to be
forged that would fill the same autonomous and democratic function
that national public opinions did within the frontiers of the different
countries’ (Rye 2009:149–50, footnote omitted).
All this, like the EP-as-mediator emblem, reflected a growing atten-
tiveness in official as well as national public discourses that ‘what the
Communities to a very large extent lack[ed ... was] popular support’
(EP 1963b:16). The Vedel Report lamented: ‘Public opinion is not
committed. At least it is indifferent or only appears in protest. Europe
has its “silent majority”; like the others, it is largely ineffective’ (CEC
1972a:34). This last turn of phrase (‘ineffective’) illustrated how the lack
of public enthusiasm was not so much referred to as a problem in itself,
in normative terms (along the lines that something had been imposed
on the Europeans that they showed no sign of wanting all that much).
Rather, it was a problem in the instrumental sense, in that it made
the Communities less able to meet the tasks they had been assigned
(Le Monde 21/04/1972). Indifference made public opinion ‘ineffective’
in advancing the cause of integration at a time when all ‘the great prob-
lems’ that arose were ‘in essence political problems that demand[ed] for
their solution a political will’ (EPA 1960b:16). In short, it would ‘not be
possible to attain objectives of the Community without help of leaders
and active support of public opinion’ (CEC 1958:14). Mobilising the
‘pressure of public opinion’ on decision-making elites hence represented
a way to ‘advance Europe’ (Leo Tindemans, cited in FAZ 14/07/1976,
see FAZ 07/06/1979), to provide the lacking ‘stimulus’ to the by now
stalling integration project (see later; EP President Colombo 1978:5).
The EPA’s official line as articulated in the Dehousse Report was: the
 Democracy and Other Challenges 59

peoples’ ‘conscious participation [in elections] will result in the only will
that can sustain the construct of the Communities beyond the contin-
gencies, divergences and particularisms of the moment’ (EPA 1960b:16).
The Commission’s First General Report already commended the EPA for
bringing ‘the public opinion of the Community to the support of all
steps or endeavours made in service of Europe’ (CEC 1958:14). In the
event, to be sure, the assumption that elections would mobilise popular
support or even respectable turnouts in EP elections proved seriously
misguided.
A third and final advantage of European elections commonly cited
among their advocates was that the Assembly could, and would, use the
‘new political authority’ resulting from its election to push integration
ahead (CEC 1976:29). Naturally this discourse was meant to make elec-
tions attractive to those already in favour of more and deeper integration
to begin with; its purpose was to convince them that at strong, elected
EP would further this cause. In her opening speech to the first directly
elected EP, its President, Simone Veil (UDF – Union pour la Démocratie
Française), celebrated that this elected Parliament would be a ‘more effec-
tive motor of European integration’ (Veil 1979). Other versions of this
image were those of the EP as the ‘nerf moteur of European Union’, the
‘moving force’, or the ‘dynamic element of the institutional mechanism
that activated the development of the Community’ (all EP 1963b:2, 4).
The Commission went as far as describing the EPA’s exercise of demo-
cratic control as not ‘negative in character’. Rather, it depicted it in terms
of being ‘a spur, and [an] inspiration and a help for the activities of the
institutions’. In other words, it used ‘democratic control’, as in the EP’s
power (for what it was worth), to prevent feet dragging in the project or
projects of United Europe, and to contain anti-supranationalist forces
(CEC 1958:14, see also CEC 1960a:17).
The debate on EP elections and powers thus partly featured the EP as
a counter-weight to intergovernmentalist or anti-integrationist forces. A
German journalist, for example, saw the pivotal task of the first elected
EP in shifting institutional power in favour of the ‘centripetal forces’
(FAZ 07/06/1979). The Commission was upfront about supporting the
EP in its mission, not least because it saw in the House a partner in
arms in moving the supranational elements of the Community system
forward (e.g. CEC 1972a:7, 1976:29–30). In the debate generally, the
argument was ‘widely used’ that even ‘without any additional powers
going to the European Parliament [ ... ], its direct election would enhance
the authority of the main supranational organ, the Commission. This
would help it to resist encroachments by national governments’ (Steed
60 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

1971:466–7). The EP’s advocacy of elections and enhanced powers, for

example, was partly founded on the experience of the member-state
governments proving untrustworthy to decide in the desired way. The
‘insecurity of the Community construction’ resulted from its being
‘plagued by centrifugal tendencies’, especially within the national
governments: ‘there is no international conference or Community
problem where its fragility is not evident, despite the treaties and despite
the institutions’ (EPA 1960b:16, see further Council President van der
Stoel 1976). A strong and elected EP, by contrast, could help to generate,
through the posited pressure of public opinion, the indispensable
‘supranational will’ (EP 1963b:1): ‘supranational’ in the sense not only
of standing above thinking in terms of nation-states (see Chapter 1), but
also of wanting more supranationalism. Ultimately, only if institutions
were created that were ‘at the same time democratic and endowed with
real powers’, could Europe live up to the challenges lying ahead (EPA
1960b:18). This was an example of the discourse discussed in Chapter 1
that advocated locking the member-states into powerful common
institutions. Bill Davies identifies a similar discourse of containing
anti-supranationalism through institution building for the context of
how the German media (and academe) received the constitutionalisa-
tion of EC law. They welcomed it, at least initially, as ‘a punch on the
nose for the Gaullists’ (Davies 2008:59–60) – to whom I am about to
turn in the next section.
Overall, the EP-as-motor-of-integration discourse targeted basically
like-minded people. As much as any of the angles I have analysed in this
section, this raises the question of why we should care on what grounds
representatives of the European institutions and those lobbying for or
against a stronger EP based their arguments when talking to each other.
I endeavoured to situate the discourses under study and the democracy
ideals they projected in their broader historical and intellectual context,
and to trace some influences between official and wider public discourse
as reflected in national newspapers. The question remains, nonethe-
less, as to what extent such specialised discourses reached beyond the
authors and readers of official reports and journalists covering European
integration, and to what extent they died away unheard. Even among
the member-state governments, Stefan Goetze and Berthold Rittberger
suggest, ‘categorical opposition’ to extending the powers of the EP was
commonplace until the early 1990s, with several governments specifi-
cally drawing ‘symbolic boundaries between the EP and national legisla-
tures’. Yet those discourses I have analysed in this section that favoured
a stronger element of supranational parliamentary democracy did sow
 Democracy and Other Challenges 61

the seeds for a fundamental discursive shift in the inter-subjective

‘cognitive scripts’ regarding the EP’s role in conferring legitimacy on
the EU’s institutional setting that underlay government action, gradu-
ally making the empowerment of the EP the ‘standard response’ to alle-
viating the EU’s increasingly acknowledged democratic deficit (Goetze
and Rittberger 2010:37). How did the democracy ideals projected in the
debates of the 1950s to the 1970s on EP elections and EP powers relate
and respond to wider discursive shifts in how political legitimacy was
publicly discussed? In this chapter’s remaining sections, I examine rival
discourses around the debates on intergovernmentalism and the finan-
cial and economic crises of the 1970s. While my aim is not (and cannot
be) to make any exact claims about the extent to which the individual
discourses on offer were internalised by citizens or other actors individu-
ally or collectively, I can investigate the competition and shifting balance
in the public sphere between contending ways of representing Europe
and the legitimacy of its changing political order (see Introduction).

Intergovernmentalism

Ultimately, the ‘centrifugal forces’ figuring in the last discourse analysed

earlier did more to politicise European integration politics than any of
the mentioned demands for institutional reform that started from claims
about the ‘political’ nature of the stakes involved. Running counter to
all attempts at establishing and legitimating a supranational system of
governance was an insistence on the member-states’ sovereignty and
control over the integration process. To extend this idea of a nexus of
forces, a tug of war between centripetal and centrifugal forces pervaded
the institutional system of the Communities, as well as discourses about
their legitimacy.
Manifesting itself in a series of crises running through the 1960s,
this tension dominated the politics of integration throughout the early
decades of integration (see e.g. Loth 2001, Ludlow 2006). At its core
was a power struggle over how supranational or intergovernmental the
Communities should be. The most vocal exponent of intergovernmen-
talism, in the shape of a ‘Europe of nation-states’ (l’Europe des nations),
was the French President Charles de Gaulle. He defended his vision in
a series of press conferences, which we can quarry for his constructions
regarding the Communities’ (il)legitimacy. De Gaulle’s foreign policy and
rhetoric constituted a powerful counterpoint to the discourses by supra-
nationalists like Jean Monnet, Altiero Spinelli, or Walter Hallstein (see
previous section and Chapter 1). The conflict escalated in 1965/66, when
62 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

France boycotted all intergovernmental meetings of the Community

bodies, partly in order to prevent the adoption of qualified majority
voting in the Council and thus to preserve her national veto power. This
‘empty chair crisis’ was resolved in the Luxembourg Compromise, which
provided that any member-state could block decisions in the Council of
Ministers on points opposed to its ‘very important interests’ (see e.g.
Vanke 1996:158, Ludlow 2006).
With regard to contests over the legitimacy of the Communities
and integration, the significance of the crises of the 1960s was
twofold. On the one hand, they cemented what would be an almost
uninterrupted structural thread in relevant discourses ever after: the
supranational-intergovernmental dichotomy (see e.g. Magnette and
Nicolaïdis 2004:390 on its role in the negotiations leading up to the
2004 constitutional treaty). De Gaulle’s essentially ‘State-Centric Europe’
would continue to be an icon to be reckoned with in any proposition
of supranational solutions (Mather 2006:2, 85–6, 112–3, see e.g. Wæver
1990). On the other hand, the crises of the 1960s brought to the fore
the fact that the individual member-states did not fundamentally agree
about what the Communities should be doing, how, and why – if any
more illustration of this was necessary after the European Defence
Community (EDC) was rejected in the French National Assembly in
1954. They discredited any efforts to represent the existence, setup, and
action of the European Communities as a matter of absolute indispen-
sability, a matter beyond disagreement, or a matter simply of experts
working out how best to pursue exogenously given consensual aims.
These were the messages of the discourses discussed in Chapter 1, but in
actual fact the way integration was turning out made it ever trickier to
deny that the stakes of integration were essentially political, and funda-
mentally contested. In response, the pro-elections discourse particu-
larly that started from the elections’ ‘eminently political nature’ was an
attempt to make a virtue of this spreading understanding. It had only
limited success, however, in breaking up an ever tighter linkage of two
intertwined, deeply ingrained dichotomies.
On one level, supranationalism stood against the defence of the
interests and power of the member-states through intergovernmen-
talism. On another, the Communities’ technocratic, elitist and admin-
istrative logics discussed in Chapter 1 stood against more ‘political’
processes of will-formation and decision-making. The respective
ends of each axis became more and more associated with the ends
of the supposedly parallel or corresponding axis. One end connected
intergovernmentalism with ‘politics’ and the protection of national
 Democracy and Other Challenges 63

interests. The other linked the Community system’s supranational

aspects with what Lindseth dubs the ‘administrative’ logic of delega-
tion away from national representative bodies to the supranational,
often bureaucratic or technocratic ones. This linkage was due partly to
the role the Commission actively assumed and discursively constructed
for itself, and partly to discourses projecting Monnet’s vision of rela-
tive ‘supranational technocratic autonomy’ from political control
(Lindseth 2010:91, 104). A further noted expression of Community
supranationalism was the equally unaccountable, ‘non-political’, and
even more detached power of ECJ justices (see Davies 2008, 2011). All
of this worked to entrench the dichotomies of supranationalism and
technocracy on the one hand, opposed by intergovernmentalism and
political will-formation on the other.
De Gaulle, in particular, defended his integration policy on the grounds
of his hostility to the ‘technocratic, nationless [apatride], and irrespon-
sible Areopagus’, creepingly reaching for supranational competences, as
he described the Commission (1965, see Ludlow 2006:73). His forceful
assertions, and the discourses embedding them, unmistakeably claimed
‘the political’ and the assertion of national interests for the side of the
intergovernmental component of integration politics. For the EP’s advo-
cates, on the other hand, it became an uphill struggle, if not entirely a
lost cause, to disentangle this association of ‘politics’, and the defence
of national interests, with intergovernmental politics. They struggled to
make plausible that the EP could be a forum for political will-formation
at the same time as being a supranational actor. Conversely, the discourse
of the technocratic/supranational-versus-political/intergovernmental
parallelism they were fighting offered a breeding ground for the
national-republican discourses that flared up in the French Maastricht
debate, which were to limit ‘the political’ and the exercise of popular
sovereignty and voluntarism to the confines of the nation (Chapter 4).
In addition to structuring discourses about what would make the
Communities (more) legitimate, this double dichotomy was also built
into successive Treaties. The balance between the two poles of the scale
was progressively re-calibrated in favour of the member-states, and
more specifically the member-state executives (rather than, notably, the
national legislatures), as the above proto democratic deficit discourse was
criticising. Lindseth (2010) maps ‘the establishment of national-executive
leadership over the integration process’ from the creation of the Council
of Ministers in the 1951 ECSC Treaty, over the strengthening of its insti-
tutional role in the 1957 EEC Treaty, to the creation of the European
Council in 1974 (100, see also Mourlon-Druol 2010), in addition to the
64 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

establishment of a dense bureaucracy of nationally dominated commit-

tees staffed by national civil servants to oversee the Commission’s
implementation of delegated acts (COREPER, comitology). Together
with the crises of the 1960s, these developments effectively ‘marginal-
ized the Commission as an autonomous technocratic policy maker’
(Lindseth 2010:91, see 91–132). This evolution at the level of facts, to be
sure, ran counter to the enlightened-social-engineering-on-the-basis-of
technocratic-expertise discourses discussed in Chapter 1. It coincided
with the production of a rival set of discourses that essentially reasserted
the themes of national interests and national sovereignty, as will be
analysed shortly.
Numerous examples from the contemporary press coverage of succes-
sive integration steps illustrated the entrenchment of the twin associa-
tion of supranationalism with technocracy, and of ‘the political’ with
intergovernmentalism, in the French and German presses. A 1955 article
in the Süddeutsche Zeitung thus explicitly equated ‘supranationalism’
with ‘supranational planning centres’ (02/06/1955). Die Welt in turn
explained the political resistance to partial or technological unions, in
particular, to the EDC, by the fear that they would ‘simply result in
new supranational organisations and authorities’, and vaguely associ-
ated ‘the supranational’ with ‘officialdom’ and with spillover processes
beyond national political control, which took ‘away their sovereignty’
without acquiring credible legitimacy of its own (07/06/1955). Le Monde,
finally, for instance, read the Rome Treaties through the lens of a push
and pull between supranationalism and national-executive control:

Both in the case of Euratom and of the Common Market, the

experts’ caution was demonstrated by their shunning of suprana-
tional systems wherever possible. The real power in Europe will lie
with the Council of Ministers of the Six. This means that there will
be an intricate system of power sharing between this body and the
European Commission, but at least there is the guarantee that indi-
vidual nations will forfeit only the minimum degree of sovereignty
required for the effective implementation of the Treaties. (Le Monde
26/03/1957, see e.g. Le Figaro 12/01/1956)

This deep-rooted discourse pitched the integration process as a

Manichean zero-sum negotiation between supranational bodies and
the member-states. It provided another of the persisting structural
threads in discourses about the legitimacy of non-national institu-
tional solutions that persists to this day. Key critical discourses in the
 Democracy and Other Challenges 65

French and German Maastricht debates, for example, were to represent

Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) in such zero-sum terms, where
France and Germany lost in terms of capacity of action what the EU
level would gain, and an overall gain was uncertain (Chapter 4). It also
marked important critiques of the constitutional treaty (Chapter 6). This
zero-sum understanding of sovereignties went directly against the oppo-
site projections of integration as a win-win, positive-sum affair under-
lying the common good narrative, and it challenged the functionalist
or federalist discourses that tried to establish that both the national and
supranational levels would increase their ability to act by cooperating
(Chapter 1). To be sure, this rival discourse could be subsumed under
the supranationalism–intergovernmentalism issue also; after all, where
on the scale between complete federalism and pure intergovernmental
cooperation the ideal point of increasing problem-solving capacity lay
actually, was the very bone of contention.
Implicit in the defence of national-executive control over integra-
tion, then, was the underlying assumption that national interests, at
least potentially, conflicted fundamentally. This confronted the myths
not only of the European common good, but also of an overwhelming
general consensus on the existence as well as the nature of this common
good (Chapter 1). It sought to tilt the discursive balance in favour of
assessing a state’s participation in the European project soberly in terms
of gains and losses to the national interest. According to this manner of
representing integration, the extent and nature of a country’s participa-
tion was not determined, or justified, by a quasi-moral commitment to
a common European good, but by the rational weighing of the costs and
benefits of available scenarios (see Chapter 1). Numerous editorialists,
notably in Germany, vigorously defended the storyline that a common
European interest naturally coincided with (fundamentally converging)
national interests against the onslaught notably from the Gaullist camp.
The General’s obsession with the ‘French interest’, they countered,
made him blind to the valid monetary or economic arguments about an
overlap of French and European interests (e.g. FAZ 17/11/1967, Die Welt
18/01/1966, and Frankfurter Rundschau 26/07/1965).
The Gaullist ‘Europe des nations’, of course, appealed to the very kinds
of ideas and understandings that the post-national discourses I analysed
in Chapter 1 had been proposing to overcome; it uncompromisingly
proposed to ‘think in terms of nation-states’. According to French
sociologist and public intellectual Raymond Aron, however, de Gaulle
was obviously not solely responsible for the reawakening of thinking
in national categories. Rather, this was embedded in a much broader,
66 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

deeply rooted mindset, where the nation-states ‘had only appeared to

collapse in the ruins of the cities destroyed under the bombs’ (1977:449,
see de Lapparent 2010:54). At the heart of de Gaulle’s vision for Europe
was 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 parlia-
ments’ (press conference 09/09/1965). The EC’s democratic legitimacy
(to the extent that it had or needed any) flowed from indirect demo-
cratic legitimation by the elected member-state governments; ‘authority
and responsibility [were] not to be found anywhere’ but in the national
governments (14/01/1963). Consequently, decisions could not legiti-
mately be taken by supranational bodies, democratic or not. They had
to be taken by a ‘regular organised concert of the responsible govern-
ments’ (05/09/1960).
Besides, they should also not be taken directly by the national legisla-
tures, which would have been an alternative national channel of demo-
cratic legitimation to the national executives (see earlier, Rittberger
2005:105–7, Lindseth 2010:103–4; on de Gaulle’s preference for a strong
presidency and against a particularly strong parliament even in the
French national context, see e.g. Knapp and Wright 2006:51–3). French
interests, in the laconic words of de Gaulle’s Foreign Minister, had
‘no other defender than the French government’ (Couve de Murville
1966:110–1). A corollary of this was the understanding that the legiti-
macy of the Community regime could not flow from a definitive transfer
of sovereignties (authorised through whatever national channel), but
required the continuous control of the national governments, that is veto
for national executives over supranational policy-making. This French,
or Gaullist, ‘conception of national leadership’ in Community poli-
tics did not, however, ultimately prevail over the other member-state
governments’ preference for ‘shared oversight via consensus politics’ in
the Council of Ministers and the comitology system (Lindseth 2010:
e-book abstract to Chapter 3).
The retention of the national veto (or unanimity requirement) was
vitally framed as a question of national sovereignty (see also Vanke
2006:158). The reassertion of national sovereignty in intergovernmen-
talist discourses, in turn, often went together with a distinction between
less important policy spheres, where supranational action was permis-
sible or justifiable, and more important ones, where it was not. The
distinction in International Relations Theory between ‘low’ and ‘high’
(essentially security-relevant) politics reverberated particularly in French
political and public discourses. The collapse of the EDC had seemed to
 Democracy and Other Challenges 67

confirm the hypothesis that, while states might willingly cooperate in

areas of ‘low politics’ such as economic cooperation and the setting of
technical standards for products, they would resist to delegating control
of ‘high politics’, including defence and foreign policy, to a suprana-
tional institution (see Hoffmann 1966:881, 59).
Raymond Aron, for instance, embraced the distinction between areas
where supranational solutions were legitimate, and others where only
intergovernmental arrangements were defensible, in expressing his
opposition to the EDC. A European defence community, he insisted,
would require ‘a minimum of a moral entente between the people’ in
order to be functional as well as legitimate. ‘If a certain brotherhood
in arms, a sense of community do not exist, what meaning will a
Constitution written by the most ingenious experts have?’ (Le Figaro
20/05/1952). Note how he excluded technocratic governance specifi-
cally for the area of defence. He later extended his point, for example,
to the possibility of pooling the military use of nuclear energy, where he
equally advocated an intergovernmental approach. His reasoning was
that the (unacceptable) ‘only result’ of a supranational option would be
that France would ‘subject its military program to the veto of its part-
ners in order to retain, for the future, a veto on the German program’
(Le Figaro 23/01/1956).5 He thus demarcated the military use of nuclear
technologies as an area of vital national interest where absolute sover-
eignty should be retained. De Gaulle, for his part, grounded his delinea-
tion of policy areas where the nation-states should carefully guard their
sovereignty and veto power on the auxiliary argument that ‘the peoples’
would especially not comply with decisions taken on the basis of supra-
national majority voting where they were perceived to compromise vital
interests (e.g. 1960, 62).
In addition to the criterion of vital, security or survival-relevant
national interests, another criterion for determining to what extent
sovereignty transfers to the supranational level were possible and
legitimate in any particular area was the question of how ‘political’,
or contested and conflict-laden it was, at least potentially. The EDC
‘debacle’, Lindseth argues, ‘suggested that the more overtly political
the policy domain (such as defense), the greater the political demands
for direct control by strongly legitimated national leaders’ (Lindseth
2010:108). This was the flipside of the reasoning discussed earlier that
justified limited EP powers on grounds of the particular, technical
and hence relatively non-political, nature of the tasks fulfilled by the
Communities. Moreover, how deeply rooted the understanding was that
supranational integration may be suitable for some policy areas, but
68 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

certainly not others, was further underlined by the habitual insistence

of defenders of the Community system’s legitimacy that integration was
strictly limited to specific sectors, namely those where it made sense due
to their intrinsic functional imperatives (i.e. above all economic and
technical affairs; see Chapter 1).
This motif of sectoral limitation was additionally intertwined with
the question of national sovereignty. Hallstein, for instance affirmed:
‘The – supranational – authorities we are establishing derive their
competence not from the self-evident, general sovereignty of states, but
from a specific surrender by states of certain prerogatives. This surrender
is limited in scope, it is not total [ ... ]’ (1951:3). He here projected a
sober image of nationally authorised, explicitly specified, and clearly
circumscribed, task-based competence transfers, which fundamentally
respected the ‘general, self-evident sovereignty of states’. Against the
charge that supranationalism would make the member countries lose
their ‘national personalities’ (de Gaulle 1965), supranational discourses
in general carefully avoided giving the impression that European
integration called the nation-state and its sovereignty into question,
reiterating for instance that: ‘What we want is not the annihilation
of the Member-states but a living association. Europe means diversity’
(Hallstein, cited in Le Monde 22/07/1965).
On the other hand, the interdependence assumption underlying
supranationalist discourses (Chapter 1) opened space for the argument
that there was ‘no such thing as a fully sovereign national state’ in any
case. Even if this was again typically paired with the acknowledgement
that ‘no government’ was ‘as yet prepared to make an unconditional
surrender of the high degree of sovereignty that it possesse[d]’ (Hallstein
1959a:3), it asserted the possibility that the situation would change in
the future. The discourses presenting integration as a counter-utopia to
national thinking did not yield to the discourses encapsulated in the
‘Europe-of-the-nation-states’ emblem without a fight. In conclusion,
then, one set of discourses or way of seeing things stood directly against
another. The balance between them was shaken to its foundations not
least by an intervening development with profound implications for the
plausibility of any legitimacy claims, national as well as supranational:
the financial and economic crises of the 1970s.

Challenges to functional problem-solving

An even bigger challenge to the early Communities’ legitimacy than the

above discourses around a Europe of the nation-states, hence stemmed
 Democracy and Other Challenges 69

from growing dents to the prosperity narrative, which stood at the centre
of early legitimation discourses (Chapter 1). Discursive attacks were on
the rise that tackled the Communities’ (and also the member-states’)
difficulties in delivering on this promise.
Throughout the 1960s, Western Europe had benefited from inex-
pensive oil imports and growing international trade, and enjoyed
persistently high rates of growth, high employment, and low infla-
tion (e.g. Dinan 2004:84). This had created a benign climate for legiti-
mation patterns portraying the Communities as delivering efficient
problem-solving, most notably safeguarding durable peace and rela-
tive prosperity. The 1950s and 1960s have thus been characterised as
a period of consent, faith in state authority, and social legitimacy.6
The golden years of post-war reconstruction and economic expan-
sion across the member-states – the ‘economic miracle’ in Germany
and the ‘trente glorieuses’ in France – had fostered confidence in state
interventionism combined with free-market dynamics. They had seen
a consensus of ‘nearly all political parties’ in Europe on the ideal and
practice of the ‘caring state’, one that embodied social justice and the
reform of inequalities through expertise and specialised government
(Held 2006:186). In this discursive climate, economic growth had
helped to paper over distributive conflicts and disagreements about the
desirable forms and limits of state action. On top of this, the spectre of
Communism as well as the recent experience of Fascism propped up
images of harmonious consensus within the member-states. In short,
the leading Western democracies and the Community member-states
enjoyed a highly developed ‘sense of loyalty to their system of govern-
ment, a strong sense of deference to political authority, and attitudes of
trust and confidence’ (Almond and Verba 1963:210–1).
This situation changed in the 1970s. The Bretton Woods international
monetary system collapsed in 1971. The 1973 oil crisis engendered a
recession across the member-states, featuring inflation, high unem-
ployment, and plunging growth rates. 1979 brought a second global
energy crisis in the wake of the Iranian revolution (see Chapter 3, Dinan
2004:126). As the member-state economies came under pressure, the idea
that acquiescence of the mass of the people to political authority meant
that they would continuously accept it as legitimate was unmasked as an
illusion. The raging financial and economic crises put enormous pressure
on existing welfare states. This entailed a general sense of vulnerability,
and of a growing irrelevance of ‘the state’ in solving the most pressing
political and economic problems. Increasing competition from Japan
and newly industrialising countries increased this perception. Political
70 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

scientists, sociologists, and philosophers debated the ‘legitimation crisis’

of the capitalist welfare state, the ‘ungovernability’ of the European
democracies, and ‘overloaded government’ (see overview in Held
2006:190–6). This literature was in dialogue with wider discursive shifts
in the European public spheres.
The crisis put previously dominant conceptions of the state as the
most suitable means for promoting both the common good and that
of the individual to the test. In addition, with the ‘cake’ no longer
‘growing’, redistribution became an ever more explosive source of
conflict. It was proving precarious to base claims to political legitimacy
too exclusively on the respective authority’s problem-solving capacity,
especially in a global situation where both problems and solutions were
largely beyond the authority’s control (see Habermas 1973, 1976). To be
sure, such critiques primarily questioned the legitimacy of the failing
nation-states rather than the European Communities. Yet discursive
patterns of rationalising the European Community on grounds of their
efficient problem-solving were equally undermined. The foundational
legitimation of the Communities’ existence, organisation, and policies
had depended essentially on the storyline that the European construc-
tion was indispensable for safeguarding peace and prosperity, as I argued
in Chapter 1. By the early 1970s, however, neither the member-states
nor the Communities could guarantee uninterrupted economic growth
or even stability. Integration effectively came to a halt in the early 1970s;
some even saw a risk of the Communities disintegrating.
The peace-and-prosperity storyline, in particular, could no longer be
relied upon as an impulse for further integration, nor could one plau-
sibly resort to it in asserting or maintaining its legitimacy. For one, the
Community proved unable to guarantee prosperity in such times of
international crisis and soaring rates of inflation and unemployment.
In addition, at these times of scarcity even the successful provision of
peace ‘between formerly hostile countries’ seemed to have lost its mobi-
lising power (CEC 1976:11). If the Communities could not help the
European nations to overcome inflation, unemployment, and recession,
or if indeed they could somehow be represented as the price for peace,
the quest for alternative ways of achieving the latter had its obvious
attractions.
On the whole, the economic crisis led to a political climate marked
by conflict and dissent over the distribution of the Community’s
limited resources, about their objectives of governance, and about how
to pursue them. What form the Community should assume, what it
should deliver, and how, were now represented as potentially divisive
 Democracy and Other Challenges 71

questions. The storylines of an uncontroversial European common good

and of a consensus on integration’s ends crumbled as integration lost its
‘guiding light, namely the political consensus [ ... ] on our reasons for
undertaking this joint task’ (CEC 1976:11). Historical events and devel-
opments had unmasked the stakes European integration as undeniably
political, as inevitably creating winners and losers, and the winners and
losers were well aware of this (see Tindemans’s accompanying letter to
his European Council colleagues in CEC 1976).
Critiques of the Communities’ failure to deliver on what had been
proclaimed to be its constitutive functions moreover linked up with
critiques of their being inefficient due to their technocratic and
bureaucratic bias. ‘Eurocracy’ became a dominant emblem in depic-
tions of European integration in the 1970s, shorthand not only for
the technocracy critique analysed earlier and its remoteness from the
realities of the life of the European citizens, but also the Community’s
performance difficulties and remoteness. The Commission, in partic-
ular, was increasingly defamed as an ‘overblown and overpaid secre-
tariat of the Community’ (Weiler 1999:11). The Eurocracy emblem
effectively embodied a first legitimacy crisis for the Community order,
putting into question the whole ‘European concept’ and making the
‘incompleted European structure’ sway (Tindemans’s letter again, CEC
1976). The European institutions, as well as Europhiles in the national
debates, took this problem-image very seriously, understanding that
it was a symptom as well as a cause of integration’s overall crisis, and
deliberating on the causes as well as possible solutions of the legiti-
macy crisis it stood for.7
The Paris Summit of December 1974 sought to address this double
crisis, and to renew the member-state governments’ support for revi-
talising integration. It invited Belgian Prime Minister Leo Tindemans
to draw up a report defining what was meant by ‘European Union’
(CEC 1976). The Report presented in December 1975 proposed a fuite
en avant by empowering, on the basis of the existing treaties, both the
Commission and the EP, extending majority voting in the Council,
and widening the EC’s authority to a much greater range of policies
(including monetary, energy, social, regional, education, and foreign
and security affairs). At the time, to be sure, the Report and the debates
surrounding it ‘were not seen to have much influence’. Nevertheless,
they ‘put down markers for ideas that surfaced later’ (McAllister
1997:117). They proved clairvoyant about nascent shifts in the popular
and elite imaginations, and initiated as well as reflected changes in offi-
cial languages and imageries, in particular, with a view to what it made
72 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

sense to say about political legitimacy in the case of European inte-

gration, and the political system established to this end. Specifically,
it introduced, or took up, two subsequently absolutely crucial themes
such legitimacy-relevant discourses – just how crucial will become
apparent in Chapter 3 (and my subsequent chapters).
The first of these constituted a real sea change in how one could speak
about the Communities’ legitimacy and make sense to people. This
revolutionary change of perspective consisted in approaching the prob-
lems and potential of Community legitimacy from the viewpoint of the
‘European citizen’ and ‘our peoples’. The Report anchored the storyline
in official discourses that ‘We must listen to our people. What do the
Europeans want? What do they expect from a united Europe?’ (CEC
1976:11). Henceforth, official legitimation rhetoric turned on ‘what
the citizens wanted’. It represented the Community and its legitimacy
vitally from the perspective of the European citizens. This constituted
a drastic change of emphasis from the earlier, rival focus on functional
imperatives as I discussed in Chapter 1, and was to crystallise in the
emblem of the ‘People’s Europe, close to its citizens’ (to be analysed in
Chapter 3).
The second shift in emphasis manifested in the Tindemans Report was
a more holistic approach to improving the Community’s image, and to
the issue of Community legitimacy more broadly, which reached beyond
output and performance-based legitimation patterns, complementing
them with appeals to the citizen’s sense of self and her feeling close to,
and to some extent in control of, Community governance. Certainly,
it did suggest trying to save the Community’s reputation, capabilities,
and legitimacy as an effective and relevant problem-solver by making
its output ‘more responsive’ to the European citizens and their needs
(CEC 1976:11). This image of responsiveness was soon to dominate
legitimacy discourses across the board. It amounted to an attempt to
save efficiency-based legitimation strategies by complementing them
with an imagery and language directed at making the Community look
more relevant, reactive, and inclusive towards its subjects. Basically, if
efficient performance was to grant legitimacy to the Community, it had
to be the right kind of performance of the right kind of tasks. Appeals to
output legitimacy had to be combined with non-functional groundings
of legitimacy claims, for example, in parliamentary democracy, collective
identity and everyday experience, or even popular sovereignty. In short,
the full spectrum of potential bases for legitimacy claims would have
to be used to justify European integration, especially at times of crisis
(both of integration itself and of national problem-solving capabilities).
 Democracy and Other Challenges 73

The Community institutions responded in the 1980s with their ‘People’s

Europe’ campaign, to which I shall turn presently.

Conclusion

This chapter has juxtaposed the legitimation discourses and strategies

discussed in Chapter 1 with the critical and competing counter-discourses
defining the discursive landscape of integration’s first two or three
decades. Against the tendency to de-politicise underlying early legiti-
mation patterns, I have traced the politicisation of Community politics,
polity, and policies, illustrating how the foundational narrative of the
existing economic and supranational integration as the way to peace
and prosperity was never uncontested. Neither was the question of who
should bear what part of the costs of integration and reach what share
of the benefits. The chapter’s three sections addressed three different
discursive contexts: first, the debates around European elections and
the EP’s powers; second, the discourses surrounding the crises in inte-
gration politics of the 1960s; and third, the financial and economic
crises of the 1970s.
First, a critical argument in favour of a strong and directly elected EP
was that the stakes of Community politics were too ‘political’, and poten-
tially divisive, for political will-formation to be left technocratic experts.
This of course challenged any strategies aimed at de-politicisation
head-on. I have discussed in detail a number of discursive dynamics
running through the debate on EP elections and EP powers. On a funda-
mental level, it was far from obvious how much democracy, and how
much supranational democracy, was needed for the emerging new polit-
ical system to be reasonably legitimate. Regarding what kind of democ-
racy had such legitimacy-enhancing potential, the debate largely treated
‘democracy’ as synonymous with electoral democracy. Another common
pattern was the equation of ‘democratic legitimacy’ with popular
support. The increasingly acknowledged lack of public endorsement of
integration here still featured mainly as a reason advanced in favour of
the political demand of EP elections. Soon it was to become an undeni-
able problem in itself, as traced in Chapters 4 onwards. Furthermore,
demands for European elections were often connected with a critique
of the technocratic bias marking the early Community system, as well
as many discourses seeking to establish its legitimacy (see Chapter 1).
Finally, I considered three sets of arguments for why specifically a
European Parliament would be predestined to make this system legiti-
mate: (a) that it would help to redress the misbalance between executive
74 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

and legislative powers resulting for the unevenness of the sovereignty

transfers from the national to the Community level (a line of reasoning
anticipating classic democratic deficit theories); (b) that it could help
to ‘associate the peoples’ of Europe with the project of European union
and shape public opinion in its favour; and (c) that the EP was uniquely
placed to advance the integration project and act as a ‘motor of integra-
tion’. These three sets of discourses all began from the premise that the
integration project as a whole was fundamentally a good thing, and I
raised the question of their broader discursive contexts, including those
not already principally ‘in favour’.
Second, a crucial discursive counter-weight to discourses that sought
to establish the Communities’ legitimacy in appeal to supranational
electoral democracy existed in the emblem, put forward vocally
by Charles de Gaulle, of a Europe of the nation-states. The power
struggle of the 1960s over how supranational or intergovernmental the
Community framework should look made it hard to deny that what the
Communities were doing and how they did it was, in fact, controversial.
This middle section investigated, in particular, the entrenchment of
discursive dichotomy between intergovernmentalism and supranation-
alism, and examined the construction of a parallel binary, namely that
between an administrative and more truly ‘political’ modes of govern-
ance. I further looked at discourses that reasserted national sovereignty
and insisted on the conflicting nature of national interests, and finally,
I considered the increasingly ingrained distinction made (not only in
International Relations Theory) between legitimacy requirements for
‘high’ versus ‘low’ politics. This linked back with the idea that the
stakes of integration were ’too political’ to be left beyond the contin-
uous control of the member-states, but favoured instead control by the
national executives rather than parliamentary control as the pertinent
elections advocacy did.
Thirdly and finally, the financial and economic crises of the 1970s and
early 1980s raised even more sweeping challenges to the foundational
legitimation discourses analysed in Chapter 1. The Communities were an
easy target for discourses highlighting their shortcomings in delivering
on their central promise of prosperity in Europe, as well as the costs of
providing for peace through this route of economic integration, which
were increasingly perceived as excessive. Serious performance difficulties
severely undermined any output-based legitimacy claims. They made it
inevitable to explore alternatives to functional, output-based legitima-
tion strategies that mainly appealed to the Communities’ performance
of efficient problem-solving, and to appeal in a more holistic manner to
 Democracy and Other Challenges 75

what the Europeans wanted and who they wanted to be. This linked with
the increasingly acknowledged need to make the substance of what the
Communities did and how they evolved responsive to the needs, desires,
and interests of European citizens. By the late 1970s, ideas had become
part of dominant discourses that proposed that the Communities also
needed some claim to reflecting the preferences of European citizens
in order to plausibly pass as legitimate. The Community institutions
responded with the pledge to bring integration and its policies ‘closer
to the citizens’, a commonplace in Community-official and national
political rhetoric ever since, and particularly in the discourses around
the ‘People’s Europe’.
On the whole, the economic crises of the 1970s and early 1980s
brought to the fore inherent features of the foundational legitimacy
narratives analysed in my first chapter that were bound to create
problems for future legitimacy claims. In addition to their inherent
bias towards efficient problem-solving as a source of legitimacy, their
emphasis on consensus construction based on rational analysis, plan-
ning, and task performance, led to a certain disregard for political disa-
greement. This proved problematic given the important issues that still
had to be negotiated in the Community and given its enlargement, in
1973, by Denmark, Ireland, and the United Kingdom, the last of which
had a certain tendency to disagree with the founding members.
3
A Europe Closer to its Citizens:
The People’s Europe Project of
the 1980s

The late 1970s and the early 1980s renewed old challenges to legitimating
European integration as well as adding new ones. Many even saw the
Community as fighting for bare survival. The Economist, for example,
declared the European Economic Community moribund in a famous
cover image depicting the Community’s gravestone in March 1982. Even
the President of the European Parliament, at the twenty-fifth anniversary
of the Treaty of Rome, likened the Community to a ‘feeble cardiac patient
whose condition is so poor that he cannot even be disturbed by a birthday
party’ (Lagerfeld 1990:60, cited after Griffiths 2006:187, see also Ludlow
2006:222). In Jacques Delors’s judgment, the only way of European
integration enduring the turn of the 1980s would be to transform the
European Economic Community into a People’s Europe (Bruter 2005:73).
In this chapter, I analyse the concerted effort by the European institutions
to re-imagine the Community as a People’s Europe, close to its citizens.
What were those challenges to Community legitimacy? The
European economies had recovered somewhat for a couple of years
(from 1976 to 1978), only to be hit by the second oil shock of 1979,
which was followed by renewed recession or stagnation, unemploy-
ment, and inflation. With economic performance varying greatly
across the Community, governments were under pressure to protect
national interests and home industries. In addition, East–West rela-
tions were tense once again. In this dire situation, the European
Community seemed paralysed by institutional inertia and internal
battles. The member-states were engaged in lengthy wrangles over
Britain’s budgetary rebate, the cost of the Common Agricultural Policy
(CAP), and Spain and Portugal’s accession. In public, political, and

76
 A Europe Closer to its Citizens 77

academic debates the term ‘Eurosclerosis’ resounded widely (see Calleo

2001, Griffiths 2006). It referred to Europe’s slow growth and gloomy
prospects in the global economy, as well as the fact that member-
states were suddenly hesitant to advance towards further integration
and even tried to reduce supranational decision-making. Superficially
at least, the integration process, and particularly progress towards the
Rome Treaty’s common market objective, seemed to be stalling. In
the face of all this, the foundational storyline that the Community
was necessary and legitimate because it brought peace and prosperity
to Europe came under heavy fire. It became even harder to maintain
that integration provided ‘improved living conditions for all’ (e.g.
preamble TEEC, Chapter 1). The Community simply did not seem up
to the job. Unsurprisingly perhaps, public support for European inte-
gration dropped significantly between the late 1970s and the early
1980s (Eurobarometer 19/spring 1983:91–99, see Eichenberg and
Dalton 2007:136).
Circumstances changed in the mid-1980s. The European economies
were finally on the upswing again. The 1984 Fontainebleau Summit
brought long-needed agreement over the British rebate and CAP. Delors
became President of the Commission, Spain and Portugal joined, and
‘Project 1992’ was launched, setting the major target of completing the
single market by this date. In other words, the European Community
regained momentum and a seemingly inexorable dynamism. Long-
standing institutional deadlocks were broken; the Single European Act
(SEA) was signed in 1986. This new treaty extended qualified majority
voting to most measures relevant to the single market, facilitating
the enactment of necessary legislation. Moreover, it linked the single-
market enterprise with flanking cohesion, social, and environmental
policies, and codified European Political Cooperation (the forerunner of
the Common Foreign and Security Policy) as part of the treaty. Another
important innovation was the progressive extension of the EP’s legisla-
tive authority (see Rittberger 2005). All this meant that the European
construct took some substantial steps towards a supranational, political
framework of decision-making. The Community both expanded its
competences and, at the same time, discarded its purely economic char-
acter, at least in the letter of the treaty. Intuitively, these changes should
have constituted a new challenge for efforts to legitimate integration.
After all, a dramatic increase in Community power had to be justified.
Berthold Rittberger suggests that political elites in the member-states did
perceive a legitimacy deficit in the post-SEA Community, particularly
as a result of prospective sovereignty transfers and qualified majority
78 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

voting (2005:145–53). On the whole though, the new legitimation chal-

lenge appears to have been mastered rather successfully. Polling data
at last showed a sizeable and sustained rise in support for integration
between 1982 and 1991 (Eurobarometer 37/June 1992:8, see Eichenberg
and Dalton 2007:136).
How did the European institutions tackle this challenge? Their legit-
imating discourses and strategies during the 1980s crystallised in the
emblem of the ‘People’s Europe’ or ‘Citizen’s Europe’ (used synony-
mously, e.g. Economic and Social Committee 1985:A). This emblem
brought to fruition a number of discourses that had been emerging from
the 1970s in response to the challenges to functional problem-solving as
the main basis of Community legitimacy. Above all, it embodied the sea
change I introduced in Chapter 2, whereby official legitimation rhetoric
now prominently focused on ‘what the citizens wanted’, and repre-
sented the Community and its legitimacy crucially from the perspective
of the European citizens.
The People’s Europe emblem was an answer to spreading demands
that the Community should be given a more ‘human’ face, and that it
should not ‘concern itself not just with economic endeavours but also
with the individual citizen’ (see CEC 1986:9). In this vein, the People’s
Europe campaign appealed to European citizens no longer mainly as
consumers, employees, or market participants. Rather, it addressed
them as culturally embedded human beings endowed with political
and civil rights specific to the European Community. The idea was to
make Europe present in their everyday lives through tangible bene-
fits, symbols and culture, and through re-constituting them as Union
citizens. Furthermore, the projected People’s Europe reached out to
all citizens in an attempt to balance out two old negative images of
the Community: the ‘trader’s Europe’, focused on economic integra-
tion and relevant mainly for those directly benefiting from it, and
the ‘technocrat’s Europe’ or ‘Eurocracy’, remote from the people
and determined by expert rationalities (CEC 1988a:1, see Chapters 1
and 2). In the ideal People’s Europe, all of its citizens could feel owner-
ship and an immediate link to the common European project. They
considered it theirs.
The People’s Europe became an official policy goal from the mid-1970s
onwards and especially during the 1980s. The discourse was reflected in
a whole a ‘system of policies’ (Bee 2008). All Community institutions
subscribed to the objective and engaged in a concerted campaign to bring
it about. The Commission advocated transforming the Community into a
People’s Europe from 1977 onwards, and the EP supported this steadfastly,
 A Europe Closer to its Citizens 79

for instance in its ‘Draft Treaty Establishing the European Union’

(CEC 1988a:11; see 1985a, EP 1984, Economic and Social Committee
1985:A). The 1984 European Council in Fontainebleau commissioned a
committee chaired by Pietro Adonnino to report on what the People’s
Europe should look like (Council 1984, CEC 1985d). Most of the meas-
ures recommended in 1985 by the Adonnino committee were imple-
mented subsequently (CEC 1985d, Shore 2000). The People’s Europe
discourse was institutionalised, specifically, through the adoption of
official Community symbols, new and dramatically intensified cultural
and communication policies, through giving an explicitly ‘European
dimension’ to national and Community policies (see Bee 2008), and
introducing Union citizenship with the Treaty of Maastricht.
I shall concentrate on four clusters of discursive patterns and strate-
gies underlying the European institution’s efforts to make people see
the Community through the emblem of the People’s Europe. Firstly,
these related discourses hinged on the image of bringing Europe closer
to its citizens by responding to their expectations more effectively.
Such demands often invoked some supposed popular will. In the first
section, I scrutinise its role in the People’s Europe rhetoric. I then turn,
secondly, to the European institutions’ effort to improve communica-
tion with the European citizens. I discuss the underlying concept of
a dialogue with those citizens. In the imagery associated with this,
who communicated with whom? More specifically, I analyse the use
of public opinion data and techniques from advertising as well as a
certain pragmatism underlying the European institutions’ information
campaign. Using the example of how the single market was promoted,
I go on to examine a number of particular discursive techniques
marking official communication strategies, including the quantifica-
tion of the expected benefits from integration or the expected losses
incurred were particular integration steps to fail. The third section
moves on to how the Community was supposed to become tangible
and visible to the citizens in their daily lives. I consider the function
of symbols, material benefits, and cultural policies. I further make a
number of observations on the genealogy and some patterns in offi-
cial constructions of the idea of a collective European identity. In the
fourth section, I trace what it meant to reconstitute the Community
subjects as Community citizens and, as such, bearers of specific indi-
vidual rights. In what way did this contribute to the creation of a
People’s Europe? A short conclusion situates the People’s Europe
campaign in the longer-term picture of the struggle for Community
legitimacy.
80 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

Citizen expectations and the will of the people

The need to align integration with citizen desires was perhaps the most
central motif of the People’s Europe rhetoric. The Fontainebleau Council
defined the People’s Europe through the target that ‘the Community
should respond to the expectations of the people of Europe’ (Council
1984, see similarly Santer 1985, CEC 1976:13, 1985d:5). The Tindemans
Report’s demand to ‘listen to our people’ and to what they wanted
and expected from a united Europe (CEC 1976:11, Chapter 2), already
contained the seeds of the ambiguous status of the will of the people
invoked in much of the People’s Europe rhetoric. On the one hand, these
discourses referred to citizen expectations as an independent source and
standard of legitimacy (for integration as a whole as well as specific insti-
tutional or policy solutions). On the other hand, they framed them as
an object of manipulation, usually to the end of reviving and advancing
the integration process.
Discourses around the People’s Europe typically understood that the
Europeans were fundamentally ‘still in favour of closer links between
our peoples’ and of deepening integration. Tindemans had insisted the
public wanted such ‘results’, but questioned ‘the lack of political will on
the part of its leaders’ to establish a ‘genuine European Union and solve
the real problems of the day at European level’ (here CEC 1976:11).
Pro-integration public opinion, by this rationale (as well as in much of
the advocacy of European elections, see Chapter 2), was to force top-
down action to deepen integration. At the same time, public opinion
was to be shaped by top-down action. After all, popular endorsement
was not strong enough for the project to be pushed forward during the
1970s and early 1980s. This kind of reasoning was circular. In order to
comply with what the European citizens wanted – supposedly, further
integration – their support had to be strengthened. To this end, not only
whatever Europe had to offer, but also public opinion itself was in need
of adaptation: ‘If this extensive [popular] will for rapprochement is to take
on a political dimension vital to ensure that action is taken, Europe
must find its place among the major concerns of public opinion thus
ensuring that it will be the focal point of the political discussions of
tomorrow’ (CEC 1976:7). This did appeal to an assumed popular will
in justifying a drive for deepening rather than halting integration in a
moment of difficulty. However, the legitimating factor, that the people
allegedly wanted integration, had itself to be reinforced.
In the People’s Europe rhetoric, courting the will of the people was
both a normative imperative and a matter of political necessity. For
 A Europe Closer to its Citizens 81

example, ‘In democratic countries the will of governments alone is not

sufficient for such an undertaking [supranational integration]. The need
for it, its advantages and its gradual achievement must be perceived by
everyone so that effort and sacrifices are freely accepted. Europe must be
close to its citizens’ (CEC 1976:26). This wording was deliberately vague
as to whether what would be ‘sufficient’ was the object of a normative
statement or an empirical prediction about practicality; a favourable
popular will was vital both for justifying and for advancing integration.
The above quoted statement did reverberate with a (noncommittal)
normative overtone that citizens should have a say about whether
or not to revolutionise the political framework in which they lived.
More importantly, however, Europe had to be close to its citizens if,
and because, supranational integration was only feasible provided that
‘everyone’ wanted it.
Still, these quotes exemplify what was a major reversal in official legit-
imation discourses: the People’s Europe rhetoric turned centrally around
what the citizens wanted out of integration. Frequent invocations of
the popular will underlined how official discourses took into ever more
account the perspective of the European citizens. Popular support was
to be mobilised, and not least by attributing some importance to what
citizens thought and felt about the European construction. Nonetheless,
what this typical language actually offered was not a re-imagination
of, say, a popular will indispensable for authorising or controlling the
Community’s authority. Instead, it continued in a different direction.
True, it called for promoting acceptance by the citizens. But it did not
call for an invitation to express their will open-endedly. That ‘effort and
sacrifices’ had to be undertaken was due to an absolute ‘need’: it was not
open to discussion. Effectively, this called for reinforcing citizen accept-
ance by promoting popular insight into the necessity and benefits of
the project. The answer to the ‘will of governments’ not being sufficient
for legitimating and achieving European Union was not to consult, or
comply with, the will of a popular sovereign. It was to make the people
want European Union. The people’s will was a malleable object of instru-
mental benefit, rather than the location of popular sovereignty.
At the same time, in the logic of the People’s Europe, the uppermost
measuring stick in determining a new ‘common vision of Europe’ and
of what exactly the Community should deliver, was whatever it took to
make people want European Union. The ‘need to redefine the objectives
of European integration’ in line with whatever would make its subjects
endorse it became a frequent motif in discourses on the Community’s
legitimacy in the late 1970s, and even more so in the 1980s (here EP
82 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

1984, see also e.g. CEC 1988a:4). The European Council invited an ad hoc
committee, chaired by Pietro Adonnino, to draw up concrete proposals
for how to achieve this (Council 1984, CEC 1985d).
A concurrent element of the People’s Europe discourses, however,
gave the Community rather unequivocal agency in both interpreting
and shaping citizen ideals. The Adonnino group, for instance, spelt out
that ‘the European Community will respond to the views of its citi-
zens only if it [ ... ] provides a channel for their ideals’ (CEC 1985d:19).
Jacques Delors, in a speech to the College of Europe in Bruges (1989),
openly advocated deepening integration by imposition from above in
order to ‘find the paths of integration through the top, since without
the latter the small streams of neighbouring solidarities will never come
together into one big river’. Both examples drew on supposed citizen
preferences or predilections to morally boost specific political objectives
(the group’s proposals; or top-down reform of the Community frame-
work and its policies, respectively). In the same breath, however, they
asserted that only action from above, including far-reaching institutional
reform, could bring isolated, half-conscious, and half-hearted grass-root
wishes to fruition. Even if the citizens knew what they wanted, they
would need political coordination from above. The Community Delors
championed in this speech was not ‘close to the people’ in that the
drive for its deepening would originate with them. In this frankness, he
departed from much of the People’s Europe rhetoric, which rather cele-
brated the additional momentum for integration that would supposedly
arise from better-inspired citizens.
Even in his picture though, and definitely in the general imagery of
the People’s Europe, the citizens would be the main addressees of any
top-down political action. The latter only realised for them what they
could not achieve on their own initiative. A final typical feature of these
discourses was that they disregarded the possibility that there might
well be bottom-up preferences against integration, or elements of it (see
Chapters 2, 4 and 6).

Communicating with the people and quantifying promises

Another key image in the People’s Europe imagery was that of a ‘dialogue’
between the European Community and the European citizens. The
latter had not only to be listened to, and to be taken seriously, but they
also had to be informed, persuaded, and communicated with. This was
compatible with the concept discussed in Chapter 2 of a strong and
elected EP as both a ‘sounding board and [a] stimulator of [ ... ] public
 A Europe Closer to its Citizens 83

opinion’ (CEC 1972a:34). The People’s Europe campaign now went hand
in hand with an increase of efforts and resources devoted to information
and communication policies.
A first step in transforming the Community into a People’s Europe was
to understand what the people wanted. In 1974, the ‘Eurobarometer’
was introduced. Its name was chosen as a metaphor for measuring the
‘atmospheric pressure’ of public opinion (Eurobarometer 1/1974:2). Ever
since, it has provided regular Community-wide surveys on popular atti-
tudes towards the Community/Union and particular policies, on their
overall satisfaction with life, their perception of the level of democracy
in their respective member-states and the Community, the development
of a sense of European identity, and so on. But how appropriate was this
tool in identifying what the citizens wanted out of Europe, and what
would bring the Community closer to them? Naturally, it was difficult
to detect a popular will from statistical enquiries.
Like all opinion polls, the Eurobarometer was a construct as well as
an tool to gauge the popular will and a European public opinion (see
Manin 1997:231), and the People’s Europe campaign actively capitalised
on this constructivist function of the act of polling, and of statistics more
broadly. This function capitalises in part on the fact that interviewees
might not actually have pre-fabricated attitudes that they are aware of,
and might ‘make it up as they go along’, which exposes them to sugges-
tion implicit in the design and situation of the poll (Zaller 1992:76). For
example, collecting information about ‘European public opinion’, the
attitudes of ‘Community citizens’ and ‘European consumers’ helped to
create these very categories – and ultimately that of a European ‘people’
(see Shore 2000:30–1). Questions regarding a European identity also
constructed as much as they measured popular beliefs by implying that
citizens did not necessarily identify automatically and exclusively with
their member-states. The Eurobarometer’s founding director Jacques-
René Rabier, in a 2003 interview, embraced this constructivist function
of the series, helping to build a ‘European consciousness’: ‘It was not just
about learning about European public opinion, but also about adver-
tising to this opinion what the citizens of this or that country thought
about the same topics’. One of the surveys’ principal objectives was to
‘reveal the Europeans to each other’ – thus projecting a community of
European citizens engaged in mutual exchange and a community of fate
(Rabier 2003:1, 5).
Moreover, the Eurobarometer polls provided regular evidence for
high levels of popular support for integration. Public support rose
steadily throughout the 1980s, peaking in 1991 with 71 per cent thinking
84 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

their country’s membership was a good thing (Eurobarometer 37/June

1992:8). This of course played into the hands of a campaign projecting
a Community close to and endorsed by Europeans. Approval figures
were lower when people were asked if their own country benefited
from the Community. Hence, while to most Europeans integration did
command support, they did not perceive their country’s membership as
producing concrete benefits to the same extent. In order to promote this
perception, the Eurobarometer collected information on the citizens’
concerns and needs; in short, on what might be perceived as benefits.
And this is where its real strength lay with regards to promoting the
Community to its citizens. According to Rabier, the Eurobarometer’s
other principal objective was to ‘guide the information policy’. It did
this by providing information on ‘who we are talking to, what we
should talk about, and how we should talk about it’ (2003:1, 5). The
Commission’s Directorates-General could ask for specific questions to
be included in the Eurobarometer in order to find out how best to pitch
particular policy initiatives. In fact, Rabier deplored that the informa-
tion policy did not make sufficient use of the Eurobarometer, as with
a meteorological early warning system (2003:5): ‘When the European
Union is attacked in a country of the Union on a given subject, is there
an immediate response that systematically puts inconsistencies right?
I do not think so’. Note how Rabier took for granted that the hypo-
thetical attack was based on ‘errors’ or faulty information, playing
down the possibility that people could simply disagree with what the
Community was and did. Moreover, it was top-down information,
and thereby indirectly public opinion, that had to be rectified, rather
than the particular policy, institutional feature, or other aspect of the
European Union under attack.
In sum, the Eurobarometer might have been better suited for testing
people’s reactions to particular policy offers and information strategies,
and fine-tuning the latter to the former, than for developing new poli-
cies or even reforming the Community institutionally in response to
their wishes. On the basis of Rabier’s remarks, one could say it was the
wrapping rather than the content that was adjusted to fit what had been
detected in popular opinion. Needless to say, this undermined claims
that the Eurobarometer helped make the Community and its policies
more responsive to citizen expectations. Where Eurobarometer results
were cited with regard to the actual definition of policy, it was often
to give weight to political demands and influence, or rationalise policy
(Shore 2000:31). For example, the executive summary of the June 1992
Standard Eurobarometer reads like a political manifesto:
 A Europe Closer to its Citizens 85

In all European countries except Denmark, people on average want

to speed up the construction of Europe [ ... ]. EC citizens are very
much in favour of the Single Market having a social dimension
[ ... ]. The European public strongly supports the idea of a common
foreign policy and a common defence/security [ ... ]. Europeans
are very preoccupied by environmental protection and want it to
become a Community area of responsibility [ ... ]. (Eurobarometer
Nr 37, June 1992:i)

By the 1980s at the latest, the claim to reflect the ‘most immediate
concerns of the European citizens’ (e.g. Santer 1985) or correspond
to the ‘deepest aspirations of their peoples’ (CEC 1973c:I, see Council
1984:11, 1983:24) was an integral part of the repertoire of discursive
commonplaces of any report, white paper, speech in the EP, Council
closing statement, and the like. Precisely what such documents asserted
to be the most urgent needs and desires of the citizens evolved over time.
Some lists were random assortments reflecting the political projects of
the day (see e.g. Council 1990, 1988a). Overall, unemployment, pres-
sures on the welfare state, economic difficulties, and growth, constituted
the overpowering issues throughout the 1980s (as well as the 1990s).
The Council engaged in ‘ritualistic denunciations’ of unemployment at
successive summits (Dinan 2004:306); the Commission joined in and
issued annual reports on unemployment as of the late 1980s. This is
to be seen not least in the light of struggles over the introduction of a
European social policy and Economic and Monetary Union. The Social
Protocol was added to the Treaty on European Union in 1991, but the EC
continued to have virtually no policy tools to alleviate unemployment.
Certainly an absolutely central technique of bringing Europe closer
to the people focused not so much on doing good, as on talking about
the good already being done. The discourse of a dialogue with the
citizens involved not only gathering information on their needs and
concerns, but also an information policy by which information flowed
in the direction of the citizens. The first direct EP elections in 1979 had
been a key catalyst for strategists within the Commission and the other
European institutions to increase efforts to try to ‘sell the Community’
and ‘market Europe more effectively’ (Shore 1993:783, citing a ‘key
activist’ in the Commission’s Citizen’s Europe campaign). They hatched
the plan of a comprehensive information and communication strategy,
fully institutionalised in the early 1990s and overseen by the Directorate
General X with its portfolio ‘Information, Communication, Culture
and Audiovisual Media’ (Bee 2008:443, see e.g. CEC 1993d and e, 1994,
86 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

1995b). But already the People’s Europe campaign called for information
policies designed to communicate the Community’s and the respective
institution’s achievements to the citizens. Their purpose was to stimu-
late ‘awareness’, raise ‘consciousness’, and make the Community’s and
the respective institution’s ‘presence felt’ (CEC 1988a:11, see 5; see also
Rabier 2003:5). Council President Jacques Santer (1985) summed up
the underlying rationale: ‘How many laudable efforts of the European
authorities are simply ineffective because the citizen does not know
about them?’ Effectiveness in this context meant bringing home the use
and benefit of Community action to the citizens. Statistical evidence
seemed to confirm that, generally, the citizens who were better informed
about European integration were more likely to support it (Inglehart
1970). This was all the more true if the benefits and attainments of the
Community, and positive perceptions of what it represented, could be
communicated to them convincingly.
Information policies, like Community action more broadly, were
supposed to be marked by a pragmatic focus on ‘those areas of greatest
importance [and ‘irritation’] to the citizen in his daily life’ (CEC
1985d:20) – in other words, those areas where additional informa-
tion could be anticipated to increase citizen support and to help foster
‘European consciousness’. The Commission praised as a best-practice
example the way it harmonised its general information campaign with
the citizens’ ‘preoccupations of everyday life’. For example, since it
is ‘in their role as consumers that the public is especially affected by
Community action [ ... ,] everything is to be gained by drawing its atten-
tion to the fact that the health, safety, information, and economic
interests of the consumer have been the main focus of legislation’ (CEC
1988a:10–11). This pragmatic aspiration not only marked informa-
tion campaigns, but was supposed to prioritise and structure the actual
content of Community action (in the later example regarding the vast
endeavour of simplifying and systematically codifying Community
law, CEC 1985d:20, but see also e.g. Council 1988b:9). In this recurrent
discourse, policy and institutional reform should be planned with the
anticipated effect of specific measures on popular approval in mind – or,
phrased more positively, with a view to giving the citizens what they
wanted most.
An inevitable question, or reproach, in the context of this new emphasis
on communication with the citizens was that of to what extent the offi-
cial information policy limited itself to merely informing the public. The
Commission made clear that in order to make the People’s Europe a
reality, information policy ‘must do more than produce facts; it must also
 A Europe Closer to its Citizens 87

provide explanations’ (1985d). This opened space for constructing and

promoting particular understandings of the supposed fact. The report by
expert group commissioned by the Commission and chaired by Willy
De Clercq took this even further, recommending that the governments
should no longer even try to explain the Maastricht treaty to their publics
given that ‘treaty texts are far too technical and remote from daily life for
people to understand’ (CEC 1993e:4, quoted Shore 2000:56). Instead, he
proposed a professionalised branding campaign, drawing on tools used
in advertising (Shore 2000:55–6). Accordingly, efforts should focus on
positioning the European Union ‘as a “good product”, with an emphasis
on the beneficial effects “for me”’ (1993:13). The report’s recommenda-
tions (and in particular, the proposal to focus on journalists as a priority
target groups’ so that they could ‘become enthusiastic supporters of the
cause’, CEC 1993e:35, all quoted Shore 2000:56) were perceived to be so
patronising that some journalists staged a walkout and compared the
Commission’s behaviour at the press conference unveiling the report to
that of a military junta (Shore 2000:55).
In terms of the content communicated to the citizens, the most impor-
tant project coinciding with the forging of the People’s Europe was the
completion of the single market. Here a common discursive device was to
represent the global, and externally given situation, in a way that made
Community Europe and the single market look like the necessary and
adequate solution. Supposedly exogenously given problems were framed
symmetrically to the solutions offered. The way we define a problem
(and that we define it as a problem in the first place), which aspects
of reality we foreground, and which we leave undiscussed, always pre-
determines assessments of the effectiveness of available solutions (see
Hajer 1995:5ff., 43). A classic example of this discursive technique was
the recurrent image of the history of European integration as a string
of appropriate responses to the evolving challenges facing the member-
states (e.g. Delors 1989, see recently Fontaine 2006). The Ur-storyline
here, of course, was that ‘common problems require common solutions’;
the member-states shared the most burning challenges facing them, and
could only meet them by collective Community action (see also Dinan
2004:168).
In this vein, advocates of the single market carefully nurtured the
motif, already well anchored in the member-state public spheres, that
European competitiveness was poor compared to that of the USA and
Japan. This took up the ‘catching-up’ theme discussed in Chapter 1.
Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber’s international bestseller ‘The American
Challenge’, for instance, had evoked how American firms were invading
88 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

Europe’s feeble and fragmented markets thanks to superior American

management techniques, research capacities, technology, and econo-
mies of scale, as well as American industry’s international reach (1967).
Official statements on the single market tapped into this imagery. They
routinely emphasised the harsh international climate, low economic
growth in Europe, the ‘slow-down in the world economy and trade’,
or resource scarcity after the oil shock (CEC 1987a:1), as well as the
compromised ‘international competitiveness of European industry’ due
to the ‘compartmentalization of the common market’ (CEC 1985c:11).
This discourse made the single market look indispensable. It positioned
it as the long-awaited ‘equal opportunity’ for Community industry ‘to
maximise its efficiency, reduce its costs and sharpen its competitive edge’
in relation to the feared overseas competitors (CEC 1987a:2). Given
the outlined necessities, only the single market would allow ‘European
firms’ to make ‘the most of an internal market’ of a population of 320
million (CEC 1985c:11) and create ‘a more favourable environment for
stimulating enterprise, competition and trade’ (Council 1985:12).
A symptomatic rhetorical device in discourses advocating the single
market was to make the project’s benefits as well as its costs tangible. To
this end, the Commission charged economists with calculating concrete
figures for the projected ‘Benefits of a Single Market’. They estimated
that the single market would significantly reduce unemployment and
raise annual growth rates to as much as six per cent (Cecchini et al.
1988). This framed everything less a loss of something already taken for
granted. It was not the establishment of the single market that would
incur intolerable costs, but inaction. The ‘Costs of Non-Europe’ (CEC
1988b, Cecchini et al. 1988, see also e.g. CEC 1985b:6) were higher
than the initial efforts involved in establishing the single market and in
achieving the already experienced benefits. ‘To do less would be to [ ... ]
offer the peoples of Europe to a narrower, less rewarding, less secure, less
prosperous future than they could otherwise enjoy’ (CEC 1985a:55). This
shifted the burden of proof from those advocating a particular political
programme to those opposing it. Opponents of the single market would,
then, have to justify robbing the peoples of Europe of what they were
meant to obtain.
The promise of the single market did succeed in capturing people’s
imaginations. Public opinion was solidly behind it (Eurobarometer 29
/June 1988:28–33, see Eichenberg and Dalton 2007:134). For the first
time in its history, the Community formed a ‘topic of general discus-
sion among Europeans interested in current affairs’. In 1987 especially,
the single market programme was greatly popularised. By the end of
 A Europe Closer to its Citizens 89

the year, it was a ‘staple item’ in newspapers, as well as radio and tele-
vision programmes throughout the member-states (Dinan 2004:218,
233). To be sure, by 1993 the advantageous forecasts and the public
euphoria were buried under recession, high interest rates, and soaring
unemployment. Unsurprisingly furthermore, there was always disa-
greement on what exactly a ‘single market’ implied. To Margaret
Thatcher, for instance, it meant ‘action to free markets, action to widen
choice, action to reduce government intervention’ (1988). To others, it
would empower not only companies but also governance to operate
at a European scale and create new social and economic policy instru-
ments now that ‘Keynesianism in one country’ had become obsolete
(see Cafruny and Rosenthal 1993:4).
In conclusion, then, the European institutions’ information policy
and their discourses generally were marked by the goal of aligning their
communication with the citizens with what could be identified as being
their most important concerns and expectations. The ideal of a two-way
dialogue with the citizens stood against more or less explicit commit-
ments to manipulating public opinion and understandings. Further
key elements were the strategy of better publicising the attainments
of integration as well as what Europeans would lose out on without
integration, and efforts to influence what citizens wanted out of the
Community, and why.

Forging Europeans

The third pillar of the People’s Europe campaign was to make the
‘cultural and human dimension of Community action [ ... ] a driving
force towards the achievement of the European ideal’ (CEC 1985d:52).
Official People’s Europe rhetoric appealed to the Community subjects
as complex, culturally and socially embedded human beings, who felt
‘European’, and on these grounds sensed a link to each other and to the
Community. Creating the People’s Europe meant making ‘Europeans’. A
shift is notable between the early 1970s and the 1980s even within those
discourses addressing the cultural underpinnings of European integra-
tion. In the early days, cultural measures tended to be referred to as
instrumental, and subordinate, to achieving economic development and
integration (e.g. CEC 1973b:11, see Bee 2008:438). However, soon the
competing discourse emerged that fostering a collective European iden-
tity and a feeling of belonging to a European culture was an ‘objective’
in itself (e.g. CEC 1988a:2–3, 11–12) – albeit still instrumental in propel-
ling and legitimating ‘the building of a united Europe’ (CEC 1973a:6).
90 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

Three types of tools stood out in the ways official discourses (as well
as policies) strove to establish the cultural and human dimension of the
People’s Europe. In what follows, I consider them in turn. The first was
to address the citizens in their immediate practical life-world, through
tangible ‘external signs discernible in everyday life’ (CEC 1976:IV.A, see
1985d:10). A second technique aimed to shape people’s cultural self-
understandings. It aimed to make them associate ‘Europe’ with ‘culture’,
and both with the European Community. Third, I shall look at discur-
sive constructions of the ‘European identity’ through official declara-
tions and representations in wider official discourse.
The first crucial approach to forging ‘Europeans’ involved making
them feel the reality of ‘Europe’ in their everyday experience through
symbols as well as concrete benefits. The Adonnino Committee proposed
‘initiatives of symbolic value’ and measures that were ‘meaningful to the
citizen in various aspects of his daily life’. The underlying aim was to
‘strengthen the Community’s image and identity’ for the citizens, and
give them ‘a clearer perception of [its] dimension and existence’ (CEC
1985d:29–30, see Council 1984:11, CEC 1976:27–8).
From 1985 onwards, a number of official Community symbols
were adopted (see Shore 2000:47–8, CEC 1988a:5–9). The blue and
yellow starred flag was chosen as the official emblem of the European
Community in 1985. The citizens were issued standardised burgundy-
coloured European passports and (in many member-states) pink and later
plastic European driving licences. Customs signs at the Community’s
internal frontiers were replaced. Car number plates were harmonised
and could now carry the emblem of the twelve stars on a blue back-
ground. Beethoven’s Ode to Joy from the Ninth Symphony was made the
official Community anthem. These symbols not only ‘enable[d] indi-
viduals to interpret political reality’, but also contributed to creating
that reality (Shore 1993:790, see Turner 1974, Bruter 2005). By forging
its ‘consciousness-raising’ Community symbols, the People’s Europe
campaign aimed to shape people’s interpretation of political reality, and
bring a more ‘European’ reality into being (CEC 1988a:9).
In addition to the symbolic level, the People’s Europe campaign
foresaw giving the European subjects some immediately felt mate-
rial benefits, such as a student stipend, or being able to by unlimited
cheap cigarettes, alcohol, or fuel across the border. More generally,
‘Europe’ should be ‘made tangible through the content of its policies’
(CEC 1985d:10). Even national policies should be given a ‘European
dimension’ (see Bee 2008:435). The new social cohesion and struc-
tural policies (CEC 1976:24–5, 1988a:1) played a prominent role in this
 A Europe Closer to its Citizens 91

respect, as did the implementation of the single market – ‘with all this
implies for people’s daily lives’ (CEC 1988a:9, see 22–6, 1985d:9–12).
Freedom of movement and residence as well as material benefits from
Community programmes had symbolic in addition to practical or cash
value. Underlying this aspect of the People’s Europe was a bread-and-
circuses rationale, according to which people would endorse whoever or
whatever benefited, supported, and entertained them – the safest way to
the hearts of European citizens being ‘through their pockets’ (Tsoukalis
2005:157). The People’s Europe’s masterminds hoped that reaching for
people’s hearts in this way would make citizens feel European, and thus
support integration.
A second approach to creating people who considered themselves
Europeans, and who felt the unification of Europe was important,
was represented by the Community’s cultural policy, developed from
1977 by the Commission with the ‘steadfast support of Parliament’
and ‘formal recognition’ by the Council (CEC 1988a:11). The idea was
that if people associated the Community with ‘culture’, and identified
with this particular culture, they would identify with the Community.
Moreover, the integration process could be boosted by ‘highlighting’ the
‘European dimension of culture’ (CEC 1973a:6). This indicates an even
grander goal underlying the cultural policies; they also aimed to make
people associate ‘culture’ in its essence with ‘Europe’ – and more particu-
larly with the European Community. A number of programmes were
designed in order to construct a collective memory and consciousness of
a ‘European cultural heritage’ (Chapuis 2009, see CEC 1988a:12, 1973c).
They involved the restoration and conservation of historical places,
architecture, artefacts, and works of art, and the ‘European Capitals of
Culture’ and town-twinning programmes. The latter initiatives were
intended to ‘bring the peoples of Europe together’. They were ways of
creating the perception of a connected space of mutual exchange and a
shared culture: ‘a European cultural area’ (CEC 1988a:12). In addition to
heritage and space, the European institutions constructed a whole new
‘ritual calendar’ (Shore 2000:49) of Euro-holidays, ‘European Weeks’ of
cultural encounters and exchange, ‘European Cultural Months’, and
‘European Years’ of one thing or another; for instance, of ‘Cinema and
Television’ (CEC 1988a:10, 38). In order to ‘encourage the spread of
information and better knowledge of each other’ (CEC 1976:28), the
Commission further promoted both production and collaboration across
member-states in the field of the information media. The (unrealised)
plan of the late 1980s, to introduce an EU-wide multilingual TV infor-
mation channel, would have projected a sense of commonality among
92 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

viewers who simultaneously received the same information about the

world as well as about each other.
The Commission’s cultural policy laid particular emphasis on promoting
the enjoyment as well as the production of culture (see Schlesinger 2001,
Theiler 2001). The intermediate goal was to ‘mobilise wider audiences’
and improve access to cultural resources. A top priority was supporting
cultural production in music and fine arts, as well as, most importantly,
in the audiovisual sector. This was done for instance through profes-
sional and artistic training, through subsidizing the production and
distribution of audiovisual material (CEC 1988a:12–3). Of course, there
had to be a ‘European dimension’ to the ‘culture’ supported, which was
to be secured by encouraging co-productions (CEC 1985d:21), or even
by paying broadcasters for including this dimensions in their shows, as
the unfortunate De Clercq Report foresaw (CEC 1993e:35, cited in Shore
2000:56). On the whole, information media, films, television shows, and
other cultural products from all parts of the Community were supposed
to make Europeans get to know, identify, and sympathise with each
other. Moreover, the underlying hope was that citizens would come to
associate the practices of both consuming and producing culture with
Community Europe. The gradual transnational intertwining of cultural
production and consumption was to make Europeans identify with each
other, with ‘Europe’, and with the European Community as generous
patron of ‘culture.
Finally, in addition to symbols, benefits, and cultural policies, the
European institutions of course constructed what it meant to be European
through their discourse, both by simply using terms like ‘European’ or
‘European identity’ in specific ways, and through solemn declarations
(see Bee 2008). The ‘Document on the European Identity’ adopted by
the 1973 European summit in Copenhagen (CEC 1973c) had given the
first direct official definition of what European identity might consist
in. It is commonly referred to as the first step in the ongoing creation
of belonging (e.g. Wiener 1997:539). It defined what it meant to be
European in terms of the ‘diversity of cultures within the framework
of a common European civilization, the attachment to common values
and principles, the increasing convergence of attitudes to life, the aware-
ness of having specific interests in common and the determination [else-
where, the ‘political will’] to take part in the construction of a United
Europe’ (I). This seminal definition was to become a reference point in
later political demands canvassing, for example, resources for informa-
tion and cultural policies, expanded EP powers, or ‘special rights’ for
Community citizens (e.g. CEC 1985d:19–21).
 A Europe Closer to its Citizens 93

Moreover, it already encapsulated many of the patterns characterising

identity-building discourses during the subsequent decade, as well as
the 1990s and 2000s, as I will discuss later in Chapter 5. In particular,
the 1973 declaration paradigmatically represented European identity
concurrently as being produced by, and at the same time producing,
further integration. Accordingly, the European identity would, on
the one hand, ‘evolve as a function of the dynamic construction of a
United Europe’ (CEC 1973c:III). That is, identity formation would be
the outcome of further integration. During the 1980s, this power would
be attributed above all to the single market and its ‘flanking policies’ of
economic and social cohesion. For instance, ‘The widening of horizons
strengthens the sense of a common identity, the feeling of belonging to
the same Community’ (CEC 1988b:2). In this neofunctionalist under-
standing, European identity was a spillover product of the ‘political
will’ to unite Europe economically and politically (CEC 1973c:I., see
Chapter 1). On the other hand, the Copenhagen Declaration emphasised
that defining the Community’s identity would contribute to a common
foreign policy, which, in turn, would help the ‘proposed transformation
of the whole complex of their relations into a European Union’. Hence,
the document bowed to the overarching telos of achieving a ‘United
Europe’. ‘The European identity’ was a twice removed auxiliary, which
would propel a European foreign policy and thereby help to ‘tackle [ ... ]
further ‘stages in the construction of a United Europe’ (CEC 1973c:III).
Yet it was also the motivating force behind the integration project, which
in essence was ‘a basic European necessity to ensure the survival of the
civilization’ which the member-states held in common (CEC 1973c:I).
This between a European identity as the outcome of, and at the same
time a driving force behind, future integration, became typical of offi-
cial discourses on European identity of the 1980s. They often painted
this virtuous circle whereby European identity motivated – or justified –
additional integration steps, while these steps in turn nurtured a collec-
tive sense of identity (e.g. CEC 1988b:2).
Another pattern in the Community institutions’ discursive construc-
tions of a European identity, also pre-empted by the Copenhagen
Declaration, concerned the relationship between European and national
identities. On the one hand, official discourse defined European identity
against nationalism, the root cause of war and strife. Taking up the post-
or anti-nationalist discourses discussed in Chapter 1, the Copenhagen
Declaration had been characteristic in delineating the Community Europe
against the continent’s past of war, ‘disunity’, ‘enmities’, and ‘misjudged
interests’. The Commission’s communication strategists considered
94 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

nationalism a ‘major obstacle’ to European unity and peace (Shore

2000:16); this obstacle could be overcome by anchoring a collective sense
European identity in the public mindset. This rationale might account for
what Yannis Stavrakakis has called the Copenhagen Declaration’s ‘naively
pacifist, neutral, even unreal language’ (2005:82). This documented antic-
ipated a common discourse that painted the Community’s international
identity in friendly, non-aggressive, and universalistic colours: ‘European
unification is not directed against anyone, nor is it inspired by a desire for
power’. If it was to avoid the dangers attached to nationalism, the desired
European identity could not be nationalism writ large.
Simultaneously, official constructions of European identity typically
defined it as compatible rather than conflicting with national identities.
In this discourse, the creation of a collective European identity was a way
of protecting, preserving, and developing national and regional cultures
and identities (see e.g. CEC 1988a:33). ‘Richness’ would classically be
associated with national culture (e.g. CEC 1973c:I, 1973a:6).1 A specifi-
cally European culture, heritage, and identity, in contrast, arose from
this diversity, and a history of exchange and interaction that linked the
nations of Europe (e.g. CEC 1988a:9, 5, see Chapter 5 for a discussion of
the role of this motif in the constitutional debates). Community iden-
tity-building was caught in the predicament of concurrently blunting
the potential of national identities to obstruct the integration project,
while retaining a sufficiently thick collective cultural self-understanding
to inspire loyalty and identification in people. The challenge was to
project a universal, inclusive identity that would overcome the exclu-
sivism of nationalism (at least within the Community population), but
retain its mobilising power. A promising middle way was to build on
existing national identities, but to redefine them as essentially European
(see Wæver 2005). In this blueprint, being French or Spanish was not
the same as being European – but being European was a vital part of
being French or Spanish. ‘What we tried to create was a double sense
of belonging; being British and being European’, as Cris Shore cites an
informant on the Commission’s cultural policy (1993:783).
This strategy aspired to counteract the important competing discourse
representing identification with Europe and with the respective nation-
states in zero-sum terms: the more European, the less Danish or British
people would feel. Statistical evidence confirmed empirically that
national and European identities were compatible and even mutually
reinforcing; particularly in the 1980s, strong national pride was in no
way opposed to a strong feeling of belonging to Europe (Duchesne and
Frognier 2002:360). On this intuition perhaps, official discourses built
 A Europe Closer to its Citizens 95

their European identity-building on the concurrent active reinforcement

of national identities. Many measures, specifically in the field of cultural
policy, were designed to promote national identities, but to rework these
as essentially European.
A final recurrent discourse characterising official language on European
identity during the 1980s was the reference to European identity-building
as a recipe for increasing popular support (see e.g. CEC1985d:21).
Many Commission officials during the 1980s understood that identity-
building was a ‘potential answer’ to the Community’s legitimacy gaps
(Shore 1993:785). Official discourses of the 1980s, and the identity-
building policies I analysed in the previous sections of this chapter, took
for granted that allegiance to ‘Europe’ as a practical, cultural, or affective
reference of belonging would result in endorsement of the Community
as a framework for political decision-making and economic problem-
solving. They also tended to use the term ‘European identity’ in the
senses of both the awareness of what it meant to be European to begin
with, and of the identification with this – taking for granted that the two
came together (see CEC 1985d:18, 21, 25). The assumption lying beneath
the active construction of ‘the European identity’ through the cultural,
education, or information policies I have discussed was that whoever
had a sense of what it meant to be European would identify with this
Europeanness, and would therefore support European integration.

Subjects into citizens

In the previous sections, I have discussed how the official People’s

Europe discourses appealed to the Community subjects’ everyday
experience and their senses of themselves as culturally and socially
embedded human beings. I now turn to a final aspect of the People’s
Europe discourse’s holistic approach to its subjects: its consti-
tuting them as political beings and rights-bearing citizens. This final
subchapter analyses the re-imagination of the Community subjects
as Community citizens (or Union citizens), involved in the political
life of the Community and entitled to political participation rights
as well as to special human rights protection. The way a polity’s
subjects are constituted is constitutive of the polity itself, and vice
versa (see Aristotle 1996:61–3). I therefore examine shifts in the self-
constitution of the Community by tracing the changing roles attrib-
uted to the Europeans in the project of European integration, the
developing meanings of ‘citizenship’, and official constructions of the
Community-subject relationship in general.
96 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

The Treaties of Paris and Rome defined the Community’s individual

subjects by virtue of their belonging to specific ‘categories of economic
and social life’, in particular, ‘producers, agriculturists, transport oper-
ators, workers, merchants, artisans, the liberal professions and of the
general interest’ (Art. 193 TEEC). Neither treaty even mentioned the word
‘citizen’. What the Rome and Paris Treaties thus did not constitute their
subjects as being, is underlined strikingly by the comparison with the
French Declaration on the Rights of Man and the Citizen (Walters and
Haahr 2005b:46–8). While the latter codified inalienable human rights
to liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression, the EEC Treaty
bestowed on its subjects the rights of free movement and establishment
within the Community. Moreover, it did not grant these rights to indi-
viduals born free and equal, but to producers, workers, and so on. Rather,
individual rights in the Community framework were originally granted,
and often demanded, in terms of ‘economic logic’ (Maas 2005:1019).
Economic integration required, in particular, free movement of labour.
The implementation of this right to free movement hence prompted a
series of social and economic rights for specific socio-economic catego-
ries of people. Particularly from the 1980s onwards, the increasing move-
ment of workers led to the demand for greater social and political equality
among foreigners and nationals. According to this standard scholarly
narrative, Community subjects were gradually granted economic and
social rights, as well as later civil and political ones, because such rights
were instrumental to the superior aim of economic flexibility (Koslowski
1999, see Meehan 1993, Wiener and della Sala 1997, Wiener 1997). And
the European institutions indeed treated Europeans, for a long time and
to an important extent, as ‘market citizens’ (Ipsen 1972, Everson 1995)
or ‘worker-citizens’ (Wiener and della Sala 1997:604), referring to them
for example as ‘citizen-consumers’ (e.g. CEC 1988a:9). Nevertheless, the
European citizens were never exclusively market citizens. Already the
EEC Treaty provided for direct elections to the European Parliament,
subject to a unanimous vote in the Council (Art. 138.3, see later).
This framed the Community subjects, at least potentially, as political
citizens who were entitled to participate, through parliamentary repre-
sentation, in Community decision-making. It cast the Europeans as (at
least latent) ‘political authors’ of Community action, instead of purely
its objects or recipients (see Walters and Haahr 2005b:47). Besides, as
early as 1962 the Commission had affirmed ‘that individuals in the legal
order’ did ‘not simply exercise their fundamental rights as mere factors of
production but as holders of civil rights’ (cited after Kadelbach 2003:6).
In contradiction to the policy paradigm that emphasised economic
 A Europe Closer to its Citizens 97

rationales (see Wiener 1997:542), an initially fledgling counter-dis-

course stressed access to political rather than economic participation. It
represented the citizens as entitled to a set of rights, including political
participation as well as fundamental human and civil rights, and others
ranging from consumer and social rights to the right to environmental
protection (e.g. CEC 1976:25, 1985b:2).
European citizenship, according to this discourse, constituted a direct
link between citizens and Community. This link consisted in a certain
legal ‘value added’ arising from European citizenship, which would give
the citizens ‘special rights as members of the Community’ (Paris Summit
1974) – that is, rights ‘specific to the Union’ (EP 1984:3, see 4.1). This
bonding power was ascribed to passive protection rights – safeguarded
more effectively than could be ‘guaranteed solely by individual States’
(CEC 1976:26) – as well as active participation rights (e.g. CEC 1993c).
European elections, in particular, were demanded on the grounds that
they would ‘associate the peoples directly to the construction of Europe’
(e.g. EPA 1960a:834, see Chapter 2).
The rights-based discourse on European citizenship first gained leverage
not least with the campaign for, and the introduction of, direct elections
to the European Parliament in 1979 (see Chapter 2). The heyday of its
articulation and its spread in the rhetoric of the European institutions
was during the 1980s, when the introduction of Union citizenship and
voting rights for third-country member-state nationals were negotiated.
Union citizenship and the codification of codifying rights specific to the
Community reappeared became a central element of the People’s Europe
project, and remained on the agenda from the 1970s and throughout
the 1980s (see Shaw 1997:III). While formal Union citizenship was not
codified until Maastricht, it did develop out of decades of Community
practice and discourse effectively treating Community subjects as
bearers, not only of economic and social rights, but also political, civil,
and human rights.
The official discourses positing the European citizens as rights-bearing
citizens during the 1980s demanded rights for them not only on grounds
of economic necessities. At least at the level of discourses, the standard
explanation of European citizenship in terms of economic logic neglects
this important discourse, which stipulated European citizenship and
rights on the basis of entitlements and normative claims about demo-
cratic legitimacy. The European Parliament’s ‘Draft Treaty on European
Union’ (EP 1984) exemplified this paradigm shift. It canvassed, for
example, uniform procedures across all member-states for EP elections,
more powers for the EP, and a right of appeal to the ECJ and of petition
98 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

to the Parliament for all citizens. Parliament supported these demands

by insisting that ‘Citizens of the Union shall take part in the political
life of the Union’ (EP 1984:4.1) – which it implied constituted an end in
itself, rather than a means to superior economic ends. The whole docu-
ment thus turned attention to the individual citizen’s role in overseeing
Union decision-making and as the ultimate source of its legitimacy.
Besides, the fact that the EP adopted this draft ‘treaty’ already asserted
the principles of representative democracy and the popular sovereignty
of the Union’s citizens. There was no mandate, say, from the European
Council. Rather, the EP self-assumed the role of acting, in the citizens’
representation, as a constituent assembly, drafting the political systems
(retroactive) foundational document or constitution. It justified its initi-
ative in the democratic legitimacy resulting from its direct election by
the ‘citizens of the Union’ (EP 1984:4.1).
The Adonnino Reports equally mirrored the rights-based discourse on
citizenship I have identified. They affirmed a role for the ‘citizen as a
participant in the political process in the Community’ as a ‘desirable’
end, and proposed measures ‘to increase citizen’s involvement in and
understanding of the political process in the Community institutions’,
including a European Ombudsman whom he or she could petition, or
the vote across the member-states. In addition to the right to participate
in and control political decision-making and deliberation, the reports
described European citizenship and special citizen’s rights ‘in relation
to Community legal instruments’, taking up the underlying discursive
ideal of special rights protection by the latter (1985d:19–20). Finally, a
Commission report recommending ‘Voting rights in local elections for
Community nationals’ across member-states (CEC1986) made its case
for such rights by stressing that the ‘most important considerations’
were ‘those of morality and justice’. Among those was the ‘spirit’ (rather
than the ‘letter’) of the Treaties.
Moreover, this report explicitly projected the image that Community
citizen should participate, through their elected representatives, in
the political decisions that affected them: ‘Decisions taken by a local
council (on schools, town planning, local taxes, etc.) affect all residents
irrespective of nationality’; therefore, all residents should be entitled
to participate in the election of this council (CEC 1986:7–8). ‘[R]eal
participation by the citizens in the Community project’ was necessary
‘as policies develop gradually in areas that affect them directly’ (CEC
1990:III). This discourse implied a normative statement, which applied
to the Community polity the Kantian or Rousseauean ideal that ‘the
addressees of the law should be able to conceive of themselves at the
 A Europe Closer to its Citizens 99

same time as its authors’ (Habermas 1998:112). To be sure, in the above

discursive examples, the citizens did not need to participate in the actual
decisions that affected them, but in the integration project as a whole.
In addition, the argument was taken only half way. ‘The same case’,
the 1986 report modified, ‘cannot be made for “political” elections
(parliamentary and presidential elections)’. Of course, decisions taken
by a national or regional parliament, or a President on matters such
as universities, regional planning, or taxes, do affect foreign residents
equally. There was an obvious argumentative compromise in excluding
‘political’ elections.
A different line of reasoning, which cut across official legitima-
tion discourses as well as demands for the extension of citizen rights,
was that European citizenship was a means of ‘developing a sense
of belonging to the European construction’, and of improving the
Community’s ‘democratic legitimacy’ (CEC 1990:III.2, see e.g. Spénale
1975:10). Re-configuring the Community as a ‘Citizen’s Europe’, where
the citizens had specific rights, was one of the key recommendations of
the Tindemans Report for bringing Europe nearer to the citizen (1976,
emphasis added). ‘European citizenship’ effectively came to stand
as shorthand for practiced ‘Europeanness’, a sense of European iden-
tity, and even a supportive attitude towards the Community (see e.g.
Prodi and Reding 2002). It was a common heading in documents by
the European institutions for cultural, social, identity, and rights-related
policies of the kinds analysed in this chapter (see e.g. CEC 1990:III).
This discursive linkage of European citizenship with European iden-
tity – and through this association, with the Community’s social legiti-
macy – provided opportunities for politically promoting Community
citizenship. Rights and democratic values were an important element of
most official constructions of European identity; this provided an argu-
ment for protecting or implementing them (e.g. CEC 1973c, 1985d:2).
In this sense, the discourse of the European institutions associated
European citizenship and European identity as mutually constitutive.
Constructions of European citizenship and of what it meant to partici-
pate in the political life of the Community were in a dialectical relation-
ship with more explicit constructions of ‘Europeans’ and a European
identity. According to the identity-base line of argument in favour of
European citizenship, the ‘Citizen’s Europe’ both expressed and inspired
the citizens’ collective sense of identity.
A key factor, of course, in establishing the Community subjects as
individual bearers of civil and social, as well as fundamental human
rights was the judicial activism of the European Court of Justice (ECJ),
100 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

as referred to in Chapter 1. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Court secured

the Treaties’ relevant guarantees through decisions on civil and social
rights, developed a determined human rights jurisdiction, and rigor-
ously applied the prohibition of discrimination based on nationality
(e.g. Weiler 1999). This negative provision in itself, and the Court’s juris-
diction more broadly, framed the individual as entitled to certain inal-
ienable rights independent of nationality in almost universalistic terms.
The ECJ’s important role notwithstanding, Union citizenship was more
than a mere formalisation of rights already existing in material law and
ECJ jurisdiction. It symbolically institutionalised the discourses I have
identified that recast ‘market citizens’, that is, the objects rather than
authors of Community action, as rights-bearing political beings with
‘political awareness’, entitled to ‘be involved in the building of Europe’
as well as to the protection of their rights as members of the Community
(CEC 1988a:9, 34, 35).

Conclusion

In conclusion, the project ‘People’s Europe’ epitomised how, from the

mid-1970s throughout the 1980s, the Community’s subjects moved to
the centre of attention in official discourse. This constituted a consider-
able shift from the legitimation- and critical counter-discourses that I
discussed in Chapters 1 and 2. The Community faced the double chal-
lenge of renewed difficulties in economic performance and of legiti-
mating its increased political dimension. These challenges were met
by a commitment to bringing the Community ‘closer to its citizens’.
This involved aligning political objectives with citizen expectations
and, through specific communication strategies, vice versa. Further, the
People’s Europe was constructed through policies aimed at the citizens’
everyday experience of the Community as useful to them, and at fostering
the sense that they, as individuals, partook in a ‘European culture’ and
a collective sense of European identity. Finally, Commission, Council,
and Parliament documents increasingly re-defined the Community
subjects as Community citizens with inalienable fundamental, as well
as political, rights. In the next chapter, I turn to the question of just
how successful these top-down techniques of shaping public percep-
tions of the Community and the status of its subjects were in appealing
to national imageries and languages.
In continuation of the results-centred foundational legitimation
discourses discussed in Chapter 1, the People’s Europe discourses took
for granted that the Community had to perform efficiently, and that
 A Europe Closer to its Citizens 101

this had to be improved further. Only what the Community would have
to perform, and how, was framed in reference to popular needs, desires,
and collective self-projections. The People’s Europe campaign empha-
sised input-oriented elements such as citizen expectations (whether
consensual or conflicting), citizen participation, or a collective sense of
being European. For example, it would frame the expansion of compe-
tences, especially for the single market, as a matter of responding to
citizen expectations of stable growth, employment, and increased
international competitiveness more efficiently, that is, as a matter of
input authenticity. In highlighting the link between the Community
and ‘what the citizens wanted’, the discourses of the European institu-
tions both responded, at some level at least, to the democracy-centred
counter-discourses discussed in Chapter 2, and anticipated the reasserted
role that the will of the people was to play in the French and German
Maastricht debates, as suggested in Chapter 4.
Still, the will of the people in the official discourses around the People’s
Europe rationales played a Janus-faced role. It was referred to both as an
object of manipulation, through communication and information poli-
cies, and as a supposed source of legitimacy for given policy positions
or polity characteristics. Input-oriented legitimacy elements would be
highlighted, especially wherever Community performance had reached
limits of material and political feasibility. Legitimacy could not, in these
cases, be claimed on grounds of efficient problem-solving perform-
ance. Input-oriented legitimation patterns were acts born of necessity
as well as, partly, rhetorical garnish. Tellingly, the active construction of
a ‘European identity’, and large-scale awareness-raising initiatives, first
gained momentum in the 1970s, when the Community’s claim to output
legitimacy was under pressure (see Chapter 2). The same applies to the
re-constitution of Community subjects as Union citizens. Member-state
citizens were increasingly being depicted increasingly as Community
citizens from the 1970s.
On these grounds, the People’s Europe campaign did distance itself
from the output-legitimation bias described in Chapter 1 for the earlier
decades. The lesson had been learned that too exclusive a focus becomes
problematic when this particular source of or claim to legitimacy comes
under pressure (see Habermas 1973). A more holistic approach was
called for. The campaign’s key image, that Community actions had to
deliver what the citizens wanted responsively and efficiently, put the
citizens and their will in the spotlight. The neofunctionalist discourse I
discussed in Chapter 1 had given way to an increased acknowledgement
that the progressive interlinking of economic institutions would not by
102 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

itself lead to a united Europe and to popular endorsement. Consequently,

the People’s Europe discourses combined efficiency-related languages
with democracy, rights, or identity-related ones. They aimed not only
at people’s immediate views of the Community, but also at their percep-
tion of the problems to which integration could be presented as the
solution, and their sense of who they were; culturally, politically, and
immediately in their personal life-worlds.
On a deeper level, of course, the main challenge continued to lie in
making the citizens want European integration. After all, integration
as a superior goal, and its institutional and partly supranational setup,
were not opened up for real contestation. The citizens’ will was ulti-
mately instrumental to the superior aim of achieving European unity.
It was no coincidence that Community-official language often talked
about ‘citizen expectations’ or ‘desires’ rather than the ‘will of the people’.
For this latter would not only have presupposed a more united body
politic, but it would also have implied more of an entitlement to exercise
popular sovereignty.
4
Maastricht in the French and
German Debates: Crumbling
Promises and the Question
of Who Might Rule

How did constructions of a People’s Europe, close to its citizens, fare in

the public spheres of the member-states? What counter-constructions
did they face of what made political authority (in general, and for the
growing authority of the re-named ‘European Union’ in particular)
legitimate and desirable? This chapter turns the focus to the national
level. It explores how what it made sense to say about the EU and its
legitimacy in France and Germany changed at a moment of exception-
ally intense debate on integration, that is, around the negotiation and
ratification of the Maastricht Treaty, signed in February 1992 and in
force from November 1993. The chapter covers the French and German
public (media and political) debates on Maastricht, as reflected in their
national presses from the beginning of 1991 to the end of 1993.1
With a view to the book as a whole, the purpose of this chapter is to
juxtapose representations of integration and the EU in national public
spheres with the foundational legitimation discourses and critical coun-
ter-discourses discussed in Chapters 1 and 2, as well as with the offi-
cial legitimation techniques around the People’s Europe discussed in
Chapter 3 and the EU-official post-Maastricht discursive crisis manage-
ment analysed in Chapter 5. This will allow us to reflect on how specific
discourses travelled between these levels, and whether there ever was
any chance of discourses around Union citizenship, greater EP powers,
transparency, subsidiarity, or governance, for example, finding reso-
nance in the French and German public spheres, given entrenched
shared understandings there of what constitutes legitimate political

103
104 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

authority. The chapter’s more immediate objective, however, is to assess

what ‘Maastricht’ meant for the EU’s struggle for legitimacy. The Treaty
on European Union (TEU) was a defining moment in the fortunes of
European integration on many levels. As to the legitimacy issue, the
common understanding in both academia and political discourse is
that it ushered in the EU’s much cited ‘legitimacy crisis’, which has
since turned into somewhat of a permanent condition (see Chapter 5).
Specifically, the treaty had three types of implications for the EU’s
legitimacy.
Firstly, in terms of its content, the treaty significantly expanded the
EU’s competences. This in itself constituted an unprecedented legitima-
tion challenge. Most importantly, the treaty committed the Twelve to
introducing Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) by 1999, that is, to
giving up their national currencies and monetary policies in favour of
common European ones. It furthermore extended EU competence to
new areas, including education, culture, public health, and consumer
protection, and gave a treaty basis to intergovernmental cooperation
in the fields of Justice and Home Affairs and a Common Foreign and
Security Policy (CFSP). In the language of the People’s Europe discourse,
all these new powers equipped the new EU with means to meet its citi-
zens’ needs and desires more effectively. At the same time, giving the
EU so much more power, including over people’s wallets, of course had
to be legitimated itself. In Germany, Die Zeit’s Editor-in-Chief, Helmut
Schmidt, cited Ralph Dahrendorf: as long as the EC had been only
marginal, its democratic deficit could be dismissed as irritating but not
seriously problematic. With integration progressing, or even only the
prospect of it, this was no longer working (DZ 30/04/1993). A number
of innovations introduced by the Maastricht Treaty had taken up long-
standing demands in discourses about input-related legitimacy (see
Chapters 1 and 7), including the introduction of Union citizenship,
and the strengthening of the European Parliament’s powers through the
co-decision, assent, and cooperation procedures. Yet, as I will suggest
in this chapter, these intended legitimacy-enhancing measures likewise
turned into legitimation liabilities, given that they went against the
grain of a number of specific deeply rooted, resilient, as well as diverse
and dynamic ideas in the member-states about what makes political,
and specifically European, authority justifiable. In short, much of what
was supposed to make the EU more legitimate and even more of a fixture
in the economic and political life of Europe – not least by making it
considerably more powerful – effectively posed a major test to the EU’s
legitimacy.
 Maastricht in the French and German Debates 105

Secondly, Maastricht directly affected the EU’s claim to legiti-

macy in that its ratification proved difficult as well as protracted, and
happened against significant political and popular resistance. The
Danish voters rejected Maastricht by referendum in June 1992 to accept
it eleven months later in a second referendum after a series of Danish
opt-outs had been negotiated (Laffan 1993:37). The Danish ‘No’ was
widely assessed as a symptom and trigger of Euro-pessimism across the
member-states (e.g. DZ 26/06/1992, Laursen and Vanhoonacker 1994:5).
The UK House of Commons, for example, passed the ratification act
with great difficulty in 1993. Parliament had reopened debate on the
Maastricht Treaty’s ratification with vengeance when Sterling left the
ERM, after ‘a safe passage’ had already seemed guaranteed (Economist
09/05/1992:14, see Best 1994b:245–6). In France, the treaty narrowly
passed a referendum on 20 September 1992, with 51 per cent to 49 per
cent of votes. The referendum sparked a public and political debate
on the European construction of a previously unseen force: the treaty
generated serious cleavages within the political parties. The Bundestag
and Bundesrat for their part adopted the ratification act smoothly in
December 1992, with all parties being generally in favour, even if some
criticism was voiced within their ranks. However, justifying ratification
proved to be the actual test in Germany. The German tabloids as well as
the serious press expressed and reported vocal opposition to the treaty,
in particular, to EMU (DZ 06/12/1991). Opinion polls indicated that
a German referendum on ratification would result in a negative vote
(DZ 17/07/1992). Moreover, ratification was delayed by challenges to
the treaty on constitutional grounds. Across Europe, popular support
rates for integration plummeted almost everywhere – and they were to
continue to fall (Eurobarometer 40, autumn 1993). As a result, claims
to the EU’s unproblematic legitimacy in the eyes of the Europeans lost
more and more of their credibility.
Thirdly and finally, the Maastricht debates constituted a stage for the
formulation and promulgation of novel, or formerly relatively marginal,
critiques of the EU. They effectively changed the discursive landscape
against which the EU and its legitimacy could be discussed in the years to
come. What was it that was changing in terms of how participants in public
debate made sense of the EU? In both countries, new and old critiques
moved to the discursive mainstream. Some of them were to gain a firm grip
of discursive representations beyond the national confines of the French
and German public spheres, for example, certain accounts of whether
democracy was possible in the first place at a supranational, European scale.
Looking backward – that is, with a view to earlier discourses legitimating
106 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

European integration – these critical discourses threatened the credibility

of traditional legitimation discourses including the peace-and-prosperity
narrative, as well as certain elements of the People’s Europe rhetoric (in
particular, the ideals of the Europeans as political subjects, of a collective
identity, or an alignment of integration with what the citizens wanted),
and last but not least, the narrative of a consensual European common
good. Looking forward to subsequent challenges to the EU’s claim to legiti-
macy, the Maastricht debates anticipated some of the motives and themes
that were to prove key discursive obstacles to the official-discursive crisis
management of the 1990s and 2000s studied in my Chapter 5.
This chapter is divided into two parts. My analyses in both parts inter-
twine the French and German cases. The first part considers the role
that EMU and the international situation played in the two debates, and
what they implied notably for output-related legitimacy claims, above
all the peace-and-prosperity narrative, as well as for constructions of
collective identities. The second part focuses on questions of democracy,
notably the question, firmly rooted in the public imaginary through the
Maastricht crisis, of whether true democracy was possible at all on an
EU-wide scale. I shall consider different notions of the EU’s democratic
deficit, the reception of Union citizenship, and the spread of and the
assumptions underlying French national-republican discourses, as well
as German no-demos critiques.

EMU and the crumbling promise of prosperity and peace

Prosperity
Both the French and German debates, and in fact critiques of the EU
across the member-states and throughout the 1990s, turned centrally
around EMU. The economic situation in the member-states was less
than ideal; the European economies were in recession, unemployment
soared, and the currency markets were in turmoil with Sterling and Lira
temporarily dropping out from the European exchange rate mechanism,
which effectively collapsed in August 1993 (see e.g. DZ 29/10/1993).
The argument in favour of EMU was that it would make the European
economies stronger.2 Yet critics of EMU contested this very claim. They
re-framed the question as whether EMU would not on the contrary jeop-
ardise growth, monetary stability and employment, rather than enabling
them. This effectively unhinged the key pillar of integration-legitimating
discourses: the promise of greater prosperity through European integra-
tion. On what foundations, then, did critics and proponents of EMU
in France and Germany, respectively, rest their arguments? And in
 Maastricht in the French and German Debates 107

what ways did they contribute to changing the discursive landscape of

plausible claims to EU legitimacy?
The French controversy crucially framed EMU in terms of national
sovereignty. It initially centred on the role of the newly reunited
Germany in the EU. More particularly, it hinged on whether Maastricht
would help France to step out of its dependence on the Bundesbank’s
monetary policy, or rather strip France of its scope of monetary and
economic policy action, by replacing the Bundesbank with a European
Central Bank. An important discursive position thus equated giving up
France’s monetary autonomy with a ‘loss of national sovereignty’ (e.g.
LM 03/03/1992). This critique not uncommonly mixed with qualms
about the voluntary subordination, in particular, to an economically
strong Germany, especially as France suffered more and more from
unemployment and recession, which were direct consequences of
the Bundesbank’s tough interest rate policy. The image proliferated in
the French media that Maastricht favoured Germany before all other
member-states, and that it was a ‘peaceful, retroactive German victory’
(LM 03/03/1992).
The main counterargument in France was that France had long lost
its monetary autonomy, being highly dependent on German monetary
policy (LM 23/06/1991). EMU would enhance the scope of monetary
action for both France and the common currency zone as a whole.
The choice was between the ‘solitary exercise of a limited monetary
sovereignty’ on one hand, and the ‘common exercise of a strength-
ened sovereignty’ on the other. In this logic, EMU would not only
enable France to master German hegemony, but it would also help the
European economies to stand up to global competition, especially from
the USA and Japan (e.g. LM 03/03/1992). Proponents of EMU and the
Maastricht Treaty often emphasised the ‘historical chance’ to build an
economic area of comparable and globally competitive weight or even
to ‘build a Community destined to become the first economic power
in the world’.3
As to Germany – if in France EMU was debated through the monetary
sovereignty lens, an important position in the German debate framed
EMU as a question of national identity. And it linked this identity
very much to German economic strength, embodied in the Deutsche
Mark as a symbol of German wealth, stability, and reconstruction, and
not least Germany’s international power – in short, everything the
Germans were proud of.4 Losing it implied losing much more than just a
national currency. Bild railed against Germany selling out ‘our beautiful
money’ and ‘giving out of our hands what has made us strong’ (Spiegel
108 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

09/12/1999). An intensive and heated debate about German national

identity was incited by the debate about Maastricht and EMU. Die Zeit
selected ‘identity’ as the one term that marked German public debate
in 1992 (01/01/1993). With unprecedented outspokenness, the issue
of national identity was now associated with the question of national
interest. This new pragmatism clashed with the traditional counter-
discourse of German particularity, whereby ‘everyone else may say: first
the nation, then Europe – this order of things is not valid for Germany’
(DZ 25/09/1992, see Marcussen et al. 1999). Commentators remarked
on the Germans’ newly found freedom to no longer place a taboo on
the concept of the nation, and to break with the nurture of an artificial
post-national identity of the old FRG, whereby one was a good German
only by virtue of being a good European, as some kind of ‘substitute
gratification in times of lost identity’ (Spiegel 09/03/1992:26) or ‘sanita-
tion of the past’ (Historian H.A. Winkler in DZ 19/11/1992). Bavarian
Minister President Edmund Stoiber caused some stir by stating that ‘the
times were over’ when some could believe ‘that the charged German
identity could be absorbed in a European identity’ (DZ 12/11/1993). The
shedding of old inhibitions opened up space for questioning whether
German pro-integrationism was in fact strong enough to prevail in
times when a united Europe involved harsh economic costs rather than
advantages – and when national identity, and national prosperity, was
perceived to be at stake.
Against this discursive background, the media, as well as numerous
politicians and other opinion leaders, extensively referred to popular
fears of inflation, recession, unemployment and tax increases.5 In fact,
according to a widespread criticism in the serious press, they deliber-
ately drummed up peoples’ ‘fears and nightmares’, instrumentalising
the still vivid German trauma of inflation (Spiegel 09/12/1991:126). Die
Zeit complained that the yellow press, above all Bild, as well as a number
of serious publications including the Süddeutsche Zeitung and Spiegel
ran a fully-fledged ‘campaign’ of ‘cheap propaganda’ (Stimmungsmache)
against EMU (27/12/1991, 14/02/1992). Pessimist stances on EMU
drew on the Cassandra prophecies extended by a number of economic
experts. In Germany as in France, economic experts warned that the
European economies were still too different to press ahead with EMU.
Monetary union would act as a ‘straight jacket’ on the weaker member-
states where high unemployment would be unavoidable in the absence
of devaluation as the most important instrument to combat it. The
result would be social and economic turmoil in, and ‘massive compen-
satory payments’ to, the poorer participating economies.6 Against such
 Maastricht in the French and German Debates 109

pessimism, defendants of EMU struggled to defend it as a necessary and

logical next step in the integration process: as an automatic, irreversible
consequence of the common market.7 They often made their point in
reference to technical economic imperatives – but expert critics of EMU
rather successfully fought for the upper hand in interpreting economic
imperatives.
Moreover, regarding the question of national and European iden-
tities in the Maastricht debates, the powerful concerns about intra-
European handouts shaped constructions of them in yet another way,
by showcasing what was not there. Several critics pointed out that the
‘solidarity’ necessary for standing by the economies under pressure
was non-existent among the Europeans (DZ 19/02/1992). This put the
argument on the table that there was no European people united by a
sense of commonality or shared identity strong enough to legitimate
redistributive measures or even a European-wide system of regulating
such measures (see also DZ 10/07/1992). In certain ways, this was a
first formulation of the no-demos critique. In this context, both the
French and the German Maastricht debates saw those very discourses
thriving that the official constructions of a European identity had been
supposed to counteract (Chapter 3). In both public spheres there were
important voices that represented Maastricht, EMU, or European inte-
gration generally as a threat to national identity. The risk of European
integration ‘diluting’ national identity was a recurrent theme in the
French debate (LM 03/06/92, see 04/09/1992). Counter to this, French
treaty advocates, including Prime Minister Pierre Bérégovoy, did echo
official constructions of the 1970s and 1980s: ‘We will not be less
French because we are more European’. On the contrary, European
integration would help France to become even more truly French:
‘The rendezvous with Europe is the chance for our country to preserve
her standing [rang], for our culture to maintain its brilliance, for our
people to build a future that matches its genius’. Europe offered the
‘material power prerequisite for preserving French identity’; it was
‘not the end of the nations but the condition of their rejuvenation’
(LM 23/06/1992, 09/05/1992, 24/06/1992). This was in line with the
mentioned motif advanced by the official discourses and identity-
building policies discussed in Chapter 4. The Maastricht debates were
a reminder, however, that highly influential discourses resisted this
understanding, holding on to a zero-sum understanding of the rela-
tion between European and national collective identities.
Across the EU, opposition to EMU was to become even fiercer in the
aftermath of the Maastricht ratification debates, that is, over the course
110 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

of the 1990s when the participating member-states were taking the

measures necessary for meeting the convergence criteria (and of course
later on when the Euro was felt to lead to price increases). In Germany,
the Bundesbank leadership was to express its long-standing qualms with
EMU in progressively sharper language, and both frontrunners for the
social democratic candidacy for the chancellorship, Rudolf Scharping
and Oskar Lafontaine, declared that, if need be, EMU would have to be
postponed, cancelled, or renegotiated (Marsh 1994:163, 211). The Kohl
government very nearly lost the 1994 elections, partly due to EMU’s
low popularity. Still, in justifying his 1996–98 programme to restructure
the welfare state, Kohl avoided mentioning the convergence criteria,
which had necessitated its austerity measures (whereas the opposition
strongly politicised his appeal to non-negotiable, external imperatives of
globalisation).8 President Chirac and Prime Minister Juppé, by contrast,
were more upfront in justifying the radical budget cuts announced in
1995 as indispensable for France’s participation in EMU. This social secu-
rity-reform and ‘refinancing’ plan incited violent street demonstrations
and public sector strikes, which have been compared to the protests of
May 1968 (Howarth and Varouxakis 2003). To be sure, the demonstra-
tions were widely seen not as directed against EMU, but rather as a cry of
frustration after already four years of recession, record high interest rates,
and steeply rising unemployment; the media generally referred to the
action as a ‘revolt against globalisation’ (LM’s headline on 07/12/1995).
Public discourse did not at the time link France’s economic problems
primarily to EMU (see Hay and Rosamond 2002:154).
In conclusion, the significant resistance to EMU both during and
after the Maastricht crisis directly affected what it made sense to
say about European integration, Maastricht, and their legitimacy. It
undercut any hopes that Maastricht and EMU – a most central pillar of
the EU’s problem-solving output – would bring European integration
‘closer to the European citizens’ by ‘responding to what they wanted’.
This theme, which described the major sea change in official legitima-
tion discourses offered by the European institutions after the crises
of the 1970s that I identified in Chapters 2 and 3, did little to tilt the
French and German (and other member-state) debates on Maastricht
in favour of the EU, and particularly of EMU. The public sphere debates
nurtured the impression that many did not want EMU, or at least were
unsure about it. In this sense, EMU is a prime example of something
that according to its advocates was meant to help the EU cater to
citizen needs, but which eventually turned into a major legitimation
liability itself. Moreover, in both the French and German Maastricht
 Maastricht in the French and German Debates 111

debates, citizen expectations emerged as relatively resistant to the top-

down, often paternalist constructions of the proponents of EMU. Or
maybe they just chose other masters among the range of positions
available in the public sphere debates, where discourses that prioritised
national interests in new ways took centre stage. The debates on EMU
featured very strong discourses that referred predominantly to national
interests. The reception of EMU in the French, German, and other
member-state public spheres thus furthermore cast a shadow over the
foundational storyline, discussed in Chapter 2, of an uncontroversial,
generally agreed-upon European common good, furthered by ever-
closer integration. Even more importantly, EMU represented foremost
a challenge to the storyline that European integration was a neces-
sary safeguard of European prosperity – which, ironically, had been an
important justification for EMU. Across the member-states, recession,
large budget deficits, and high unemployment additionally made the
Union look powerless in securing Europe’s economic wellbeing. In
short, Europe’s promise of prosperity had lost its persuasive power
for many. As recession, large budget deficits, high unemployment,
and a civil war on Europe’s doorstep made the EU look increasingly
helpless, the basis for output-related legitimacy claims based on the
EU’s unique problem-solving capacities was eroding. What is more,
integration was now increasingly represented not only as not neces-
sarily helpful, but also as an increasingly costly endeavour. Especially
in Germany, giving up the national currency was widely represented
as a major sacrifice for the European idea and – ‘and, in the long run,
peace’ – rather than something Germany would get out of integration
(DZ 06/08/1993, see 25/09/1992). This of course undermined output
efficiency as a source of legitimacy.

Peace
As integration was felt to become ever more costly, more and more
doubts were expressed regarding the narrative that integration was the
one and only route to peace across Europe (see Chapter 1). If European
integration could secure peace only at the expense of prosperity, and if
it was not even very good at that, then it was no longer taboo to discuss
alternative approaches to achieving durable peace. In other words, the
discursive link I described in Chapter 1 between peace and prosperity
as the main promises of integration suffered as well. This corroding
influence on the integration-equals-peace narrative coincided with
three further developments that undermined the EU’s claim to being
the safeguard of peace in Europe: a radically transformed international
112 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

situation after the fall of Communism, a series of right-extremist attacks

in the only-just reunified Germany over the course of 1992, and the
war raging in Yugoslavia. Paradoxically, at the same time the demands
of ‘peace’ were an absolutely crucial argument in favour of EMU and
Maastricht. Advocates of Maastricht and of EMU re-framed a strong
German and overall West European commitment to them as indispen-
sable to containing a re-emerging culture of nationalism and chauvinism
in Europe.9
As for the world stage, three years after the revolutions of 1989, the
Cold War order was no longer as unambiguous a point of reference in
public deliberation. The Soviet Union (or Russia) and Communism were
not obvious unifying factors any more. The Community had not yet
come to an agreement over whether fully to admit the young democra-
cies in Central and Eastern Europe who wanted to join. In France, this
was referred to as a reason both for and against ratifying Maastricht. On
one hand, there was the reasoning that the treaty’s indifference towards,
or exclusion of, Central and Eastern Europe was cause enough to reject
the Europe it envisaged. On the other hand, however, there was the
position that the EU, and Maastricht, were indispensable to dealing
with the post-Cold War situation.10 This second take largely dominated
in the German debate as well. Here progress towards European unity
was typically presented not only as an important counterweight against
Russia – but also as a ‘pillar, reference point, and hopeful horizon’ for the
countries of Central and Eastern Europe, and the EC as a ‘community of
responsibility’ (Haftungsgemeinschaft) towards them.11
The recently reunified Germany was well aware that it inspired fears
and concerns in its neighbours regarding its renewed power position
in Europe and the world, as the German public debate on Maastricht
confirmed. Such worries were fuelled by a string of racist and xeno-
phobic assaults in 1992. In August Die Zeit gave alarm: ‘No day passes
in the unified Germany without foreigners being attacked some-
where’ (21/08/1992). In France, too, the peace theme expressed itself
notably in omnipresent worries about the German question. These
were directed not only against Germany’s economic hegemony, but
also more generally against Germany’s ‘old demons’ and ‘romantic
irrational forces’.12 The German press covered these French suspi-
cions extensively. In the print media as well as in parliamentary
debate (across party lines), the position was frequently expressed
that European integration, and a clear German ‘Yes’ to Maastricht,
was indispensable to ‘assuaging increasing mistrust in the world’ and
to reassuring Germany’s neighbours of its commitment to European
 Maastricht in the French and German Debates 113

integration (Bundestag 1993:1084, 10834, DZ 25/09/1992). Several

German journalists and opinion leaders, moreover, cautioned against
a return to a Bismarckian balance-of-power system in Europe, where
coalitions would be formed against an all too big and economically
all too powerful Germany; the only viable alternative, according to
them, was a Europe of deepening integration, and that presupposed
an unmistakeable German commitment to it (e.g. DZ 12/11/1993,
06/08/1993).
The old discourse of European integration being a ‘historical
imperative’ beyond contestation, and a question of morality,
for Germany was still going strong (DZ 01/01/1993). In France,
too, celebratory rhetoric presented a continued commitment to
European integration as a moral imperative, although this played
a less central role than in Germany.13 Still, the open criticism of
Maastricht and EMU in the German press underlined that the core
narrative of integration as a duty had taken some serious knocks. It
was being challenged as never before in German post-war history
until then. Against this discursive shift, the Chancellor repeated the
old storyline that German and European unification were ‘two sides
of the same coin’ (cited after Banchoff 1999:193). If Germany did not
stand by its word that German re-unification would be embedded
into European integration, this would be an unacceptable breach of
promise in this view (e.g. DZ 14/02/1992). Another latently moral-
ising discourse, especially in the German press, equated opposition
to EMU with the much-deplored revival of nationalism in Germany
and Europe. It called critics of EMU ‘Deutschmark nationalists’ – a
term with distinctly negative connotations in the Germany of the
time (e.g. DZ 25/09/1992). This discourse adduced the meek, and
falling, popular support for EMU and integration more generally, to
the burgeoning nationalism in Eastern Europe ‘marking off’ on the
West, or at least to an ‘epidemic of pusillanimousness’ that had been
‘sweeping through Europe since the Danish No’. This appealed to the
old narrative of collective federal German self-understanding that
integration meant overcoming the nation’s nationalist and militarist
past and hence was sacrosanct as an end. 14
The situation in the Balkans gave support to a further frequent image
in the German press, which described a growing gap between ever-
deepening integration in Western Europe and resurging nationalism,
fragmentation and disintegration in Eastern Europe and, especially,
in Yugoslavia.15 This idea once again reaffirmed European unification
as the anathema to nationalism and its dangers, taking up the old
114 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

indispensability-to-peace narrative (Chapter 2). A new corollary of this

discourse – and its counterpart in France – was the idea that a strong
‘European myth’, and an unwavering endorsement of Maastricht,
was the only way to contain the resurging chauvinism, ‘nationalist
convulsions’, and separatist aspirations in Europe. In France these
were often referred to as the ‘balkanisation’ of Europe (not confined
to the Balkans but extending to the whole continent, in particular,
Scotland, Catalonia, and Germany).16 With a view to the construc-
tion or reassertion of collective identities, Yugoslavia, the question
of Eastern enlargement, and the involved outside perspective on the
EC, offered opportunities to advance claims regarding the aims and
values underpinning the integration project, in particular, democracy
and basic rights, the overcoming of nationalist hatred, modernity
and the wrenching of agency, progress, and prosperity from the ruins
of the world wars.17 This resonated with the official identity projec-
tions analysed in Chapter 3. Yet the member-state controversies over
EMU and Maastricht also challenged such constructions of a common
European identity, as I will discuss later.
Overall, the war in Yugoslavia provided important support for the
argument that European integration was indispensable to protect
Europe against nationalism, war, and strife. But it also dealt an almost
lethal blow to the narrative that integration was in fact able to safeguard
peace on its very doorstep. The Twelve’s uncoordinated action towards
(the former) Yugoslavia underlined the united Europe’s helplessness in
providing peace, just as the economic situation had cast serious doubts
on its promise of prosperity. Depending on one’s stance, the EC’s
foreign-political failure in the Balkan wars confirmed its inadequate-
ness in filling the role that legitimating rhetoric had grandiloquently
claimed ever since the first steps of European integration. Alternatively,
it underscored the need to ratify Maastricht, and finally to develop
common means of action, including a Common Foreign and Security
Policy (CFSP), which had found its way into the treaty as part of the
second, intergovernmental pillar. This double-sided quality applied to
the EU’s place on the international stage more generally (and in fact to
most demands on EU problem-solving). The fall of Communism and
the German question, the first Gulf War, and the war in Yugoslavia, all
changed the demands made on Europe as well as its performance record.
Albeit to varying degrees, they could all be interpreted as manifesting
greater-than-ever need for – but also the failure of – European integra-
tion. The biggest challenges to the EU and its legitimacy were also its
greatest raison d’être.
 Maastricht in the French and German Debates 115

Whose rule? Citizens, the body politic, and democracy

Let us now shift the focus from legitimacy claims founded on the
performance of efficient governance and results or outputs, to claims
to legitimacy grounded on democratic input and a link with the will
of the people (see Chapter 7). Here the Maastricht crisis marked the
thunderous entry of the issue of how democratic the EU was from the
comparatively specialist and institutional discourses around EP powers
(Chapter 2) and Union citizenship (Chapter 3) to the mainstream of
both countries’ political and media debates. Rather than making the
EU appear more legitimate by making it more democratic, the growing
attention devoted to the issue of EU became a liability for the EU’s claim
to legitimacy. The ‘democratic deficit’ critique was anchored firmly as an
emblem in representations of the EU and its legitimacy. In addition, the
French and German Maastricht debates also announced how difficult
it would be to remedy this deficit in democracy, given the substantially
diverging dominant understandings of what more, or better, democracy
would mean in the EU context.

Democracy and citizenship

Adopting the theme in the EP-elections advocacy discussed in Chapter 2,
the German press initially emphasised mainly the EP as the main source
of greater democratic legitimacy for the EU.18 The key concern for the
coverage on the treaty negotiations and the actual outcome was the
treaty’s meagre progress towards ‘Political Union’.19 Besides a common
foreign and security policy, this was defined in terms of greater legisla-
tive and budgeting powers for the EP.20 Chancellor Helmut Kohl had
(unwisely, according to some) declared Political Union a condition for
EMU (see DZ 06/12/1991, 18/09/1992). German demands for linking
EMU to Political Union, and hence for greater democratic accountability
and representation, tended to represent the politics-economics paral-
lelism as an economic imperative. The common explanation was that
‘monetary union had to be supported by a common political scaffolding’
because the expected ‘redistributive conflicts [had] to be resolved politi-
cally, not by printing money’. The mention of inflation conjured up a
great trauma of German twentieth-century history.21 This view implied
that the preconditions in terms of body politics were sufficient to warrant
such political resolutions. As distinct from today’s association with fiscal
cooperation, the ‘political’ in this context in the German Maastricht
debate tended to refer to democratic representation and accountability,
as well as, to a lesser extent, positive rather than negative integration.
116 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

Thus to some extent it was ‘democracy which constituted the political’

in German discourse (Jachtenfuchs 2002:175, 198, 202).
In France, by contrast, where the Assemblée Nationale had compara-
tively more meagre rights, the more promising practical-institutional
remedy of choice for the EU’s lack of democratic credentials was the
treaty’s partial re-balancing of the respective powers of the Council
versus the Commission, in favour of the democratically elected national
governments.22 This supposed move towards a more Gaullist-type ‘Europe
des Nations’ was typically invoked as an argument for the progress consti-
tuted by the treaty towards a more democratic EU. Strengthening the
EP had little legitimacy-enhancing powers in the context of the French
media debate given the general mépris for the EP, expressed not least in
the well-rooted image of MEPs’ poor record of attendance, and wide-
spread criticism that they were selected more by those deciding on party
lists than by the voters (e.g. LM 18/09/1992).
The French debate addressed matters of democracy centrally through
the prism of citizenship. ‘Ministre déléguée’ of European Affairs Elisabeth
Guigou tried to uphold the People’s Europe discourse that Union citi-
zenship and the associated rights made Europe ‘less and less abstract’
and closer to its citizens (LM 03/06/1992, see Chapter 3). Yet, in the
cacophony of competing voices, she was fighting a lost battle. Maastricht
opponents raged against Union citizenship as mere ‘ornament’, intended
to justify the supranationalisation of European politics.23 Moreover, an
important discourse presented Union citizenship as an attack on French
national citizenship. In this way, Union citizenship was yet another
example of something that, rather than helping to legitimate the EU,
turned out to be a legitimation challenge.
Union citizenship could be read as an aggression on French citi-
zenship, in that the involved voting rights for foreign EU nationals
in local and European elections undercut the French notion of who
belonged to the nation. In the French understanding, where descent
or birth were no exclusive ways of acquiring French nationality (alter-
natives being marriage and permanent residency), ‘citizenship and its
corollary, the vote, are the means to identify and unify the members
of the national community: whoever votes is a citizen as well as
French’.24 Allowing EU nationals to partake of this prerogative would
practically make them French according to this formula. This would
affect the established equilibrium of what it meant to belong to the
French nation. How serious this was perceived to be was illustrated by
the revision of Article 88–3 of the French constitution, which explic-
itly excluded non-French Union citizens from eligibility as Mayor or
 Maastricht in the French and German Debates 117

Deputy Mayor. This was defended on the grounds that these offices’
right to elect the senate would give such foreigners undue oppor-
tunities to participate in the exercise of popular sovereignty. In the
reasoning of the National Assembly and the Senate, an essentially
national conception of citizenship shone through (Keraudren and
Dubois 1994:151–2). This associated the practice of citizenship and
democracy with membership in the French nation, which was defined
in turn in more restrictive, essentialist terms than the traditional,
political participation-based definition had done. In the face of all
this, the challenge of plausibly legitimating EU citizenship possibly
far exceeded the gain in legitimacy through the re-constitution of
Europeans as EU citizens.
A further way in which EU citizenship threatened to make national
citizenship vanish equally challenged the re-imagination of Union
citizens as actively involved in the practice of democracy at a European
level. Socialist former Defence Minister Jean-Pierre Chevènement’s
misgivings about Union citizenship were grounded on the notion
that its point was not only to rationalise the supranationalisation of
EU politics, but also ‘to make people forget the very real disappear-
ance of national citizenship’ (LM 02/05/1992, see 03/06/1992). This
discourse echoed a much older analysis, here represented by historian-
philosopher Raymond Aron, of the pooling of sovereignties under-
mining the practice of citizenship:

The Community weakens the feeling that people may have of their
own citizenship. Ordinary citizens are less and less sure of who
makes decisions. They have no easy means to know if a specific
decision was made in Brussels or in the capital of their country of
origin. Even though the European Community tends to grant the
same social and economic rights to all the citizens of the Member
States, there is no such thing as a European citizen. There are only
French, German or Italian citizens. (Aron 1974:638, cited in Lacroix
2010:105, 108–9)

This analysis (which connected with the technocracy critiques I referred

to in Chapters 1 and 2) of course partly doomed official attempts to
forge a sense of Union citizenship (of the type discussed in Chapter 3)
from the beginning.
In less concrete and more metaphysical terms, the expressed concerns
with the threat to French citizenship from European integration cut even
deeper in the French understanding of political legitimacy, which rested
118 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

on the self-determination of the nation in the context of the Republic.

Together with the no-demos critique originating in the German consti-
tutional court’s Maastricht decision, this discursive development in
France, to which I shall now turn, questioned the very possibility of
meaningfully practicing democracy beyond the nation-state, as well as
the effect of European integration on the practice of democracy in the
context of the nation.

Nations, demoi, and deficits

As the French referendum campaign became more radical, the ‘defence
of the nation’ became ‘a major argument of the advocates of the “No”’
(LM 11/09/1992). It often linked with a defence of France’s repub-
lican identity (e.g. LM 02/05/1992). Politicians and intellectuals of all
colours and expertises defended what they considered the essence of
the Republic, citing authorities from de Gaulle to Rousseau. The French
Maastricht debate saw the emergence of what Justine Lacroix has
called, for the context of political philosophy, a ‘national-republican’
paradigm. Among political philosophers who defined themselves as
‘republicans’, she maintains, the ratification debate spurred a reinvest-
ment of the concept of ‘nation’, for a long time left to conservatives,
and a ‘rehabilitation of cultural nationalism’ (2010:109, see Laborde
2001).25 This development in political thought was in dialogue with
a set of discourses in the wider public debate around Maastricht as
reflected in the press and in statements by politicians. I thus use
Lacroix’s label ‘national-republican’ to refer to these discourses in
this wider public sphere, and to a slightly wider range of related argu-
ments. Coming in both left- and right-wing versions, these discourses
essentially confined the practice of democracy and citizenship, or
simply ‘the political’, to the nation-state. What is more, I argue, they
did so for any voluntary action upon a world defined by economic
and technocratic rationalities.
The key stone of the emerging wider public national-republican
discourse was, as for de Gaulle, that ‘democracy is inseparable from
national sovereignty’ (Séguin, TF1 03/09/1992:27). To alienate or transfer
national sovereignty to the European level, even if this could be done
in a ‘formally democratic’ way, meant ‘destroying the ‘understanding of
the Republic by which France has lived for 200 years’ and ‘ripping up the
contract that binds the citizens together’ (LM 14/08/1992). Such claims
often rested on the assumption that the nation was the only framework
of political voluntarism; ‘in order to have a will, the people has to be
constituted in one unity, the nation’ (Dalem 2001:60, in reference to
 Maastricht in the French and German Debates 119

Debray 1992:61). Member Jean de Lipowski, RPR, for example, affirmed

in the Assemblée Nationale that he could not see, given that there was
‘no European nation’, ‘how the EP could express a volonté générale that
does not exist’ (Jung 1999:71). Since there was no European nation, this
reasoning implied, there could be no European-wide general will. Popular
sovereignty, however, could only be exercised by a sovereign nation. As
a result, popular sovereignty necessarily coincided with national sover-
eignty in these discourses.
Another reason given for the supposedly indissoluble link between
democracy and the nation was the understanding that democracy
essentially presupposed a strong common sense of belonging. Gaullist
Philippe Séguin, a leading spokesman of the No campaign, in a famous
televised debate with Mitterrand on the eve of the vote, for example,
discarded the possibility that the EP could exercise democracy, as in
representation of the European citizens, on these grounds; ‘I cannot
see how the European Parliament, a multinational parliament, could
achieve a true legitimacy’ (TF1 03/09/1992:27). There were a number
of supporting arguments for this stance. They, too, resonated with
elements of the German no-demos critiques, discussed later. On the
one hand, Chevènement, for instance, judged that one of the prereq-
uisites of democracy was ‘shared values and references’ as it implied
public debate; ‘as long as such a public sphere does not exist, the
nation remains the pertinent framework for democratic debate, alone
to found legitimate authority’ (LM 02/05/1992). On the other hand,
others adduced the argument that a minority could only accept ‘the
law of the majority’ if and because they shared ‘a very strong sense
of common belonging’ (Séguin on TF1 03/09/1992:27). Such a senti-
ment, he implied, was reserved to the national community. On the
Maastricht-critic left, Régis Debray endorsed the same understanding:
‘Democratic politics, the participation of all in the making of the
law, presupposes a capacity to identify with each other (as fellow citi-
zens, the other is I) in the framework of one same people, which one
cannot invent at will’ (1992:51, cited in Dalem 2001:60). A key pillar
of the national-republican paradigm was thus that the democratic
ideal could not be disentangled from national identity and the nation
(Lacroix 2010:110).
Through democracy, the debate also touched upon the question of
whether the nation could meaningfully exist independently of the State.
Historian Marc Fumaroli, Director of the Académie française, identified
attitudes towards ‘the nation’ as a new central cleavage cutting across
party and ideological lines:
120 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

[ ... ] those on the side of the ‘Yes’ bet on the nation as distinct from
the State, transcending the State. They enumerate [ ... ] the chances
offered to it in the framework of a deepened Community, which
obliges every state part of the treaty to sacrifice a little bit of its sover-
eignty to the common interest. The emphasis in effect has to be on
the nation (which is new), on its own vitality, since the State that
represents the nation in the Community has committed to no longer
wanting to do everything itself. The confusion between State and
nation, the identity of State and nation, lose their compulsory nature.
National identity and the national character return to the responsi-
bility and the initiative not only of the State, but of civil society. [ ... ]
The respective roles of the nation and the State emerge with greater
clarity and equilibrium. (LM 12/09/1992)

On the side of the ‘No’, a powerful position wanted to revive and

rebuild the State as the only meaningful embodiment of the nation.
They affirmed that the State was necessary ‘as the objective realisation
of the community of the citizens, whereby the State [ ... ] presents itself
as the guarantor of national sovereignty and of the rights of all those
who participate in constituting this sovereignty’ (LM 14/08/1992).
In order to be able to ‘mediate between citizen and the universal’,
as Chevènement put it, the nation could not be defined in purely
abstract terms. It was inseparable from the Republic, or the State, as
the place where the universal materialises. In order to materialise, the
universal had to combine with the particular (Chevènement 1992:234,
6, see Dalem 2001:62). If ‘every nation is characterized by a tension
between the rational, formal, and abstract principles of citizenship and
the communitarian and ethnic reality of civil society’, the commu-
nitarian component was what the national-republicans wanted to
re-emphasise (Lacroix 2005:2). Yet Union citizenship discourses often
neglected this component, or presented it as secondary or outright
obsolete. Even worse, if they linked Union citizenship with European
culture or identity (for Union citizenship, as any non-cosmopolitan
citizenship in fact, reproduces the French Republican tension between
universalism and particularism), national-republicans would perceive
it as an even greater threat to the nations’ communitarian and ethnic
reality. Union citizenship projected a hypothetical move towards a
post-national identity, which weakened democracy within the nation-
state by exacerbating the dangers facing contemporary democracy.
These exacerbated dangers included the ‘growing autonomy of indi-
viduals and their disinterest in public affairs’ and the disembodiment
 Maastricht in the French and German Debates 121

of democracy in part through the prevalence of rights-based language

(Lacroix 2010:110, see 2008).
In addition to the issue of democracy, moreover, Maastricht oppo-
nents in France set up the EU as the antithesis to political voluntarism
in a further sense: as the reign of economic rationales and technocracy
as opposed to ‘the political’, as in the effective ability to change things
in accordance with political will. The political left had traditionally
affirmed an opposition between socialist ideals, often associated with
economic protectionism, and the realities of European integration. But
even Gaullist Philippe Séguin denounced Maastricht as

the work of the spirit of management and the triumph of political

renouncement. French politics does not reform anything anymore, it
no longer builds anything, it no longer changes anything, it manages.
Our choice now [ ... ] is whether we want to restore the State, the
Republic, and the nation or whether we want to get rid once and for
all of these values by tying our hands through this construction that
has no place for them. (LM 10/09/1992)

French intellectuals used the general scepticism towards Maastricht

to underline the need to ‘re-politicise the public sphere’, supposedly
de-politicised by European integration (Dalem 2001:61). Political theo-
rists Jean-Marc Ferry and Paul Thibaud criticised the way that the EU’s
political structures repressed initiatives and the expression of original
thoughts, and created more constraints than it permitted initiatives
(1992:85, see Taguieff 2001). Debray went as far as opposing the EU’s
political system to an arrangement that would be capable of ‘returning
to the individuals their dignity as citizen’ (1992:51). Politicians, for
example, Chevènement, joined the chorus, claiming that ‘the acceler-
ating [ ... ] devolution of not only monetary but also legislative and regu-
latory power to technocratic organisms lacking legitimacy contribute
to the crisis of France’s republican identity: the lack of the citizen’. This
crisis, according to him, could only be redressed by ‘returning the power
to the citizens’ in the form of institutions of democratic control in the
national parliaments and the European institutions, but even more
importantly by ensuring that the Republic, reinvented, would remain in
charge of essentially political decisions in a ‘European confederation, rich
of its nations’ (LM 02/05/1992). The image of the EU as a powerful tech-
nocracy crystallised the criticisms of the EU as a non-political, undemo-
cratic power, distant and unaccountable to the European citizens. To
Chevènement’s mind, ‘Maastricht again [took] powers away from the
122 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

peoples in order to give them to the technocrats’ – and whoever said

technocracy said decline of democracy (LM 23/06/1992). To Séguin’s
mind, too, the ‘democratic deficit’ stemmed from ‘the nature and role
of the Commission’ itself and the ‘technocratic irresponsibility’ which
was the ‘keystone of the European institutions’. Rather than being able
to democratically sanction their leaders, the European citizens were
being ‘conquered by the arbitrary power of anonymous experts’ (Libé
31/08/1992).
In sum, French national-republicans of both the left and the right
positioned the EU as an antithesis not only to active political partici-
pation, but also the active political shaping of reality – both of which
were re-associated with the nation and the Republic, and delineated
against social engineering on the basis of functionalist and techno-
cratic rationalities. This powerfully developed the twin dichotomy
(which Chapter 2 described for the context of the contests of the 1960s
over how supranational or intergovernmental the European construc-
tion should be) of supranationalism and technocracy on the one
hand, opposed by intergovernmentalism and political will-formation
on the other.

* * *

In Germany these discourses had their counterpart in the no-demos

argument already touched upon above. This argument was formulated
most prominently by the Federal Constitutional Court in its decision
on the Maastricht treaty. It questioned whether, given the lack of a
European ‘demos’, meaningful supranational democracy in the EU was
conceivable at all. It was to proliferate far beyond Germany, and far
beyond the confines of constitutional jurisprudence (see Müller 2010,
Davies 2012), and academic political thought, to the European polit-
ical and public spheres. In Germany, the constitutional complaints and
subsequent decision gave significant impulse to the published debate
(DZ 15/10/1993). Der Spiegel, in particular, welcomed the fact that they
raised questions ‘which Bonn’s negotiators had not at all considered’,
and covered these questions extensively.26 In terms of content, the
court’s decision pushed the debate from the question of how democratic
the EU was to the question of whether and how democracy was possible
at all at a European scale. In this, it was in tune with the French national-
republican concern that tied the practice of democracy and citizenship
to the confines of the nation and the republic – although the French
discourse focused more on democracy in the national context than most
 Maastricht in the French and German Debates 123

no-demos discourses, which rather emphasised the lack of something

reproducing the national body politic at EU level.
The Bundesverfassungsgericht found that the treaty was compatible
with the Basic Law, but did place restrictions on the future development
of the EU (1993, see the court’s headnotes in Laursen and Vanhoonacker
1994:515–6). In its statement of grounds, it defined the EU as ‘a union
of countries in order to create an ever closer union among the peoples
of Europe (organised as states; TEU, Art. A), rather than a state based
upon a European state people’ (‘Staatsvolk’, Headline 8). Since there
was no European demos, it argued, the only body politic that could
exercise popular sovereignty as far as Germany was concerned was
the German people. This was why the democratic institutions of the
Federal Republic and in particular the Bundestag had to be left with a
‘substantial level of [ ... ] tasks and authority’ (Headline 4), including
decisions over the future expansion of EU competences. Note that the
court implicitly left open the possibility that a European demos could
possibly be created (see Weiler et al. 1995). Historian Heinrich August
Winkler advanced this reading in Die Zeit by explaining that ‘all the
Bundesverfassungsgericht was saying was that as long as the democratic
deficit was not remedied, the EC could not be more than a federa-
tion of states. Consequently, whoever wants to advance Europe has
to dare more democracy’ (DZ 19/11/1993). This reading went directly
against a statist interpretation of the ruling, according to which only
statehood enabled democracy and constitutionalism and which the
ruling’s key architect Paul Kirchhof advanced (Kirchhof 1993:63, see
Müller 2010:94).
In the German public sphere, the court’s decision and the claimants’
arguments boosted discourses that linked the concepts of demos (people
as in body politic) and ethnos (people as in ethno-cultural community).
The possibility of a European Staatsvolk began to be discussed widely –
and often in terms of the lack of a shared European language, history,
and culture. As a result democracy was discussed through the iden-
tity prism more than hitherto. The exercise of popular sovereignty was
increasingly linked to the defence of national sovereignty. Der Spiegel,
which had been a great advocate of expanded EP powers, now enthusi-
astically embraced the court’s understanding that, at least until the EP
received sufficient powers, democratic legitimation should work through
the national demoi. The magazine raged against Karlsruhe’s sanctioning
the treaty as constitutional as a betrayal of ‘popular sovereignty’ and
the ‘democratic principle’. Maastricht, in this tirade, amounted to the
‘disempowerment of the Parliament in Bonn and the incapacitation of
124 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

the voters’, patched up ‘noncommittally’ by the ‘distant prospect’ of a

stronger EP (18/10/1993:31, see 28/06/1993:32).
The prospect of creating, through strengthening supranational
democracy, some kind of European demos, on the other hand, was an
important counter-vision promoted by the Maastricht decision. Jürgen
Habermas (1992, 1998, 2001a/b) and Dolf Sternberger (1990:12–16) were
developing the argument that a European political community would
arise with Union citizenship, as well as powerful supranational political
institutions controlled and authorised through a European-wide demo-
cratic process. In this reading, democracy, and the practice of citizenship
and popular sovereignty, had no necessary conceptual connection with
the historical nation. Not only did a demos not have to coincide with an
ethnos, moreover, democratic will-formation did not presuppose a collec-
tive self-understanding of citizens in a democratic community. On the
contrary, it could generate a sense of collective identity in the form of
a ‘constitutional patriotism’; that is, a shared sense of belonging based
on loyalty to the constitutional procedures and underlying values of
the constitution (Habermas 1998:161). This very paradigm was precisely
what French national-republicanism wanted to counterbalance (Lacroix
2010:110, 2004). Still, among French Maastricht advocates, too, the
idea did circulate that a European collective consciousness could be
engendered through the creation of appropriate European institutions –
not least among the German neighbours, above whom loomed the
Damocletian sword of chauvinism (LM 16/06/1992).
In the German media debate, the idea of creating a European patriotism
was often framed, besides in terms of demos-building through institu-
tional reform, in terms of the need for more efficient ‘Überzeugungsarbeit’
(labour of persuasion). This topos of convincing the citizens of the neces-
sity of European integration played a key role in both Germany and
France. It linked with the spreading image that the Danish ‘No’ and
the ratification crisis more generally reflected the more thoroughgoing
‘glaring gap that was opening up between Europe’s political elites and
its citizens’ regarding European integration (DZ 25/09/1992). This gap
was often understood to be due to the inherent distance and opacity of
European decision-making procedures to the European citizens. Guigou,
for example, stated ‘For thirty-five years, nothing was said about Europe.
It was made among specialists. Now it is time to explain’ (LM 03/08/1992).
This statement also encapsulated the implicit belief upheld by many
French as well as German Maastricht advocates, that overcoming this
gap between the EU and its citizens was a matter of convincing them, a
matter of ‘pédagogie’. This need for a better education was the leitmotif
 Maastricht in the French and German Debates 125

in the French campaign (LM 09/09/1992). It was to provide for much

resentment and calls for an emancipation from top-down condescen-
sion in the 2004/2005 debate in France, as I will discuss in Chapter 6.
The pédagogie and Überzeugungsarbeit discourses took up the image of
a ‘Europe Closer to its Citizens’ (Chapter 3). They also reproduced the
tendency described earlier in relation to references in People’s Europe
discourses to citizen expectations of projecting a more efficient top-
down shaping of popular mindsets on the basis of an exogenously
given goal of further integration. Like the official discourses leading
up to Maastricht discussed earlier, ratification proponents advocating
better ‘convincing’ and pedagogy were not open to reversing or slowing
down the drive to integration in response to falling support rates. They
disregarded the possibility that the citizens might be immune to even
perfect convincing and educational efforts. They typically started from
the premise that ‘Europe’ was ‘necessary’. ‘Only, too few know this’,
the reason being, not that one could actually disagree about integra-
tion’s absolute necessity, but that the Überzeugungsarbeit had ‘been inad-
equate so far’ (here DZ 03/07/1992). This anticipated and motivated the
European institution’s increased devotion of effort and resources to the
EU’s communication and information policies (discussed in Chapter 5).
Explaining the workings and benefits of the EU was to be treated, by
treaty advocates perplexed by the unseen political and popular resist-
ance to it, as a recipe against the EU’s image as an uncontrollable, intran-
sigent bureaucracy (e.g. LM 03/08/1992, DZ 03/07/1992). Moreover,
such an educational approach was often referred to as a remedy against
the discourse, analysed earlier, that ‘Europe’ was threatening to dilute
national identities and cultural specificities (LM 03/06/92).
In addition, however, an alternative reading of the distance between
citizens and the EU manifested by the ratification crisis and popular
opinion data became apparent: ‘Europe cannot be built without the
Europeans – that was the message of Copenhagen’. This reading was to
become highly influential in both constitutional debates (Chapter 6).
It picked up on the official focus on bringing the Europeans on board
described in Chapter 3, and established it firmly in the discursive
landscape of what it made sense to say about EU legitimacy. The solu-
tion proposed by the editor-in-chief of Die Zeit, Theo Sommer in this
example was ‘more transparency of the decision channels, a greater
openness of the debate, less privy council [geheimraetliche] compla-
cency’ (DZ 26/06/1992). This solution also played a key role in the
way the EU’s leaders and institutions managed the (post-) Maastricht
legitimacy crisis, as discussed in Chapter 5. Ratification proponents,
126 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

although above all specialists in EU affairs, also referred to the subsidi-

arity principle as a safeguard against unchecked EU power (e.g. LM
03/06/92, DZ 03/07/1992). These voices were in tune with the official-
discursive crisis management of the EU’s much cited legitimacy crisis
ushered in by Maastricht’s difficult ratification (see outlook below and
Chapter 5). Some, comparatively isolated, voices did moreover demand
greater ‘democratic legitimation’ – tying the distance discourse in with
the old German demand for more supranational democracy in the EU.
Without greater democratic legitimation, popular support could not be
regained (DZ 16/09/1992). This anticipated a discourse that would have
its heyday in the context of the failure of the constitutional treaty and
that gave the EU’s ‘democratic deficit’ a new meaning. The democratic
deficit in this reading consisted not only in shortcomings regarding how
accountability, representation, or authorisation was institutionalised in
the EU – but also in the lack of popular support.

Conclusion

In sum, the debates over the Maastricht Treaty’s ratification opened a

new chapter in the discursive struggle over what ‘demos’, ‘democracy’
and ‘citizenship’ might mean in the context of the EU. The French
and German public controversies (as reflected in the media) served
as stages for politicians, journalists, intellectuals, and other opinion
leaders to advance new discourses, and manifested radical changes
about what could plausibly be said about EU democracy and legiti-
macy. The official discourses analysed in Chapters 1 to 3 partly ran
through both public sphere debates, but they met with thriving coun-
ter-discourses that, at the time, seemed to win the day. In particular,
images of an EU aligned with citizen needs and expectations and of an
EU efficiently serving citizen interests were severely undercut by vehe-
mently expressed concerns about EMU’s implications for economic
stability and the member-states’ capacity to act. The official focus on
the ‘human dimension’ of the EU and the fledgling efforts at EU-wide
identity-building were rebuffed, just as with the re-constitution of the
member-state citizens as Union citizens. These discursive patterns,
as this chapter has illustrated, triggered counter-constructions that
reacted against perceived threats resulting from European integra-
tion (in particular, from EMU, but also from European regulation and
identity-building more generally) to national identity as well as to the
national texture and practice of democracy, citizenship, and popular
sovereignty. Overall, the Maastricht debates saw the reassertion of,
 Maastricht in the French and German Debates 127

and in the German case the shedding of, old inhibitions regarding,
national identity defined at least partly in essentialist terms.
The Maastricht debates firmly anchored the issue in the discursive land-
scape of whether true democracy was at all possible on a Community-
wide scale. A particular discourse confining the practice of citizenship
and democracy – and ‘the political’ outright – to the nation-state moved
to the mainstream of French debate. The treaty’s codification of Union
citizenship proved especially problematic in France in that it was seen
as a threat to the national political community, essentially defined and
delimited through participation in the practice of national citizenship.
French national-republican discourses, and also the transposing citizen-
ship legislation, reasserted citizenship as confined to and constitutive of
the nation. This firmly rejected the officially projected direct link to be
forged between the EU and its subjects as entitled to specific protection, as
well as participation rights, by virtue of being Union citizens. In Germany,
too, increasingly loud voices questioned the possibility of meaningful
democracy at a level above that of the nation on the grounds that there
existed no European people. This no-demos thesis was to spread far and
wide into the German and other member-states’ media and academic
debates, in addition to legal spheres, and it continues to structure repre-
sentations of the EU’s (potential for) democratic legitimacy.
Finally, as one might expect, this chapter has indicated important
differences in national understandings of what it would mean for the EU
to be more democratic or more legitimate. The expansion of EP powers,
for example, widely demanded in German political and wider public
discourse had, however, little prospect of convincing the French. A new
definition of the EU’s democratic deficit emerged in the context of the
Maastricht crisis in both public spheres. It defined this deficit in terms
of the falling popular support for integration. The idea that the people
had to be convinced, educated or ‘taken on board’ had spilled over from
clairvoyant official legitimation strategies of the past decade or two (e.g.
CEC 1976, 1985d, see Chapter 3) to the national public spheres. At the
time of the Maastricht debates, it still featured a tendency to implicitly
frame citizen attitudes as objects of education, information, and manip-
ulation, as did similarly the People’s Europe discourses.
5
Discursive Crisis Management:
Stressing and Stretching
‘Democracy’, 1990s–2000s

EU officials, politicians, and journalists agreed with academics that

the controversies over the Maastricht Treaty signified the death of the
‘permissive consensus’, and a severe crisis of legitimacy for the EU. How
did they constitute and discursively manage this crisis? How did they
define this legitimacy gap, what were the implicit blueprints of where
the EU should be heading, what it should be about, and how, and by
whom, it should be governed? Furthermore, to what extent did official
discourses around and after Maastricht respond to the discursive devel-
opments in the member-state public debates on Maastricht I considered
in Chapter 4? Later, in Chapter 6, I will in turn explore how those top-
down constructions of the EU’s legitimacy crisis were again received and
re-modelled during the French and German debates on the constitu-
tional treaty.
A common reading of the Maastricht crisis was that it was a water-
shed in the EU’s fortunes, not least in that a ‘new actor’ had entered
the stage of EU politics: the European citizen (e.g. DZ 20/04/2004).
Whereas the People’s Europe campaign had turned around the citizen,
whom it wooed in a comparatively patronising top-down manner
(Chapter 3), ‘the people’ had now actively ‘shocked the powers that
be by registering defiance’ (Weiler 1999:8). The tables were turning:
‘things will never again be as comfortable for politicians as they had
been before: public opinion matters’ (Eurobarometer Nr 38, December
1992:iv). Political actors could no longer act on the assumption that
the citizens would not interfere with the deepening and widening of
integration. The Europeans had grown increasingly alienated and had
lost ‘confidence’ in the idea of the European Community (e.g. Council

128
 Discursive Crisis Management 129

1992c:411, EP 1995:2). A mainstream description of the EU’s legitimacy

crisis was the idea of a pro-integration ‘Europe of the elites’ opposing
a more sceptical ‘Europe of the electorates’ (Laffan 1993:37). In short,
the EU had a legitimacy problem because and in that its citizens had
become more sceptical than previously. But why were they more scep-
tical, according to these discourses?
One pattern in the explanations publicly offered by the EU insti-
tutions was to attribute popular scepticism to a lack of information
(see also Chapter 3). From this angle, the EU’s legitimacy gap was to
an important degree called an ‘information gap’ (e.g. Eurobarometer
Nr 38, December 1992:x). The presumption was that ‘the public [did]
not understand European affairs’. Better information and communi-
cation would ‘help it understand’ (Walters and Haahr 2005b:75). The
Commission rationalised this strategy by referring to statistical evidence
on the correlation between, on the one hand, levels of awareness or
knowledge of the EU and, on the other, positive attitudes towards it
(e.g. CEC 2001:11). The Eurobarometer took this approach as far as
suggesting that the EU created by the new treaty coincided with the
‘type of united Europe’ that the majority of citizens approved, while
the type they rejected ‘clearly’ was ‘neither foreseen in the Maastricht
Treaty nor [ ... ] represented by the current EC’. The only problem is ‘the
public does not know’ (Eurobarometer Nr 38, December 1992:x). The
challenge, then, was to inform them that they were getting what they
wanted. On these grounds, the Maastricht crisis entailed a multiplica-
tion of efforts and resources devoted to EU information and communi-
cation policies throughout the 1990s and 2000s (CEC 2001:11, 2002:11,
Council 1992a:396, 1992b:409, Delors 1993). The communication
budget increased three-fold from 1992 to 1998; a special Commissioner
was given the responsibility for information and communication (Meyer
1999:624). In terms of substance, the commitment to ‘demonstrat[ing]
to our citizens the benefits’ of the EU and the treaty (Council 1992b:409)
went hand in hand with a concurrent ‘strategy [at the negotiation stage]
to keep “sensitive decisions” away from the public eye’ (Meyer 1999:630,
see Shore 2000:54–6, 98, citing CEC 1993e).
In addition to targeting what the citizens knew and thought about
the EU, the recognition that the EU was undergoing a legitimacy crisis
forced Union officials and commentators to confront what it was about
the EU and integration themselves (rather than about the citizens) that
had entailed the crisis. Maastricht compelled defenders as well as critics
of the EU to face up to the issue of the legitimacy of the EU and its
institutions. A ‘normative turn in European Studies’ saw scholars
130 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

investigate the nature of the EU’s legitimacy problem through the

lenses of normative political theory (Bellamy and Castiglione 2003:7,
see overview in Føllesdal 2006). The European institutions, too, had to
turn towards these questions if they wanted to address the crisis, which
they did not deny. During and immediately after the treaty’s thorny
ratification, politicians, EU representatives, and scholars joined forces in
representing the EU’s legitimacy gap in terms of its ‘democratic deficit’.
The Eurobarometer ascribed plummeting public support rates vitally
to this democratic deficit, which was ‘all of a sudden very visible and
audible, real and evident’. Only one in seven respondents had said that
citizens had ‘sufficient democratic influence’ in Community decision-
making (Eurobarometer Nr 38, December 1992:vi). Hence, the domi-
nant discourse treated the EU’s democratic deficit as the main challenge
in overcoming the crisis of popular confidence.
In fact, during the decade or so after Maastricht both European insti-
tutions and academia tended to take for granted (and often still do)
that ‘legitimacy’ was one and the same thing as ‘democratic legitimacy’
(see Skach 2005:152). With a view to the long-term discursive history
of contests over EU legitimacy, this new clear emphasis on democracy
constituted a shift with regard to the limited space attributed to democ-
racy in visions of Community legitimacy of the 1950s–1970s, which
rather put the weight on the efficient delivery of tasks such as peace and
prosperity (Chapter 1, and see Chapter 2 on early projections of democ-
racy as central to the Communities’ legitimacy). This shift happened
partly in response to the political and public resistance to Maastricht
and to the national public debates analysed in the previous chapter.
As I suggested earlier, democracy had come to play a key role in the
challenges to EU legitimacy in these debates, especially in the nation-
al-republican and no-demos critiques. Decidedly more prominent and
contested, however—and appealing to less exclusive, expert or compara-
tively informed audiences, were EMU and concerns for national identity.
In this regard, the official focus on democracy stood in marked contrast
to the French and German Maastricht debates.
Moreover, if the main challenge to EU legitimacy was supposed to be
the democratic deficit, everything of course depended on how this deficit
was defined and framed. The debates around European elections and a
stronger parliament of the 1960s and 1970s had emphasised electoral,
parliamentary democracy of a partly supranational nature (Chapter 2).
The democracy critiques advanced in the French and German Maastricht
debates, in turn, tackled the EU democracy issue principally from the
angle of whether democracy was at all possible at EU level (Chapter 4).
 Discursive Crisis Management 131

Counter to this, the official-discursive management of the Maastricht

crisis and its long aftermath at least initially shifted the emphasis away
from this overwhelming difficulty and instead towards more manageable
questions of the specific democratic credentials of the EU’s institutional
order. In addition, it actively favoured alternative understandings of
democracy to the majoritarian ones featuring in the 1960s and 1970s.
This chapter investigates how official rhetoric surrounding EU legiti-
macy and democracy bent and stretched the term ‘democracy’ in
specific ways. In Chapter 2 I traced a proto-version of the academic
democratic-deficit critique to the debates during the early decades of
integration around EP elections and expanded EP powers. In academic
journals, the democratic-deficit critique had been gaining momentum
since the mid- or late- 1980s. It peaked, with or following Maastricht,
in the early to mid-1990s (with another, even more pronounced peak
in the early 2000s; Rittberger 2005:29, see overviews in Moravcsik 2002,
Føllesdal and Hix 2006). According to its emerging ‘standard version’
(a ‘non-attributable [ ... ] aggregate of public opinion data, politicians’
statements, media commentary, and considerable learned analysis’;
Weiler et al. 1995:1), integration had progressively shifted legislative
competences from the national parliaments towards the Council of
Ministers – without including the EP as an equal partner in the EC/
EU legislative process. ‘Classical democratic deficit theory’ therefore
denounced the ‘dispossession’ of national representative institutions,
only partially compensated at the European level (Dehousse 1995:125).
As a result of these processes, decisions in the EU were ‘insufficiently
representative of, or accountable to, the nations and people of Europe’
(Lord 2001:165). On top of this, integration had transformed the demo-
cratic process in the member-states themselves, and negatively affected
their own claims to legitimacy (e.g. Eriksen and Fossum 2002:401).
French concerns about the survival of ‘the political’, which I discussed
in Chapter 4, could be subsumed under this last element. Most of the
other elements of this academic democratic-deficit critique echoed
particularly with the German Maastricht debate. They were to be crucial
again in both countries’ debates on the constitutional treaty, which is to
be analysed in Chapter 6.
The members-state debates analysed in the previous and the next
chapters, as well as the official-discursive management and political rhet-
oric under study in the present chapter, underlined how the democratic
deficit was a powerful and manipulable catchphrase (Mény 2003:8–9.
Several competing visions and models of democracy co-existed uneasily
in official discourses on the EU’s legitimacy crisis, and could be enacted
132 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

in pushing for respective preferences about an allegedly more legitimate

institutional arrangement. The European Parliament had a natural stake
in continuing to be seen as the ‘main repository’ (Weiler 1999:78, see
Chapter 2) of democratic legitimacy in the EU. Building on the argu-
ments underlying the advocacy of the 1950s–1970s of European elec-
tions and greater EP power, it continued to rally tirelessly for expanded
parliamentary, legislative powers (see e.g. EP 1992:2a–f). In the EP’s
projected ideal of EU legitimacy, democratic accountability, authorisa-
tion, and representation had to take place in a bicameral system, in which
one chamber was the supranational EP while the other represented the
member-state parliaments; legitimation through the national-elected
representatives alone was insufficient. This corresponded largely to the
dominant discourse on a more democratic EU that I discussed in rela-
tion to the German Maastricht debate (Chapter 4). National parliaments,
in turn, had an interest in propagating the idea that resolving the EU’s
democratic deficit meant returning powers to them, and giving them
better tools for controlling their executive’s action at the European level.
Extending the powers of parliaments, whether national or supranational,
meant returning lost power to the legislative over the executive branch.
In contrast, certain member-state governments, and by extension the
European Council, promoted a rival understanding, at least when
addressing the wider public. On the negotiating table for successive treaty
reforms, to be sure, by the mid-to-late 1990s, the standard response to
the EU’s legitimacy crisis among the governments, political leaders, and
diplomats negotiating successive treaty changes had become to grant the
EP more powers (Goetze and Rittberger 2010, Magnette 2003).
A rival discourse invoked a zero-sum game, not between national
and European parliaments, but between the legislative and execu-
tive branches cutting across the national and supranational levels.
This discourse had already appeared in the supranationalism–
intergovernmentalism debates analysed in Chapter 2. It would be
advanced not least in order to promote particular preference on the
members-state-Community axis; its proponents’ preferred source of
democratic legitimacy for the EU was the Council – the member-
states’ extended arm – rather than the EP, which represented the EU’s
supranational elements. Mitterrand for instance had canvassed this
position in the French Maastricht debate (Chapter 4). John Major, too,
decreed that ‘European Union’ derived ‘its basic democratic legitimacy
through the national Parliaments’, which in turn conferred legitimacy
on the European Council. The European Parliament was therefore
‘not the answer to the democratic deficit’. Since the representatives
 Discursive Crisis Management 133

of the member-state executives were legitimated through national

democratic processes—which people would continue to see ‘as their
democratic focus’, power should be concentrated in the intergovern-
mental rather than the supranational elements of the EU’s institu-
tional framework (Major 1994:7, see Chapter 2). In line with this
understanding, the 1992 European Council in Lisbon underlined
the need to strengthen the dialogue between national parliaments
and the EP (Council 1992a:396). This paid lip service to the impor-
tance of parliamentary democracy, but simultaneously revealed the
concurrent intention to promote the indirect, international, rather
than the supranational dimension of democracy in the EU. Tellingly,
the Birmingham Declaration, proclaimed at a 1992 emergency
Council meeting in response to the Maastricht crisis, used the word
‘democracy’ exclusively for the context of the member-states (Council
1992b:409). Commission representatives, for their part, rhetorically
stressed the ‘strong natural alliance’ between the Commission and
the EP (after all, who else could ‘carry forward the European project?’
[Prodi 1999a]). President Delors (1993) proclaimed a ‘crusade for
democracy in close cooperation with’ the EP. However, as an institu-
tion the Commission did not have much interest in making Union
decision-making more accountable to either the EP or the national
parliaments.
Generally, the Commission continued to emphasise efficient govern-
ment performance as the main ground for claiming EU legitimacy
(see Chapters 1 and 7). In other words, it stressed output legitimacy
over elements of input legitimacy, including democratic authorisa-
tion, accountability, or representativeness. It weighted the democratic
legitimacy of Union government against its effectiveness, giving priority
to the latter. ‘Democracy comprises the very essence of the Union’, it
declared, ‘while effectiveness is the precondition for its future’ (CEC
1995a:4). The yardsticks the Commission employed for improved deci-
sion-making mechanisms, for example, were decision-making efficiency
and governance performance, as opposed to democratic input legitimacy
(CEC 1995a:6). Ironically though, the trade-off between ‘democracy’
and ‘effectiveness’ could also work in favour of democracy- or generally
input-based legitimation rhetoric, at least of a certain kind. Focusing the
debate on the Community’s democratic deficit could be an opportune
way of shifting an even more pressing challenge to the background.
Economic performance in Europe had been poor; the population was
generally suspicious of the impending common currency, and only time
could provide the proof for the success of EMU. Additionally, the EU was
134 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

struggling to assert itself as an actor on the transformed stage of interna-

tional politics in the post-Cold War world. All this once again strained
the credibility of narratives grounded in the claim to the EU’s efficient
problem-solving performance. Perhaps its democratic credentials were
a relatively less daunting issue than the question of the EU’s continued
relevance.
On the whole, the equation of the EU’s legitimacy crisis with the
‘democratic deficit’ of its decision-making procedures was exception-
ally successful in tainting the discourses of all institutional actors and
the core decision-makers in EU politics. At least rhetorically, they all
committed to making EU decision-making more democratic, and to
strengthening the parliamentary element, whether they emphasised
the role of the European or the national parliaments. The Amsterdam,
Nice, and constitutional treaties did progressively expand parliamentary
control, consultation, or co-decision (see e.g. Rittberger 2003, 2005).
Still, the actual institutional reforms ultimately did not change the
institutional structure of the Commission initiating, and the Council,
representing the member-state governments, deciding on legislation,
with the supranational parliament ‘co-deciding’ or expressing opin-
ions. Some judged that rather than strengthening the link between citi-
zens and decision-makers, they actually further diluted it (Kohler-Koch
2000:513). Failures to parliamentarise EU decision-making more thor-
oughly were facilitated by the fact that parliamentary scrutiny, account-
ability, and representation increasingly constituted only one of several
co-existing frames of democratic legitimacy. Why incur the political cost
of substantially expanding the EP’s power if not everyone even agreed
that this was what would make the EU more legitimate or democratic?
Why not rather emphasise alternative visions of a more legitimate, more
democratic EU?
Competing visions of what could make the EU more democratic
included ‘making Community action more transparent’ and imple-
menting the principle subsidiarity (both of which I shall now consider
in turn). These were, for example, the principal elements of Delors’s
‘crusade for democracy’ (1993). In the months and years following
the Maastricht crisis, European Council, Commission, Parliament, as
well as national governments and parliaments converged on transpar-
ency and subsidiarity as the defining features of most proposals for
how to remedy the EU’s democratic deficit1 (later on, identity issues
shifted to the foreground, as I will argue subsequently). Transparency
and subsidiarity came to be used virtually synonymously with democ-
racy, so consistently were the three named in the same breath. Official
 Discursive Crisis Management 135

discourses effectively blurred the boundaries between these concepts.

How did this happen?

Democracy as transparency

Framing what was illegitimate about EU government in terms of a lack

of transparency was a ‘tactical response’ by the European institutions
(Lodge 1994:344). In this view, fixing the democratic deficit did not
require institutional and constitutional reform, but only making EU
decision-making more transparent. Further, a typical premise was that
improving the openness and transparency of legislative and bureau-
cratic procedures would bring the EU closer to its citizens, rallying
much-needed public support (e.g. Council 1992b:409, 1991, EP 1995:4,
see Mather 2006:78).
In its emergency meeting in Birmingham, the European Council
pledged to open up the work of the EU institutions, ‘including the
possibility of some open Council discussion’ (Council 1992b:point 1.8).
The Commission repeatedly vowed to become ‘much more open’
(e.g. Prodi 1999b: ‘It is time for some glasnost here!’), spending a lot of
effort and resources during the 1990s on its transparency programme
(see Héritier 1999, Lodge 1994). The EP joined in calls for making EU
decision-making more transparent, while continuing to emphasise the
parliamentary dimension of a more democratic EU (e.g. EP 1992:2g).
Transparency and openness were also prominent items on the agenda for
the renegotiation of Maastricht at the 1996 intergovernmental confer-
ence resulting in the Treaty of Amsterdam (e.g. CEC 1995a, 1996). This
was not only due to pressure from EP and Commission, but also certain
member-state governments, as well as ‘the public’ (Dinan 1999:255,
see 181–2). In the French and German ratification debates, the issue
had not yet featured very prominently (but would play a more impor-
tant role in the constitutional debates). Academic commentators had
since increasingly suggested that transparency, information or mutual
horizontal control and distrust among political actors could function
as alternatives to parliamentary scrutiny. Such mechanisms, they said,
could reinforce accountability and democratic support (Héritier 1999a,
see Magnette 2003:151, Dehousse 1995).
According to the discourses of the European institutions, there was a
triple link between a more transparent EU and a more ‘democratic’ one.
The first regarded national parliaments—who could only control what
they knew about. The Edinburgh Council committed the institutions to
increasing the transparency of EU decision-making above all in order to
136 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

‘allow for wider debate’ in national parliaments (Council 1992c:412–13).

According to a Commission report in preparation for the 1996 IGC, a
more ‘open’ EU would be one in which national parliaments could be
‘involved more closely in Union affairs’ as they would have ‘timely
access to all the information they need, from the various institutions
and bodies of the Union, and from their governments’ (CEC 1996:7).
Increased transparency in this sense would enable national parliaments
to overview Commission, Council, and their respective governments’
voting behaviour in the Council. This argument associated democracy
as transparency with democracy as parliamentary accountability. In fact,
however, while transparency and access to minutes and voting reports
were necessary to ensure parliamentary accountability, they were not
sufficient in the absence of institutionalised veto and control mecha-
nisms (and given the sheer volume of decisions taken by the various
EU institutions). Further, both above-cited references to improved
parliamentary accountability through transparency were limited to the
national parliaments, neglecting the European Parliament – and indeed
the voters.
The second link concerned these voters. Improving the citizens’ access
to information about decisions at hand, and the relevant procedures,
was supposed to incite them to take an active interest in EU politics and
legislation, and to engage in public will-formation that would inform
legislative behaviour. This was in tune with the deliberative-democracy
perspective in academic approaches to EU legitimacy (see Chapter 7).
The Birmingham Declaration claimed that making the Community
more open and transparent would ‘ensure a better informed public
debate on its activities’ (Council 1992b:409). This rhetoric cast a blind
eye on the possibility that citizens, even if enabled to access information
about political decision-making, might choose not to take an interest
or engage in public deliberation. Or, even if they did, they might reject
perfectly transparent decisions and refuse to grant a perfectly open
decision-making process political legitimacy.
The third link only concerned democratic accountability. Official
discourses and practices implied that increased transparency would
allow the public to scrutinise administrative practices as well as political
decision-making processes. This invoked – an illusory – accountability,
control, and hence empowerment of the people vis-à-vis the power of
the EU. For in reality, the public in this discourse would oversee and
observe, rather than influence or sanction, decisions taken.
William Walters and Jens Henrik Haahr (2005b:73–5) interpret EU
transparency programmes in terms of the ‘technology of power’ of
 Discursive Crisis Management 137

‘transparison’, following historian Kevin Baker (1994), who had iden-

tified it (rather hesitantly) for the French Revolution. This govern-
mentality technique manifested in the notion that ‘those affected’ by
acts of the Union had to be ‘in a position to obtain all the informa-
tion they require’ (CEC 1996:7). What mattered most was to advance
the image that ‘Europe is no longer deciding its future behind closed
doors’ (CEC 1995a:1a). The message was that by bringing EU decision-
making ‘into the light of public scrutiny’ (Prodi 1999b), one would
bring it closer to its citizens. Of course, the fact that the citizens could
‘see’ did not in itself mean that they could actually influence, control,
or even retroactively sanction, the decision-making they observed.
In this regard, the emphasis of official discourses on transparency
helped to divert attention from this lack of actual power. The tech-
nology of ‘transparison’ was also well illustrated by the institution
in 1995 of the European Ombudsman (Haahr 2005:15, see Magnette
2005). Complementing the citizens’ right of petition to the EP, the
Ombudsman introduced a new possibility for citizens to be able to
register complaints. This implicated their right to scrutinise govern-
mental and administrative action, and inherently to a ‘certain form
of treatment’ by the EU institutions. Of course, the Ombudsman’s
only formal power has been to make inquiries and articulate public
criticism (Walters and Haahr 2005b:75).
A readily acknowledged element and precondition of ‘transparison’
was that the workings of the EU were not only evident to the citizen’s
eye, but also understandable to his or her intellect. ‘What the Union does
has to be understandable: democracy depends on this’, the Commission
avowed (CEC 1996:7). A more ‘open’ Europe, in the Commission’s rhet-
oric, would be a simpler, more understandable Europe. This involved
‘simplifying Europe’ and its institutional arrangements, including the
treaties and the decision-making process. At first, openness through
understandability was more of a public-relations slogan than a guiding
principle of concrete institutional reform proposals (see the vagueness
of CEC 1995a:4–5, 1996). Still, making the EU’s legislative procedures,
the division of competences between Union and member-states, and
generally, the treaties, ‘clearer and better understood without changing
their meaning’, was a main aim of the ‘declaration on the future of
the Union’, annexed to the Nice Treaty (Council 2000). The Laeken
Declaration subsequently gave prominence to ‘simplification’, in the
service of increasing the overall transparency of Union action to the
citizen (Council 2001). The discourse that the EU system was in need
of radical simplification became so embedded that it played a decisive
138 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

role in the run-up to and in bringing about the Convention on the

Future of Europe (Magnette and Nicolaïdis 2004:385–8, see Closa 2004,
Shaw 2003, Rittberger 2005).

Subsidiarity as closeness to the citizens

Another magical weapon against citizen alienation and the with-

drawal of popular support, according to the post-Maastricht discourses
of the EU institutions, was the principle of subsidiarity (e.g. Council
1992b:410, Council 1992a:396, EP 1995:I). Sometimes subsidiarity
was simply equated with ‘nearness’ or ‘closeness’ to the citizens (e.g.
Council 1992b:410, EP 1995:2). Note that this discourse built on long-
standing equivalents in member-state political debate. Helmut Kohl for
example had presented the subsidiarity principle as enabling ‘people to
identify with the path towards Europe in their own way’; Bundestag
1993:10829.
Subsidiarity had been on the Community reform agenda since the
1980s.2 It was codified in the Maastricht Treaty. By its very letter, the
principle set out that: ‘In areas which do not fall within its exclusive
competence, the Community shall take action, in accordance with
the principle of subsidiarity, only if and in so far as the objectives of
the proposed action cannot be sufficiently achieved by the member-
states and can therefore, by reasons of scale or effects of the proposed
action, be better achieved by the Community’ (TEU Title II B Art. 3b).
The treaty, more generally, demanded that decisions had to be ‘taken
as closely as possible to the citizen’ (TEU Art. A). This suggested that
they would be taken under his critical gaze, scrutiny and control. The
subsidiarity discourse implied a natural link between subsidiarity and
transparency, and of both with democratic control and closeness to
the citizens (e.g. CEC 1995a:5). To be sure, this association of transpar-
ency with the lowest possible level of decision-making had to strike
a balance between representing low-level action as transparent while
not undermining efforts to represent supranational decision-making
as transparent, too.
Subsidiarity, as in decision-making at the lowest effective political or
administrative level, was meant to assuage concerns that the weight of
the individual citizen was minimal, and further decreasing, in the EU
framework. A widespread popular and political discourse corresponded
to what Joseph Weiler’s technical term of ‘inverted regionalism’ refers
to (1999:265): the more citizens were included, the less their individual
votes counted. In reaction to this discourse, both defenders and critics of
 Discursive Crisis Management 139

EU legitimacy would present the subsidiarity principle as a limit on the

number of decisions taken at a greater distance (e.g. CEC 1995a:5).
In this they responded to a widely accepted explanation of Maastricht’s
thorny ratification, which had taken root in political as well as academic
discourses: through rebuffing the Maastricht Treaty, according to this
explanation, the European citizens were expressing fears of, and oppo-
sition to, ‘ever more Europe’. The 1992 December Eurobarometer had
stated that the previous ‘consensus about “Europe” and about “more
of it”’ had eroded (v, vii). Many citizens now doubted that integra-
tion should continue progressively to include ever more policy areas.
Maastricht had only worked as a ‘powerful accelerator’ of the resulting
change of climate in public opinion. The public reaction against the
treaty had been so violent because its opponents credibly presented it
as incarnating ‘still much more Europe to come’. In the face of such
evidence, national and European leaders agreed, in the wake of the
Maastricht crisis, that popular opinion opposed further steps of deep-
ening integration. Further increases of the Union’s power were out of the
question for the time being (e.g. CEC 1995a:6, see Mather 2006:52).
Subsidiarity was further invoked as the antithesis to a European
‘superstate’ (e.g. EP 1994:3), ‘Brussels’ regulation frenzy’ (Bundestag
1993:10817–18), or the excessive centralisation of ‘everything’ in Brussels
(e.g. CEC 1995a:2, Eurobarometer Nr 38, December 1992:ix, see Council
1992b:410). In official rhetoric, subsidiarity even served as a panacea
against the fears of many citizen’s of losing their national and regional
identities as a result of European integration (Council 1992b:409, see
Eurobarometer Nr 38, December 1992:ix; this was also a recurrent point
in the Bundestag’s debates on Maastricht). In short, subsidiarity provided
refutations for all kinds of concerns about the EU.
What the Europeans, according to the Eurobarometer, did accept
was that sovereignty had to be ‘pooled and exercised through
common institutions’, but ‘only in such policy areas, where national
(or regional) governments can no longer solve problems effectively’
(Eurobarometer Nr 38, December 1992:ix). The subsidiarity principle
was defined and framed in direct accordance with this perceived
public understanding (see earlier and e.g. CEC 1995a:2, EP 1995:I,
Council 1992c:419). But how was one to decide to which policy areas
the absolute need for collective action applied? The Commission
presented ‘working out the right level for the most effective action,
whatever the question concerned’ as an objective question of effi-
ciency. By including subsidiarity in the Maastricht Treaty, it affirmed,
the member-states had made a commitment to finding ‘the best way
140 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

of serving the citizens’. This criterion of efficiency made subsidiarity

a means of justifying supranational measures (‘which are better taken
collectively than in isolation’) rather than ‘diluting the Union’ (by
demanding action at the lowest possible level) (CEC 1995a:2, 5).
One only needed to label specific problems as shared by all or several
member-states and as demanding collective action. Issues earmarked
as solely manageable at a European level were, for example, greater
security, solidarity, employment, and the environment (e.g. EP 1995:I,
CEC 1995a:2). Efficiency as the criterion for working out the right level
of action de-politicised this question as a technical matter, a matter of
weighing objective capacities against each other. Nevertheless, deter-
mining this level of action was admittedly a ‘political and subjective
process and presupposed a political answer to the fundamental ques-
tions which application of the principle will undoubtedly raise’ (CEC
1993d, cited after Best 1994:25). In practice, the application of subsid-
iarity has been found to foster deliberation and the collective search
for political agreement (Føllesdal 2000). In less generous terms, it
nurtured conflict. It fuelled both the powerful image and the practice
of ‘competence creep’ in the EU.
In response to this negative image, subsidiarity was by the end of the
millennium replaced as the magic weapon for overcoming citizen alien-
ation by the (related) motif of a ‘better division and definition of compe-
tence in the European Union’. The ‘impression that the Union takes on
too much in areas where its involvement is not always essential’ had to
be counter-acted (Council 2001). When German foreign minister Joschka
Fischer called for an EU constitution, he supported this demand with a
similar argument (2000:6). The EU’s most urgent and fundamental chal-
lenge, he argued, was to reorder competences between EU institutions
as well as between the EU, the nation-state, and the regions. A more
explicit codification of who was in charge of what would move the issue
of competences to the realm of non-negotiable rules of the game, and
help fight the popular perception of the EU as an overly powerful and
active bureaucracy (see similarly Council 2001:I).
In sum, both the transparency/openness and the subsidiarity discourses
claimed to bring the EU ‘closer to the citizens’. Yet, neither of them
necessarily implied more real citizen influence on what they could freely
observe and what was taking place ‘near’ them. As far as democratic
authorisation and accountability were concerned, both discourses, while
on the surface speaking to supranational democracy, effectively tilted the
balance in favour of indirect, intergovernmental democratic legitimation
via elected national representatives.
 Discursive Crisis Management 141

Governance and participation

Besides framing democracy as transparency and presenting subsidiarity

as the key to bringing Europe closer to its citizens, the legitimation
discourses of the EU institutions were marked by a third key develop-
ment. This took place later than the first two and peaked around the
turn of the century. It presented ‘governance’ as the answer to the EU’s
democratic and social legitimacy deficits. Academics had employed the
concept to the EU since the mid-1990s, leading to a ‘governance turn’ in
EU studies (Kohler-Koch and Rittberger 2006, see Chapter 7). The concept
spread to the official EU circles, particularly the Commission, under
the Commission presidency of Romano Prodi and through the work of
his ‘Forward Studies Unit’ (Magnette 2003:146–7, see e.g. Lebessis and
Paterson 2000, De Schutter et al. 2000, Hubert and Caremier 2000). The
2001 ‘White Paper on European Governance’ and a series of speeches by
Prodi to the EP reflected the official version of what governance meant in
the context and discourse of the EU (CEC 2001, Prodi 2000, 2001). What
did governance mean in the rhetoric of the European institutions, and
what kind of participation did it foresee? I will highlight three aspects.
First, thinking of EU politics in terms of governance offered a way out
of the supranationalism versus intergovernmentalism dichotomy, which
had structured political and academic debates since the very beginning
of integration (see Chapter 2). The academic and political governance
discourses now promoted the reading that the EU was already more than
an international regime, but was unlikely ever to become a federalist state.
This new way of thinking about sovereignty in the EU could be invoked
flexibly to assuage concerns either about too much or too little supra-
nationalism. Describing the ‘nature of the beast’ (Risse-Kappen 1996)
as something ‘sui generis’, rather than an insufficient approximation to
both the intergovernmental or the supranational models of European
politics, was useful in soothing fears that the EU was moving towards
either of these options. Rather than being deficient in terms of the
available models of political authority, the EU, according to the govern-
ance paradigm, was developing an innovative, more efficient system
to deal with new challenges such as economic globalisation or climate
change (see Mayntz 2005). In this way, the Commission’s governance
discourse worked against the established notion that successful govern-
ment required an unambiguous hierarchy and allocation of competences
between its different levels. This constituted a further shift away from
subsidiarity as an organising principle – and additionally presented an
alternative to codifying competences: ‘we have to stop thinking in terms
142 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

of hierarchical layers of competence separated by the subsidiarity prin-

ciple and start thinking, instead, of a network arrangement, with all
levels of governance shaping, proposing, implementing and monitoring
policy together’ (Prodi 2000).
Second, the governance discourse claimed to offer a whole new
vision of democracy, developing better alternatives to the accepted
models of representative democracy, and particularly of civic partici-
pation (Magnette 2003:144; on the ‘participatory turn’ in EU studies,
see Chapter 7). The traditional parliamentary system with its majori-
tarian aspects was, accordingly, ‘ill adapted’ to the needs of a diverse
and hybrid creature like the EU, under the sway of pronounced national
feelings (Dehousse 1995:134). In selling the Commission’s idea of
European governance, Prodi would recall low election turnouts across
the liberal democracies, and identify, among the citizens, an increasing
‘disenchantment’ with the established model of democracy as well as
a ‘growing crisis of faith’ in their parliamentary representatives (Prodi
2001). Notwithstanding, ‘democracy’ remained an indispensable prereq-
uisite for credible claims to political and EU legitimacy.
Hence, the challenge was to stretch what comprised ‘democracy’, in
yet another step. Equating democracy with ‘governance’ was the obvious
answer: ‘When we speak of “governance” we are, in fact, discussing
democracy’ (Prodi 2001, see similarly CEC 2001:32). In fact, this discourse
represented governance as a superior type of democracy, ‘more complete
and thoroughgoing’ than traditional parliamentary representation.
Moreover, it was the ‘kind of democracy our fellow-citizens want’ (Prodi
2001), the much-needed solution for the global phenomenon of citizen
‘alienation from politics’ (CEC 2001:32, see Norris 1999). The govern-
ance discourse was claimed not only to ‘radically rethink the way we
do Europe’, but also to ‘devise an exemplary new relationship between
Europe’s citizens and its institutions’ (Prodi 2000, 2001).
What was this new relationship between citizens and EU institutions
that was foreseen in the governance discourse? According to Jérôme
Vignon, the Forward Studies Unit’s chief adviser on the 2001 White
Paper, the problem with democracy in the EU was not that it did not
have ‘a parliamentary institution analogous to that found at the centre
of national public life’. The EU’s legitimacy crisis was not so much a
question of this ‘deficit’. Rather, it originated in the fact that the EU
had the wrong kind of democratic institutions; the ‘procedures of the
European Community’ had become ‘formal rather than genuine’. What
did this mean? To Vignon’s mind, it was particularly the classic mecha-
nisms of parliamentary accountability that were doomed to remain
 Discursive Crisis Management 143

‘formal’ (De Schutter et al. 2000:4). A more genuine type of democracy

in contrast would be ‘much more participatory, “hands-on”’ (Prodi
2000). The implication was that, even if the deficits in the – formal –
mechanisms of parliamentary representation were remedied, the EU’s
‘crisis of democracy’ would persist. The way forward was to look for alter-
natives to this traditional kind of indirect democratic participation.
How was this alternative vision of genuine participation fleshed out?
Participation was one of the five outlined ‘principles of good governance’
of the 2001 White Paper (CEC 2001:10). Yet tellingly, there was nothing
in it about direct popular participation, and little about parliamentary
representation (Mather 2006:108). This was because the document
projected a counter-image of participation, centred on ‘civil society’.
In this image, the subject of improved ‘participation’ or ‘involvement’
was not so much the individual, nor the people as a whole (as, say,
the bearer of a general or a majority will), but civil society. Improving
participation meant ‘involving civil society’, consulting interest parties,
objective-based networks, and subnational levels of government (CEC
2001:11–18). The focus in the governance paradigm was on constant
‘information-sharing amongst participants’ at all the multiple levels
of governance rather than representation (Mather 2006:80, see CEC
2001:16–17, and Art. 1.47 DCT). ‘Civil society’ included: ‘trade unions
and employers’ organisations (“social partners”), non-governmental
organisations; professional organisations; organisations that involve
citizens in local and municipal life with a particular contribution from
churches and religious communities’ (CEC 2001:14). The White Paper
thus defined civil society – the subject of political participation – in
functional terms as a set of groups defined by particular ends. General
actors who defended a more global view, such as political parties, were
mentioned only once and very vaguely, as the EP critically noted (EP
2001, see CEC 2001:16, Magnette 2003:149). In short, while the White
Paper did frequently use words like citizens, people, or general public,
its concrete proposals concerned almost exclusively non-parliamentary
organised interest groups, framed as the ‘representatives’ of ‘civil society’
rather than citizens or the people.
What is more, the governance discourse’s ubiquitous references to
civil society concealed the point that the governance conception of
participation did not actually foresee any ‘real right’ of the citizens
‘to be consulted’. Only the European institutions, and above all the
Commission, could initiate ‘participation’ and choose the groups to be
consulted (Magnette 2003:150, see Kohler-Koch 2000:524). In effect, the
reforms suggested by the White Paper did not aim to enhance the level
144 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

of participation of ordinary citizens, but to consult those already active

and organised (Magnette 2003:148, 151). A key presumption underlying
the Commission’s governance discourse was that most citizens did not
want to be involved in politics. They were happy to delegate the tasks
of informing decision-makers about their interests and holding them
accountable to more mobilised, better-informed and organised fellow
citizens. On these grounds, the Commission had actively developed
from the 1990s onwards a system of ‘networks, focused on specific objec-
tives’ (CEC 2001:18, see Kohler-Koch 1999). It tried to compensate for
inequalities in representation through organised groups by supporting
weak groups in order to ‘guarantee the systematic involvement of all
affected interests’ and ‘all of those who have a stake’ (Lebessis and
Paterson 2000:30, 22). Nevertheless, the ‘institutional “logic of influ-
ence”’ persevered, which privileged strong economic or organised inter-
ests with the necessary resources. ‘Numerous case studies’, moreover,
have provided evidence that the Commission, in determining who will
be heard, first pursue[d] its own institutional interest’ (Kohler-Koch
2000:524).
The third and final aspect of the official governance discourse to
be addressed here concerns the balance of input- and output-based
legitimacy in this paradigm (see Introduction and Chapter 7). Beyond
participation, legitimacy in the governance paradigm resulted to a
considerable degree from the efficient delivery of specific tasks that
the citizens expected to be fulfilled. While ‘governance’ was ostensibly
about civil society involvement and participation, output efficiency
persisted as a parallel legitimation frame, of a higher priority than
that regarding the EU’s democratic credentials, however defined. Prodi
(2001) reiterated the old storyline that returning the EU to the confi-
dence of its citizens presupposed the EU delivering efficient problem-
solving and thus persuading them that the EU was still ‘our only hope’
in ‘response to galloping globalisation’. In the words of Myrto Tsakatika,
the ‘governance debate served to give the traditional Monnet formula
for legitimating EU governance a good repackaging: “output” legitimacy
was the strong point of EU governance as much as ever’ (2005:202, see
Lord and Magnette 2004:4–5).
The novelty was that the governance conception of participation in
terms of consultation provided the EU and legitimation discourses with
a new means of identifying alleged citizen needs, much as the supposed
‘dialogue with the citizens’ I analysed in Chapter 3 had done before.
The prime benefit in ‘involving civil society’ lay in the ‘important role’
it could play ‘in giving voice to the concerns of citizens and delivering
 Discursive Crisis Management 145

services that meet people’s needs’ (CEC 2001:14). Consulting organised

networks and interest groups was more effective in this respect not only
than opinion polls, but also than direct popular participation could ever
be: ‘Participation is not about institutionalising protest. It is about more
effective policy shaping’ (CEC 2001:15).
The governance discourse was tailored, furthermore, to promote
the Commission’s traditional self-representation as the ‘guardian’ of
the Treaty and the common European interest, the impartial mediator
between and ‘sympathetic ear’ for contrasting political views, national
interests and interest group pressures, as well as the centre of technocratic
expertise (Tsakatika 2005:199–200). Civil society consultations gave the
Commission new instruments to ensure good performance in managing
the vast array of its policy programmes. To this end, the Commission did
not (need to) consult Parliament (see Kohler-Koch 2000:522). Rather,
it drew on interest group representatives, giving a voice to those who
would be affected and hence knew best which options would lead to
optimal delivery, and who had expert knowledge. The White Paper
pledged to raise popular ‘confidence in expert advice’ (CEC 2001:19).
Both in this regard and through its structural favouring of informed
and organised citizens or groups, the White Paper ‘may be regarded as
a restatement of the Technocratic Europe’s raison d’être – “leave it to the
experts”’ (Mather 2006:85, see Tsakatika 2005:208–9, 215).
Overall, the governance discourse assumed that the European citizens
ultimately preferred delegating civic participation in political decision-
making and policy-making to parliamentary representation because
this gave them what they wanted, or at least what was best for them.
The discourse reaffirmed efficient problem-solving output as a source of
EU legitimacy: ‘Effective action by European institutions is the greatest
source of their legitimacy’ (Prodi 2000, see e.g. CEC 1995a:2, 5).

Identity- and demos-building

If the governance discourse was aimed at re-imagining the subject of

political participation and democracy in unorthodox ways (as civil
society rather than individual citizens or a collective citizenry), it was
flanked by even more prominent official discourses around EU legiti-
macy that essentially aimed to bring into being a collective European
political subject or body politic, which, in many respects, resembled
national peoples. In the medium and longer-terms, the relevant post-
Maastricht official discourses extended their emphasis to identity- and
demos-building. The discourses around transparency, subsidiarity, and
146 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

governance had been stretching what democracy might mean in the

context of European integration. What was at stake in discourses around
identity- and demos-building, in contrast, was nothing less than the
plausibility of claims that there could be democracy at the EU level in
the first place.
With this re-balancing of discursive emphasis, the European insti-
tutions tackled not least two important discourses that had become
prominent in the French and German public spheres with and after
the Maastricht crisis (Chapter 4): ideas tying the practice of democracy
and citizenship to the confines of a national community, and no-demos
arguments questioning whether there could be supranational democracy
at EU level, given that no European demos existed. The identity- and
demos-building measures and discourses of the European institutions
during the late 1990s and early 2000s developed elements of the People’s
Europe project, but aimed to circumvent such powerful objections that
had gained visibility in the meantime. To what extent did they constitute
attempts to convert the population of the EU into something it failed
to be, according to the above critiques: a demos beyond their member-
states? What vision of democracy in the EU context was projected in
the process, and in what ways did this reify traditional ideas from the
nation-state context?
By way of what we may call an affective turn in official discourse and
policy, with time the Commission and the other institutions increas-
ingly framed the EU’s legitimacy gap as the symptom of an identity
or ‘cultural deficit’ (Shore 2000:3) – in a way a ‘community deficit’
(Etzioni 2007) – and less than initially as a function of the democratic
deficit. The Maastricht Treaty had established the legal EU competence
for European culture and heritage, which resulted in hitherto unseen
resources and instruments for the EU cultural policies originating in
the People’s Europe campaign (Chapter 3). In the Commission’s rhet-
oric of the late 1990s and early 2000s, the challenge in overcoming
the EU’s continued legitimacy gap was, to an important degree, one
of communicating to the Europeans what the European identity
consisted in (e.g. CEC 2002:12). Cultural policy, was the unchanged
assumption, could help create a collective European cultural identity
and, as such, was an ‘integration factor’ (CEC 1996:102).3 The under-
standing that the strengthening of a collective sense of European
identity would increase (or was a condition of) popular support for
integration and the EU’s legitimacy continued to characterise the
rhetoric of EU institutions and national politicians (see Chapter 3,
and e.g. EP 1995).
 Discursive Crisis Management 147

The new emphasis in official discourse and EU policy on iden-

tity took place against the backdrop of a relevant scholarly litera-
ture on European identity, which had proliferated since the early
1990s. A central position here held that in gathering the indispen-
sable popular support for further integration (the elite-driven form
of which had reached its limits with the Maastricht crisis), the ‘affec-
tive dimension’ (Laffan 1996:100) – or whether or not the citizens
could be induced to actually like the EU – would be crucial. Some
had referred to this as the need for a greater ‘libidinal’ appeal of the
Union (Stavrakakis 2005). In short, the EU had to become not just
useful, but also likeable, and meaningful, to its subjects (Kristeva
2000, see Delanty and Rumford 2005:1). This meant revitalising
discourses which had already left their imprint on the People’s Europe
project (Chapter 3). These discourses represented the Union as much
more than a framework of economic cooperation, and defined and
promoted awareness of what it meant to be European. A European
identity, was the idea, would act as the necessary ‘social cement of
the modern liberal community’.4 Identity-building and cultural and
social integration would not only make political integration possible
(Theiler 2003:844, see Kurzer 2001:25) but also help generally to
‘gather loyalty’ from the EU citizens and ‘build up a much needed
legitimacy’ (García 1993:172).
How did EU policies and discourses take up the challenge to make this
affective dimension of the EU real? The nascent cultural and commu-
nication policies I discussed as part of the People’s Europe campaign
were expanded and continued working towards this goal (see Shore
2000, Bee 2008). The EU ‘Media’ programmes, for example, did so by
promoting cultural production in the audiovisual sector (Council 2006,
see Schlesinger 2001, Theiler 2001). Moreover, the ‘Europeanization’
of identities and everyday practice, driven by the effect of EU policies
and institutions, could be traced in domains such as language, money,
tourism, sex, and sport (Borneman and Fowler 1997) or in public health,
alcohol, and drug policies (Kurzer 2001). Top-down identity-constructing
techniques further included attempts at projecting an external identity
for the EU on the foreign-policy stage, the EU’s immigration and migra-
tion policies, the policing of its borders, or the boundaries symbolised
by the single currency. A lot of these policies and discourses can be
shown to have constructed an ‘us’, delineated against a ‘them’.5 This
seemed particularly opportune in view of the fact that since the fall of
Communism, Europe lacked such a unifying ‘other’, a common threat
and enemy.
148 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

On one level, official legitimation attempts, consequently, aimed

at forging a collective identity beyond the context of the nation, but
one that nonetheless was culturally and emotionally thick enough to
have strong mass mobilising appeal. This dimension of official identity
constructions projected a communitarian sense of belonging of the kind
the French national-republicans (who had worked towards reinserting
the national, communitarian element into republicanism) had claimed
to be indispensable to the practice of democracy and citizenship – and
categorically limited to the community of the nation (Chapter 3). On
another level, given Europe’s cultural, ethnic, linguistic, and histor-
ical heterogeneity, a more abstract, thin, inclusive, and construct-
ible EU-wide identity was possibly all that was achievable (e.g. Jolly
2005). At any rate, a shared European identity was only desirable to
most Europeans as long as it did not threaten their national identi-
ties (Eurobarometer Nr 38, December 1992:ix–x, see Chapter 3, and e.g.
Laffan 1996:98, Kurzer 2001:11).
The discourse of ‘unity in diversity’ seemed to offer a way out. The
motto codified by the constitutional draft treaty (Art. I-8) had become a
‘primary theme of European cultural policy’ since the 1980s and, after
the Maastricht crisis, an absolute staple item in the identity-related
discourses of the EU institutions.6 The discourse of diversity as a value
gave a focal point to the older discursive practice of positioning the EU
as indispensable for realising, protecting, and promoting the ‘flowering’
(TEU Art. 3p) of the diverse European national cultures and identities
(Chapter 3). It allowed (in theory at least) superimposing the mobilising
power of thick national or other particularist identities on the integra-
tion project. Furthermore, drawing on an emerging intellectual tradition
of approaching European history as one of mutual interaction, official
discourses now more and more stressed the dimension of ‘intercultural
dialogue’ or ‘mutual awareness amongst Europe’s cultures’ in the plural
(Council 2006:3).7
Another response to the heterogeneity challenge to an EU identity
built on the originally German intellectual and academic discourse of
‘constitutional patriotism’ (Sternberger 1990, Habermas 1998:155–61,
Ferry 2005, Lacroix 2008, etc.). The concept referred to a collective sense
of shared identity resulting from the citizens’ loyalty to and identifica-
tion with the political system, its rules and procedures, as well as under-
lying values (see also Weiler and Wind 2003). In accordance with this
theoretical approach, dominant official discourses on European identity
have stressed abstract values, principles, and institutional features of the
EU’s political system (see Bee 2008). The Amsterdam Treaty, for instance,
 Discursive Crisis Management 149

listed liberty, democracy, respect for human rights and fundamental

freedoms and the rule of law (Art. 6, see further e.g. EP 1995:I or the
Preamble to the 2000 Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European
Union). Such projections of the EU’s identity as a civic identity reacted,
in part, to the no-demos argument, which was premised on an ‘organic’
understanding of peoplehood (Weiler 1995:219). Constitutional patri-
otism allowed conceiving of a European demos as united by non-organic,
non-ethnic, non-primordial senses of belonging, and therefore as one
that could be developed. Still, such discourses accepted the necessity
to begin with of a shared sense of belonging as a basis for a demos and
hence democracy (see Chapter 7).
The EU’s civic identity unifying this demos was supposed to spring
from a number of sources. The official declaration and codification of
rights and of common ‘European’ values underlying the EU’s political
life and system was a deliberate demos-building tool. Furthermore,
the identity-building and legitimation strategies of the European
institutions continued to be grounded on the understanding, which
I discussed in Chapter 3, that the experience of political participa-
tion and of Union citizenship would help inspire constitutional
patriotism in the Europeans (e.g. Habermas 1998, Delanty 1995:15,
Mouffe 1992:8). The European institutions continued to use the term
‘EU citizenship’ in the same sense as ‘EU identity’ (see e.g. Council
2006:3 or Prodi and Reding 2002). Finally, collective identity could
result from voluntary collaboration in the common political project,
from the Europeans’ willingness live under a common rule to which
they consent of their own accord (e.g. Warleigh 2003:13, Kohler-Koch
2000:520, Nicolaïdis 2004b). Of course, while there was evidence that
most EU-Europeans did prefer their countries to be members, they
had had only limited chances (especially through national elections
or not voting in European elections) to formally express their consent
or disaccord with the EU’s existence and its political system. Still, if
the Union’s citizens did not share a common past, voluntarily sharing
a future destiny could have a powerful appeal (Laffan 1996:99, see e.g.
Sloterdijk 1994:46, 54–5).
An obvious instrument of promoting a European constitutional
patriotism was a European constitution. German Foreign Minister
Joschka Fischer popularised the idea, and put it on the political agenda
(2000). With his famous speech at Humboldt University in May 2000,
he provoked a series of public reactions amongst European political
leaders and intellectuals (see Loth 2002, Leonard 2000, Fossum and
Menendez 2005:401), ultimately leading to the institution of the
150 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

Convention on the Future of Europe and its Draft Treaty establishing

a Constitution for Europe. In the run-up, an increasingly dominant
discourse affirmed that a European constitution would ‘help create
“Europeans”’ (Wiener and della Sala 1997:608, see Habermas 2001,
Preuß 1995). On a practical level, a single and accessible document as
opposed to the numerous and bulky existing treaties would make it
easier for the European citizens to identify what the EU stood for. This
included replacing these unwieldy existing treaties with a single docu-
ment succinctly stating the values and principles at the core of the
EU, but also a definition of where European integration was headed
and where it should end – the EU’s ‘finalité politique’ (Fischer 2000:6).
All this was necessary if the Europeans were to identify with the EU’s
values, principles, and institutions.
Moreover, some hoped that the adoption of a European constitu-
tion in itself would constitute a symbolic act of a European demos
constituting itself, and that the drafting process would give prompt
a ‘constitutional moment’ (Ackerman 1980) of an exceptionally wide
participation by ‘individuals otherwise dedicated to private happiness’
(Arato 1994:173–4) in the re-definition of the system’s constitutional
features (see Weiler 2002:556–7, Sájó 2004, Wiener and della Sala 1997).
Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, Chairman of the European Convention, enthu-
siastically endorsed this discourse, and compared the convention’s work
to that of the American Philadelphia Convention in 1787 (2003; in refer-
ence partly to Siedentop’s 2000 question ‘Where are our Madisons?’). A
credible claim that the people were involved in the EU’s constitution-
making exercise was of course essential to this end. This was why a
convention was invited to draft the constitutional text. In the Council’s
logic, civil society had to be involved through ‘wide-ranging discussions
with all interested parties; representatives of national parliaments and
all those reflecting public opinion; political, economic and university
circles, representatives of civil society’ (2000).
In dialogue with the academic debate, a hope associated with the
project of an EU constitution and the way it was drafted, was that these
would spark debate and favour the emergence of a European public
sphere, which had been a central preoccupation of the Commission
as well as the EP.8 The absence of European-wide media and debate
was described by many as central to the EU’s democratic deficit (see
e.g. Süddeutsche 24/02/2000 citing Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio
Guterres). Finally, an EU constitution would symbolise the traditional
function of constitutions to limit the power of the state, or the European
institutions, clearly delineating competences between the European,
 Discursive Crisis Management 151

national, and regional levels (Fischer 2000:6) and taking up the leitmotif
of the need to simplify and clarify the EU’s complex political system
(Council 2000:5, 2001). Larry Siedentop, for instance, in his bestseller
‘Democracy in Europe’, advocated that only a written constitution could
save Europe from the bureaucratic despotism resulting from the ‘rapid
accumulation of power in Brussels’, ‘the appendage of Paris’ (2000:104,
113, see 2–3).
In sum, the constitutional convention and the EU constitution
were supposed to address issues with the EU’s democratic legitimacy,
in part directly through institutional reforms concerning (typically) in
particular the transparency of the EU institutions or the role of national
parliaments (Council 2000:5, 6). Moreover, in addition to its substantive
reforms, a formal EU constitution was a tool of demos- and identity-
building, and reflected the general turn in official discourse and politics
towards these legitimation techniques.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I traced the shifting meanings and emphases in

discourses that defined and responded to the EU’s ‘legitimacy crisis’
since the difficult ratification of the Maastricht Treaty. I analysed how
the blueprints of a more legitimate EU, and of what was wrong with
the EU as it was, have evolved over time. During and after the rati-
fication controversy the European institutions framed what would
make the EU more legitimate around the themes of democracy, trans-
parency, and subsidiarity. They re-imagined democracy in terms of
openness and transparency as opposed to, say, popular participation
or parliamentary accountability. This rationalised the relative lack of
more thorough institutional and constitutional reform. Subsidiarity,
actually a rather abstract principle of competence allocation, was
hailed as vital to bringing EU decision-making ‘closer to the citizens’.
In a subsequent wave, the meaning of democracy was stretched to
denote the consultation and involvement of ‘civil society’ – a euphe-
mism for organised interest groups, as opposed to the people as a
whole or the individual citizens. This not only shifted the debate
away from the questions that had dominated the French and German
Maastricht controversies’ debate on EU democracy: whether democ-
racy was possible at all at an EU level (Chapter 4). But in addition, as
I have argued, the almost exclusive emphasis on these watchwords,
and on democracy with its carefully engineered associations, effec-
tively served as a distraction from threats to the traditional peace-and
152 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

prosperity-legitimation narratives, due to the transformed interna-

tional situation after the fall of Communism, the EU’s poor record in
the Balkans, and the comparatively dire macroeconomic situation in
most member-states in the 1990s. It was an attempt to divert atten-
tion away from EMU, which had been the most crucial challenge to
EU legitimacy in the Maastricht debates. In the longer term, attempts
at constituting a European demos and at stimulating a collective EU
identity or constitutional patriotism shifted to the centre of offi-
cial-discursive attention. These efforts and discourses responded to
critiques advanced in the French and German Maastricht debates,
notably the connection of democracy to the context of the nation, as
well as the no-demos thesis. They were limited, however, to the level
of official declarations, culminating in the draft treaty on a constitu-
tion for Europe, and of top-down cultural policies. The re-imagination
of democracy in terms of interest group pluralism, too, found limited
resonance beyond specialised discourses. They did not play much of
a role in the French and German public debates on the constitutional
treaty; and civil society organisations as discursive actors were ‘hardly
quoted’ in the French press (Maatsch 2007:264). Chapter 6 will
now explore how and to what extent the official-discursive patterns
analysed in this chapter were reflected and did or did not ‘fly’ in the
French and German debates on the constitutional treaty.
6
A Constitutional Moment? The
Constitution in the French and
German Debates

To what extent, then, were the academic and EU institutional communi-

ties correct in their analyses of, and responses to, the alleged root causes
of the citizenry’s increased alienation from the EU and its politics?
This chapter juxtaposes the official legitimation discourses and repre-
sentations analysed earlier with the wider public debates in France and
Germany on the constitutional draft treaty’s ratification, as reflected in
the press. How did the discursive representation of the EU and its legiti-
macy change during these key moments of discursive re-construction
and contestation?
In France, the referendum on the constitutional treaty caused an
exceptionally intense debate on the EU, which found its equal only
in the Maastricht debate. During the core period covered here, from
1 March 2005 to the referendum on 29 May 2005, public opinion
shifted from a strong majority of 60 per cent intending to vote Yes to
the final 54 per cent who voted No (Ipsos 2005). Published public as
well as private popular debates focused for several weeks on questions
related to the EU; according to a poll, the referendum was subject in
83 per cent ‘of conversations’ in May 2005 (IFOP, cited Ricard-Nihoul
2005:3). Rarely is the EU the subject of so much public attention. The
German debate was much less intense in comparison, but still exception-
ally animated by the standards of German controversies over European
integration. It responded actively to the main themes dominating the
French debate and engaged with them. For the German case, I focus
on the time from early May 2005, when 59 per cent would have voted
yes in a hypothetical referendum on ratification, to early June 2005,
when only 40 per cent would have voted in favour.1 Additionally, I

153
154 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

draw on a wider sample of newspaper articles for the whole of 2005.2

Through my exploratory focus on the debates’ narrative, argumentative,
and constructivist dynamics – on the main discursive positions at play,
and how they interacted – I aim to offer an angle on the constitutional
episode different from that taken by the literature that seeks to explain
why the French voted the way they did, or why German public opinion
shifted over the course of the debate.3

What kind of Europe do we want? The French debate

The European constitution deeply polarised French opinion; and the

rift went across the usual partisan lines.4 This case study maps the argu-
ments, images, and story-lines defining the French public, political
debate as reflected in the press, on the left and the right, in the ‘Yes’ and
the ‘No’ camps. I open with a number of observations on some general
discursive patterns that characterised the French debate. I then discuss,
as a first step, the central discursive binary (and its corollaries) running
through this debate, between a ‘social Europe’, associated with all kinds
of respective ideals of a better world, and a ‘liberal Europe’, feared and
antagonised by both camps. Secondly, I study the respective roles played
in the debate by the questions of ‘democracy’, Eastern enlargement, and
Turkish accession.
Perhaps the most important key to understanding the French debate
was the following pattern. At least initially, the advocates of ratifica-
tion focused on making a case for how the constitution would improve
the status quo. The EU and its member-states, and in particular France,
they repeated, would be better off if the constitution were ratified.
They emphasised concrete institutional improvements. Ever-recurrent
motives were, for instance: that the revised voting rules and deci-
sion-making procedures would enable the enlarged 25-member EU
to function; that France’s voting weight would be increased (e.g. LF
10/05/2005); that the constitution would make the EU more demo-
cratic and more transparent; and that the charter of fundamental rights
was a significant advance (see Milner 2006:257, Maatsch 2007:266–9).
In contrast, the advocates of the No-vote pilloried the gap between
the Europe of the constitution and different ideals they evoked of a
better Europe. Effectively, they redefined the question of the refer-
endum and the debate. The official referendum question read ‘Do you
approve the bill authorising the ratification of the treaty establishing
a Constitution for Europe?’ The constitution’s opponents reframed the
‘real question’ as ‘Which Europe do we want?’5 Of course, ratification
 A Constitutional Moment? 155

advocates also discussed this question, and thereby unwillingly fuelled

a dynamic that worked against the constitution.
The redefinition of the question strategically shifted the measuring
stick for assessing the constitution, from the status quo with all its short-
comings, to an ill-defined ideal open to manifold interpretations. This
had the advantage of taking all those on board who generally approved
of European integration, which was the case for the vast majority; right
after the negative referendum, 88 per cent considered France’s member-
ship ‘a good thing’ (Flash Eurobarometer 171/June 2005:22). Even
among critics of the constitution, as a Libération journalist described,
‘everybody, with only the exception of Jean-Marie Le Pen, vied each
other in their faith in Europe’ (Libé 24/05/2005a). Framing the topic
of debate in terms of a quest for a better, alternative world allowed
causing an obstruction to the constitution’s ratification to be regarded
as a positive act of ‘hope’.6 In this frame, voting No was not a statement
against Europe, but an expression in favour of a different, better Europe.
A French No would entail a ‘salutary crisis’.7 Among constitutional
critics from leftist and anti-globalisation (altermondialiste) contexts,
the narrative was widespread that a ‘vast European movement’ would
‘arise from a French No and allow a stronger and more leftist text to be
won’ (Duhamel 2005:14, see e.g. Libé 23/03/2005a). In the rhetoric of
the right, a ‘French no would without doubt announce a new Europe
founded on [national] sovereignty and the free cooperation of states’ (LF
25/03/2005). A general confusion about whether or not the constitution
would be renegotiated if rejected supported this constructive reading of
rejecting the constitution (see FAZ 24/05/2005).
Moreover, the redefinition of the question opened up discursive space
for a critical engagement with what was perceived to be wrong, not
only with the proposed treaty, but also with the EU. Since anything
was conceivable in this moment of public imagination of ideal alterna-
tives, there was much with which to take issue. In terms of de Villiers’s
canvassing, ‘Each of us has a reason to say no’ (Cambadélis 2006:35,
LM 24/05/2005a). The opponents of the constitution did take fault with
specific passages of the treaty, sometimes giving rather twisted inter-
pretations of what the constitution would change. For instance, they
intimated that the EU constitution would abolish the right to abortion
and divorce.8 It would re-establish the death penalty, undermine the
secular principle of ‘laïcité’ and hence the nature of the French republic,
and effectively lead to the dismantling of French public utilities (‘services
publics’).9 Misleading lay interpretations of the legal text (everyone regis-
tered on the electoral board received a copy by post) circulated on the
156 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

internet, but also in prime-time debates on some of the main television

channels and the press.
Advocates of the constitution accused opponents of wilful misrep-
resentation, ‘lies’, and ‘frenzied falsehoods’.10 According to them, the
No camp actively worked with the confusion about the meaning of
the legal text. The defenders of the constitution talked much about
the ‘educational task’ of correcting these misrepresentations and illu-
minating what the provisions really meant. They lectured about how
different, apparently contradicting clauses related to each other, and
how they really would or would not modify the EU’s set up.11 They
engaged with the prominent concerns one by one. The freedom of
thought, conscience, and religion (Art. II-70), for one, did not entail an
attack on French secularism, they asserted. The constitution did not ban
abortion in proscribing the right to life, they explained. Even if the text
did not contain the words ‘services publics’ (public utilities), they pointed
out that it referred to them as ‘services of general economic interest’,
and recognised and protected them for the first time in EU history.12 The
No camp retorted by denouncing, in turn, the pro-side’s ‘policy of lies’.
It defamed the ‘educational’ approach as patronising.13
In this climate of mutual accusations and confusing positions in circu-
lation as to what the actual text entailed, citizens were often at a loss.
Beyond the actual, confusing text of the treaty, the balance was often
tilted by what they associated with it. Taking advantage of this, the
No campaign effectively moved the debate from a pragmatic analysis
of the actual changes foreseen to what the constitution, and the EU
in general, stood for. They successfully imposed this discursive agenda
on the defenders of the constitution. The Yes camp was pushed on the
defensive. Often they could only protest against the discursive linkages,
images, and story-lines advanced by the No-side, arguing that this or
that had ‘nothing to do’ with the constitution (e.g. LF 15/04/2005).
The following analyses are organised around a number of funda-
mental binaries that essentially structured the discourses of both the
No and the Yes camps. The opposition between a ‘liberal Europe’ and
a ‘social Europe’ was the most important. This liberal-social divide was
reflected, and grounded, in different related discursive patterns regarding
the relationship between impersonal market forces, globalisation, and
European supranationalism, on one side, and human political agency or
viable social policies, on the other. Further structuring binaries, which I
shall discuss subsequently, contrasted a democratic Europe to a Europe
marked by a ‘democratic deficit’, or a Europe of shared values to a Europe
that included Turkey. These binary oppositions tended to correspond to
 A Constitutional Moment? 157

the respective positive ideals of the Europe supported versus negative

counter-images of the Europe rejected. In the case of the No campaign,
the rejected type often coincided with the EU either as it had developed
historically or as the constitution would institute it. In the case of the
Yes camp, the argument was that the constitution would help to bring
the EU closer to the desired ideal and would help to cut back on the
undesirable aspects, or else that it had nothing to do with whatever
bugbear in question.

‘Social’ versus ‘liberal Europe’

The emblem of ‘social Europe’ pervaded pro- and anti-constitution
discourses alike. Constitution-opponents on both the left and the
right presented the treaty and the EU in its current form as threat-
ening social Europe, whereas a strong No-vote would make social
Europe possible (Duhamel 2005:14, see Libé 23/03/2005a). In turn, the
Yes-campaign of the Socialists affirmed: ‘The way to social Europe is a
Yes’ (Duhamel 2005:32). Jacques Chirac repeated that the constitution
would allow ‘safeguarding the European social model’, and was ‘a deci-
sive step towards a more social situation’.14 What exactly constituted
the threatened social Europe, or the European social model, remained
relatively hazy. Depending on respective political orientations and
personal concerns, the phrase could invoke the French ‘social acquis’,
social protection, reduced unemployment, higher spending in public
education, secure pensions, affordable health insurance, efficient public
utilities, and so on.15 According to an understanding common in the
German press coverage of the French controversy, the French emblem
of the social Europe mostly mirrored respective ideals of a perfect French
welfare state, as it would be in a perfect world and as it had not been
working for decades (e.g. DZ 09/06/2005c).
Most importantly, social Europe was defined against ‘liberalism’
(neoliberalism, ultraliberalism). Liberalism would be associated with the
‘Anglo-Saxon’ economic and social models, and characterised mainly by
the oppositions I shall introduce in this subchapter. Again, both oppo-
nents and proponents of the treaty used the social-Europe-versus-liberalism
antithesis. Opponent Jean-Pierre Chevènement linked approval of the
constitution to the spectre of liberalism with all its associations: ‘There
is no leftist Yes, and no Gaullist Yes. All there is is a liberal Yes. Full stop’
(LM 07/04/2005). A common metaphor for the constitution, in particular
its ‘restrictive third part that defines an economic and social policy that is
liberal’ (Buffet, LM 20/04/2005b), was that of a ‘liberal corset’ or ‘liberal
straitjacket’.16 On the pro-constitution side, Socialist Jack Lang, among
158 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

others, called the constitution a ‘bulwark against ultraliberalism’ (LM

28/05/2005). President Chirac and Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin like-
wise joined the anti-liberal rhetoric (see Libé 24/05/2005a). ‘Liberalism will
end in disaster just like Communism’, Chirac declared in front of French
MPs.17 In his televised discussion with 83 ‘young persons’, he brandished
the document as Europe’s weapon for resisting ‘the globalisation carried
by an ultraliberal current’ (LM 16/04/2005). In this way, however, some
press commentators observed, he accredited the fears of a ‘liberal Europe’
that ‘attacked French social advantages’, and ‘played into the hands of
the partisans of the No’ (LM 24/05/2005a). The discursive situation was
in such deadlock that, according to EU scholar and convention member
Olivier Duhamel, any mention of the word ‘liberalism’ triggered off a reac-
tion against the constitution (2005).
The equation of the Europe of the constitution, or of unwanted
types of Europe, with ‘liberalism’, was underpinned by a parallel link
between the constitution and the threat of (even higher) unemploy-
ment. In March 2005, audiovisual media reporting gave even more
room than usual to the relocation of French jobs abroad (délocalisations).
‘No day’ passed ‘without a relocation announcement’.18 Campaigners
on the No-side explicitly linked the constitution and délocalisations.
Henri Emmanueli, in his role as a central proponent of the socialist
No, undertook a ‘tour de France of the dislocated’ to 25 companies (LM
26/05/2005a). Jacques Nikonoff, president of ATTAC France, alleged:
‘if the yes wins on 29 May [ ... ,] dislocations will be accelerated’ (LM
24/05/2005b, see Duhamel 2005:18). In September 2004, Laurent
Fabius, the leader of the Socialist dissidents, had made his support
for the constitution (which he withdrew three days later) condi-
tional upon the stipulation ‘everything for employment and against
industrial relocation’ (LM 29/05/2005). He later accused the ‘Polish
commissioner in charge of the regional policy’ of openly wanting
to ‘facilitate délocalisastions within Europe’ (LF 07/03/2005). Strictly
speaking, the Commissioner’s responsibilities were entirely unrelated
to the constitution, but she served Fabius and others in mobilising a
climate of insecurity, pessimism, and fears of job losses against the
constitutional treaty.
The same applied to the widely demonised services directive. Many
anti-constitutionalists associated the constitution with the influx of
cheap labour mainly from the new Eastern member-states (e.g. Libé
21/05/2005, see Duhamel 2005:19). This was emblematised in the
directive that in France was referred to as the Bolkestein directive,
after the name of the former Commissioner in charge. De Villiers
 A Constitutional Moment? 159

rhymed ‘Bolkestein, Frankenstein, another million unemployed’

(LM 17/03/2006), popularising not only the orthographic mutilation
‘Bolkenstein’, but also the rage against the infamous ‘Polish plumber’.
The directive, de Villiers alleged, permitted the latter to

offer his services in France, at the salary and with the rules of social
protections of his country of origin. Out of the 11 million persons
working in the services sector, one million jobs are threatened by this
directive. We are dealing with a dismantling of our economic and
social model. (LF 15/03/2005)19

De Villiers thus established the directive and the plumber as symbols

for threatened French jobs, salary and protection standards, and the
economic and social model. Fabius, too, warned that the directive
announced a ‘harmonisation of labour legislation at the bottom’ (LF
07/03/2005). Pro- and anti-campaigners alike competed over ‘who was
the most hostile to the Bolkestein directive’ (Libé 24/05/2005a). The
Chirac government distanced itself from the directive, which it had
negotiated itself (see LM 29/05/2005). In despair, and in vain, treaty
supporters repeated that the directive had ‘nothing to do with the
constitution’ (Libé 16/03/2005).
A corollary of the discursive opposition of ‘liberalism’ to an ideal
‘social Europe’ was the opposition of ‘the market’ to ‘the social’. As soci-
ologist Alain Touraine explained in the Süddeutsche, the market-versus-
social opposition was typical of French discourses, not only of the
left. Unlike New Labour or the German tradition of the ‘social market
economy’, the French left had long tended to present the market and
the protective welfare state as two antipodal, rather than potentially
mutually reinforcing, forces. The call for the state to regulate and inter-
vene in the market in order to guarantee social security and secure jobs
had traditionally been louder in France than elsewhere in Europe (SZ
19/05/2005; and in fact, the German left presented the market-social
relation in different terms, as I shall elaborate later). I discussed in
Chapter 2 how early official legitimation discourses had striven to have
this active function of the state partly transferred, in people’s minds, to
the European Communities during the initial decades of integration.
In 2005, however, both France (amongst other member-states) and the
EU had experienced difficulties in delivering these functions for many
years. A frame had gained ground in the public French imaginary that
blamed the EU for forcing France into a world where ‘the economy’
prevailed over ‘the common good’. ‘The market’ prevailed over ‘the
160 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

social’, and the two were mutually exclusive. Some leftist- as well as
rightist-sovereignist opponents to the constitution nurtured hopes that
France or the member-states could master liberal market forces, if only
the EU did not interfere (Touraine, SZ 19/05/2005).
The constitution’s opponents, especially but not exclusively those on
the left, blamed the document for shifting the EU’s system towards ‘the
market’ at the expense of the French and European social systems. Their
criticism bundled in the constitution’s formulation that competition in
the internal market was ‘free and unobstructed’ (Art. I:3–2), a principle
fixed in the Treaty of Rome’s Article 3 since 1957. Notwithstanding, to
the far left and to altermondialistes, the constitutional treaty represented
a further step in the ‘organised submission’ to the ‘forces of the market’
(LM 24/05/2005b, see ATTAC 2005). Across the political spectrum, many
complained that this ‘economic principle’ was being ‘erected as a consti-
tutional principle for the organisation of society’ (Libé 23/03/2005a).
Pro-constitutionalists retorted that according to Article I-3, competi-
tion was not an ‘objective in itself’, but a means to the objectives of
full employment and social progress.20 Anti-constitutionalists insisted
by reference to the treaty’s ‘restrictive third part’ that, in contradic-
tion with the laudable goals, values, and fundamental rights set out in
Parts I and II, defined ‘an economic and social policy that is liberal’
(Buffet, LM 20/04/2005b). Even some proponents of the ‘Oui’ criticised
the treaty for effectively leaving social policy to the member-states
(LM 24/05/2005a), that is, the EU would not interfere enough: ‘even
if this treaty does entail some advances, the demand of competitive-
ness continues to take precedent over the imperative of solidarity’. As
a result ‘social and fiscal dumping remains possible’ (LM 26/05/2005d).
Generally, the association of the EU with liberalism rested on the idea
that the convergence criteria and the policies of the European Central
Bank ‘prevent[ed] fighting unemployment with contra-cyclical strate-
gies’ (LM 26/05/2005d). Together with the principle of unobstructed
competition’, this seemed to make a ‘Euro-Keynesianism’ impossible
(LM 28/05/2005). Note, of course, that German discourses tended to
portray the very independence of the central bank as a condition for
social-market policies (see later).
Minister of the Interior Nicolas Sarkozy set out to undermine the
market-social antagonism, anticipating his 2007 presidential campaign
(although he also reproduced the antagonism in statements like ‘the
new Europe will be no longer at the service of the market’). In his
discourse, market forces, and those of globalisation, were essential to
making social policies possible, by virtue of making France competitive.
 A Constitutional Moment? 161

He attacked the eagerness of many constitutional sceptics to preserve

the French social model when this model had been failing for over a
decade. ‘The best social model is that which gives everyone a job. Hence,
it is not ours’ (LM 14/05/2005a). Sarkozy positioned competition and
competitiveness as the only ways of making the French model viable
in a world, which was undergoing processes of globalisation independ-
ently of European integration.
In the liberal-versus-social frame, the ‘impersonal forces of the market’
and globalisation (‘mondialisation’) on one side were up against a more
‘human’ world on the other (e.g. Nikonoff in LM 24/05/2005b, see
ATTAC 2005). Globalisation was pivotal in how the EU was represented
in the French constitutional debate. Many constitution critics in France
depicted the EU as an agent, a precursor, or amplifier of globalisation.
The alternative ‘social Europe’, by contrast, stood in their vision for the
‘mastery’ of these inhuman forces. Presidential widow Danielle Mitterrand
praised the No as a ‘forceful demonstration of our humanism’ (Spiegel
23/05/2005b). In opposition to this discourse, Yes advocates framed
precisely the EU and the constitution as ways of mastering globalisa-
tion or, in Sarkozy’s words, of ‘putting the market at the service of the
human being’ (e.g. LF 15/04/2005). They framed the EU as a ‘bulwark’
against globalisation (just as against liberalism, e.g. Libé 24/05/2005b).
Moreover, they repeated, a rejection of the constitution would not stop
globalisation. On the contrary, it would unleash globalisation’s forces;
indispensable means of regulating these forces collectively would be
given away (see LF 14/04/2005, Libé 09/03/2005). The image of Europe
as a resource for mastering globalisation was flexible as regarded different
political orientations. In the language of the orthodox left, the constitu-
tion would provide ‘some useful means’ to check ‘neoliberalism’ and
inhuman market forces. The Charter of Fundamental Rights, for instance,
offered European employees an ‘effective tool for toning down [salary]
inequalities’ (Libé 25/05/2005). On the centre-right, and in Sarkozy’s
language, the constitution acted as a ‘reform accelerator’ for the French
system, which was in dire need of increasing its global competitiveness
(FAZ 25/05/2005, see LF 14/04/2005). Of course, many on the left would
call the very reforms he had in mind ‘neoliberal’.
The Sarkozyste line of argument went against the grain of another
entrenched assumption in French Euro-sceptic discourses, one which
opposed ‘l’Europe’ to political voluntarism. I discussed this assumption
underlying many critiques of integration during the Maastricht debates and
during the 1990s in Chapter 4. In the debate on the constitution, political
agency or ‘the political’ was frequently opposed to the external constraints
162 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

of the market or globalisation. This binary pervaded leftist and rightist,

anti- as well as pro-constitution discourses. The difference was that consti-
tutional proponents understood that the constitution, or European inte-
gration generally, could help the member-states to recover lost capacity of
action (e.g. Libé 26/05/2005). The opponents understood that it would, on
the contrary, exacerbate the ‘lack-of-leeway-for-political-agency’ problem.
Leftist discourses defined, with Nikonoff, ‘liberal Europe’ as the antithesis
to ‘the political’ and ‘political responsibility’ (Libé 23/03/2005a). Rejecting
a world in which the market ruled gave many French the ‘feeling that
they were the agents of their own fate’. To many it meant that ‘France,
the political country par excellence’, refused the ‘primacy of economics’
over politics (Cambadélis 2005:35, 28). The droite sociale [social right] of
Philippe Seguin, agreed that ‘social Europe’ would mean recouping polit-
ical agency and the capacity to shape the world according to one’s will,
and that the constitution obstructed this. The national-republican sover-
eignist frame that had emerged in the Maastricht debate (Chapter 4) had
gained widespread acceptance. Now many more people seemed to take
for granted that political voluntarism, and the capacity to change and
control the world, was at odds with (at least some possible models of) the
European Union.21 In many No-discourses on the right, this capacity for
wilful action on the world was generally reserved for the nation-state. For
de Villiers, Le Pen, or Dupont-Aignan, a No meant refusing the primacy of
European supranationalism over politics.
In contrast, many of the constitution’s opponents on the political
left did not frame political voluntarism as inherently antagonistic to a
supranational political framework, or to Europe. Some saw, as already
quoted, the constitution’s shortcoming as that it did not go far enough
in creating supranational frameworks for political voluntarism. They
wanted ‘more, not less, Europe’. Rejecting the constitution was an act of
reclaiming political agency over economics, precisely by demanding a
more supranationalist arrangement. Nonetheless, a certain reflex against
supranationalism, at least by implication, was notable among consti-
tutional opponents of the left as well. The phrase ‘the political’ now
increasingly also designated political, ideally democratic, will-formation
or political contestation, as opposed to more de-politicised methods of
resolution (see also Glencross 2009). References to ‘the political’ in this
sense drew attention to conflicts of interest and processes of negotiating
between them. In the anti-constitutionalist line of argument advanced
by Nikonoff, the ‘“constitutionalisation” of economic policy’ moved
essentially political questions out of the realm of public contestation
(e.g. Libé 23/03/2005a). Pro-constitutionalists replied by repeating that
 A Constitutional Moment? 163

the constitution, by making EU decision-making more transparent,

would precisely move it to the realm of public scrutiny and opinion-
formation (e.g. Libé 26/05/2005).
In sum, both camps took up the discursive divide between a snug
‘social’ world of ‘humanism’ where ‘political will’ and a successful
French social model triumphed over external constraints, and a world
subordinated to the inhuman forces of ‘the market’ and ‘globalisation’ –
a world of unemployment – and a dismantled French social and educa-
tion system. The difference was that the opposing camps placed the
constitution, or the EU generally, at different ends of a spectrum of
agency towards these supposed alternatives.

Democracy and enlargement

In comparison to social and economic questions (and in comparison to
the German debate, see later), the issue of democracy remained relatively
marginal in the French anti-constitutionalist discourses. This was in
spite of the constitutionalists’ mantra-like repetitions that the constitu-
tion would make EU decision-making more democratic. (On the whole,
as Valéry Giscard d’Estaing criticised, people were remarkably unrecep-
tive to the arguments of the opposed camp, LM 15/06/2005.) Prominent
defenders of the constitution explained, time and again, the specific
significance of the foreseen institutional reforms and the human rights
charter.22 The other side admonished that these advances did not go far
enough. The EP still had no legislative initiative, they pointed out, the
citizen’s initiative (not binding upon the Commission) was ultimately
useless, and the Commission would still be neither sufficiently account-
able nor authorised.23 It was also common to brandish the ‘clearly
obstructive revision procedure’ (Libé 12/10/2004, see LM 28/05/2005).
This criticism crystallised in the widespread image that the constitution
and its political and economic biases was ‘engraved in marble’ (see Libé
23/03/2005a). Some critics did fall back on the old critiques of the EU
as non-transparent, elitist, and undemocratic (LM 28/05/2005) but, in
contrast to the Maastricht debate, this idea seemed an almost nostalgic,
familiar filler.
Two instances particularly embodied the unease of ‘French public
opinion’ with EU democracy: the Bolkestein controversy and the 2004
enlargement. To many, they were an incarnation of how decisions that
would ‘deeply disrupt the life of the French’ and constitute a threat to
French welfare, jobs, and salaries, would be ‘taken over their heads’. The
services directive, many claimed (falsely, if the French government is
constituted of elected representatives), had been passed ‘without their
164 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

elected representatives being able to have their say’. An even more

frequent reproach was that the French were ‘never consulted’ about
Eastern enlargement (all LM 30/03/2005).
The main thrust of critiques of EU democracy did not aim so much
at the EU’s institutional setup and day-to-day decision-making proce-
dures or practices. This was in clear contrast to the EU-official discourses
analysed in Chapter 2, and the German democratic-deficit critique
discussed in Chapter 4 and later. In the French constitutional debate, the
phrase ‘democratic deficit’, if employed at all, tended to be used in more
inclusive, interpretable senses. Some used it to denote the perceived lack
of political agency, as discussed (e.g. Libé 12/10/2004), some for the EU’s
weak performance of whatever would have been “good for the people”
from their respective standpoints (e.g. LF 02/03/2005). The term was
also used for the indifference of many citizens to EU politics, expressed
in low participation in EP elections (e.g. Libé 23/03/2005a). Most impor-
tantly, however, the concept served as an emblem of the weak role of
the citizens in the construction of ‘l’Europe’, that is, in European consti-
tution-making during the past five decades:

For the partisans of the No, Europe has been constructed outside of
all rules of democracy, and the project of the constitution is a new
piece of evidence for this. With the exception of the referendum on
the Treaty of Maastricht in 1992, the French, they say, have been kept
well away from the European debate, to which only some initiated
circles have access. (LM 28/05/2005, see Libé 23/03/2005a)

In Habermas’s analysis of the French No, the people, hardly ever having
been given a chance to authorise or reject the integration process as a
whole or any of its specific steps, wanted, at least temporarily, to throw
a spanner in the works of a process which had been happening beyond
their scrutiny and influence (SZ 06/06/2005).
This line of argument was particularly relevant with regard to
the question of Turkish accession. Chirac had already tried, in
October 2004, to disengage Turkish accession from the constitution by
promising a separate French referendum on the admission of Turkey
in due course (LM 29/05/2005). This attempt failed. Le Pen called on
the people to vote No in order to say ‘No to Turkey’s entry to the
Union’ (LM 02/03/2005a). Dupont-Aignan argued that ‘the treaty
in reality opens Europe’s door to Turkey’ (LM 28/05/2005, see LF
07/04/2005). De Villiers reiterated that ‘the questions of Turkey and
the Constitution are obviously linked’. According to him, refusal of
 A Constitutional Moment? 165

Turkish accession was ‘one of the principal motivations’ of the no’. ‘If
the yes wins’, he predicted, ‘the process [of accession] will be irrevers-
ible whereas if the no wins negotiations will immediately be suspended’
(LF 15/03/2005). They all reasoned that rejecting the constitution
was a ‘means of preventing Turkey’s accession’, of defying the ‘trap’
of commenced negotiations leading ‘ineluctably’ to Turkey’s admis-
sion. This was, they said, the people’s one opportunity effectively to
express their objection (LM 05/03/2005). Only this symbolic act of
obstruction could force Europe’s political leaders to act in considera-
tion of their peoples’ misgivings. Many compared Turkish accession
to the 2004 enlargement. Enlargement towards Turkey would be an
equally precipitous ‘fuite en avant’, a defiance of political, cultural, and
economic facts, some anti-constitutionalists of both the left and right
argued.24 A No to the constitution was hence also an ex post protest to
Eastern enlargement. The partisans of the Yes insisted that the consti-
tution provided a means of stopping Turkish accession, accepting the
rhetoric that Turkish membership was something to be prevented. The
No camp, particularly the ‘non de droite’, effectively imposed an essen-
tialist discourse on many constitutionalists (if they did not already
have one); Chirac, for example, now distanced himself from Turkish
accession, which he had originally supported. In line with de Villiers’s
arguments, he stated that Turkish traditions were ‘incompatible with
Europe’s values’ (LM 16/04/2005).
Several pro-constitutionalists warned that their opponents instrumen-
talised xenophobic feelings in emphasising dangers of ‘social dumping’
from Turkey and Central and Eastern Europe.25 François Hollande
thus accused the constitution’s opponents of ‘doing Le Pen’s job’.26
Pro-constitution Gaullist MEP Roselyne Bachelot (UMP) described how
during her campaign reunions she had to ‘try to channel outbursts of
the xenophobic and racist kind’. For ‘some’, she said, it was ‘as if we
were trying to instil a foreign body in a European Union that has certain
values’ (LM 05/03/2005). In fact, fears of job losses and threats to the
French social state did link with hostility to both the Eastern European
and Turkish accessions. Anti-constitutionalists claimed that it was
Turkish accession, itself and hence the constitution itself, that would
fuel ‘xenophobia and racism’: ‘What we have observed with regard to the
immigrants – “they are taking our jobs from us” – will be the case incom-
mensurably with regard to the Romanian, Polish, or Latvian workers’
(LM 24/05/2005b). In line with this reasoning, whoever supported the
constitution and Turkish accession would be partly responsible for erup-
tions of xenophobia and racism.
166 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

What is wrong with the French? The German debate

How did the German wider public debate relate to the French contro-
versy, and to the constitutional treaty? What were the main issues and
the main dynamics in the German debate? The German Bundestag rati-
fied the constitutional treaty by a large majority (569 against 23 votes,
two abstentions), and the Bundesrat followed suit on 27 May. The press
covered ratification and reported and commented on the deputies’ justi-
fications of their positions. However, a more controversial and more
animated debate was mobilised as French and Dutch resistance became
apparent. According to a recurrent storyline in the German sample, the
French and Dutch had triggered a Europe-wide debate. The German press
drove home this point by taking up and deliberating on specific ques-
tions raised in the Dutch and French discourses; Die Zeit for instance
ran a series of articles on how ‘social’ the EU actually was.27 At the same
time, German politicians as well as intellectuals also tried to have some
input into the campaign and debate in France (e.g. LM 14/05/2005b,
SZ 03/05/2005). Of course, the German debate linked the questions
inspired by the French and Dutch controversies with the particular pre-
existing motives and backgrounds in the German discursive landscape.
The answers offered in the German debate hence differed, often consid-
erably, from the neighbouring countries’ debates.
This German case study, too, is divided into two main sections. After
this brief introduction, in which I comment on three general dynamics
of the German debate, I shall discuss the two most prominent clusters
of discursive motifs. The first did not so much concern the constitu-
tion itself but rather discursive associations with the EU and the general
discursive context. This cluster hinged on fears of unemployment and
‘salary and social dumping’, and their connections with Eastern enlarge-
ment and the EU, as well as the relationship between market forces and
the welfare state. The second cluster was gathered around questions of
democracy. These latter discourses had a more immediate link with the
constitution. They concerned the question of a European public sphere,
the perceived distance between the EU and its citizens, the nation-
state’s place in democratic legitimation, and the ‘finalité’ of European
integration.
Generally, the German press, in making sense of the constitution’s
popular rejections in the two neighbouring states, took their protest seri-
ously, and looked into its motivations. A prevalent explanation of the
no-votes was that the EU had become, in the words of a Die Zeit author,
‘too fast, too expensive, and had gone too far’.28 This account looked for
 A Constitutional Moment? 167

reasons of the No primarily in the EU itself, rather than in the French

and Dutch voters – although domestic political contexts, or the voters’
socio-psychological motivations, were sometimes adduced to ration-
alise what was going on with these Western neighbours. Interpreting
the significance of the No-votes, the reading was widespread that, in
Habermas’s formulation, ‘the recalcitrant electorate-people [Wahlvolk]’
was rising in protest (SZ 06/06/2005, see equally Spiegel 13/06/2005b).
Der Spiegel elaborated this narrative in a series of highly opinionated
and lurid articles: the European citizens were no longer willing ‘uncom-
plainingly to put up with Brussels exerting more and more influence
on their living conditions’ on grounds of paternalistic arguments, but
with only ‘weak’ legitimation. They were no longer ready to swallow the
‘clandestine invention of the State Europe’ (09/05/2005, 14/03/2005).
References to ‘the Europeans’, ‘the citizens of Europe’, or ‘the mood in
Europe’ were common; in this language, the electorate-people in ques-
tion was implied to be a pan-European one. In addition, many press
commentaries on the French and Dutch referendum votes either silently
took for granted or explicitly argued that the Germans shared their neigh-
bours’ misgivings (e.g. FAZ 13/05/2005a). The reporting usually included
the German citizens’ concerns in the search for reasons why ‘the citizens
had become so sceptical’ of the EU (HAB 31/05/2005). The underlying
understanding was that the French had rejected the constitution for
the same reasons that the Germans were now expressing scepticism in
opinion polls. Accordingly, the Dutch and French Nos were expressions
of a general ‘atmosphere’ or ‘mood’ across Europe (Spiegel 06/06/2005);
a particular ‘mixture of frustration with mass unemployment, fear of the
EU’s Eastern enlargement, and rejection of reforms [that had] impacted
the elections in North-Rhine Westphalia’ (SZ 04/06/2005).

Unemployment, Eastern enlargement, and ‘the market’

As in France, fears of pressure on German wages and social standards
featured in the German debate. In fact, the constitutional debate took
place against the backdrop of a scandal that had peaked in the months
preceding ratification. In February 2005, a trade union had started an
awareness campaign to highlight the fact that thousands of employees
in German abattoirs (about a third of the total 66,000, or 26,000 overall,
according to different calculations) had been replaced by colleagues
from the Eastern European new member-states, who worked for a frac-
tion of German wages (SZ 05/03/2005, HAB 26/02/2005). Similar effects
were reported in other sectors. The agitation in the published public
debate was great.
168 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

The most common interpretation of this development was that

competition from the new Eastern European citizens spoiled the price
of labour in Germany and undermined German social protection stand-
ards. The common term for this became ‘salary and social dumping’.
Political and press discourses partly blamed the services directive for
increasing this danger (SZ 07/05/2005). Contradicting his own govern-
ment’s previous position, chancellor Gerhard Schröder now turned
against the services directive, in unison with the French government
and some German trade unions.29 In the language of the Springer press,
the government, the opposition, and trade unions thus partly framed
the matter as one of ‘protecting German labour law from the EU’ (BMP
05/02/2005). The ‘headlines about East-European cheap workers’ caused
the Red-Green coalition to take some distance from what, ‘as all of its
predecessor governments, it had previously praised: competition, the
opening of the market, and freedom of trade’ (Spiegel 09/05/2005, see
FAZ 13/05/2005a).
Nonetheless, neither the government nor the opposition, nor the
print media, distanced themselves from European integration as such.
Neither did they make a link between social and salary dumping and
the constitution. In resonance with the French ‘Polish plumber’, the
‘Polish butcher’ did become a crystallisation point in the representa-
tion of Europe, or of the citizen’s perception of the Union. A Zeit author
accredited him as a ‘symbol for the irritation with Europe’, a colleague
from Der Spiegel as the ‘symbol of unfair [labour] competition’ from the
East (DZ 09/06/2005c, Spiegel 09/05/2005). Angela Merkel in her speech
in the Bundestag in the debate on the constitutional treaty’s ratifica-
tion polemically referred to Polish tilers and the services directive (SZ
13/05/2005). Still, East-European craftsmen were much less prominent
in the German than the French corpus. For instance, the Süddeutsche and
Frankfurter Allgemeine samples did not contain the image of the Polish
butcher at all. When the tabloid Bildzeitung staged an unofficial refer-
endum on the constitution among its readership (who rejected the treaty
by 96.9 per cent), not even No-advocate Peter Gauweiler (CSU) made the
link between the EU (or the constitution) and the Polish butcher, or the
services directive, in his pleadings.30
A concurrent, and stronger, position presented the challenge of
salary dumping as a matter of reforming German labour legislation.
The German law, much more than the services directive, had to be
changed. This frame, prominent in the newspapers analyses as well
as in political discourse, opposed using the EU as a ‘scapegoat for
homemade problems’.31 Rather than blaming the EU or the services
 A Constitutional Moment? 169

directive for increasing salary competition and threatening German

protection standards, one should, for example, expand legal minimum
salaries to additional sectors (a measure objected to by the conserva-
tive and liberal oppositions). Other suggestions included expanding
the ‘Entsendegesetz’ (Assignment Act), under which foreign employers
sending employees to the Federal Republic had to respect the condi-
tions of employment effective in Germany (both SZ 28/04/2005,
12/04/2005). The Chair of the German Trade Union Federation
(Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund) declared that ways had to be sought
to protect the traditional German principle of equal pay and protec-
tion standards for all employees (SZ 04/02/2005). Moreover, some
commentators called upon the German authorities to combat clan-
destine employment and feigned self-employment more effectively
(‘Scheinselbständigkeit’); they framed social and salary dumping as a
problem of illegal practices rather than EU legislation (SZ 14/04/2005,
11/04/2005).
In spite of this focus on German solutions, the meat-industry affair
did reflect, and promote, a certain emerging discursive link between
German unemployment and the EU. This association had been rela-
tively unheard-of in the German wider public sphere, which had tended
to blame globalisation rather than European integration for unemploy-
ment, the prime challenge at the time for German politics and society.
The new connecting factor was Eastern enlargement. Now the EU
incited ‘fears of jobs loss because of cheap workers from the East’ (HAB
31/05/2005). Given the gap in labour costs and protection standards
between East and West, the influx of cheap labour and the relocation of
jobs could be presented as ‘unavoidable consequences’ of enlargement.
‘The EU’, in short, was ‘perceived as a menace at least since Eastern
enlargement’ (Spiegel 09/05/2005, see HAB 03/06/2005).
The enlarged EU’s linkage with unemployment was used politically
to oppose Turkish accession. ‘That, on top of all, Bulgaria, Rumania
or Turkey are to burden European budgets and labour markets, [was]
an overkill for the vast majority of people’, asserted one journalist in a
polemic against the constitution (HAB 03/06/2005). The conservative
opposition led by Angela Merkel used the negative referenda to affirm
their objections to Turkish membership, arguing that the popular rebel-
lion against the EU, manifested in the resistance to the constitution,
could not be overcome if the people were overtaxed by this enlarge-
ment (see FAZ 17/06/2005a). The opposition could rest its demand on
a strong analogous discourse in the print media that ‘[t]he resistance
to the constitution is also a consequence of the expansion to the East,
170 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

which is far from having been digested, and about which the peoples
were not consulted’.32
Importantly, however, the sources I have analysed did not place the
constitution itself in the context of unemployment. There was practi-
cally no discursive association between unemployment and the consti-
tution, against a reasonably strong linkage with the services directive
and an even stronger one with Eastern and potential Turkish enlarge-
ment, and at least some (mediated) association between unemployment
and the EU as a whole. Tellingly, not even the archetypal constitutional
opponent, Gauweiler, evoked the spectre of unemployment in his plea
(Bild 02/06/2005b). Some sought deliberately to disengage integration,
enlargement, and the services directive from labour-market and growth
problems. Wolfgang Schäuble, Vice Floor Leader of the CDU/CSU in
the Bundestag, reminded his readers that Germany had ‘had problems
with structural unemployment and lacking growth dynamic before’ (SZ
07/05/2005). Going one step further, Industrial Commissioner Günter
Verheugen reasoned: ‘Without Europe, there would be not less, but
more, unemployed in Germany today’.33 Elsewhere, he adduced that
the single market had created two million jobs between 1993 and 2003
(Spiegel 07/03/2005).
The story that Germany would be worse off without the EU than with
it, pervaded political as well as journalist discourses. In slightly modi-
fied versions, it extended to the services directive, which supposedly
created more jobs (600,000 according to a repeatedly cited Commission
study) than it destroyed (SZ 16/02/2005, HAB 26/02/2005), and to
Eastern enlargement. In this last respect it read: ‘Germany has prof-
ited massively from Eastern enlargement. The export world champion
needs open borders; in fact they secure more jobs than they destroy’ (DZ
21/04/2005, see HAB 31/05/2005). Even the Bildzeitung offset its polemic
against German net payments with a reminder of the ‘enormous bene-
fits’ in the form of export opportunities for Germany from the single
market (06/06/2005). The claim that ‘the German economy is better off
with than without European integration’ was often made on grounds
that competition from Asia and the US – or ‘globalisation’ – made
European cooperation indispensable.34 The understanding that ‘further
European integration’ was a matter ‘of no alternative’ remained virtually
uncontested (SZ 07/05/2005).
Another frame was to blame the ‘quarrel over the services directive’
on general resentment of the market. ‘[W]here it has become popular to
blame every evil on the market it seems to be only consistent to attack
the core of European integration, the single market’ (FAZ 13/05/2005a).
 A Constitutional Moment? 171

Many German authorities in politics, journalism, and scholarship

argued against French or, for instance, Schröder’s newly acquired
market-hostile discourses. Their mantra was that ‘competition’ was
not in itself ‘something negative’ (Spiegel 07/03/2005). They contested
the opposition, spilling over from across the Rhine, between ‘the
social’, and competition and ‘the market’.35 In the analysed sample,
the discourse that the ‘welfare state live[d] on growth’ was strong (DZ
09/06/2005a): that competition and ‘the market’ were necessary to
create growth and to create jobs (SZ 04/06/2005). This German defence
of the market was rooted in the traditions of social democracy and
the social-market economy. It had been powerfully re-articulated in
the debate instigated in April 2005 by Franz Müntefering, Chairman
of the SPD. Müntefering had compared financial investors to locusts:
‘Some financial investors do not waste a single thought on the human
beings whose jobs they destroy; they stay anonymous, faceless, and
attack businesses like a swarm of locusts, exploit them, and leave’.36
The socialist left and certain trade unions had exploited this formula.
In contrast, much of the media and politicians of the centre-left and
beyond had taken offence with this ‘wrong’ perception of the role of
investors (Uterwedde 2007:70). Interestingly, not even the proponents
of the locust thesis had ever really linked their object of criticism with
the EU or the proposed constitutional treaty.
A central discourse defended ‘the market’, the Single Market, and
especially the constitution, against responsibility for ‘homemade’ prob-
lems in the member-state economies.37 Former chancellor and Die Zeit
editor Helmut Schmidt, for instance, described the high unemploy-
ment in most member-states as due to ‘erroneous developments within
the member-states’, who in fact were ‘responsible’ (DZ 09/06/2005b).
Several journalists recalled, in a way reminiscent of Sarkozy’s line of
argument, the ‘salutary impulse of modernisation’ and of reform from
European integration’s so-called liberal constraints (DZ 09/06/2005a).
The crucial thing was not to leave the market forces unchecked, to strike
a ‘balance between market expansion and market correction’ (Grimm,
SZ 01/06/2005, Uterwedde 2007:70). ‘Competition at any price and on
the back on the weak, of the environment, or of security’ was inad-
missible (Verheugen, Spiegel 07/03/2005). Constitutional lawyer Dieter
Grimm argued that this balance had been ‘lost’ in Europe. The member-
states’ capacity for action had shrunk, due in part to European market
expansion, in part to phenomena of globalisation. At the same time,
social policy was a poor fit for European harmonisation. All this, said
Grimm, had ‘nothing to do’ with the constitutional treaty. On the
172 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

contrary, the treaty and its charter of basic rights gave reason to hope
for a better balance between market expansion and correction (all SZ
01/06/2005, see Scharpf 2002). In opposition to the much-cited French
flirtation with EU-wide protectionism, the overpowering verdict in my
German sample was that the closure of European economies was ‘no
option for the future’.38 In the words of Die Zeit’s co-editor Josef Joffe: ‘If
Europe sees itself as a bulwark against globalisation, it will be overrun by
it’ (DZ 23/06/2005, see 09/06/2005a). The German press clearly tended,
as Commissioner Verheugen did in his pleading for the constitution, to
present globalisation as an imperative reason for European integration,
and sometimes for not disturbing the integration impulse by jeopard-
ising the constitutional treaty (Bild 02/06/2005a). Integration, at least
until Eastern enlargement, could shield Europe from some of the adverse
effects of globalisation, but only if it played by the rules of globalisation,
rather than trying to exclude its dynamics from a European fortress.
To be sure, the globalisation card was not played particularly promi-
nently, since integration and the EU per se did not come under much
pressure. The discourse against European protectionism recalled the
German debate of the mid-1990s on the reunited country’s weaknesses
as a production and investment ‘site’ (Standortdebatte), resulting from
international competition in a globalised economy. This debate had
featured two camps with regard to globalisation. ‘The camp of the
“liberal revolution”’ presented globalisation as ‘commanding liberal
breaks’ and the adaptation of the production site, Germany, to the
globalised world’s demands. The camp ‘of the status quo took consola-
tion in the demonisation of globalisation’. By the late 1990s and early
2000s, the latter camp was relatively marginal, comprising globalisation
critics, some trade unionists, and a small part of the SPD (Uterwedde
2007:68–9, see Hay and Rosamond 2002:160–1, Schmidt 2000:174–8).
The image that now dominated the debate, and marked the positions
of SPD and CDU (Uterwedde 2007:87, 78–92), was that of the need
to ‘master globalisation’ rather than either submitting or shutting off
against it. German newspaper coverage on the constitution continued,
as did the two major parties’ programmes, to feature European inte-
gration as a prime means of mastering globalisation, or else took this
understanding silently for granted.

Democracy and the people

What, then, were the criticisms voiced against the constitutional
treaty? What did they reflect about prominent representations of
the EU and its legitimacy? Typically, statements on the constitution
 A Constitutional Moment? 173

referred to the pros as well as the cons of the treaty text (this was
different from France, where virtually every published enunciation on
the constitution became a campaign statement; almost any conceiv-
able argument would be adduced if – but only if – it could prop up the
respective position).
On the positive side, there was a general agreement that the proposed
constitution would make an EU with 25 member-states more ‘capable
of action’. Another common argument was that the constitution would
bring the Union ‘closer to the citizen’ and/or make it more transparent.
Further, it was generally uncontested that the constitution would make
the EU ‘more democratic’.39 The German debate thus largely bought
into these official legitimating story-lines justifying the constitutional
project and draft treaty (see Chapter 5). On the negative side, the
German sample revealed a relative consensus on the challenges to EU
legitimacy. For a number of members of the Bundestag from the CDU/
CSU, the lack of a reference to God in the preamble was its most decisive
shortfall.40 Yet this critique was practically limited to the conservative
circles of the CDU/CSU. Apart from this objection, the issues raised by
critics and defenders of the constitution and integration in general coin-
cided for the most part. The overwhelming understanding in the sources
I have analysed was that the EU needed to be made more efficient, more
democratic, and less distant or intransigent to the citizens. The differ-
ence between critical and appraising comments often lay in the extent
to which the constitution or the constitutional debates was argued
to sufficiently resolve these challenges. If there was a question about
the constitution’s advances in democratising the EU, it was whether
the relevant advances went far enough, or whether they attacked the
‘democratic deficit’ from the right angle. Different assessments of the
constitution’s democratic progress depended on the respectively applied
understanding of ‘democracy’. If ‘democracy’ was still used in a primarily
institutional sense during the German Maastricht debate, its meanings
were now more flexible and diverse. The respective weights given to the
different possible senses seem to have shifted by or during the German
constitutional debate. Generally, the sample referred in surprising depth
and fairly frequently to the arguments of political theorists and consti-
tutional scholars such as Jürgen Habermas, Fritz Scharpf, Dieter Grimm,
Armin von Bogdandy, or even Thomas Hobbes.41
The question of a shared public sphere in which deliberation and
opinion-formation could take place was a key issue for the EU’s demo-
cratic legitimacy. This concept, originating in the normative political-
science and constitutional-law literatures on EU legitimacy, reappeared
174 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

recurrently in the debate in the German newspapers.42 A considerable

number of enthusiasts celebrated the EU’s ‘constitutional moment’ as
a ‘proof’ for the existence of a ‘European public sphere’.43 This claim
rested on a deliberate emphasis on mutual influences between the
different national debates and in the assertion that there had virtu-
ally been a ‘pan-European referendum campaign’. Moreover, as the
French and Dutch were deliberating the constitution, a recurrent image
in the German sample was that the ‘rest of the European Union was
watching in fascination’ (all Spiegel 23/05/2005a), just as they might a
Champions’ League match (DZ 09/06/2005e). Not everyone followed
this analysis. Notwithstanding, both sides agreed that a shared public
sphere was a necessary condition for political legitimacy both in the
eyes of the Union citizens and according to ideal legitimacy condi-
tions silently taken for granted. Historian Heinrich August Winkler,
for instance, attributed the ‘credibility crisis of Project Europe’ to the
dominant ‘policy of completed facts’. It was characteristic for the EU,
he argued, that important decisions were being taken without ‘public
debate’ (‘öffentlichen Diskurs’). This, according to Winkler, could not but
provoke Euroscepticism (Spiegel 02/05/2005). Stoiber insisted that the
German Bundestag should debate future EU directives before they were
decided. He made this stipulation on grounds that ‘a European public
sphere does not exist’ – hence, the parliament had to exercise the task of
public deliberation. Like Winkler, Stoiber raised the stakes by predicting
that the European ‘citizens would not give up their scepticism [towards
the EU] until there were passionate debates in Germany about directives
from Europe’ (SZ 13/05/2005).
In my sample of the constitutional debate, the traditional meanings
of the term ‘democratic deficit’, as discussed in relation to the German
Maastricht debate in Chapter 4, persisted. Related critiques aimed at
the absence of a European demos or public sphere, as well as at the
EU’s ‘organisational structure’ or inter-institutional balance. Some,
comparatively isolated, voices denounced the constitution as not going
far enough in remedying the loss of parliamentary control in favour of
the executive branches due to the transfer of sovereignties to the EU
(see HAB 12/05/2005). More typically, advocates as well as most critics
of the constitution acknowledged its ‘uncontested’ reduction of ‘some
democratic deficits’ (e.g. Spiegel 06/06/2005, see 23/05/2005a). They too
used ‘democracy’ in this sense, well-established in German political,
scholarly, and media discourses.
In addition though, and chiming with the French constitutional debate,
the EU’s ‘democracy problem’ was increasingly discussed in terms of the
 A Constitutional Moment? 175

‘gap between the Union citizens and their parliamentary representation’,

or generally the distance between citizens and the EU (e.g. SZ 01/06/2005).
Despite laudable increases in the powers of the European and national
parliaments, ‘what this power in Brussels contrive[d] and [set] out on, still’
remained ‘alien to surprisingly many citizens’ (Spiegel 06/06/2005). Much
more than in France, a first kind of depiction emphasised the institutional,
practical, and tangible dimensions of this alienation. For instance, a series
of articles in Der Spiegel polemically described EU democracy as an ‘infe-
rior democracy’ (13/06/2005b). This was due, they argued, mainly to the
sheer speed and volume of EU legislation. The Brussels ‘power machinery
worked with such a high number of cycles that the national parliaments
[were] simply overwhelmed’ (09/05/2005). The magazine described at
length the ‘piles’ of paper about EU legislative projects loaded ‘every day’
onto the desks of Bundestag members, for whom it was not humanly
possible to keep up (supposedly, they ‘do not even read the constitution’,
13/06/2005). This image posited democratic control over the EU’s doings
as impracticable. It connected the omnipotent-bureaucratic-machinery
frame with the democratic-deficit critique, in that democratic control was
institutionally insufficient and practically unfeasible.
Secondly, the citizens’ alienation was moreover criticised, inde-
pendently of institutional questions, in an almost metaphysical sense.
Democratic-deficit critiques increasingly linked up with the image of
an intransigent, distant, but omnipotent power in ‘Brussels’. The criti-
cism embodied by the image of endless piles of unread EU legislation
connected with the old misgivings about excessive regulation and inter-
vention by the EU. Der Spiegel again devoted another series of articles
to opposed ‘the power from a different star’ intervening ‘more and
more in the lifeworld of its citizens’ with ‘undamped, and uncontrolled,
regulation rage’ (here 06/06/2005). Peter Gauweiler warned that the
constitution would turn the EU into a ‘unitary state’ [Einheitsstaat]; if
it was ratified, there would remain ‘no realm of public life that the EU
cannot co-shape’ (Bild 02/06/2005b). Two articles in the sample invoked
Kafka’s castle as a symbol of an omnipotent bureaucratic EU power that
‘secretly invented’ its own transformation into the ‘State Europe’ (Spiegel
14/03/2005, HAB 03/06/2005). An EU directive that prohibited construc-
tion workers to go about their jobs without wearing shirts (for the sake
of protecting them against the sun) and numerous other supposedly
absurd regulations provided support to this frame.44 This discourse was a
fervent reaction against the legitimation emblem of the regulatory state
safeguarding the common European good on the basis of expert ration-
ality and bureaucratic impartiality (Chapter 2).
176 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

Still, a recurrent discourse countered the ‘omnipotent-and-out-of-

control-bureaucracy’ frame. It emphasised particularly that the new
Commission had drastically reduced the number of new legislative initi-
atives. It called attention to Commissioner Verheugen’s much-reported
promise that even currently effective rules would be ‘overhauled, simpli-
fied, and if necessary abolished’.45 In addition, this discourse empha-
sised elements of control over the EU’s executive component, notably
by way of the EP’s expanded powers (FAZ 12/05/2005) or the constitu-
tion’s advances in making EU decision-making more transparent.46 A
concomitant act, passed together with the Ratification Act, was further
to improve democratic input into EU politics. It concerned the role of
the two chambers in subsidiarity complaints and the introduction of
majority votes in new policy areas (FAZ 13/05/2005b). The press cele-
brated this act as guaranteeing the two chambers ‘direct participation
opportunities in EU legislation’, in exaggeration of its actual content
(e.g. FAZ 28/05/2005b).
Critiques of EU democracy and the reference to the distance between
citizens and the EU sometimes coincided with a defence of the nation-
state. Recalling French national-republican discourses, constitutional
justice Hans-Jürgen Papier, for instance, claimed that ‘nowhere do parlia-
mentary democracy and the protection of liberties function better than
within the nation-state’s limits’ (DZ 16/06/2005b). In the nation-state,
went one subtext, political decision-making would be more representa-
tive, accountable, and legitimate, and citizens would perceive it as less
distant. In this sense, the defence-of-the-nation-state frame concerned
misgivings about ‘excessive centralisation’ and disproportionate trans-
fers of sovereignty rights to the EU as well as, typically, about the neither
democratically controlled nor authorised power of the Commission (see
SZ 12/05/2005). Another subtext of Papier’s implied difficulties was that
of protecting individual liberties against political power at the suprana-
tional level. This chimed with a relatively unusual image in the German
discourses on the EU; namely that of the EU as an unaccountable jurid-
ical power. Der Spiegel ran an investigative story about the European anti-
corruption agency’s expanding competence, about Europol ‘acting up
as a secret service’, and about both ruthlessly creating ‘Europe-victims’
(06/06/2005). Considerable agitation about the ‘European arrest
warrant’ had created a link between the ‘over-interventionist-Brussels’
frame and supposed fears for individual liberties. The warrant allowed
holding Union citizens in prisons of member-states other than their
own. It received substantial attention in the German press and audi-
ovisual media. Der Spiegel cited concerns among constitutional court
 A Constitutional Moment? 177

representatives about the ‘conspicuously low level of [basic rights]

protection’ by the European Court of Justice, and reported on several
cases of Germans being unfairly treated in foreign jails, again depicting
the EU as an impervious Kafkaesque unaccountable power (06/06/2005,
see 14/03/2005).
Peter Gauweiler, who filed a constitutional complaint against the
constitution’s ratification, linked his critique of excessive EU compe-
tences with his objection to the precedence of EU over German law
(HAB 12/05/2005). (This was in addition to the claim familiar from
the Maastricht complaint that the constitution ‘disempowered the
Bundestag’ [FAZ 17/06/2005b], which was however not the main
reproach reported on in the sample on the constitutional debate.)
According to Gauweiler’s reasoning, only a referendum could authorise
a ‘new constitution’.47 He saw the draft treaty as an attack on the Basic
Law, and hence on German identity. Interestingly, Der Spiegel joined
him in worrying about the protection of basic rights (06/06/2005, see
HAB 12/05/2005). Gauweiler’s line of argument transposed the key
threat to German identity from the EU from the loss of the national
currency (as I observed for the Maastricht debate) to the loss of the
national constitutional system (on perceptions of the latter threat,
see Davies 2011, 2012). Gauweiler demanded that a ‘replacement’ of
the Basic Law as the constitution constituted it (FAZ 17/06/2005b),
or even only substantial modifications, had to be authorised by refer-
endum rather than by the Bundestag and Bundesrat. This ran counter to
the Habermasian understanding that institutional and constitutional
faits-accomplis would subsequently help create a European public
sphere and demos (Habermas 1998:161). Gauweiler promoted the old
counter-frame, represented by Dieter Grimm, that ‘fundamental deci-
sions about the European Union [had] to remain where they are suffi-
ciently democratically answerable, in the member-states’. In Grimm’s
reasoning, this imperative did not preclude an expanded participa-
tion of the EP in legislation, as foreseen by the constitutional treaty.
‘Yet, without sufficient societal foundations’ (a European-wide public
debate, above all), ‘the parliament cannot carry the burden of legitima-
tion alone’ (FAZ 12/05/2005). Since the societal foundations, namely ‘a
common people with a common language’ and a shared public sphere
(or a ‘European Spiegel’), were lacking in Europe, Der Spiegel joined
in, the EU was ‘not ready for a true parliament’ (13/06/2005). This
discourse was of course a version of the no-demos argument that had
become a part of German public (as well as legal and politiological
debate) around Maastricht (Chapter 4).
178 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

Gauweiler and Grimm’s defence of the nation-state was complemented

by an understanding that some competences were essentially national,
whilst others could legitimately and for efficiency’s sake be transferred
to the EU level. Eminent politicians of the Union, notably Angela Merkel
(as leader of the opposition) and Wolfgang Schäuble (as Vice-Chairman
of the CDU in the Bundestag) demanded not only ‘a clearer demarcation
of competences’ (Schäuble) but even advocated the option of possibly
returning certain competences ‘which are perceived as bureaucratic
or bothersome’ (Merkel) or which transcend the ‘originally European
competences’ (Schäuble) to the national level (FAZ 13/05/2005c, SZ
07/05/2005). In determining which competences could legitimately be
supranationalised, and which had to remain national, efficiency played
an important role. Efficiency, however, was also turned into an argument
in favour of supranationalism, on grounds of the declining national
capacity of action (see Chapter 1 on this line of reasoning in early legiti-
mation discourses). Habermas warned against an ‘illusionary confidence
in the capacity of a nation-state’.48 ‘Less and less of its tasks could still be
met satisfactorily at state level’, explained Grimm, who typically strove
to reconcile both frames in a pragmatic way (FAZ 12/05/2005). This
development necessitated supranational elements of problem-solving
and hence supranational elements of democratic legitimation. Der
Spiegel reported on Fritz Scharpf’s idea of ‘output’ legitimation and on
von Bogdandy’s argument that the people were ‘entitled’ to be governed
effectively, and that Europe helped to ‘recover the capacity of action’
lost at the national level (13/06/2005). To be sure, the magazine, self-
proclaimed defender of ‘true democracy’, denounced this ‘authoritarian
body of thought’, ‘tailor-made for the Europe of Brussels’.
Der Spiegel attacked the EU’s ‘expert democracy’, which ‘no longer asks
what the citizens’ interest is, but instead decides what is in the citizens’
interest’ (13/06/2005). It hit the nerve of a general discourse against
the EU’s ‘arrogant’ and paternalistic practices of ‘dictating integration
from above’, of disempowering the citizens along the lines of ‘you do
not understand anyway and in the end you will see that everything
was right’ (e.g. DZ 16/06/2005a). Habermas called this ‘the comfortable
bureaucratic mode of a unification from above’ (SZ 06/06/2005). The
critique of this mode of decision-making had become a crucial dimen-
sion in accusations of the EU’s democratic deficit. This was a clear shift
and expansion in the usage of this democratic-deficit trope from the
more institutions-oriented understanding discussed for the Maastricht
debates (Chapter 4) and the proto-versions outlined for the campaign
around European elections (Chapter 2). It developed the concurrent
 A Constitutional Moment? 179

idea in circulation in the Maastricht debates of the democratic deficit as

the lack of popular support for integration (Chapter 4).
Many sources in my German sample, moreover, judged that relying
centrally on output-based legitimacy was no longer feasible in economi-
cally difficult times (e.g. DZ 16/06/2005a). Habermas’s verdict was that,
for a long time, the project of integration had been able to ‘legitimate
itself through its results alone’. The elected governments, rather than
the citizens, had been able to advance the process, and ‘[a]s long as
everyone profited, the citizens were content’. But ‘economic change’ was
ushering in ‘redistributive conflicts’, for which ‘output-legitimation’ was
‘no longer sufficient’ (all SZ 06/06/2005). The discourse was strong that
‘people were no longer ready to submit without questions and unrepin-
ingly to a dictate’ (DZ 16/06/2005a). In this picture, the problem was
not so much that the people did not want governance at the European
level. It was a matter of how, rather than whether, the EU took charge of
specific policies. Moreover, it was a matter of the overall goals of inte-
gration and specific EU policies, and of how to decide on them. For
decades, Habermas asserted, ‘the politicians’ had ‘swept’ the question of
the EU’s finalité ‘under the carpet’ in order to avoid polarisation. ‘Now
the recalcitrant electorate-people brushes the dirt towards them [ ... ] in
their own back yard’. In his reading of the popular resistance to the
constitution, they had brought the argument into the open over where
the EU should be going. The people were demanding an ‘open contest’
on the proper objective and ‘fundamental orientation’ of European inte-
gration. Having inspired Joschka Fischer’s call for a debate on the EU’s
‘finalité’ (see Chapter 5), Habermas now decreed that if the EU was to
win the citizens’ approval, ‘a political perspective had to associate itself
with it’ and with the constitution-making process (all SZ 06/06/2005).
This did ‘not mean to anchor a [particular] policy in the constitution
itself’. Rather ‘a deepening of Political Union would allow overcoming
the standstill of intergovernmental consultations and giving a voice
to Europe’s citizens’. The paralysing conflict over incompatible goal
conceptions could not be resolved by plebiscite. ‘The European institu-
tions’ had ‘simultaneously to internalise and unleash’ the conflict about
incompatible conceptions of the goals of integration for this conflict to
result in productive solutions.
Concurrent with demanding the institutionalisation of a suppos-
edly open-ended debate on the EU’s finalité, Habermas proposed his
own substantive reading of the political perspective he thought the
citizens wanted. The referendum votes, he judged, ‘definitely’ carried
the ‘following message’: ‘Not all Western nations are ready to put up
180 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

with the cultural and social costs, at home and worldwide, of the lack
of the equalisation of wealth, which the neoliberals want to impose on
them for the sake of an increased growth of wealth’. In other words,
the people continued to want redistributive social and cultural policies.
The redistributive scheme Habermas envisaged would, in his worldview,
only be possible through supranational cooperation. Only a ‘deepening
of the European Union with the aim of politically consolidating and
cushioning Monetary Union by gradually harmonising the member-
states’ fiscal, social, and economic policies opens up the perspective of
regaining at this level capacities of action lost by the nation-states’ (all
SZ 06/06/2005). This is what he meant by ‘Political Union’.
The keyword of the EU’s finalité was also taken up, in the German
debate, in relation to the Turkish question. It provided the argument that
the citizens had to know which Europe, in which geographical borders,
they were facing, in order to overcome their essentially distrustful orien-
tation. In short: ‘The Turkish question forces us to reach a settlement as
to which Europe we want in the end’.49 Overall, there was much soul-
searching in the German wider public debate, as reflected in the national
press, about the EU’s actual nature and ends, and those desired for the
future; the EU’s finalité. The journalists and intellectuals whose contribu-
tions I studied agreed widely that the old peace-and-prosperity argument
I discussed in Chapter 1 was no longer sufficient for bringing the people
on board (Spiegel 06/06/2005, see FAZ 28/05/2005a). Many distanced
themselves from the ‘usual pathos’ employed at historical crossroads
in European integration. Especially the ‘losers’ from EU-associated
policies wanted concrete material perspectives of future benefits and
the impression of their concerns being heard (Spiegel 09/05/2005, see
FAZ 28/05/2005a). A new pragmatic mood was reflected further in the
suggestion that already avowing a general ‘disillusionment’ and avoiding
‘overdrawn expectations’ would lead to better relations between the EU
and its citizens (DZ 09/06/2005c, see 02/06/2005).

Comparisons and conclusions

What, then, were the implications of these two debates (respectively

and by comparison) with a view to the EU’s quest for legitimacy, and
what it made sense to say about EU legitimacy? On an immediate level,
the comparison between the constitution’s reception in the French and
German wider public debates (as reflected in the selected newspapers)
illustrates the advantages and disadvantages of submitting constitu-
tion-making decisions to popular referendum. On the one hand, the
 A Constitutional Moment? 181

French referendum, unlike others, mobilised an exceptionally intense

and inclusive debate, while the German debate was relatively much
more reserved. On the other, the referendum dynamic entailed a great
polarisation and a discursive reduction of the complex issues at hand
to the positive-negative binaries of the French debate. By comparison,
the German debate was more nuanced and more balanced, which may
of course have been a function of its being relatively less inclusive. The
French (as well as the Dutch) case, moreover, proves the risks involved
in submitting a text as complex as the constitutional draft treaty, a
third part of which included the entirety of the previous treaties, to
popular referendum, rather than ratifying it by parliamentary decision.
In France, everyone ended up having an opinion on the constitution.
However, this opinion, as well as the effective vote, was often an overall
one about Europe, the EU, and the general stakes in twenty-first-century
politics, rather than one about the relative advances of this particular
treaty. To be sure, the debates as well as the popular reactions in both
countries were co-determined in part by domestic political contexts.
In France, high unemployment, a general climate of pessimism and
smouldering frustration, and President Chirac’s extraordinarily low popu-
larity came to bear (Libé 06/04/2005, Le Gall 2005:106). Notwithstanding,
the debate was essentially one about the EU. The French debate largely
turned on the question ‘Which Europe do we want?’ (and on whether
the constitution would bring Europe and France closer to the respective
ideal, or at least to preferable solutions). With a view to the long term,
this illustrated that the long-standing official discourse of listening to
what the citizens expected from European integration (e.g. CEC 1976:7,
Chapter 3) had hit a nerve. It spoke to a discursive need in the member-
states. With regard to the French referendum debate more narrowly, the
push of the debate to the question of what kind of Europe was wanted
represented a discursive victory of the No campaign. It turned the debate
away from the actual treaty provisions, after all largely advantageous to
France, to more general associations with the EU – and in particular with
the EU one did not want (Milner 2006:267, LF 10/05/2005).
Seen from the outside, there was of course a crucial problem with
the French constitutional debate. The French, in their enthusiasm to
exercise their pouvoir constituant, were inclined to forget, or neglect, that
other European nationals might have different ideas of what the EU
should look like, and that the constitutional draft reflected this variety
and constellation of ideas and interests, however unsatisfactorily (at the
same time, of course, it was precisely this that they did not forget, and
they fought tirelessly for what they perceived to be French interests).
182 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

Even if the French government had attempted to re-negotiate the

constitutional draft in perfect alignment with a rather utopian French
compromise on how it should do that, other governments would have
had to represent divergent blueprints.
As to its most central themes, the French debate on the EU consti-
tution played most importantly on the field of social and economic
questions and with regard to the EU’s role in exacerbating, as against
alleviating, French nationals’ and individual vulnerabilities to interna-
tional competition. The No camp managed to frame resistance to the
constitution as an act of bringing about an alternative, better world, in
which humanism and political will triumphed over impersonal market
forces and the ill effects of globalisation. The Yes camp argued that it
was, on the contrary, the constitution itself that would favour such a
world. They accepted, however, this world’s desirability, and hence the
hegemony of this discourse. To many, opposition to the constitution
was, finally, a way of protesting ex post against enlargement 25 and of
throwing a spanner into the works of Turkish accession negotiations.
This discourse against Turkish membership was mirrored by the German
opposition, who interpreted the constitutional controversy as expressing
popular unease with an EU that would include Turkey.
Generally, the German debate directly reacted to the questions raised
in the French and the Dutch referendum debates,50 placing them, of
course, into its own discursive contexts. The original discursive situ-
ation in Germany was comparable to that of France in its general
climate of pessimism and perceived vulnerability to unemployment
and competition from low-cost labour countries, which now included
EU member-states. In both countries, unemployment and ‘social
and salary dumping’ had been associated discursively with the EU,
notably through the previously missing link of Eastward enlargement.
Nonetheless, unlike in France, German newspapers and politicians
hardly made a connection between these problems and the constitution.
One explanation for this divergence, I have argued, was the different
discursive balances in the two national public spheres between repre-
sentations of market forces as a vehicle, versus the antithesis, of social
policies, or of the EU as a means of mastering globalisation versus an
agent of globalisation.
German criticisms of the constitution and the EU, moreover, hinged
prominently on questions of democracy. The French Yes campaign, too,
tirelessly pointed to the constitution’s advances in making the EU more
democratic, but had limited success in making this discursive position
dominate the debate. In this sense, the German constitutional debate
 A Constitutional Moment? 183

was more responsive than the French was to the EU-official discursive
strategy of presenting ‘democracy’ as the main challenge to the EU’s
legitimacy, as I discussed in Chapter 5. In both France and Germany,
the particular proposed official redefinition of democracy in terms of
simplification, transparency, openness, and governance, proved not very
effective. The way ‘democracy’ was used in both debates differed from
the senses given in the EU-official discourses I analysed in Chapter 5. In
both France and Germany, the EU’s ‘democratic deficit’ had now come
to be used as shorthand for the general alienation of the citizens from
the EU. This moved away from the usage of the term in the Maastricht
debates (Chapter 4) and the prototypes of the democratic-deficit critique
advanced in the context of the debate on European elections (Chapter 2),
both of which had mainly focused on the democratic credentials of the
European institutional order. It took up the topos from the Maastricht
debates I referred to in Chapter 4, of the democratic deficit as consisting
in the lack of popular support for integration, but also recognized it
more clearly as a problem that would not be easily overcome by an
educational labour of persuasion.
The French and German constitutional debates also gave a more
concrete quality to the democratic-deficit critique than the national-
republican discourses and the no-demos arguments I analysed for the
Maastricht debates had done. In the constitutional debates, critiques of
EU democracy found a forceful emblem; assuming a backward-looking
element, they denounced the weak democratic authorisation of the inte-
gration process as a whole, and of its particular stages. The complaint
was ubiquitous, most notably, that the people had never been asked
about the EU’s eastward enlargement, and this despite its important
repercussions on the national economies. The very project of a consti-
tution, conceived of as an ex post foundational moment that involved
the people and as an opportunity for the people to authorise, ex ante,
the current foreseen and future reforms, aimed at this critique against
lacking popular input. This legitimation attempt was already under-
mined by the lack of popular involvement in the convention. It received
a fatal blow when the French and Dutch peoples refused to sign what
they perceived as a legitimation blank cheque.
Some German contributions in particular furthermore pointed towards
a new pragmatism in approaching the question of the EU’s legitimacy.
The asserted need for an open, and not exclusively top-down, contest
over the EU’s ‘finalité’ and ‘political perspective’ played an important
role in the German debate on the constitution and on the controversies
in the neighbouring countries. Joschka Fischer’s finalité idea projected
184 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

finding some agreement on where European integration would go,

and where it would stop (Chapter 5). The demanded political perspec-
tive involved, in Habermas’s vision, adding policy substance to the EU
competence portfolio that would include redistributive matters. More
generally, it involved avowed sober politicking, in the open, over who
would win and lose, respectively, from particular options for the EU’s
general setup and its particular policy choices. The centrality of ‘social
Europe’ in the French debate illustrated that many citizens were well
aware of the unavoidable trade-offs in EU politics, and that their inter-
ests were at stake.
With a view to the balancing act between claims to legitimacy based
on input authenticity and those based on output efficiency, finally,
these debates dramatically underlined the fact that not just any
performance output, however efficient, would grant the EU legitimacy.
Both debates, but especially the French one, constituted rare moments
of exceptionally inclusive public deliberation about what European
solutions people wanted, and thus about what kind of output would
increase the EU’s output legitimacy in their eyes, or rather, what kind
of output they did not desire from it. From a more pessimistic perspec-
tive, these were moments in which it became clear just how deeply
many European citizens felt that what the EU had been doing was
out of touch with what they wanted. Output-legitimation without at
least a veneer of input authenticity was unsustainable. Both debates
moreover reflected and nurtured the spreading understanding that
integration was not a Pareto-efficient, positive-sum game in which
everyone gained and no one lost. Its outputs were not (only) indi-
visible public goods, as the foundational legitimation discourse I
analysed in Chapter 1 had it. EU policies and integration could not
benefit all equally. This also meant that EU output could not durably
satisfy all equally. Many Frenchmen (and others) seemed to feel the
need to ensure that they would be on the winning rather than the
losing side, and hence they raised their voices. In their articulation of
what they wanted out of integration, economic advantages and other
relative material benefits from integration played a prominent role. A
common undertone in the French debate was that the EU would pass
as more legitimate and desirable if, and only if, its output and its setup
were better aligned with the respectively held preferences. However,
given the fundamentally conflicting preferences between the French,
and between the French and other member-state nationals, this could
of course not point the way to increasing the EU’s output legitimacy;
too many conflicting expectations stood against each other. Hence,
 A Constitutional Moment? 185

some generally acceptable procedure of defining what the EU should

be about was proving essential for making output-legitimation effec-
tive for everyone, including those who did not directly benefit from
or agree with particular outputs.
Both the French and German debates on the constitutional treaty
projected an ideal whereby the citizens were actively involved in setting
and prioritising the goals of EU action. This is not to say that the old ideal
of an EU responsive to citizen expectations, diagnosed in a top-down
manner and discussed in Chapter 3, did not persist. It was battered,
however, by the flourishing counter-discourse (and empirical fact) that
many Union citizens felt that the EU was not furthering their inter-
ests satisfactorily. Consequently, if the citizens were to make sure that
their interests and worldviews were represented at the EU level, they
had to get their act together and take their fates into their own hands.
Many commentators interpreted the constitutional crisis as a token of
how fed up many citizens were with European integration progressing
seemingly relentlessly beyond their control or influence; they supported
the afore-mentioned reading of the referenda as an occasion finally to
put a spoke in the wheel of integration. Yet the input-related motifs
in the constitutional controversy were still inextricably tied to what
the citizens expected in terms of output from EU action. While output-
legitimation did practically presuppose a certain credibility that the
problem-solving performance was in line with what a majority people
desired or what they could accept as desirable or justly established tasks,
dominant positions and self-representations of the wider public debates
did allow for the reading that the citizens did not so much want to have
a say for the sake of having a say, as for the sake of safeguarding their
partisan interests. Input legitimacy was inextricably tied up with output
expectations.
To conclude, the creation of an EU ‘constitution’ (even if the ‘treaty’
carried that name only in a distorted way) was an attempt to increase
the EU’s and integration’s legitimacy. Yet, the forging and strengthening
of a European constitutionalism or constitutional patriotism was graced
with limited success. Constitutions temporarily solidify certain rules of
the game beyond endless re-contestation, and thus give legitimacy to
authority that complies with them (see Grimm 1994:289–90, Elster and
Slagstad 1988). However, even in nation-state contexts these rules, too,
continue to run into legitimation challenges, and they, too, need to be
amendable if they are to keep their legitimating persuasiveness. Even
constitutions like the US or British ones (assuming that Britain has one),
which enjoy exceptional degrees of social legitimacy, have encountered
186 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

existential problems that threatened key features of the polities they

constituted, for instance with the US Civil War, or with Scottish pres-
sures for devolution and/or secession. Given the transient, dynamic,
and essentially contested nature of political legitimacy, the expecta-
tion that anything could solve the problem of EU legitimacy, or in fact
the problem of legitimacy of any kind of political entity, is mistaken to
begin with.
Attempts to alleviate the European construction’s legitimacy deficit
(in the eyes of both its citizens and of impartial observers) are as old as
the European construction itself, this book has suggested. Particularly
prominent were, on the level of concrete reforms, for example the intro-
duction of Union citizenship (Chapter 3), the direct election of the EP
and the gradual, if limited, expansion of its powers (Chapters 2 and 3).
On the level of discursive paradigms, I discussed the People’s Europe
campaign (Chapter 3) and the EU governance discourse (Chapter 5)
earlier. The constitutional project continued on, and went beyond,
these earlier attempts in several ways. It constituted an attempt to
tackle the EU’s legitimacy problem head-on, comprehensively and
as conclusively as possible. While those earlier legitimation strate-
gies targeted specific institutional problems or aimed to bring about
specific shifts in how people would perceive and imagine the EU, the
Convention on the Future of Europe aimed to strike a sweeping blow.
In this sense, it was reaching for the stars. We now know it failed to
constitute the foundational act of a retroactive and ex ante popular
authorisation of integration and the EU, for which the more optimistic
of its supporters may have hoped. It is unlikely that such a sweeping
blow of legitimation will be conceivable again. It might just be that
the issue of EU (and any political order’s) legitimacy can by its very
nature never be resolved conclusively. The book’s final chapter will
now explore this possibility.
7
The Story and the Literature:
Democracy, Efficiency, and the
Contested Game of EU Politics

The struggle for its legitimacy, then, is as old as European integration

itself. Over the past six decades, a wealth of rival and mutually referen-
tial discourses has been competing to make the project look more – or
less – legitimate. They have battled over how to make sense of the EU
(and its predecessors) in the first place, over what it would mean for
them to be legitimate, and over how legitimate they were. To varying
degrees, the discourses on offer from EU-level official statements
pushed and responded to discourses in the national public spheres,
and the other way round. What holds the different episodes analysed
in the individual chapters together, and what lessons are there to be
drawn from the discursive history of this struggle? This chapter weaves
the episodes of my individual chapters into one story, and relates it
to developments in the academic literature on EU legitimacy. The
emphasis in it is not on summarising the book’s analyses, but on
bringing their interpretations into dialogue with specific important
sites of investigation, controversies, and structuring concepts in the
pertinent scholarship.
A succinct précis of my story helps the bigger picture to emerge.
This will, in turn, reflect back on the individual stages in this history.
A key tension underlying discursive contests over EU legitimacy is the
balancing act between bringing the people in and keeping them out (or
from obstructing integration). This elemental tension manifested itself
in two related threads that structured the discursive history I described:
firstly a balancing act between claiming legitimacy on the basis of results
or integration’s beneficial consequences, and on the basis of a link of
integration and the EU with what the Europeans want; and secondly a

187
188 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

constitutive tension, or always at least latent conflict, between de-politi-

cising and politicising EU politics. These fundamental tensions have run
through this book’s chapters. They also correspond to two constitutive
features of, or lines of inquiry in, the recent literature on EU legitimacy.
Much of the scholarship approaches EU and political legitimacy through
the lens of the binary categories of ‘input-’ versus ‘output-based’ sources
of legitimacy, with the relationship between the two increasingly being
subject to investigation. In addition, a growing body of work describes,
analyses, or calls for, an increased ‘politicisation’ of European integra-
tion, European decision-making, and European issues – a development
that counteracts concurrent persisting technocratic and de-politicising
tendencies. In the subsequent two sections of this concluding chapter,
I relate my discourse-historical narrative to these literatures respec-
tively, and reflect on the relationship between scholarly and official,
political, and public legitimacy-relevant discourses. I critically engage
with these scholarly accounts in a two-directional manner: To what
extent and how can these conceptual lenses help to highlight particular
dynamics or patterns of the discursive history analysed in this book?
And conversely, how can this book’s discursive history shed light on the
questions debated in these literatures, and on the value and limitations
of thinking about political legitimacy in terms of input- and output-
related categories, or in terms of a push and pull between de-politicising
and politicising forces at work?

The story assembled

Narratives and arguments about what it was that made integration and
the EU (or its predecessors) legitimate changed over time. In the early
years of the European Communities, two fundamental legitimating
story-lines were central: that integration was indispensable to securing
peace and prosperity across Europe, and that practically everyone agreed
that it served a supposedly uncontroversial European ‘common good’
(Chapter 1). Democracy did not initially play a very crucial role in early
legitimation discourses, although counter-discourses demanding more
of it did exist (Chapter 2). A key foundational discursive technique, still
robust today, was to de-politicise and gloss over potentially contentious
issues through a variety of means. Notwithstanding, what form integra-
tion should take and to which overarching ends, was never uncontested.
While it was intuitive that everyone in Europe wanted to live in peace
and prosperity, it was by no means obvious how this could, or should,
be achieved, and who should bear the costs or reap how much of which
 The Story and the Literature 189

benefits. It also did not go without saying that economic integration was
the way forward. The campaign for direct European elections, the fierce
disputes of the 1960s over how supranational the Communities should
be, and the economic and financial crises of the 1970s, illustrated that
not everyone agreed on what the Communities should be doing and
how (Chapter 2). During the early 1980s, the ‘peace-and-prosperity’
storyline came under additional pressure from once-again fraught East–
West relations, as well as renewed economic difficulties. ‘Eurosclerosis’
seemed to affect Europe’s prospects in the global economy as well as
its progress towards the common market objective. The European
institutions responded by re-imagining the so far functionally defined
European Communities holistically as a ‘People’s Europe’ (Chapter 3).
This concerted campaign appealed to the people no longer merely as
‘market citizens’, but also as culturally embedded human beings, and as
political citizens with participation and protection rights specific to the
European Community. Its underlying idea was to make Europe present
in people’s everyday lives through tangible benefits, symbols, discursive
constructions of European identity, and increased efforts in the cultural
and communication policy fields.
Maastricht was a watershed, not only in the integration project’s
general fortunes. In addition, its difficult ratification in the early 1990s
changed the landscape of what could plausibly be claimed about the
legitimacy of the re-named European Union (Chapter 4). Fierce popular
and political resistance to the treaty’s ratification, in combination with
dropping popular support rates, caused commentators as well as poli-
ticians to declare the popular ‘permissive consensus’ towards integra-
tion dead. In this situation it became impossible to maintain that the
EU brought about by Maastricht reflected what the Europeans wanted.
Politicians and commentators widely agreed that the EU’s legitimacy
was in crisis, and in many ways this crisis has lasted ever since. In the
French and German ratification controversies, a number of old and new
criticisms gained hold of political and wider public representations of
the EU. Both debates, and in fact critiques, of the EU across the member-
states and throughout the 1990s, turned centrally around Economic and
Monetary Union (EMU), and especially around concerns for economic
and price stability. More particularly, the French dreaded the subjection
of their monetary action range to a European Central Bank and a domi-
nant re-united Germany, whereas the Germans feared for their beloved
national currency, stylised as a symbol of German wealth, power, and
national identity – all now threatened by the European currency. A further
central point of discussion in both debates was whether democracy was
190 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

possible at all on a European scale. An important discourse in France

confined the practice of democracy and citizenship, or simply ‘the
political’, to the nation-state. And an increasingly prominent German
critique questioned whether, given the lack of a European demos, mean-
ingful EU-wide democracy was conceivable at all. This argument of the
Federal Constitutional Court’s was to proliferate far beyond the German
legal, academic, and public spheres.
In discursively managing the Maastricht crisis and the ensuing
protracted general legitimacy crisis of the EU during the 1990s and
early 2000s (Chapter 5), the European institutions initially framed
the EU’s legitimacy gap in term of its ‘democratic deficit’. This took
up French and German critiques of EU democracy. At the same time,
however, official rhetoric focused so much on this issue that it shifted
much more urgent national public concerns, voiced for instance in the
French and German Maastricht debates, with EMU, or with the power
balance in post-cold war Europe, to the background. About the Euro,
one communication strategy was silence. In addition, official rhetoric
and discursive usage effectively stretched the meaning of ‘democracy’ in
three ways. During and immediately after the ratification crisis, it often
equated democracy with transparency, and ‘closeness to the citizens’
with subsidiarity. In the medium term, the paradigm of governance –
not limited to the academic debate but thriving also in official rhetoric
and practice – claimed to offer a more ‘genuine’ and ‘authentic’ alterna-
tive to traditional representative democracy, with which citizens were
increasingly disillusioned (Romano Prodi). This discourse focused atten-
tion on the consultation and involvement of civil society as opposed
to the people or the citizens, prioritising responsiveness and efficient
catering to the citizen expectations over democratic control, representa-
tion, or accountability. Finally, institutional discourses and EU policies
projected Union citizenship and reinforced identity-building measures,
and particularly the forging of a European constitutional patriotism,
as solutions to the EU’s democratic deficit. This moved the emphasis
to strengthening the affective bond between citizens and the EU, and
to creating the symbolic conditions for a European-wide demos. These
discourses, policies, and reform attempts culminated in the project of
the EU constitution.
At the end of the day, the official emphasis on democracy during the
1990s and early 2000s may have backfired, as the French and German
debates on the constitutional treaty indicated (Chapter 6). While democ-
racy did play a key role in them, it did so not in the senses advanced by
the masterminds of official rhetoric. Rather, across member-state public
 The Story and the Literature 191

spheres, the reading was pervasive that the citizens who resisted the consti-
tutional treaty were finally throwing a spanner in the works of a process
that, for decades, had been proceeding inexorably above their heads. In
this image, the No-votes were a statement of popular sovereignty – in
a rather traditional, majoritarian-electoral sense of democracy. In France
particularly, the democracy theme was intertwined with the issues of
enlargement and specifically Turkish accession, through the argument
that a positive referendum would durably reinforce the logic of ever more
integration beyond the control of the people. The discourses of French
opponents as well as proponents of the constitution were structured by a
series of oppositions. A snug ‘social’ world of ‘humanism’, where ‘political
will’ and a successful French social model triumphed over the external
constraints, stood against a world subordinated to the inhuman forces of
‘the market’ and ‘globalisation’, a world of unemployment and disman-
tled national social and education systems. The difference between the
opposing camps was that they presented the constitution, or the EU gener-
ally, either as part of the problem or a solution to it. The German debate in
turn pivoted, on one hand, around fears of unemployment and ‘wage and
social dumping’ as well as the relationship between market forces and the
welfare state. The 2004 enlargement had provided the previously virtu-
ally missing link of unemployment with European integration. A second
cluster of motifs prominent in the German debate concerned questions of
democracy as well as the ‘finalité’ of European integration.
Together, the French and German constitutional debates illustrated
not only once again that democracy, citizenship, and a more legitimate
EU meant very different things in member-state public and EU-official
parlance. More importantly, and perhaps a little less obviously, the ways
in which official discourses had employed these terms moreover ulti-
mately failed to turn around the French and German public spheres.
Public discourse there held on to French national-republican tendencies
or the classical democratic ideals implicit in many German critiques of
the EU’s democratic deficit, both of which I discussed in the Maastricht
case studies (Chapter 4). This may be unsurprising given that official
discourses on democracy and legitimacy had bracketed out the most
fundamental and threatening issues raised in the member-state contexts
as early as the Maastricht debates. Attempts to deviate discourses on EU
democracy to less compromising grounds, which would require much
less institutional or constitutional reform (such as further strengthening
the European Parliament, a recurrent key demand in Germany despite
the fact that hitherto steps in that directions had had limited success in
improving the EU’s perceived legitimacy), effectively failed.
192 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

Overall, the history of discourses around the legitimacy of the EU and

integration constituted a multi-layered web of interrelated themes and
discursive lines. It was made up of (but not limited to) ongoing contests
over how much and what kind of democracy was necessary, over what
the EU should be doing and how, and how well it was doing it, or over
the kind of relation the EU had, or should have, with the European citi-
zens. One central tension runs through all discursive legitimation and
delegitimation patterns discussed in this book, as well as their interplay:
they are all marked by an inescapable balancing act between bringing
the people in and keeping them out. Striking the right balance between
taking the people on board while simultaneously preventing them from
obstructing certain desired integration steps and processes has been a
key challenge in legitimating the European project and its institutions.
Ever since Tindemans’ seminal demand (CEC 1976, see Chapter 2), offi-
cial EU rhetoric and legitimation patterns turned essentially on ‘what
the people wanted’ (so that then its legitimacy could be claimed, partly,
on grounds that it represented or delivered this). Yet, the fact that they
revolved centrally around the European citizens and their needs and
sensitivities did not necessarily mean that these citizens got more of an
actual say. The People’s-Europe and post-Maastricht EU-official legitima-
tion discourses (Chapters 3 and 5, notably) tended to emphasise demo-
cratic responsiveness over democratic accountability or authorisation,
often linking responsiveness with modes of governance ensuring effi-
cient performance, even at the expense of representativeness, partici-
pation, or democratic control, and generally seeking alternatives to
majoritarian modes of democracy and their procedures. The citizens,
I suggested, remained objects and spectators rather than authors of EU
action in these discourses. The will of the people, or citizen expectations,
was at the epicentre of these discourses. But it had a double status in
both, in that it was referred to as both an object of manipulation and, at
the same time, an independent source of legitimacy. The constitutional
episode only continued on the old aspiration of legitimation strategies
around, for example, Union-citizenship and EU-governance to make
the EU citizens feel ownership and authorship over the EU, its political
actions, and over how it worked. All these discourses that emphasised
the role of the citizens in ways that looked beyond classical models of
national electoral democracy may have woken sleeping dogs. Much
more than, and counter to, those preceding legitimation discourses, the
constitutional treaty, its ratification procedures in many member-states,
as well as the official rhetoric and wider public discourses around the
project, centred on popular participation, authorisation, and control.
 The Story and the Literature 193

At the end of the day, this very focus on participation was decisive in
making the constitutional project fail.
Now, the tightrope walk between bringing the people in and keeping
them out was built into the very nature of the European integration
project. It arose from the fact that European integration has essentially
been a top-down enterprise in engineering political reality – at the same
time as needing, in order credibly to claim legitimacy, to make plausible
that it was somehow in line with ‘the will of the people’. In fact, the
need to entrench and find voluntary compliance with an entirely new
political order and its demands was at the very root of the perceived need
to construct and court some sense of its legitimacy (see Introduction),
and not only among the actors who had to accept the system as reason-
ably legitimate for it to exist and function (Hart 1961), but indirectly
also among the European citizens, whose beliefs and understandings
were a key asset in convincing those sustaining the system of what was
generally accepted.
The contradiction between integration’s nature as a top-down enter-
prise, and its simultaneous supposed link with a popular will, shone
through, for instance, in the opposition between Monnet’s pragmatic and
indirect, intergovernmental approach to democracy in the Community
context and Spinelli’s direct, bottom-up, supranational counter-vision
(Chapter 2). It also surfaced, for example, in the way the advocates of
direct European elections envisaged the EP as a motor for further inte-
gration as well as the main repository of democratic legitimacy in the
Community structure (Chapter 2). The post-Maastricht redefinition,
finally, of what it would mean for the EU to be more democratic in
terms of transparency, subsidiarity, and civil society consultation, as
opposed to classical democratic authorisation, control, or accountability
(Chapter 5), was another symptom of it. Having the citizens watch over
the happenings of EU politics, giving their input on clearly delimited
issues through clearly defined, relatively inconsequential channels, was
a way of safeguarding the relatively smooth functioning of EU decision-
making without too much popular interference.
A further strategy for coping with this constitutive contradiction was
the cited tendency in official legitimation practices and discourses to try
to bring popular expectations in line with the European project rather
than the other way round. The discourses and policies accompanying
the People’s Europe campaign or European identity-building strategies
actively and explicitly strove to shape the citizen’s expectations and self-
understandings (Chapter 3). The related techniques and strategies form
part of the exercise and establishment of an important form of political
194 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

power that is constituted by ‘manipulation’ or the ‘ability to influence

the way people think’; to induce them to accept certain values rather
than others, as well to ‘make them feel powerless’ to change what they
are incited to take for granted, or to conceive of alternative blueprints
(Birch 2007:206–7, see Lukes 2005:28, 38). One example of such attempts
at manipulation that I discussed was the Eurobarometer, which scruti-
nised public opinion in order to inform not only policy-making, but
also communication strategies. It is thus emblematic of discourses that
projected an alignment between citizen expectations and Community
action by mutual rapprochement, that is, moving both citizen expecta-
tions and Community action closer to shared ground. Of course, many
advocates of having a convention draw up the constitutional treaty, or
of holding referenda on it, may well have aspired to align the EU better
with citizen expectations (rather than, or in addition to, trying to shift
citizen expectations closer to the EU and what it had to offer). Some of
them might have actually been willing to plunge into an adventure with
an unpredictable ending, including, possibly, that the people would
reject the reforms suggested to them, or that they would not want inte-
gration to proceed any further. In effect, however, the constitutional
project and constitutional referenda perpetuated the predicament of
earlier consultations of the people or peoples. The invocations and
supposed consultations of the popular will I have analysed all essentially
excluded the possibility that the people might chose not to board the
boat, that they might not want what they were being offered, or that
they might be indifferent to it. This applies to the popular referendum
on integration foreseen by Charles de Gaulle, as well as to the referenda
held about Maastricht, the constitution, and the Lisbon Treaty. Against
the background of the Euro crisis, however, references to the will of the
people that disregard the possibility of popular resistance seem to have
lost their persuasive power for good.
With hindsight, a chief mistake in the context of the constitu-
tional episode was a widespread political misjudgement of (or, cyni-
cally speaking, a lack of manipulative power over) how the European
peoples would react to the draft ‘constitution’ presented to them. The
failed ratification of the constitutional treaty seemed to prove a long-
standing sceptical tradition of distrust in the people right. Jean Monnet
thought it wrong to consult the people about the Community struc-
ture in the first place (Chapter 2), and de Gaulle’s idea for a refer-
endum, too, had tellingly remained unrealised. Both understood that
the people, if consulted, might have hampered the creation of the
Europe they foresaw. The Maastricht crisis, and the Irish rejections
 The Story and the Literature 195

of the Nice and Lisbon Treaties, had confirmed what a gamble it was
to solicit popular approval for comprehensive treaty reforms. Still,
most advocates of the convention, the constitutional treaty, and the
unfortunate title of ‘constitution’ chose and embodied the rhetoric of
popular participation and consensus. Carried away by the honest hope
of spurring a moment of consensus and popular approval, and over-
coming the integration project’s original sin of lacking direct popular
authorisation, many of them believed that the European peoples, or
people, might ceremoniously endorse the proposed re-founding docu-
ment. They were in good faith that what made so much sense to them
would make sense to its addressees as well. Again, they might be less
inclined to believe this today.
This original good faith exposes a structural problem that surfaced
repeatedly in the legitimation history I have described. Repeatedly, and
in some situations more than in others, official legitimation strategies
and discourses proved out of tune with what would have seemed plau-
sible, and what would have raised the EU’s legitimacy, in the eyes of its
citizens. The People’s Europe campaign, the governance discourse, or
the constitutional project, might have been more convincing to those
who formulated or commissioned them than to those whom they were
meant to address. Parallel to Rodney Barker’s argument about national
governments (2001), the ‘rulers’ in EU politics risked justifying their rule
and the EU in their own eyes more successfully than in the eyes of their
subjects.
Where did communication between the EU-level elites and the
national public spheres succeed, then, and where did it fail (despite
the fact that they strove to impose certain discourses on one another)?
In other words, how did specific legitimacy-related discourses travel
between, and develop out of each other in, the EU-official and national
public contexts? Typically the different discursive levels took up specific
discourses from the other levels – but then twisted and redefined them
in more opportune ways. As a rule, top-down legitimating strategies
thrived when they assimilated discourses already present in the wider
public spheres. The foundational peace-and-prosperity narratives for
instance penetrated, and to some extent originated in, both contexts.
They were exceptionally successful. Official discourses of the 1990s and
2000s, including the projects of a constitution and already of Union citi-
zenship, partly responded to legitimacy challenges from the public, legal,
as well as academic public spheres, including the national-republican
discourses or the democratic-deficit and no-demos critiques, as I pointed
out (see Chapters 4, 5, and this line of enquiry throughout). The idea
196 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

of publicly deliberating the EU’s finalité was an attempt at responding

to, and an acknowledgment of, the gradual politicisation over the last
five decades of what the EU should be doing (see later). Here the reform
stalemate around Lisbon and the Eurozone crisis have effectively tilted
the discursive power balance even further in favour of the national
publics, where greater openness about the controversial stakes of EU
politics has become indispensable to any plausible claim to EU legiti-
macy. Even before this, however, many official legitimation discourses
failed to find resonance in national public-sphere discourses in that, or
because, issues that had become politicised in the latter were not suffi-
ciently acknowledged in the former, such as for example the French
concerns with an economically neoliberal Europe (in the offing in the
Maastricht, and dominating in the constitutional, debates). To be sure,
official legitimation attempts generally tended to respond to elite-level
(academic, constitutional, political, intellectual) discourses, which were
not necessarily in tune with more popular discourses. In other words,
the success of top-down legitimation strategies depended also on whose
discourses in the member-state public spheres they appealed to.
Finally, communication between EU-official and national public
discourses stood and fell by whether or not they struck the right chord
in relation to a number of fundamental tensions that underlay the
discursive history I have described. For the elemental balancing act
between bringing the people in and keeping them out was reflected in
two further related balancing acts, which seem to be innate to making
claims about EU legitimacy. Over time different legitimacy-relevant
discourses handled them through varying emphases on the conflicting
elements. The first of these two threads, both of which I briefly set out in
the introduction and referred to periodically throughout the book, was
the tightrope walk between claiming legitimacy on the basis of results or
problem-solving performance, and on the basis of a link of integration
and the EU with what the Europeans want. Here efficient performance
may or may not have been posited to be in conflict with the democratic
involvement of citizens. The second thread concerned the constant
push and pull between politicising and de-politicising discursive forces.
It translated into a continuously shifting balance between these two,
ultimately in favour of the latter, and into the unremitting challenge of
balancing the need to open up certain questions for democratic contes-
tation with the need to place others beyond the realm of democratic
contention. These two themes running through the discursive history
I have outlined correspond to the two structuring features or key lines
of debate in the academic literature on EU and political legitimacy that
 The Story and the Literature 197

I discuss in turn in the following two sections: the common concep-

tualisation of legitimacy in terms of input- and output-related factor,
and its common diagnosis of and/or demand for an increased politici-
sation of EU politics. In what follows, I relate my discursive history to
those two sites of debate and inquiry in the academic literature. To what
extent and how does thinking of this discursive history in terms of the
categories of input versus output legitimacy and politicisation help to
illuminate particular aspects of this history? What light can this discur-
sive history cast on the use and limitations of, and the questions arising
from, conceptualising political legitimacy in these categories?

Government by and for the people

Scholars of EU legitimacy have ‘for the most part been focused on

mechanisms that Fritz Scharpf (1999) has delineated in terms of output
legitimacy – a performance criterion centring on the ability of EU insti-
tutions to govern effectively – and input legitimacy – involving political
participation by and representation of the people’ (Schmidt 2010:6).
The distinction is also captured, with slightly different dividing lines, in
terms of ‘consequentialist’ versus ‘procedural’ legitimacy (e.g. Rittberger
2003), or of legitimacy through effectiveness versus democracy or partic-
ipation (e.g. Dahl 1994). The notion that in democratic systems the
legitimacy of the political order depends both on its delivering certain
results or outputs and on its responding to democratic inputs, is deeply
entrenched in scholarly accounts of political and EU legitimacy. This
applies whether their focus is on the normative de- and reconstruc-
tion of standards of legitimacy in the post-national constellation, on
assessing the EU and integration against these measuring sticks, or on
the empirical description, explanation or exploration of public support,
popular attitudes, or processes of social construction. In Scharpf’s
seminal account, claims to political legitimacy can rest on arguments
about both ‘input authenticity’ and ‘output efficiency’:

Input-oriented democratic thought emphasizes ‘government by the

people’. Political choices are legitimate if and because they reflect the
‘will of the people’ – that is, if they can be derived from the authentic
preferences of the members of a community. [Input legitimation strat-
egies, he elaborates a little later on in the text, tend to ‘rely on the
rhetoric of ‘participation’ and of ‘consensus’’, and in addition presup-
pose a certain ‘belief in a ‘thick’ collective identity’ for majority rule to
loose its ‘threatening character’.] By contrast, the output perspective
198 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

emphasizes ‘government for the people’. Here, political choices are

legitimate if and because they effectively promote the common
welfare of the constituency in question. (Scharpf 1999:6–9)

Applied to the discursive history recounted in this book’s chapter, for

instance the peace-and-prosperity and indispensability discourses of
the foundational decades appealed to output efficiency, and the whole
project of the Single Market and EMU were undertakings aimed, for some,
at legitimating European integration by furthering shared European
interests. Input legitimacy-related discourses included the early coun-
ter-discourses around a strong and elected European Parliament, the
discourses around Union citizenship and later on transparency, subsidi-
arity, and governance (although they simultaneously laid claim to
output-efficiency gains as well, as I will explain later). Additional exam-
ples included the cultural and symbolic policies aimed at forging some
sense of common European identity – in Scharpf’s framework, a prereq-
uisite for input legitimation to work.
Distinctions between input- and output-based, or procedural and
consequentialist, legitimacy resonate with Eastoninan systems theory,
which described a political system in terms of the ‘complex set of proc-
esses through which certain kinds of inputs’, such as citizen demands
and citizen support, ‘are converted into the type of outputs we may
call authoritative policies, decisions and implementing action’ (Easton
1965:17). Scharpf made this schema available for normative democratic
theory by arguing that normative arguments about democratic legiti-
macy rationalised political choices or institutional order either from its
inputs or its outputs. However, the impact of his conceptualisation has
not been limited to normative or theoretical accounts of EU or political
legitimacy. It extends also to empirical accounts, including the public
opinion research that (in line with another of Easton’s seminal concep-
tualisations) treats legitimacy essentially as popular regime support, and
often distinguishes between utilitarian, output-oriented explanations
and affective, identity- or other input-related explanations.1
The conceptualisation of input versus output legitimacy reflected, or
set, an emerging agenda for researching the relative weight of input- and
output-legitimacy factors in producing legitimacy for a political order,
and in particular for the EU. Academics have tackled this question from
a range of methodological and from empirical as well as normative
perspectives. Counter to the academic analysis of the EU’s legitimacy
in terms of its democratic deficit, dominant by the 1990s (see Magnette
2003, Rittberger 2005:29 on timing), output-oriented accounts sought
 The Story and the Literature 199

to establish that the EU’s outputs and ‘government for the people’,
rather than its input authenticity, were the key normative foundation
of its legitimacy (e.g. Scharpf 1999:283, Majone 1996, 1998, see Bellamy
2010:3). A vibrant body of research emphasises the importance of
performance output in circumscribing and in achieving political legiti-
macy. Reaching beyond the particular case of the Community-European
political order, this work calls into question the focus of many political
theorists on democratic procedures and democratic rights as the main
or sufficient modes of political legitimation. It comprises both in-depth
case studies (e.g. Rothstein 2009, Zhao 2009) and a quantitative and
mainly survey-based literature on the ‘universal sources of legitimacy’
or regime support (see overview in Gilley 2006a, see Levi et al. 2009).
The scholarship on EU legitimacy can roughly be divided into accounts
that place the focus on elements of input legitimacy, those that empha-
sise outputs as a source of legitimacy, and those that somehow combine
both claims (few would deny that both types of legitimacy sources are
necessary).
On the input-legitimacy side, a large literature debates which are
the appropriate criteria of input legitimacy and democracy for a
post-national polity like the EU, and measures the ‘democratic deficit’
of its institutional order, decision-making processes, societal conditions,
and so on against such ideals. As to what kinds of input legitimacy ideals
they feature, there has been a significant development in this litera-
ture. Studies of input legitimacy traditionally focused on representa-
tion and accountability through electoral and party democracy, with
particular attention to the role of the European, and later also the
national, parliaments. By the mid-1990s, however, the parliamentary
analysis of how to make the EU more democratic lost its hegemony
(Magnette 2001:292–3). This was partly in answer to a general trend
across liberal democracies of declining popular confidence in the tradi-
tional institutions of representative democracy (see Cain et al. 2003). It
was also due to a growing acknowledgement of ‘structural limitations’
in the model and practice of representative democracy more broadly,
and specifically in the EU polity (Greenwood 2007:334). Given the
related difficulties in strengthening classical, electoral representative
democracy in the EU, and in sync with EU-official discourses, the schol-
arship on the EU’s input legitimacy concerned itself with the considera-
tion of alternative, non-majoritarian or post-parliamentary, modes of
legitimation (e.g. Dehousse 1995, Beetham and Lord 2001, see Bellamy
2010:8). A further type of alternative input legitimacy mechanisms are
‘counter-majoritarian mechanisms’, which are supposed to bring in
200 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

voices or concerns that might otherwise go unheard within a majori-

tarian democracy (Bellamy 2010:11–14, see Majone 1996:285–7). These
include veto points such as consensus, unanimity, or qualified majority
requirements and the co-decision procedure, as well as strong courts,
basic rights, or the use of ‘the law’ and legality as an enabling tool of
integration and legitimation.
A main focus in the input-focused literature in search of alternatives
to the parliamentary analysis of democracy was on models of participa-
tive and deliberative democracy, leading to what has been dubbed the
‘participatory turn’ in the scholarship on EU legitimacy.2 In addition (or
in connection), a ‘governance turn’ in EU studies has been identified for
the late 1990s and early 2000s (Kohler-Koch and Rittberger 2006). The
‘core idea’ of participatory democracy and the related practice of civil
society consultation is that ‘it should be interest groups (i.e. membership-
based organisations) rather than individual citizens that are involved
in public policy-making’. This paradigm builds on ideas underlying
US-American interest group pluralism (see discussion in Birch 2007). It
starts from a ‘principled understanding’ that ‘participation in itself is in
line with fundamental democratic principles, in particular equal repre-
sentation’ (Saurugger 2008:1276, see Skogstad 2003:322). Proponents
of deliberative democracy, in turn, claim centrally that the legitimacy
of a rule, policy, or decision policy flows to an important degree from
the reasoned consensus reached through inclusive deliberation, based
on processes of ‘mutual persuasion’ and arguing about their normative
validity, rather than a bargaining compromise, among those concerned
(Risse 2006:191, see e.g. Eriksen and Fossum 2000). EU Studies research
on governance, finally, focuses on one hand on ‘new modes of govern-
ance’ and on the other on the EU as a ‘regulatory state’ (Kohler-Koch
and Rittberger 2007:27). The new modes of governance that scholars
both observed and inspired (see e.g. Héritier and Rhodes 2010) relied
only marginally on legislation and majoritarian democracy. Instead they
incorporated private and public actors, or interests, at different levels
in the EU’s multi-level polity in their formulation, drawing again on
the participatory-democracy ideal. Arguments in favour of participatory
democracy and new modes of governance tend to project not only the
mentioned input-legitimacy gains, but also output-related legitimacy
gains (Saurugger 2008:1276, see Schmidt 2004, see critique in Grande
2000). Accounts of the EU as a ‘regulatory state’, by contrast, tend to
focus their claims about EU legitimacy more exclusively on performance
output-increases from delegating tasks to the EU, arguing that perform-
ance improvements compensate for losses on the input legitimacy side.
 The Story and the Literature 201

On the output-legitimacy side, scholarly accounts emphasising the

performance or quality of governance as a source of legitimacy hinge
on the EU’s capacity to deliver certain results of effective govern-
ance. The academic literature shows ‘considerable variation’ in what
is taken as legitimacy-enhancing output (Gaus 2010:9–10). Some
scholars focus on effectiveness in fulfilling specific tasks delegated
by public actors. Others emphasise general problem-solving effec-
tiveness in tackling the complex problems of an internationalising
world (e.g. Borrás and Conzelmann 2007:532–4, see Bellamy 2010:2,
7–8, Risse 2006:191). Others yet see output legitimacy as ‘satisfied
when the Union delivers what people expect from it’ (Lenaerts 2003).
(Note already the explicit reference of this definition of output legiti-
macy to input legitimacy-related popular expectations, which is also
present in Lincoln’s phrase of ‘government for the people’.) Scharpf
himself defines the output side of democratic legitimacy and collec-
tive self-determination as implying ‘effective fate control. Democracy
would be an empty ritual if the political choices of governments were
not able to achieve a high degree of effectiveness in achieving the
goals, and avoiding the dangers, that citizens collectively care about’
(Scharpf 1997:19). What unites proponents of output legitimacy is
that they often ‘argue that the “actual existing” model of majori-
tarian, party democracy may have reasonable, if weakening, creden-
tials on “input” grounds, but what count are democratic “outputs”’
(Bellamy 2010:3, see e.g. Scharpf 1999:21). Hence, their stress on
outputs often goes in tandem with an emphasis on the mentioned
non- or counter-majoritarian sources of legitimacy. They showcase
not only participatory-democracy modes, but also the authority
of law or of technical expertise, or delegation to semi-autonomous
authorities such as constitutional courts, central banks, or other regu-
latory and administrative agencies. In the literature these arguments
are captured in the emblem of the ‘regulatory state’. Delegation, its
proponents argue, is not only common practice in most advanced
industrial democracies, but moreover particularly well suited for the
particular policy fields in which the EU is active (Majone 1996:611,
Lindseth 2010, Moravcsik 2002). Notwithstanding, a major criticism
concerns losses in terms of input legitimacy, including accountability
and responsiveness involved. The questions of whether such losses in
terms of input legitimacy are a necessary flipside of improved deci-
sion-making or problem-solving outputs leads on to a central line of
inquiry in the study of political and EU legitimacy, which is how the
two types of legitimacy sources relate to each other.
202 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

A growing number of studies investigate the nature of the nexus

between input- and output-related legitimacy.3 Some scholars approach
the issue of EU legitimacy from the premise that there ‘is an inevitable
trade-off between output legitimacy and input legitimacy, between an
emphasis on government for the people and an emphasis on govern-
ment by the people’.4 Postulates of a zero-sum or even negative-sum
relationship between the two bases of legitimacy typically rely on the
notion that ‘the “effectiveness” of outcomes would be unacceptably
harmed if dissenting views were acknowledged and engaged at each
stage’ (White 2010c:56). Some scholars specify that trade-offs with
output performance exist for the traditional models of representative,
party, electoral democracy, but less so for alternative modes of input
legitimation.5 In fact, this is a central reason adduced in the advocacy of
participatory modes of democracy. Still others find that even for alterna-
tive modes of participation, and specifically the participation of elites,
organised civil society or affected citizens, there is a price to be paid for
increased decision-making efficiency and ultimately policy efficiency, in
the form of losses in terms of input legitimacy. This is due not only to
the often involved neglect of traditional, majoritarian modes of input
legitimacy, but notably also to the elite and top-down nature of such
consultations, to the often insufficiently democratic internal structures
of civil society organisations, and to citizens’ uneven access to them.6
Counter to zero-sum understandings of the relationship between input
legitimacy and output legitimacy, many scholars have contended that
input and output legitimacy are not fundamentally in tension with one
another. In a survey with stakeholders of a particular policy area that
measured perceived legitimacy at both ends, Karl-Oscar Lindgren and
Thomas Persson find a correlation between the two: ‘measures aimed
at increasing the input legitimacy of the EU also hold the promise of
increasing its output legitimacy’ (2010:449).
Beyond correlation, what is the connection between input and output
legitimacy? On a first level, they complement each other. One can make
up for weaknesses of the other. Scharpf argues that ‘input-oriented
arguments never carry the full burden of legitimising the exercise of
governing power’, but are always supplemented or even displaced by
‘output-oriented arguments showing how specific institutional arrange-
ments [ ... ] will favour policy choices that can be justified in terms of
consensual notions of the public interest’ (Scharpf 1999:188). Conversely,
a reasonably plausible claim to input-based legitimacy can make
outcomes acceptable that might not otherwise be. Complementarity can
also be temporal, in that one type of legitimacy argument can help tide
 The Story and the Literature 203

over times of difficulties regarding the other (e.g. Zhao 2009, see also
Easton 1965:273). Finally, if, as the ‘overloaded state’ theorists of the
1970s noted, performance demands on governments are increasingly
beyond their reach and control (see Held 2006:187–201), then legiti-
macy is intrinsically unstable to the extent that performance outputs are
(Habermas 1973, Offe 1984). In fact, most scholarly accounts actually
refer to both types of legitimacy sources (see e.g. Føllesdal 2006, Beetham
and Lord 1998) even if they emphasise one of them as more important
than the other one (see Bellamy 2010:3). Of course, this two-pronged
approach might be due to the fact that one type of argument about
legitimacy simply might only work if the other type is also invoked at
least to some extent.
For, on a second level, there is a strong case that input and output legit-
imacy actively feed into each other. Deliberative democracy advocates
argue that the process of reaching a reasoned consensus strengthens not
only input legitimacy, but hence also ensures a high degree of compli-
ance. This favours good performance and output legitimacy (Risse
2006:191, Hurd 1999:387, Neyer 2003). ‘Functional’ or instrumental
approaches to participatory democracy or civil society consultation in
EU governance, on the other hand, understand that involving affected
actors in decision-making leads to system effectiveness (Saurugger
2008:1276, Heinelt 2007). This is held to help overcome implemen-
tation problems by mobilising not only the willingness, but also the
knowledge and expert resources of stakeholders or policy networks.7
An even stronger, third argument for the mutually reinforcing nature
of input and output legitimacy is the following. Not only do measures
aimed at one promote the other also. In addition, the two necessarily
depend on each other, and are interlocked through their own innate
logic. This inextricable link between input- and output-related sources
of legitimacy is rooted in the idea of the ‘the common welfare of the
constituency in question’ to be promoted by government or EU action
(Scharpf 1999:6). This common welfare or public interest provides the
standards by which output legitimacy is measured. It is the lynchpin of
all claims to output-legitimacy legitimacy (Moravcsik and Sangiovanni
2002:142–5, Beetham and Lord 1998:23–5, Bellamy 2010:7–8). Scharpf
approaches this ‘public interest’ in terms of content. To his mind, the
kind of output that would create output legitimacy for the EU is a suit-
able balance of market-liberalisation and social protection (1999:43–83,
199). The problem with this is that it is not at all self-evident what this
public interest consists in. For output legitimation to work, there has to
be some plausibility to claims that the output at hand somehow reflects
204 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

the preferences of the constituency in question. In other words, output

legitimacy requires some degree of input. Specifically it presupposes that
common interests are defined through some ‘institutional framework
produced by processes of collective self-determination’. Some scholars,
moreover, argue that some type of collective identity is essential in
aligning interests with an orientation towards the common good (Kraus
2004:562). As Scharpf puts it, a ‘belief in a “thick” collective identity’ is
important to making ‘the welfare of all [ ... ] an argument in the prefer-
ence function of each’ (1999:8). In sum, these arguments hold input and
output legitimacy as inherently interdependent.
Overall, much of the literature that investigated the relative weight of
input- versus output-based elements in creating or maintaining litera-
ture, or makes certain assumptions or claims about their relationship as
one of either inevitable trade-offs or complementarity, is marked by a
relative neglect of such ways in which the two types of claims to legiti-
macy refer to and depend on each other in terms of their own innate
logic. A look to long-term patterns and shifts in what it made sense to
say about EU legitimacy (what this might mean, and how the EU is or
is not deficient in this regard) in particular discourses, can contribute
precisely this: an exploration of what was plausible in these discourses
in their own terms, in relation to competing ones, as well as with a view
to the languages, imageries, and ideational conditions these discourses
are embedded in.
With a view to the grand developments and shifts in the balance
between input- versus output-related claims about EU legitimacy, the
early stages of the long-term, overall evolution of constructions and
challenges of EU legitimacy were characterised by a dominant focus
on output-related arguments, in particular the promises of peace and
economic and social progress though integration (Chapter 1). These
discourses were counter-acted early on by demands of more electoral,
parliamentary democracy at the supranational level, in particular a
strong and directly elected European Parliament. They were also chal-
lenged by competing discourses, particularly in the context of the empty
chair crisis of the 1960s, or the flagging delivery of prosperity in the
aftermath of the oil crises of the 1970s (Chapter 2). These events played
into the hands of discourses that raised input-related questions such as
who was to decide, and by what procedures, on what the Communities
should be doing and how. They also illustrated that an all too exclusive
reliance on output-related legitimacy arguments made the overall claim
to legitimacy vulnerable in times of weak performance. In any case, the
initial output bias (complemented and challenged by such input-focused
 The Story and the Literature 205

discourses) was thoroughly turned on its head with Maastricht and its
difficult ratification. The ratification debates anchored the issue of the
EU’s democratic deficit firmly in the agenda of contests over EU legit-
imacy, and both the French and German ones turned further on the
question of whether democracy was conceivable at a level beyond the
nation and the nation-state (Chapter 4). Ever since, questions of input
legitimacy have been a force to be reckoned with. Legitimacy could
no longer be claimed mainly in output terms – and be plausible in the
public spheres. In ‘discursively managing’ the much-referred-to ensuing
legitimacy crisis of the EU, the European institutions focused their atten-
tion prominently on the issue of democracy, as well as on the perceived
glaring gap between the EU and its newly created citizens (Chapter 5).
The academic literature’s turn towards the rehabilitation of output legiti-
macy thus went in the opposite direction to powerful discourses empha-
sising issues of input legitimacy, and indeed that was its very intention.
Academia was involved not only in analysing, but also in constructing
legitimacy. Consequentialist or output-focused academic accounts of
EU legitimacy were in dialogue with and reinforced concurrent counter-
strands in official discourses that insisted that despite the importance of
democracy, ‘[e]ffective action by European institutions [was] the greatest
source of their legitimacy’ (Prodi 2000, see Chapter 5). (As it happens,
the public-sphere debates on Maastricht as well as the constitution also
featured absolutely central output-focused counter-discourses, but these
output issues were framed to question rather than support claims to EU
legitimacy – see later.)
Direct resonances between the academic and the wider public, polit-
ical, and EU-official debates can be observed for instance in regard of the
democratic deficit critique. Here, the advocacy of the 1960s and 1970s
on EP powers and elections presented a proto-type of classic academic
democratic deficit theory of the 1980s and 1990s (Chapter 2). This earlier
political and public debate gives the academic parliamentary analysis
of EU democracy of the later period a certain Owl of Minerva-like
quality. Direct input of academic ideas into the legitimating discourses
and surrounding policies and practices, conversely, can arguably be
assumed, for example for Easton’s notion of diffuse and specific support
into European communication, cultural, and citizenship policies, and in
particular the ‘People’s Europe’ idea to use tangible material, everyday
benefits and symbols to bring Europe closer to the citizens (Chapter 3).
The non-majoritarian or post-parliamentary turns in the literature,
finally, were in a close feedback loop with the ways in which EU-official
discourses around and after Maastricht stretched the term ‘democracy’,
206 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

shifting its meaning away from classic electoral and parliamentary anal-
yses to highlight transparency and subsidiarity. The most immediate
synchronisation, perhaps, between academic and EU official discourses
was manifested in the Commission’s quest for participatory modes of
democracy, bundled in the paradigm of governance, with the arguments
in favour of the central practice of civil society consultation here closely
matching the academic cases discussed earlier (Chapter 5). In short,
resonances can be traced between EU-official and national political or
public discourses and academic discourses (for research exploring the
actual exercise of mutual influence, see e.g. White 2003, Leucht 2010).
How does the discursive history of contests over EU legitimacy relate,
specifically, to the literature on the relationship between input and
output legitimacy? Can long-term patterns and shifts in official, polit-
ical, and public discourses be adduced to shed light on this relationship?
Three features stand out in how the relationship between input- and
output-oriented claims to legitimacy played out in discursive practice. A
first regards the very point that all claims to output legitimacy depend
at least to some extent on some plausible input-related legitimacy claim
as well. They depend, if not necessarily on the definition of the ends
and goals of performance in institutionalised democratic processes, or
on the basis of some thick sense of ethnic or cultural belonging, then
at least on reasonably consensual notions of some ‘common good’ or
‘public interest’ by which performance output can be measured. In a
nutshell, whether or not such a European common good existed, what
it consisted in, and how to pursue it, was a major site of contestation in
the struggle over EU legitimacy (a related but different challenge was to
credibly convey that European integration as it was evolving furthered
this efficiently – in addition to advancing particular, e.g. national inter-
ests). Foundational legitimation patterns concentrated on establishing
and identifying such a common good, and framing it as non-divisive and
self-evident, and its pursuit as a moral imperative. These discourses were
undercut early on. The question of the ends and goals of European inte-
gration, and how to pursue them, reappeared on the discursive agenda
with reliable constancy, with peaks around the struggle over how inter-
governmental or supranational the Community system should be in the
1960s, the financial and economic crises of the 1970s, around EMU,
the European constitution, and lately the Eurozone crisis. The European
public interest, and how the EU’s output efficiency should be evaluated,
never was an unproblematic, exogenous given. The story of the struggle
over EU legitimacy is the story of how, if efficient performance was to
grant the EU legitimacy in the eyes of its citizens, it had to be the right
 The Story and the Literature 207

kind of performance. The devil lay in determining the ends and goals of
integration, and of EU action.
Specifically, and this is a second feature I wish to single out, people
had to feel reasonably represented by, and in control of, what kind
of actions the EU provided, what kind of institutional order it repre-
sented, and the procedures by which they were defined, decided, imple-
mented, and controlled. To make claims to input-authenticity plausible
was a central challenge for legitimation discourses. From the mid-1970s
onwards, official legitimation discourses increasingly recognised that,
for legitimation by output to work, the citizens had to feel at least to
a degree that EU action reflected their ‘authentic preferences’ (Scharpf
1999:6). The history of EU legitimation can be read as a learning process
of how to create credible linkages between input and output legiti-
macy. The output-biased early strands of this history were marked by
conflicting visions of how much and what kind of democratic impetus
was necessary, and available, for creating European Union. After all,
allowing too much popular input on contentious issues might have
opened the way to potentially uncontrollable disagreement (Chapters 1
and 2, e.g. on Monnet’s vision). In the early days, many discourses
around the Communities’ legitimacy, if they touched on input-related
legitimacy at all, mainly framed it in terms of indirect democratic legiti-
mation via national representatives – with the exception of early feder-
alist discourses. Notwithstanding, early counter-discourses insisted on
input-related conditions of legitimacy and particularly a greater element
of supranational electoral democracy, often arguing on the grounds
that – counter to the image projected by the ‘common-European-good’
narrative – not everyone agreed on what the new polity should be
doing, how, and why (e.g. Dehousse 1960:16–17, Chapter 2). In effect,
the recurring conflicts over the direction of integration firmly rooted
questions of input authenticity on the discursive map of contests over
the legitimacy of integration and its institutional order.
The discourses of the European institutions soon reflected this shift
in public and political discourses, and at least acknowledged (if not
actively showcased) input-related conditions of legitimacy. From the
late 1970s or the 1980s onwards, official discourses hinged on aligning
integration more closely with ‘what the citizens wanted’ (see CEC
1976:11). The People’s Europe campaign took up the cause of bringing
‘Europe closer to its citizens’ and rooted the motif in official rhetoric
of Community action being responsive to citizen expectations. The
related legitimation techniques aimed at understanding and reacting
to, but also influencing, popular expectations and self-understandings.
208 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

A series of identity-building measures and the eventual introduction of

Union citizenship all propped up claims to the EU’s democratic input
legitimacy, even if comparatively little progress was made towards more
direct, supranational democratic input or control. The People’s Europe
campaign interlinked such input-oriented legitimation strategies with
the persistent premise that for the Communities to be legitimate, they
above all had to perform efficiently, and that output efficiency had
to be improved further: only the issue of what they performed was
framed in reference to popular needs, expectations, and collective self-
projections. From a theory-building perspective, this discursive develop-
ment reflected the practical experience that input-related legitimation
elements were necessary for discursive output legitimation to be believ-
able. Political communication and some sense of collective identity,
a shared project, and democratic empowerment proved indispensable
not least to forging consensual notions of a shared public interest. In
sum, in the discursive practice of the struggle for EU legitimacy, an
inbuilt logic was at work that made legitimacy claims grounded on
input authenticity and legitimacy claims based on output-efficiency
mutually dependent – one type of argument worked only if combined,
at least to some extent, with the other.
This created the background for a third pre-eminent feature of how
the input-output dichotomy manifested itself in discursive practice: the
history of the struggle for EU legitimacy has been a history of shifting
emphasis between the two poles of legitimacy. This dynamic underlines
the thesis of a relationship of complementarity between input- and
output-based legitimacy. It applies both to overall shifts in the general
discursive emphasis over time, and to what individual discursive actors
stressed, pragmatically, in particular situations. Moreover, such two-
timing was due in part to the recognition of the inherent interdepend-
ence of the two poles, and partly to strategic choices of playing, in the
given context, the presumably more convincing side of the legitimacy
coin. For instance, the criticisms featured in the French and German
Maastricht debates referred to the full spectrum of input- versus output-
related issues: on the output side most importantly EMU and the EU’s
poor record in Bosnia, and on the input side the EU’s democratic deficit
and the very possibility of democracy beyond the nation-state. But in
both public spheres, the overwhelming issue was EMU and its costs,
elements of the EU’s output. Regardless, official crisis-reaction rhetoric
emphasised input- over output-related questions, addressing above all
issues of how to improve the EU’s democratic credentials or the condi-
tions for supranational democracy. At the time, and ever since, official
 The Story and the Literature 209

discourses talked a lot about issues of input legitimacy (even though

the Commission in particular left no doubt that at the end of the day
‘effectiveness’ was of a higher priority than ‘democracy’). This stress on
the input-legitimacy side was partly due to an honest will to address the
very real related problems. At the same time, it was a way of distracting
from the EU’s continued performance problems (during and after the
Maastricht crisis, in particular high unemployment, price increases
widely attributed to the Euro, and the EU’s troubles in finding its place
on the post-Cold War stage of international politics). This dynamic
applies generally to the discursive history I have charted. Both critics
and defenders of EU legitimacy would highlight input-oriented legiti-
macy elements, especially where EU performance was reaching the
limits of material or political feasibility. Whenever legitimacy could not
convincingly be claimed on grounds of problem-solving efficiency, legit-
imating discourses would switch over to elements of input-authenticity.
In particular, both the active construction of a European identity and
the re-constitution of subjects as Union citizens originated, and then
gained momentum, in periods of economic difficulties. Critics of EU
legitimacy, in turn, put forward criticisms on all fronts when output
legitimacy claims came under pressure.
In conclusion, the distinction between input-based and output-
orientated legitimacy has been an organising theme not only in academic
analyses of EU legitimacy, but also in practical discourse around this
issue. Research in EU Studies and political science more broadly has
focused on either one or both ends of the dichotomy, as well as on how
they interrelate. Tracing the shifting emphases in the discursive history,
and how individual legitimacy-related discourses balanced their appeals
to the two ends, brings out interesting features in these discourses indi-
vidually and in their overall balance and evolution. For example, did
they use supposed legitimacy gains on one side to rationalise losses on
the other, and if so, did they do so the grounds of a supposed trade-off or
a mere prioritisation of one over the other – or did they appeal to a mutu-
ally advantageous relationship between input and output legitimacy?
For example, the People’s Europe as well as the governance discourses
did make such an appeal to more ‘genuine’, humane, and holistic forms
of democracy, which would simultaneously help to make Europe more
responsive and tangibly beneficial to its citizens (Chapters 3 and 5). The
progressive acknowledgement of the interrelation of input and output
legitimacy in the discourses studied to a certain extent discredited
scholarly claims that effectively only one side, usually the output side,
really ‘counted’ in the case of the EU. The long-term discursive history
210 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

of contests over EU legitimacy raises doubts about the separability and

mutual exclusiveness of the input and output legitimacy categories. It
suggests that the two are not only complementary but also inextricably
interrelated. From the very beginning, more output- and more input-
focused legitimacy discourses competed for general plausibility (see e.g.
Chapters 1 and 2); and most discourses covered both, at least to some
extent (even the output-obsessed peace-and-prosperity and indispensa-
bility discourses claimed input legitimacy through the channel of repre-
sentative national governments). On the whole, the history of imagining
and legitimating the EU can be described as a history of striking the
right balance between input and output legitimacy. One key, contin-
uous, discursive challenge lay in defining the range of ‘public interests’
by the standard of which the EU’s policy output could be measured.
Other areas of contestation included who should decide and according
to which rules what the EU should do, and over what kind of institu-
tional order should be maintained or created at the European level.
This leads on to questions of how far the European polity’s policy and
overall polity objectives, decision-making processes, and institutional
setup could, and should, plausibly be protected from politicisation. If
input legitimacy is understood as ‘input authenticity’; that is, the EU’s
action, political system, and legitimating discourses reasonably reflecting
the authentic views and preferences of its European constituents (Scharpf
1999:6–7) – then the challenges of identifying, and mediating between,
such preferences are far from anodyne. Input authenticity might arise
not so much from a match between citizen preferences, and the guiding
goals of European integration, but rather from a long-term contest over
what we want to achieve with it and what standards we want to measure
it by. Continuous discursive re-contestation is the only way to re-adapt,
again and again, the discursive nexus between input and output legiti-
macy, without which the EU’s legitimacy suffers, given that none of the
two types can work without the other. This is the inherent connection of
the input–output legitimacy tension underlying the discursive history of
EU legitimation on the one hand and, on the other, the related constant
push and pull between politicising and de-politicising forces, to which
I now turn.

Politicisation versus de-politicisation: EU politics

as a contested game

Besides approaching EU legitimacy in terms of input- and output-related

sources of legitimacy, academic accounts of EU legitimacy and in EU
 The Story and the Literature 211

studies more broadly have recently been marked by the ‘buzzword’ of

the EU’s ‘politicisation’ (de Wilde 2011:571, see Paterson and Nugent
2010:412–14, Hooghe and Marks 2012). In James Tully’s judgment, the
‘most urgent problem facing the EU is to develop the best approach to
conflicts over integration’ (2007:71). Piet de Wilde, on the basis of a
review of the growing literature around the politicisation of EU poli-
tics, defines the ‘process of politicization of European integration [ ... ] as
an increase in polarisation of opinions, interests or values [concerning
EU institutions, decision-making processes, as well as issues] and the
extent to which they are publicly advanced towards the process of
policy formulation within the EU’ (2011:559, see 566–8). The litera-
ture around politicisation comprises, and often combines, two types
of approaches. Part of it is concerned with establishing the occurrence,
analysing the nature, and explaining the causes of this development.
Another perspective argues that this process should be encouraged and
emphasised, for instrumental and/or normative reasons. In this section
I shall first discuss this literature, and then move on to considering how
my discourse-historical narrative relates to it.
Empirical analyses of the dynamics of politicisation include, more
particularly, research on popular, elite, and political party attitudes,8 or
analyses of mass media discourses opposing integration as well as partic-
ular lines of argument evaluating the EU polity.9 Often the emphasis
is on an increased polarisation of opinions and positions, and espe-
cially ‘euroscepticism’ as undermining a supposed earlier dominant
‘permissive consensus’. Other accounts explore the history, national
cultures, and ideologies of ‘resistances’ to Europe, or how street protests,
political activism, and social movements are increasingly related to
European integration.10 Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks (2009) find that
a politicisation of European integration in elections and referendums
has made the preferences of the general public and of national political
parties decisive for jurisdictional outcomes; the ‘permissive consensus’
that allowed pro-integration elites to go unhindered in building Europe
in the early decades of integration has been replaced by a ‘constraining
dissensus’. Hooghe and Marks’s research forms part of an important
body of work that scrutinizes ‘patterns of conflict’ arising in the EU. This
research studies the lines along which issues hang together, and which
structure political conflict and competition.11 It charts the ‘EU ‘political
space’ and the location of social groups [including political parties] and
the competition between actors within this space’ (Hix 1999:69) or
the diversity of policy positions within and between parties (Pennings
2002). It maintains that political contestation concerning European
212 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

integration is rooted in the basic conflicts that have shaped political life
in Western Europe for many years (Marks and Steenbergen 2004: back
matter), and marked by multiple dimensions or ‘battle lines’ (Peterson
2001:292), including pro vs anti integration and left vs right (Hix 1999),
‘green / alternative / libertarian’ vs ‘traditionalism / authority / nation-
alism’ or ‘gal / tan’ (see Hooghe and Marks 2009:16–18, Hooghe et al.
2002, Marks et al. 2006), intergovernmentalism vs supranationalism and
other class, institutional, ideological, or sectoral dimensions (Peterson
2001:292). As to analyses of how citizen preferences are translated into
policy demands and offers by political parties, the view has established
itself that ‘the European process of political representation fails mainly
because political parties do not compete on so-called European issues’
(Mair and Thomassen 2010:20).
An (implicit or explicit) normative assumption about how the political
space and political conflict should be organised underlies many of these
empirical analyses: ‘In any full-grown democracy, parties must confront
voters with real choices that matter. The European Union is often said
to be devoid of these choices owing to minor policy differences between
parties’ (Pennings 2002:59, see Muirhead 2006:714–15) – and some citi-
zens are reacting to this unsatisfactory situation with political apathy or
opposition to the EU as a polity. This line of argument partially explains
popular scepticism in terms of how political conflict is structured and
organised at EU level. Simon Hix and Andreas Føllesdal, in particular,
connect a critique of the way politics and policymaking is organised and
controlled in the EU with an analysis of how citizens respond to it, and
of popular as well as party Euroscepticism. Their demanded attempt at a
solution is that EU policymaking and political leadership, and political
programmes representing sufficiently different choices, be subject to
greater contestation and adversarial debate (Hix 2008, Føllesdal and Hix
2006). This would enable citizens, groups, and political parties to make
their dissent heard without resorting to an outright rejection of the EU
polity. The failure to allow for opposition, Peter Mair points out, is likely
to lead to the ‘mobilization of an opposition of principle against the
EU’ (2007:1). Given, as Jonathan White rephrases this point, that the
EU ‘regime offers few opportunities for organised political opposition,
and those which exist have traditionally been weakly structured along
partisan lines, citizens who are dissatisfied with events in Brussels have
only the options either to disengage from political developments alto-
gether, or to oppose the very idea of a European polity’ (2010c:55).
Many calls for a recognition or even active encouragement of a politi-
cisation of EU politics take a ‘scientific perspective’ based on predictions
 The Story and the Literature 213

of what would happen otherwise (White 2010c:56, see e.g. Tsakatika

2007:876), for instance of a ‘rise in anti-EU populism across the member-
states’ (Risse 2010:8). ‘Organised political conflict’, White argues, ‘is
likely to be a necessary condition of any satisfactory consolidation of
the European Union’ (2010c:55, 69; see also Tully 2007:74). The urgent
challenge of developing an approach to conflict over integration (Tully
2007, see earlier) is not only a normative challenge. It also defines the
future of integration and what is feasible in EU politics on the basis
of facts regarding political and popular resistance and pressures. This
line of argument is typically grounded on the reasoning that politicisa-
tion is a ‘direct consequence of the increasing authority of the EU’. The
root cause of politicisation hence lies in the very nature of the EU. Any
attempt, like those of national executives and the Commission following
the failure of the Constitutional Treaty, to ‘take European integration as
a political issue as much off the agenda as possible and limit involve-
ment of citizens in EU decision-making [ ... ] is unlikely to succeed in
the long run’.12 One reason given in the literature for why containing
politicisation is a lost cause concerns the particular nature of economic
integration, and specifically the ‘liberalization attempts’ driven by the
Commission and ECJ, which are liable to either ‘transform the insti-
tutional foundations on which some of the member-states’ economic
systems rely or create political resistance to an extent that challenges the
viability of the European project’ (Höpner and Schäfer 2010:344). The
underlying more general argument adduced is that the stakes of EU poli-
tics are innately controversial in that they inevitably create winners and
losers (see e.g. Tsoukalis 2005, Føllesdal and Hix 2006), as highlighted
spectacularly by the ongoing Eurozone crisis.
This book’s chapters have traced how this very idea or awareness has
progressively rooted itself deeply in public and political, as well as EU
official discourses on the nature and legitimacy of the EU and European
integration. Disregarding this fact carries the potential of significant
resistance, as illustrated by the Maastricht and constitutional debates
(Chapters 4 and 6). Distinct politicisation dynamics did indeed run
counter to the de-politicisation efforts discussed in Chapters 1 and 3.
‘Debating Europe’, or opening up ‘which Europe and which type of poli-
cies the EU should pursue’ for contestation, Thomas Risse notes, ‘might
prove the only way to defend modern and cosmopolitan Europe against
the increasingly forceful voices of Euroskepticism’ (2010:8).
At the same time, counter to all calls for accepting politicisation
as a fact and encouraging it, an important voice cautions that, due
to the European citizens’ abiding fixation on their national political
214 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

communities, providing more democratic channels of politicisation

might open a Pandora’s box of incontrollable resistance, intensification
of conflict, and ultimately disintegration (Bartolini 2005, 2006). On a
more optimistic note, others argue that the very ‘potential for resistance
to political denationalization’ harboured by politicisation ‘increases the
need – both from a normative and descriptive perspective – for the legit-
imation of [ ... ] international institutions’ such as the EU (Zürn 2004). In
this way politicisation might effectively invite efforts in the direction of
the ‘justificatory fix’ that Glyn Morgan calls for, providing justification
for integration as such (2005), rather than bearing the seeds of integra-
tion’s self-destruction.
Besides ‘scientific’ or consequentialist lines of reasoning, politicisa-
tion is put forward as desirable on normative grounds. Here politici-
sation is described as improving equal representation, responsiveness
and accountability, and as counteracting the biases built into political
systems. In Schattschneider’s view of democracy, in particular, the
‘people’ – whose formal political participation is effectively limited to
the choice between competing leaders – ‘are involved in public affairs
by the conflict system. Conflicts open up questions for public interven-
tion. Out of conflict the alternatives of public policy arise. Conflict is
the occasion for political organization and leadership’ (Schattschneider
1960:135, see Introduction). Advocacy of politicisation is rooted in adver-
sarialist, agonistic, or pluralist models of democracy.13 Conceptually,
politicisation has been set against the ‘politics of expertise’ – which
it counterbalances – and against the latter’s different modes, such as
technocracy, epistemic communities, and bureaucracy (Radaelli 1999,
see also Lindblom 1965, Glencross 2009). These modes are particularly
pronounced in the EU political system, where ‘non-elected institu-
tions heavily inform policymaking [and] the practices of government
take on a technocratic character that tends to conceal the value choices
embedded in decision-making’ (White 2010c:56, see Tsakatika 2007).
Politicisation could bring such value choices, clashes of interests, and
rival interpretations of the public good and competing stances on the
objectives of policymaking out into the open, and ensure more inclusive
representation of voices underrepresented in a de-politicised environ-
ment. Finally, on a self-reflective level, contests over a plurality of views
on legitimacy have been argued to contribute to overall legitimacy, in
line with ‘a recent turn in the literature on legitimacy towards analyzing
political systems as mechanisms for mediating between several views
of legitimacy, rather than articulating any one’ (Lord and Magnette
2004:183, see Nicolaïdis 2004a).14
 The Story and the Literature 215

The literature furthermore recommends politicisation instrumentally,

on the grounds that it would help to achieve other goals that are norm-
atively desirable in their own right. The key independently welcomed
posited outcomes of politicisation concern polity- or identity-building
roles attributed to it. In particular, politicisation is commended for
enabling the Europeanisation of the national European public spheres,
and ultimately the development of a common European public sphere,
central in deliberative models of EU democracy (e.g. Risse 2010:6, see
Trenz and Eder 2004, Zimmermann and Favell 2011:507). Moreover,
politicisation is postulated to promote a sense of belonging to the polit-
ical community in the framework of which political contestation does,
or might, take place, and to its other potential participations (Checkel
and Katzenstein 2009, White 2010c:69, Risse 2010:6). In Tully’s words,
[w]hat holds the diverse members [of a community] together and gener-
ates bonds of belonging to the community as a whole across ongoing
differences and disagreements is that the prevailing institutions, proce-
dures and norms of integration are always open to free and democratic
negotiation and experimentation with alternatives by those subject to
them’ (Tully 2007:75). White, moreover, explores how an ‘explicitly
political bond, based on the appraisal of political problems might be
conceived for a European polity’. He opposes such a political bond to
rival, effectively ‘de-politicising’ approaches that conceive such a bond
in terms of shared interests, cultural attributes or shared values and
principles, which tend ‘either to empty public life of the pursuit of
shared ends or conversely to downgrade the importance of adversari-
alism’ (2010a:104, see Mouffe 2000). Together with Lea Ypi he has made
a case for the beneficial role of partisanship on political justification
with a view to the common good of the political body as a whole, and
in cultivating a democratic ethos and the conviction of the worth of
political agency among citizens (White and Ypi 2011, 2010).
The discursive history described in this book suggests that thinking
of the EU in terms of a forum for political contestation and conflict
rather than the harmonious pursuit of shared and public interests may
point to a way of coming to terms with fragmented collective identi-
ties, the issue of demos-hood, weak identification with the EU, and frail
popular enthusiasm for it – all dynamics that legitimation techniques
and discourses around the People’s Europe emblem and the constitu-
tional chapter sought to address (Chapters 3 and 5). Yet, rather than
proposing to make citizens love and identify with the EU, this contes-
tation-appraising approach involves showcasing the EU’s dimension as
a political framework in which they or their representatives compete to
216 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

make their interests and visions weigh. This way of thinking about the
EU obviates a difficulty with the concept of a ‘community of project’,
based on shared projects and ambitions, as opposed to a common iden-
tity as an alternative way of forging a collective sense of belonging to
the EU, and ultimately engender popular support (Nicolaïdis 2004a, see
Morgan 2005). This form of community still presupposes some degree of
consensus on what such projects may be, and what their objectives are.
The history of discursive contests investigated in the earlier chapters,
however, suggests that such a consensus might have been lacking, and
might continue to be so, or at least not be very strong. White’s study of
interviews with taxi drivers, too, cast doubt on the extent to which the
ideational background necessary for a ‘community of project’ empirically
exists among citizens (2010b).
Rendering openly and fairly carried-out conflicts of interests and
visions constitutive of what integration is about could make a virtue
out of this necessity. Thinking of the EU as a forum for conflict and
contestation might project a pragmatic basis for a political bond
underpinning European integration that is less demanding than
cultural, value-based, or even ‘community of project’-based projec-
tions of community. Perhaps the metaphor of a game is useful in
projecting a European political bond. Hannah Arendt, in James Tully’s
reading, conceived of politics as a ‘specific kind of game-like activity’
consisting in interaction among equal citizens with different view-
points (Tully 1999:162, see Arendt 1977). It is in virtue of engaging
and participating in such agonic contestation for recognition and
rule that humans, like all players, take on their identities as citizens
and as peoples. Moreover, through this very activity they bring into
being and sustain the very ‘field of action’ of the game and the ‘public
realm’ in which they interact.15
A European political community might be conceived of as arising from
the activity of a game played together. This relaxes the demanding condi-
tions of consensuses on essential identities, values, or substantial ends
and goals as alternative bases for a common political bond. As adver-
saries in a game they play together. The players of the game may or may
not like one another. They may or may not identify with one another,
or with some shared cultural essence, values, or projects. What counts
is that they accept each other as co-participants, whether adversaries,
teammates, or even just supporters. By being part of the game, or the
league, they are ascribed and assume certain roles and identities.16 The
activity (anticipation, memory, following) of playing the game is what
makes it real. It is what transforms playgrounds into courts, stadiums
 The Story and the Literature 217

into the sites of competition and meaningful encounters. The European

citizens and peoples bring into being a European political community by
engaging with each other in the game of European politics over recogni-
tion of specific identities, over clashing values, and competing interests
and visions for Europe’s political, social, or economic future. They take
on their identities as Frenchmen, persons of a certain political leaning
and issue preferences, as well as players in the EU game, by virtue of
participating in it. Recognising and respecting adversaries becomes vital,
in that without them there would be no game.
This, of course, points to the question of why players should want
there to be a game to begin with. Reasons include the pure pleasure,
passion, and pride taken in playing, or other material rewards, including
considerations of what would happen if there were no game, hence nor
the respectful relations between adversaries that ideally come with it.
From the perspective of the political body as a whole, play and contest
can have civilising functions (Huizinga 2000:46–75), not least by
teaching us how to lose, to be wrong, and to respect the other (Gadamer
1989:30), or by channelling interactions into an activity with distinct
rules, codes of behaviour, and clearly marked limits of where the game
begins and ends (Huizinga 2000:50). Thinking of politics, and EU poli-
tics in particular, as a game, might, like a ‘well-functioning democracy’
built on the ‘vibrant clash of democratic positions’, be a way of trans-
forming ‘antagonism’, or struggle between enemies, into ‘agonism’, or
struggle between adversaries. It might help to avoid the danger of ‘[t]oo
much emphasis on consensus and the refusal of confrontation’, which
in turn may lead to citizen apathy, disaffection with political participa-
tion, or with European integration and EU politics or, worse still, ‘the
crystallization of collective passions around issues which cannot be
managed by the democratic process’ (Mouffe 2000:102–4).
The key narrative explanation for why the particular game of
European integration needed to be played was that it was the only way
of overcoming age-old antagonisms and conflicts between the European
nations (Chapter 1). I also analysed several further discourses and tech-
niques of representing European integration as a matter of absolute
necessity, on the grounds of the European countries’ growing interde-
pendence, and for the sake of making prosperity and ‘progress’ possible.
These discourses worked towards rooting in the public imaginary the
idea of a shared European interest or common good. This common good
provided direction and ultimate justification for the integration project,
and glossed over collective action problems and distributive conflicts
in actualising it. This discourse was supported by the related discourse
218 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

that there was a general consensus on the actual existence and nature
of this common good, based on rational insight in the imperative indis-
pensability of cooperation (Chapter 1). Both discourses diverted atten-
tion away from adversarial contestation and from a clash of diverging
interests, value, and preferences.
Powerful counter-discourses, however, as well as fierce political
conflicts between member-states (particularly in the 1960s) and the
Communities’ performance difficulties in delivering on the promise of
enabling the European nation-states to secure wealth and growth during
the 1970s and early 1980s brought home that not everyone agreed on
what Europe should be doing and how. Decisions about the particulars
of how to integrate Europe inevitably created winners and losers, and
even converging interests might be unattainable through integration as
it was evolving. Advocates of European elections and a more powerful
European Parliament, moreover, rested their demands for a greater
element of parliamentary, supranational democracy centrally on their
emphasis on the essentially political, far-reaching and controversial
stakes of Community politics (all contents of Chapter 2). Fierce resist-
ance to the ratification of Maastricht and in particular EMU, further-
more, dealt a further serious blow to the narrative of a consensus on a
common European good, as well as on the ends and goals of European
integration. The Maastricht ratification debates gave a central place to
concerns for national sovereignty in France and for national identity in
Germany. Both concerns proved to be fierce competition for concerns
for a common or shared European interest (Chapter 4). The constitu-
tional debates, finally, can be read as a forceful assertion of people’s will
to influence decisions over the future of the EU and its member-states.
People wanted to bring their voices to bear in favour of one of several
distinct and fundamentally clashing political, economic, and social
visions for Europe (Chapter 6). In this sense the constitutional debates
constituted powerful demands for open contestation over distinct and
competing policy options, institutional reform, and the future direc-
tions of integration.
The starting point for proposing to think of EU politics as an adver-
sarial game, thus, is not a desire to conceive of a viable foundation of
political community, but is to recognise the existence of a powerful
strand of the history described in this book. This strand is comprised of
discourses that effectively politicised the stakes, forms, and policies of
integration, either directly by putting the emphasis on the conflict-based
nature of integration politics, or indirectly by advancing specific posi-
tions in tension with alternative, possibly dominant positions. These
 The Story and the Literature 219

politicising forces were in constant tension with the de-politicisation

techniques and patterns I discussed in Chapter 1 and have flagged
up intermittently throughout the book. Politicising discourses defied
appeals to technocratic, bureaucratic, and administrative rationalities,
or the authority of the law and courts. This field of tension between
politicising and de-politicising forces was constitutive of the discursive
history of contests over EU legitimacy. It was a manifestation not least of
an underlying struggle over which issues, ideas and alternatives would
make it onto the agenda of public consideration and become ‘part of
politics’. This struggle involved creating and reinforcing certain values,
discourses, and institutional practices, but not others (see Introduction).
Furthermore, the push and pull between politicising and de-politicising
dynamics was also related to another constitutive tension in the discur-
sive history of EU legitimation that I made reference to in the first
section of this chapter, namely the contradictory and simultaneous
needs to ‘bring the people in’ while at the same time ‘keeping them
out’. Concern that the people would be unable to come to an agreement
was as much a reason for keeping them at arm’s length as concerns that
they would disapprove of what they were being offered.
A further underpinning of the politicisation versus de-politicisation
tension was competing understandings of democracy and of how democ-
racy related to the notion of a common good (see Mouffe 2000:80–107,
Tsakatika 2007). Discourses advocating a greater element of parlia-
mentary democracy in the EU decision-making system grounded their
demands centrally on the essentially political, far-reaching, and contro-
versial stakes of Community politics (Chapter 2, see also Chapters 4
and 5). They projected a politicisation of Community politics through
the institutional channels of electoral democracy, in line with the
‘aggregative model’ of democracy. This model understood democracy as
the aggregation of essentially pluralistic interests and preferences, and
rejected notions of ‘mobilizing people towards an illusory consensus on
the common good’.17 In aggregative understandings of democracy, as in
most discourses around European parliamentary democracy, aggregation
of preferences took place through political parties and competitive elec-
tions. These gave people the opportunity of rejecting or accepting their
leaders at regular intervals. In between elections, popular participation
was less important, or even less desirable, as it was considered to have
dysfunctional consequences for the working of the system (Schumpeter
1947, Mouffe 2000:82, Tsakatika 2007:871). This latter understanding
was present not only in the elitist discourses highlighting efficient
outcomes on the basis expert rationalities, but also accepted in much of
220 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

the advocacy of strengthening the European and national parliaments

(see Chapter 2).
The People’s Europe discourses heralded by the call to ‘listen’ to what
the people wanted from a united Europe (Chapters 2 and 3), as well as
the discourses putting the emphasis on the transparency of decision-
making and on civil society involvement (Chapter 5), projected addi-
tional ways of also involving citizens in between elections. All these
discourses partly projected ideals of deliberative democratic legiti-
mation, based on free and equal public deliberation, argument, and
reason-giving (see Tsakatika 2007:872 and e.g. Habermas 1996). They
all addressed a stated need to bring Europe ‘closer to its citizens’. They
sought to counter people’s perceived growing disaffection with an
integration process perceived as driven by elites and linked to popular
preferences through a rather imperfect system of accountability. They
were ways of discursively dealing with falling popular support rates and
public resistance such as that voiced forcefully on the occasion of the
Maastricht ratification crisis. The problem, however, with the People’s
Europe discourse of closely linking Europe to citizen expectations, was
that it continued to presuppose a rather strong notion of a common
good, and a general orientation towards it. I suggested that the will of
the people had an ambiguous status in this discourse in that it acted as
both an independent source of legitimacy and as an object of manipu-
lation (Chapter 3). This may have been the implication of an effort to
keep the lid on a Pandora’s box of a wildly clashing expectations. If the
citizens really were invited to form, articulate, and argue over what they
wanted out of integration, they might be unable to come to a consensus.
As a result, the discursive shift in official discourses on EU legitimacy
towards what the people wanted involved a considerable element of
de-politicisation efforts.
The post-Maastricht openness or transparency paradigms projected
an image of citizens being capable of overseeing EU decision-making at
all stages. Yet they effectively treated citizens as spectators and objects
rather than as authors actually in control of EU action (Chapter 5). The
governance paradigm, in turn, was vulnerable to the criticism that it
institutionalised inequalities and limits of access to political will forma-
tion (equally Chapter 5). The negative referendums on the constitu-
tional treaty at the ballot box, and my case study of the French and
German ratification debates (Chapter 6), may indicate a certain failure
of both the openness/transparency and the governance discourses to
realise the legitimating potential of the deliberative-democracy ideal.
The French debate particularly invites the reading that the people were
 The Story and the Literature 221

demanding contestation through the channels of party democracy, and

in the traditional and new forums of the public sphere, rather than
through invitations to civil society organisations and organised inter-
ests extended by the Commission. What is more, as with the current
ongoing debates over how to respond the crisis of the Eurozone, the
French constitutional debate was a powerful assertion of people’s will to
engage in contestation over fundamentally clashing visions of the EU’s
policies, general direction, and constitutional reform, and to bring their
influence to bear in political, economic, and social decisions.
Already the Maastricht debates analysed in Chapter 4 were charac-
terised by a certain reaction against the common-European-good and
permissive-consensus discourses. They also undermined the deeper
assumption underlying both early legitimating and pre-and post-
Maastricht official discourses, of a general moral orientation towards
the common good as opposed to the adversarial contestation over
competing interests, values, and preferences. This focus on consensus
may have contributed to the confinement of ‘the political’ (of polit-
ical contestation and agency over economic imperatives) to the nation
in French national discourses, as well as the assertion of concerns for
French national sovereignty and German national identity that domi-
nated the respective Maastricht debates (Chapter 4). Both Maastricht
case studies featured central discourses asserting a will to make sure
national interests and clashing ideological, social, political, and
economic preferences were not forgotten over a supposed consensus
on a de-politicised common good. These discourses, like similar ones
central in the constitutional debates, also announced a refusal to
accept that decisions as momentous as those over EMU and the EU’s
institutional and constitutional reform were taken beyond popular
and political contestation in a technocratic and de-politicised register
and grounded on a discourse of no alternatives (see Chapter 3). As I
suggested in Chapter 6, the French No-vote was in part an assertion
of popular sovereignty over a process represented as driven by elites.
The exceptionally intense debates at both key junctures in integra-
tion history also marked an assertion of ‘communicatively generated
power’, which emerges in deliberation in independent public spheres,
is filtered through the representative democratic institutions, and ulti-
mately exerts influence on political decisions (Habermas 1996:301–2,
Tsakatika 2007:871–2). However, in both the Maastricht and the
constitutional debates discourses, projecting the reaching of consensus
based on rational argument and reason-giving were met with powerful
counter-dynamics that instead favoured an understanding of politics
222 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

as based on adversarial confrontation, and compromise at most, over

potentially conflicting preferences. Interestingly, this did not imply
the absence of an orientation towards a common good, and even a
common European good. The constitutional debates in particular were
very much led in terms of a search for a better kind of Europe, that is,
with the interest of the European political body as a whole in mind.
Only they were structured along the lines of fundamentally opposed
visions of what this common good might consist in.
In conclusion, this book in general and this section in particular have
sought to add to empirical analyses of, and normative demands for,
the politicisation of EU politics, by charting the role of contention and
conflict in discourses regarding the legitimacy of the EU and integra-
tion. The history of EU legitimation is the story of a constitutive tension
between, on one hand, de-politicising forces including powerful narra-
tives of a common European good and a general consensus around it
and, on the other, competing discourses that put the emphasis on the
controversial stakes of EU politics and actively politicised them. This
aspect of this book’s discourse-historical narrative is pertinent with a
view to both empirical and normative accounts of the politicisation of
EU politics: firstly, it is relevant in that the discursive history studied in
this book explores some of the particular modes and workings of a factual
politicisation of EU politics. In contrast to existing work emphasising the
competitiveness of EU politics, and the inevitable trade-offs that make
political choices unavoidable at almost every step, my point is made not
in reference to the structural conditions and stakes of EU decision-making
(interest constellations, incentive structures, institutional structures,
etc.), but on the grounds of what has made sense in the European public
spheres over time and, in this light, what is likely to have the power to
persuade people now. Secondly, the nature and content of the discursive
shifts that constituted and referred to the politicisation of the EU’s poli-
tics, policies, and polity support normative calls for being upfront about
the divisive stakes of EU politics. Given the discursive history and gene-
alogies outlined in this book, discourses glossing over the controversial
nature of EU politics are likely to lack persuasive power.
As to its specific research frame, my book seeks to complement the
existing contributions to literature on the politicisation of EU politics,
which not only ‘tend to give insufficient attention to the relationship
between institutional settings and everyday life’, but also ‘to underplay
the significance of how political actors interpret and reproduce the
social and political world’ (White 2010c:54, see 57). My aim is to look
beyond decision-making processes, not to the Europeans’ everyday
 The Story and the Literature 223

life, but to how the substance, form, and existence of EU action are
publicly represented, interpreted and made sense of – in the discourses
of those involved in it and through the reception and contestation of
these discourses in some member-state public spheres. This book offers
a study of patterns and changes in the ‘ideational conditions’ (White
2010c:63) that shape the conditions for politicisation processes and
political adversarialism. It investigates ways of representing the social
and political world that come to make sense to people, and of how
these discourses relate to each other, evolve, and change in their relative
appeal. If ‘[o]rganised political conflict is likely to be a necessary condi-
tion of any satisfactory consolidation of the European Union’, White
adds that it ‘needs to be conflict that resonates beyond the confines of an
institutional setting’ (2010c:55, 69, see earlier). While part of my source
material does comprise institutional discourses shaping what it made
sense to say about EU legitimacy, I have additionally aimed in this study
to tackle their interactions with and resonances in public discourses in
the member-states – how specific ways of representing the world trav-
elled between these forums. As I said in the Introduction, the book is
an experiment in trying to overcome the common limitation charac-
terising governmentality-inspired studies, which lies in their neglect of
ways of ‘putting a face’ on not only the operation, but also the recep-
tion and subversion of power (Zimmermann and Favell 2011:507). With
this aim in mind, I investigated the interaction of discourses both by
those representing and legitimating power, and by those subject to and
resisting it by advancing counter-ways of representing politics and the
social world. Finally, as distinct from the frame research that I equally
discussed in the Introduction, I have focused not on actors and their
alignments, relative power, or coalitions, but rather on the substance
of their discourses and the discursive competition for plausibility at the
level of content, assumptions, argument, and narrative.

Conclusion

This chapter has assembled the different episodes of historical contests

over EU legitimacy into one story, bringing this discursive history into
dialogue with two important sites of investigation and structuring
concepts in the academic literature. I analysed this narrative through the
conceptual lens of legitimacy through input authenticity versus output
efficiency, and made a case for how the discursive history described
can shed new light on how the two types of legitimacy relate to each
other. The lynchpin of their nexus lies in ensuring some level of input
224 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

authenticity in defining the standards by which to assess legitimacy-

enhancing performance output. This book’s discursive history suggests,
I have argued, that such an interlinking of input and output legitimacy
relies less on a simple match between citizen preferences and the goals
of integration or its policies, but rather on open processes of contestation
over what we want to achieve with it and what standards we want to
measure it by.
Leading on from this point, I then portrayed the history of EU legiti-
mation as marked by a constant push and pull between de-politicising
and politicising forces. I argued that the discursive history I described
indicates that an open and appraising approach to contestation over
rival visions, interests, and values regarding the action, nature, and
future of the EU might be a condition of plausibility for any discourses
about their legitimacy. Discourses projecting a European common good
as indivisible and uncontroversial lack credibility given the preceding
history of discursive contestation. I further probed the metaphor of
a game between adversaries as a basis for a political bond between
Europeans, pointing to its advantages over notions of communities of
culture, project or affection, and its advantage of openly recognising the
conflict-based nature of EU politics. Given the central strand of politi-
cising forces in the discursive history described, agreeing to play and
compete with each other might be all that the Europeans are willing
to agree on – and it would not be little. While the legitimacy of the EU
cannot, of course, thrive on contestation alone, it cannot thrive without
contestation.
Conclusion: EU Legitimacy as a
Sisyphean Aspiration?

What can the history I have discussed teach us about the status quo
and the future of EU legitimacy? The EU’s legitimacy problem remains
unresolved and is likely to stay so. The key lesson perhaps from my
historical narrative of EU legitimation is that the problem of political
legitimacy never can be resolved permanently. This is, in part, because
the real world keeps producing intractable problems that undermine
claims to legitimacy. Political authority has to be re-legitimated continu-
ously, and legitimacy claims are continuously re-contested and have to
be adapted. The good news is that this is not specific to the EU, but a
general feature of political life (see conclusion to Chapter 6). In addi-
tion, legitimacy never can be achieved conclusively in that it keeps
changing in accordance with what particular actors claim and believe
about it, and with their relative power over people’s minds. This book is
an experiment in studying EU legitimacy in ways that can accommodate
and illuminate this aspect of its nature, in particular by looking at these
actors’ discourses and the contests between them, in their contingent,
particular, and changing forms – by exploring the discursive politics of
legitimation and delegitimation. The timeless structure of legitimacy
beliefs can only go so far in helping us grasp the capricious, alterable,
and disputable facets of political legitimacy, which are yet so constitu-
tive of it. All told, relative legitimacy is an evasive, flimsy, and contested
state of affairs that needs to be fought for and reproduced endlessly.
My discussion of the politicisation of EU politics prepared another
lesson to be drawn from the discursive history of the struggle over EU
legitimacy told in this book: for claims to the EU and integration’s legiti-
macy to be plausible, given the preceding discursive history of contests
over what it made sense to say about this question, they must be upfront
about the inevitably controversial stakes and nature of EU politics.

225
226 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

The French and German (but also other member-states’) debates on

Maastricht, and then the constitutional treaty discussed in Chapters 4 and
6, reflected and nurtured the spreading understanding that integration
was not a Pareto-efficient, positive-sum game in which everyone gained
and no one lost. Its outputs were not only indivisible public goods, as
the foundational legitimation discourse I analysed in Chapter 1 had it.
EU policies and integration could not benefit all equally. Meanwhile, the
Eurozone crisis has made even more unmistakeably clear the dilemma
of all EU action: whatever the EU does or does not do, benefits some
member-states, and some groups within them, more than others. It has
brought to the fore asymmetries in how the member-states share respon-
sibility for this crisis, and the costs of redressing its effects. Discourses
that highlight the divisive stakes of practically everything at EU level
must be reckoned with. Denying the costs and conflicts involved in EU
politics would do more to de-legitimate the EU than to raise its legiti-
macy. The rhetoric common in official discourses, especially during the
first decades of integration, that stressed harmony, consensus, and the
convergence of interests in a common European good, pursued on the
basis of expert rationality, has come to seem either removed from reality
or outright cynical. If the EU and integration’s social legitimacy is to
be maintained or strengthened, contests over conflicting interests and
visions for the EU have to be carried out in the open. Through this
route, legitimacy crises such as those of Maastricht, the constitutional
episode, and the Eurozone debacle may paradoxically in effect reinforce
a perception among the citizens that their interests and desires are not
discounted behind a rhetorical veil of harmony, but represented and
fought for in the open. In this sense, these crises could ultimately even
help to increase the EU’s legitimacy from these citizens’ perspectives.
In the face of the history of discursive contests over the legitimacy
of integration and the EU, a new kind of pragmatism may be called
for in talking about this issue. The kind of sweeping blow at providing
legitimacy for European integration ex post and ex ante through some
kind of constitutional moment of popular deliberation, endorsement,
and authorisation that the constitutional treaty and flourish aimed
at proved a reach for the stars, even under the much more favourable
discursive conditions of the time. Increasing integration’s and the EU’s
social legitimacy possibly requires a change of paradigm in political style,
rhetoric, and legitimation techniques from the legitimation discourses
discussed in Chapters 6, 4, and earlier, towards a realistic recogni-
tion of the competitive nature of EU politics. As I have suggested, the
history of discursive contests over EU legitimacy was in part a history
 Conclusion 227

of politicisation and emphasis on the divisive rather than the uniting

stakes of integration and EU politics, even if it was counteracted espe-
cially in the early decades by rallying cries around a common European
good (see Chapter 1). Given the discursive shifts and developments
in what it has made sense to say about EU and integration legitimacy,
claims to EU legitimacy might win from – and probably have no choice
but to do so if they want to be plausible – recognising and nurturing
the EU and EU politics more explicitly as a forum where conflicting and
competing interests and visions are negotiated. The Euro crisis has argu-
ably brought these long-standing discursive shifts to culmination.
Thinking of the EU as a forum for conflict and contestation, I suggested,
might also have the positive effect of projecting a more plausible basis
for political community than cultural, value-based, or even ‘community
of project’-based projections of community (Chapter 7). The underlying
idea would be to think of the European political community as a game.
Its players may or may not identify with one another or some shared
cultural essence, values, or projects. In fact, they may not even like each
other. What counts is that they accept each other as co-participants – and
that means at least partly as adversaries – in a game they play together.
In a football game you do everything you can to make sure you win
and the opposing team loses, and yet the opposing team are vital in
making the game happen. Without them there would be no game. This
is one good reason to recognise each other as participants in one game.
There might be more imperative reasons for keeping the game going
too, including monetary or other material ones, or the unattractiveness
of the scenario where it stops, but the playful pleasure derived from it
and the collective self-understanding and self-worth arising from taking
the game seriously are also important – if not sufficient in themselves.
Recognising the EU as a forum for productive conflict and contesta-
tion might not call so much, or not necessarily, for new or reformed
institutions, as for a discursive climate, imageries, and languages
through which people can make their concerns come to bear. As
James Tully notes in his blueprint for democratic negotiation on the
norms driving and circumscribing integration, politicisation can take
place through institutional channels and the ‘official fora of the tradi-
tional public sphere, but also wherever individuals, groups, nations or
civilizations come up against a norm of integration [or a policy, institu-
tional solution, etc.] they find unjust and a site of disputation emerges’
(Tully 2007:74). Jonathan White argues, as mentioned, that the kind of
organised political conflict that is necessary to enable ‘any satisfactory
consolidation’ of the EU ‘needs to be conflict that resonates beyond
228 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

the confines of an institutional setting’ (2010c:55, 69). Paul Magnette

suggests that politicising the EU is possible on the basis of the existing,
or slightly amended treaties, by way of a ‘cultural change’ in how policy
proposals were presented by the Commission and publicly deliberated
upon by both the EP and the Council; not as compromises between a
consensual political class made ‘before public deliberation’ and brokered
by the Commission as a ‘body designed to bypass political conflict’,
but as one possible policy among different alternatives, ‘on different
ideological assumptions’ (2003:13–14).
In addition to where and how such contestation might be encouraged,
Tully’s model is enlightening with a view to what would make the EU
more democratically legitimate not least in that it stipulates that demo-
cratic negotiation be ‘open-ended’: the ‘general form that the norm of
integration must take cannot be imposed beforehand by an appeal to
allegedly universal, necessary, or self-evident processes of moderniza-
tion, democratization, juridicalization or Europeanization, for, in many
cases, it is precisely these framing discourses that are being called into
the space of questions and challenged [ ... ]’ (2007:74). On a practical
level, this means not least that if citizens are to be consulted, be it by
referendum or by wider public civil society dialogue, this needs to be
done in a way that does not pre-determine the kind of answer that alone
would be heard. Otherwise they will perceive their consultation as a
sham, and rightly so.
Discourses around the ongoing difficulties of the Eurozone serve to
highlight how studies of how the EU and its legitimacy are talked about
in particular discourses, and of how rival discourses compete over relative
plausibility, can add an illuminating perspective on questions occupying
scholars of political legitimacy, including the question of how input and
output legitimacy relate to each other. The Euro crisis has put the EU under
enormous pressure to prove what it is worth in managing – and not exacer-
bating – this crisis. It has placed the spotlight not only on EMU’s, but more
broadly the EU’s, difficulties in responding effectively, but also severely
undermining claims to their output legitimacy. The current ongoing crisis
constitutes a particularly dramatic event in a series of events that have
brought to prominence discourses questioning the legitimacy of the EU
and European (economic) integration on the grounds of their ability to
master the challenges of a globalising world and its changing economic,
ecological, and other imperatives (including the financial and economic
crises of the 1970s discussed in Chapter 2, or the post-reunification dip
in Germany that affected the German Maastricht debate). Stark national
differences in the extent to which different member-states were affected
 Conclusion 229

by and responsible for the crisis, as well as in the costs of redressing it,
have once again brought to the fore a number of input-related questions
about how to negotiate, authorise, control, and justify solutions, or to
what extent EMU reflected authentic citizen preferences and identities to
begin with. These mean not least that EU output cannot durably satisfy
all equally.
But already the constellation of competing discourses around the
constitutional treaty, especially but not only in France, could be read
as an indication not only that performance outputs were a key site of
contestation on which the plausibility of claims to EU legitimacy was
played out – but also that the war over legitimacy could not be won on
grounds of outputs alone. Input-related issues have continued to play
key roles in discursive contests over EU legitimacy, not only as a result
of performance difficulties on the output side, and due to successful
rival discourses that have firmly rooted input- (such as democracy-
and identity-) related themes in the space that defined the terms in
which it made sense to talk about EU legitimacy. They were also central
due to mutual dependencies (of the kind outlined for the Eurozone
crisis’ implications for discursive contention over EU legitimacy) at the
level of what it makes sense to say about input and output legitimacy,
respectively. The French and German Maastricht debates, for instance,
are good examples of the contests between, and interweaving of, strong
input-related misgivings and strong output-related concerns that have
defined the discursive history of EU legitimation ever since that field
of tension was defined by the early counter-discourses to the founda-
tional focus on output legitimacy discussed in Chapters 1 and 2. In
sum, output-legitimation works only if coupled with input.
More specifically, in order to persuade those not immediately bene-
fiting from particular EU outputs, and in order to give direction to and
provide standards for assessing output, some kind of input-based argu-
mentation will be needed, be it on the grounds of how decisions are
taken, on the grounds of who the people think they are and want to be,
on the grounds of some collective bond or sense of commonality, or on
the grounds of some greater good that they can subscribe to. The discur-
sive history of contests over EU legitimacy indicates that not just any
performance output, however efficient, would grant the EU legitimacy.
Output-legitimation without at least a veneer of input authenticity is
unsustainable. And concurrently, while output-legitimation does practi-
cally presuppose a certain credibility that the problem-solving perform-
ance is in line with what a majority people desired or what they can
accept as desirable or justly established tasks, the constitutional debates
230 The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

as well as the Maastricht debates did allow for the reading that many citi-
zens did not so much want to have a say for the sake of having a say, as
for the sake of safeguarding their partisan interests. In other words, input
legitimacy was inextricably tied up with output expectations. In the long
run, the discursive history of EU legitimation unfolded as a continuous
struggle over the existence and nature of shared European public inter-
ests: over whether there was such as thing as a common European good,
what it was, and how it could or should be pursued. Moreover, this history
was marked by a learning process that revealed that people had to feel
reasonably represented by, and in control of, integration’s guiding goals,
and how they were defined. Output had to reflect citizen preferences if
it was to add legitimacy. In other words, legitimation on the grounds
of outputs and legitimation on the grounds of inputs were inextricably
interdependent at the level of what it made sense to say.
Overall, then, the discursive history of contests over EU legitimacy has
been marked by a number of constitutive tensions: the continual funda-
mental tightrope walk between bringing the people in and keeping them
out expressed itself, firstly, in a constant balancing act between the two
poles of input- and output-related claims to legitimacy and, secondly,
in a constitutive push and pull between de-politicising and politicising
dynamics. A further, final structuring tension running through the
discursive history of EU legitimation was the following one: discourses
seeking to establish the legitimacy of integration and the EU have been
caught, throughout integration history, in the dilemma of highlighting
the achievements of European integration while downplaying, or at
least not showcasing too much, the revolutionary changes it represents.
The Maastricht and the constitutional crises were in part due to popular
outcries at how far and how deep integration had progressed without
many people taking much notice. Maybe it is time for a more straight-
forward, ruthlessly open approach that is focused on establishing the
EU as a framework that, with some luck, is here to stay – as a frame-
work in which it is acceptable and even desirable to disagree on substan-
tial questions. If this became generally accepted, much would be won,
and contradictory visions and preferences could be negotiated openly
without threatening the project as a whole. This book’s title refers to
legitimacy as struggle. It does so both in the sense that legitimacy can
never be fully and permanently achieved, or indeed fixed in its mean-
ings – and in the sense that it rests fundamentally on the acknowledge-
ment of the struggle between fundamentally different and often clashing
ideals and interests.
Notes

Introduction: Approaching Legitimacy through

Discursive Meanings
1. Policies and practices, which are a further important influence on what the
EU and its legitimacy might mean to different people, are represented in
this research design only indirectly, insofar as they are reflected in discourses
about them. This allows me to focus on the meanings attributed to them
rather than taking them ‘by their word’ (Zimmermann and Favell 2011:496,
see Walters and Haahr 2005:16).
2. A certain relative neglect of agency in the operation of power is a
common criticism raised against studies in the ‘governmentality’ tradition
(Zimmermann and Favell 2011:494–496, 507, see later on this approach and
how my book relates to this tradition). On the flipside, the advantage of
their and my emphasis on discursive content is that it opens up the view
to dynamics of discursive construction that may be obstructed in studies
concentrating on discursive actors and their battles for relative influence. For
actor-centred approaches to the EU, see the framing research discussed later,
Rowell and Mangenot 2010, Kauppi 2003, Georgakakis and Weisbein 2010;
see Zimmermann and Favell 2011:497–501.
3 See Gallie (1956:168): ‘’When we examine the different uses of these terms
and the characteristic arguments in which they figure we soon see that there
is no clearly definable general use of any of them which can be set up as the
correct or standard use. Each party continues to maintain that the special
functions which the term fulfils on its behalf or on its interpretation, is the
correct or proper or primary, or the only important, function which the term
in question can plainly be said to fulfil. Moreover, each party continues to
defend its case with what it claims to be convincing arguments, evidence and
other forms of justification.’
4. For an account of ontological presuppositions underlying different positions
in EU studies, see Kauppi 2010.
5. See Höffe 2007:20, Føllesdal 2006:447, Scharpf 2009:173. On legitimacy as
a motivation for rule following in international relations, see Hurd 1999.
On authority as distinct from both coercion and persuasion, see Arendt
1977a:92–3. On legitimacy as essential to the ‘operation of political life’, see
Coicaud 2002:1.
6. Vivien Schmidt’s ‘discursive institutionalism’ (2008) is one conceptual frame-
work seeking to capture the power of ideas and discourse in influencing the
creation, change, and persistence of institutions. See further e.g. Akman and
Kassim (2010) on the enabling role of myths in the institutionalisation of a
particular EU policies, and de Wilde (2011:565) on the constraining impact
of the politicisation of integration on its actual course. Schmidt’s paradigm is
part of a wider tradition of ‘new institutionalisms’ across the social sciences.

231
232 Notes

Their sociological and cultural offshoots, in particular, see institutions as

embedded in, as well as shaping, culturally specific interpretative frames of
meaning that guide human action and affect what options are ‘reasonable’
in any given situation (Hall and Taylor 1996:946).
7. On the ‘communicative dimension of legitimacy’ as is regime support, and for a
case for therefore studying this dependent variable through the examination of
discourses, see Schneider et al. 2010:15, 2007. On the use of narrative construc-
tions in the historiography of European integration, see Gilbert 2008.
8. See e.g. Kohler-Koch and Rittberger 2007, Beetham and Lord 1998, Lord
and Magnette 2004, Lord and Harris 2006, Lucarelli et al. 2010, Lindseth
2010, Schmidt 2004, Tully 2008:225–310, or Thomassen 2009. A prolific
literature turns specifically on the EU’s “democratic deficit” (see overviews in
Føllesdal and Hix 2006, Hix and Høyland 2011:132–7). Another group of
scholars have emphasised that the EU’s legitimacy importantly rests upon its
problem-solving capacities, superior to those of the individual member-states
(e.g. Majone 1996, Moravcsik 2002, Scharpf 1999, see concluding chapter).
Yet others again have problematised EU legitimacy through the lens of the
issue of European identity or some sense of commonality (e.g. Beetham and
Lord 1998:33–58, Habermas 1998, Risse 2010, Checkel and Katzenstein 2009,
Lucarelli et al. 2010, Nicolaïdis 2004a, 2012, Kraus 2008 and 2012, White
2010a and 2010b). On the value of ‘creative disagreement about legitimacy
in the EU’ among EU scholars, see Lord and Magnette 2004; see also Pélabay
et al. 2010.
9. See e.g. Eriksen and Fossum 2000, Eriksen 2005, Fossum and Schlesinger
2007, Trenz and Eder 2004, Habermas 2008. On the ‘participatory turn’ in
EU Studies emphasising deliberative democracy and the role of organized
civil society, see Saurugger 2008:1275, Greenwood 2007.
10. See e.g. Easton 1975, Almond and Verba 1963, Gillie 2006a and 2006b, Levi
et al. 2009, Norris 1999.
11. The two questions regularly included in the Eurobarometer and usually
taken as indicators of the EU’s legitimacy are whether one’s country’s
membership is a good thing, and how much one’s country has benefited
from its membership. Consequently, complex webs of beliefs on legitimacy
are reduced to a few simple indicators, and are assumed to be reasonably
stable, conscious, central, and straightforward cognitive categories, isolated
from social context, situations, and inter-subjective interaction (see White
2009:101). There tends to be little consideration of the possibility that such
opinion polls are constructions as much as expressions of popular attitudes
(see Manin 1997:231; Shore 2000:51–2).
12. For other legitimacy-related histories of ideas and political ideologies, see
Clark 2007, Barker 2001, Lacroix 2008, Conway 2004, or Conway et al. 2008.
13. On discourse analysis in European studies generally, see, in particular Wæver
2004, Diez 1999, and Howarth and Torfing 2005. For an explanatory frame
analysis (counting relative frequencies of mentioned, coded themes) of how
citizens, high-school history books, and novels conceptualise integration,
examining which themes distinguish supporters from non-supporters, see
Medrano 2003. For quantitative content analyses, see e.g. Jachtenfuchs et al.
1998, Jachtenfuchs 2002, and Jung 1999 (on legitimacy-relevant themes in
 Notes 233

party programmes), Mihelj et al. 2008 and Liebert 2007a (on national media
debates on the constitutional draft treaty). Studies that do combine quantita-
tive with qualitative-interpretive discourse-analytical approaches often limit
their qualitative element to the identification of coding categories, which are
subsequently quantified by way of statistical methods (e.g. Schneider et al.
2010, e.g. 56–7; see 134–45 on their method of analysing the ‘grammar of
legitimation statements’).
14. Walters and Haahr 2005b:17, see Baker 1990, Foucault 1984, Elbe 2001.
15. E.g. Rittberger 2003 and 2005, Parsons 2003, Schimmelfennig 2003,
Christiansen et al. 2001, and Checkel and Moravcsik 2001.
16. See Daviter 2007, 2011, Fligstein 2001, Fligstein and Mara-Drita 1996,
Nylander 2001, Princen and Rhinard 2006, Kohler-Koch 2000.
17. Goffman 1974:21, see Fligstein 2001:265–6, Rein and Schön 1991:263–4,
Nylander 2001:292–3.
18. Not until the concluding chapter do I venture into offering some, cautious,
reflections on what the history of the discursive contests analysed might
tell us about the nature of political legitimacy. I suggest that contin-
uous discursive re-contestation very much constitutes what legitimacy
consists in, as well as the idea that legitimacy on grounds of results and
legitimacy on grounds of reflecting the will of the people are inherently
interdependent.
19. For applications of the governmentality approach to European integration,
see Walters and Haahr 2005a and 2005b, Larner and Walters 2004, Rumford
2002, and Shore 2006. On the approach in general, see in particular Foucault
2007, 2008, Dean 1999, Burchell et al. 1991, Rose 1999, Rose and Miller 1992,
Miller and Rose 2008, Larner and Walters 2004, Merlingen 2003. Münch’s
book ‘European Governmentality’ (2010) uses the term governmentality in
its concurrent sense of a ‘historically specific form of governing associated
with twentieth-century liberalism and the bureaucratic control of popula-
tions’ (Zimmermann and Favell 2011:494, see Barry et al. 1996). It makes out
a ‘liberal drift’ in academic and intellectual debates on multi-level govern-
ance in France, Germany, and Britain, and identifies as their main respective
legitimacy ‘semantics’ republicanism, legalism, and conventional liberalism
(2010:9).
20. On the question of a “sociological turn” in EU studies generally, see White
2010, de Wilde 2007, Saurugger and Mérand 2010; see Favell and Guiraudon
2009, Guiraudon and Favell 2011, Zimmermann and Favell 2011, and Rumford
2002. More specifically, for a study of focus groups discussing Europe, see
Duchesne et al. 2013, Duchesne and Van Ingelgom 2008, Garcia and Van
Ingelgom 2010; for a comparative qualitative survey of ordinary citizens’ atti-
tudes on Europe as expressed freely interviews structured around open-ended
questions, see Gaxie et al. 2011; for an ethnography of the everyday experi-
ence of high-skilled intra-European migrants, see Favell 2008; on ‘Europe in
the Political Imagination’ of taxi drivers as expressed in group interviews, see
White 2010b, 2011; for an account of the role of symbolic means in estab-
lishing the EU’s power and legitimacy, see Foret 2008. On the politicisation
of European identity or what it means to be “European”, see Checkel and
Katzenstein 2009; on what “Europe” meant in competing constructions of
234 Notes

European identity in both mass public opinion and newspaper debates in

five member-states, see Risse 2010. For a comparative study of “European
Stories” in intellectual debates about Europe in national contexts, see Lacroix
and Nicolaïdis 2010; on social theories of Europeanization, see Delanty and
Rumford 2005; and for accounts of the ideas, ideologies, and identities under-
lying specifically resistance to the EU, see Heine 2009, Lacroix and Coman
2007, or Crespy and Verschueren 2009. Finally, on self-images projected by
the European institutions, see e.g. Hansen and Williams 1999, Magnette
2003, or Tsakatika 2005, or Obradovic 1996.
21. For other accounts combining empirical and normative perspectives on polit-
ical legitimacy, see e.g. Clark’s history (2007) of how notions of legitimacy
have been presented, debated, and applied in the contexts of particular events
in international history. See further Barker 2001 on the self-legitimation by
rulers in their own eyes rather than those of the citizens. For the case of
the EU, see Bellamy and Castiglione’s (2003:8) taxonomy of the internal
(subjective, personal value-based) versus external (objective, principle-based)
dimensions of legitimacy.
22. More specifically, Habermas develops a long-term developmental sequence
of successive ‘legitimation levels’ marked by different ‘formal conditions for
the acceptability of reasons that make legitimations [ ... ] effective’ (1976:45).
Beetham posits a number of specific legitimacy criteria that represent the
structure underlying what people in all societies, past and present, have been
considering as legitimacy (1991:15, 21).
23. For a normative approach to the question of legitimacy, which at the same
time seeks to ‘set things in historical perspective’, drawing upon the history
of social and political ideas, see Coicaud 2002, p. 6.

1 Peace, Prosperity, and Progress: Early Legitimating

Narratives, 1950s–1970s
1. For political theory accounts of de-politicisation, see Bellamy 2009 and
2010:7–8, Manent 2003, White 2010a; for a sociologico-anthropological
analysis, Foret 2008; and for an authoritative study of integration’s depend-
ence on the ‘postwar constitutional settlement of administrative govern-
ance’, Lindseth 2010:3.
2. When I speak of a pattern or discursive technique recurrent in the sources
I tend, as a general rule, to reference one or two representative text items
rather than listing all the items in which it can be identified.
3. See e.g. Pineau 1957, Marjolin 1958:4, CEC 1960a:20, Spiegel 10/07/1957:27–8,
CDU/CSU 1957, Hallstein 1951:3.
4. To be sure, when the EEC Treaty was signed in 1957, the failure of the
European Defence Community was recent enough for the understanding to
linger (at least among German commentators if less so in the French press)
that military integration was also a vital element necessary to achieve both
peace and prosperity (e.g. Süddeutsche 02/06/1955) But this argument soon
vanished from centre stage, giving way to discussions about what remained
politically feasible (see Dedman 2010:87, Milward 2000:213).
 Notes 235

5. E.g. CEC 1958:12, see CEC 1960a:16, Marjolin 1958:5, Hallstein 1959c:5,
1955, Martino 1957, The Hague Summit 1969, or Spiegel 27/03/1957:8.
6. E.g. Hallstein 1955, 1959a:2, Süddeutsche 1955/06/02, Mansholt 1958c, Le
Monde 22/07/1965.
7. In economic theory an ideal public good is a good the benefits of which are
‘nonexcludable’ and ‘nonrivalrous in consumption,’ that is, no one can be
excluded from consuming it, and its enjoyment by one party does not reduce
its availability and benefits for another. Peace is a paradigm example of a
pure public good: ‘When it exists, all citizens of a country can enjoy it; and
its enjoyment by, say, rural populations does not distract from its benefits for
urban populations’ (Kaul et al. 1999:4). ‘Prosperity’ in contrast is of course
highly excludable and rivalrous. Note, moreover, that a key teaching in the
theory of public goods is the free-rider or collective action problem, based the
fact that individual members of a group have little incentive to contribute
to the provision of a public good (Olson 1965). This problem also opens up
ample space for contestation.
8. Walters and Haahr 2005b:52–3, see e.g. EEC Treaty, Article 8; The Hague
Summit 1969:8; Werner 1970, and EP 1969:23.
9. Monnet 1978:431, see e.g. CEC 1960a:19, 1958:13, Spiegel 10/07/1957:29.
10. E.g. Hallstein 1959a:3, 1959b:1; Marjolin 1958:4, Monnet 1962, see Schuman
1953:7.
11. 1972:30–55, see e.g. Delors 1989. See Nicolaysen 2004:109–10 on to the
omnipresence of this ‘catchphrase’ in German juridical discourse. On the
profound role of the German legal system and the rule of law in shaping
German national identity since the imperial period, see Davies 2012.
12. While the argument about this legitimacy works well for the German case, it
is less convincing for France (or the UK).
13. See e.g. Mattli and Slaughter 1998:184. On the broader context of case law
and ‘courtroom dialogue’, see Davies 2012. On how the ECJ developed and
sustained a vibrant tradition of democratic constitutionalism from the 1960s,
see Cichowski 2007.

2 Democracy and Other Challenges: Early

Counter-Discourses, 1950s–1970s
1. E.g. Coudenhove-Kalergi 1924, Spinelli 1966, see Steed 1971:462, Burgess
1989, 2000:31–36. On this ideal underlying the preferences of particularly
the German delegation in negotiations around the Schuman Plan and the
eventual founding treaties, see Goetze and Rittberger 2010:44–7.
2. Lodge and Herman 1978:228, see e.g. Marquand 1979, FAZ 07/06/1979, Le
Monde 21/04/1972, and CEC 1976:29 or 1972a:8, 11.
3. Herman and Lodge 1978:226; e.g. CEC 1976:28, 1972a:11, EPA 1960b:18,
Veil 1979, FAZ 07/06/1979.
4. See Chapter 5 and e.g. Dehousse 1995:125, Weiler et al. 1995, Moravcsik
2002, Føllesdal and Hix 2006; see Rittberger 2005:29 on timing.
5. See Lindseth’s (2010:108) similar reading of an academic piece of Aron’s
(1956:4–5).
236 Notes

6. See Held 2006:185, Almond and Verba 1963; for the European Community
specifically, see Lindberg and Scheingold 1970.
7. See e.g. FAZ 14/07/1976, Biesheuvel et al. 1979 [1980]:10–2, 49–56.

3 A Europe Closer to the Citizens: The People’s Europe

Project of the 1980s
1. Peter Kraus (2012:14, see 2008) has referred in this context to the ‘billiard-
ball view’ of cultural diversity in EU identity politics, ‘in which the billiard-
balls are the EU’s member-states: while each ball gets its own colour, all balls
look more or less the same and make more or less the same kind of noise
when they clash at intergovernmental meetings because of their conflicting
political priorities’.

4 Maastricht in the French and German Debates:

Crumbling Promises and the Question of Who Might Rule
1. All articles that mentioned the treaty, its negotiation, and ratification in Le
Monde (LM), Die Zeit (DZ) and Der Spiegel (Spiegel) were included for the years
1991, 1992 and 1993. This sample was complemented further with more
targeted snowballing-triggered searches in other publications, including
Libération (Libé) and Le Figaro (LF).
2. E.g. LM 24/06/1992, 03/07/1992, 07/05/1992, 04/09/1992, 11/09/1992,
12/09/1992.
3. E.g. LM 24/06/2992, 03/07/1992, 07/05/1992, 04/09/1992, 11/09/1992,
12/09/1992.
4. See e.g. DZ 16/10/1992, 12/02/1992, Spiegel 09/12/1991, 09/03/1992.
5. See Marsh 1994:153, Spiegel 09/03/1992:26, de Villiers in LM 12/08/1991, de
Villiers 1992:90, Keraudren and Dubois 1994:158.
6. Spiegel 09/12/1991, FAZ 11/06/1992, DZ 16/09/1992, 10/07/1992, 17/05/1991,
18/09/1992, 14/02/1992, de Villiers 1992:90, LM 12/08/1991.
7. E.g. DZ 13/12/1991, 20/12/1991, 14/2/1992, 11/09/1992, 12/6/1992.
8. Hay/Rosamond 2002:161, referring to a speech by Oskar Lafontaine on
28/06/1996; see Banchoff 1999:20.
9. E.g. DZ 01/01/1993, 26/06/1992, 25/09/1992, see also Bundestag 1993, LM
16/06/1992.
10. See LM 05/09/1992, and 17/09/1992 or 04/05/1992, respectively.
11. DZ 25/09/1991, 19/11/1993, 06/12/1991.
12. Former Prime Minister Michel Rocard, cited in Spiegel 07/09/1992, see DZ
11/09/1992, 13/08/1993, LM 29/09/1992 (‘demons’).
13. E.g. LM 14/04/1992, 04/05/1992, 08/06/1992.
14. Sommer, Zeit 26/06/1992, 01/01/1993; see Marcussen et al. 1999.
15. E.g. DZ 17/05/1991, 26/09/1991, 03/01/1992.
16. LM 13/04/1992, 14/04/1992, 29/04/1992, 30/04/1992, 05/09/1992.
17. DZ 03/01/1992; on modernity see LM 29/04/1992, 16/06/1992 (Jean-Marie
Colombani).
18. E.g. Handelsblatt 26/06/1992, reprinted in Hrbek and Bofinger 1992:236–40;
DZ 13/12/1991, 03/07/1992, 22/11/1991.
 Notes 237

19. See Jachtenfuchs 2002:171–98 on this traditional demand of all the major
political parties. In the French ratification debate, in contrast, the term
‘Political Union’ played a secondary role; it was employed mainly to refer
to the CFSP, which Mitterrand considered the core of Political Union, or else
the German preference for a stronger EP (see LM 07/12/1991, 30/04/1992,
05/09/1992).
20. E.g. Spiegel 02/12/1991:35, 02/03/1992:166; see 09/12/1991:127, citing Die
Welt and Rheinischer Merkur; see DZ 19/09/1991.
21. Bundesbank vice-president Hans Tietmeyer, Spiegel 09/12/1991:129. Most
German politicians and journalists stuck to the formula that economic coop-
eration needed to be secured by thoroughgoing political cooperation: ‘a
common currency only makes sense when economic, tax, finance and social
policies are really interlinked’ (Karl Otto Pöhl, resigned Bundesbank President
in Financial Times Deutschland 15/05/1992, cited in Beuter 1994:99; see
Spiegel 02/12/1991:36–8, 16/12/1991:22, and e.g. Bundestag 1993:10844).
The combination of ‘federal economy and confederative politics’ was a
‘bugbear’, according to Die Welt’s publisher (cited in Spiegel 02/12/1991:36,
see 16/12/1991:22).
22. E.g. Mitterrand on TF1 1992, see LM 05/09/1992, 07/12/1991, 18/09/1992.
23. Chevènement in LM 02/05/1992, see 03/06/1992.
24. LM 09/09/1992, see Chevènement 1992:244, Jung 1999:117.
25. According to Lacroix, this ‘national-republican argument is twofold. First,
its proponents hold that the democratic ideal cannot be disentangled from
national identity [as suggested by Habermas and his constitutional patri-
otism, see below]. Second, national-republicans maintain that the move
towards a post-national identity is undermining democracy within the
borders of existing nation-states. For it exacerbates the twin dangers facing
contemporary democracies: the growing autonomy of individuals and their
disinterest in public affairs’ (2010:109ff, see 2008).
26. Spiegel 24/05/1993:25, see 11/01/1993:16, 12/04/1993:114–16, 24/05/1993:24–5,
21/06/1993:16, 28/06/1993:31–3, 18/10/1993:31–2. The plaintiffs had argued
against the Treaty’s constitutionality on the grounds that it violated Article
20’s stipulation that ‘all state power originate[d] from the people’, who legiti-
mated and authorised the ‘organs of the legislative, the executive, and the
judicature’ through elections. One plaintiff reasoned that his right to partici-
pate in the execution of state power through electing the Bundestag was
substantially reduced as the Treaty transferred essential competences from the
national parliament to the Community level (see Wieland 1994:2–3, Beuter
1994:100–1, Spiegel 14/12/1992:32). A group of four MEPs reasoned that the
transferred competences would be insufficiently controlled by the EP (e.g.
Spiegel 11/01/1993:16, 21/06/1993, see 28/06/1993:32). In short, parliamen-
tary power (of both the Bundestag and the EP) was at the centre of both lines of
reasoning.

5 Discursive Crisis Management: Stressing and Stretching

‘Democracy’, 1990s–2000s
1. See Council et al. 1993, 1992a:396, 1992b:409–10, 1992c:412; EP 1995:2, 4;
CEC 1996:I.3; see Lodge 1994:343.
238 Notes

2. E.g. EP 1984, Delors 1989, see Dinan 2004:244 and McAllister 2010:91 on a
Commission report on the 1975 Tindemans Report stressing the principle.
3. See e.g. Shore 2000, Theiler 2003, Delgado Moreira 2000 for analyses of rele-
vant policies.
4. Howe 1995:27, see Pantel 1999:47, Miller 1995, Tamir 1993.
5. See Cederman 2001, Favell 2009, Balibar 2001, 2005, Shore 2000:87–122,
Delanty 1995.
6. Pantel 1999:46, see CEC 2001:32, Lamassoure 2004, Council 1992a, b, c, or
the Preamble to the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union,
proclaimed by the Presidents of the European Parliament, the Council and
the Commission at the European Council meeting in Nice in 2000.
7. Note that in official discourse, the units of Europe’s cultures were typically
(implied to be) its different national cultures. It thus remained rooted in what
Kraus refers to as the ‘billiard-ball’ view of diversity (which I mentioned in
Chapter 3), where ‘diversity is politically structured according to uniform
(political, legal, territorial) criteria and translated into a collection of sepa-
rate isomorphic units,’ and as opposed to ‘complex diversity’ and where ‘the
former billiard-balls are being more and more often mixed up in some kind
of “cocktail” (and this cocktail is served both at the group and at the indi-
vidual level)’ (Kraus 2012:12).
8. CEC 2002:8 and passim, see Wallström 2005, CEC 2001:12, 2006, EP 2006,
Lebessis and Paterson 2000:29, Hubert and Caremier 2000.

6 A Constitutional Moment? The Constitution in the

French and German Debates
1. LM 10/05/2005, citing Infratest-Dimap and ARD, TNS Infratest, Spiegel
13/06/2005a.
2. Overall the chapter’s source base is thus constituted by a large systematic
sample of newspaper articles for these time frames from Libération (Libé),
Le Figaro (LF), Le Monde (LM), as well as the Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ), the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), Die Zeit (DZ), Der Spiegel (Spiegel), and the
Bildzeitung (Bild). In addition, I draw on a number of specific focused searches
in Berliner Morgenpost (BMP) and Hamburger Abendblatt (HAB) as well as, for
both cases, a larger non-systematic sample for the period from September
2004 to June 2005. I further collated additional systematic mini-samples for
key events outside the core time frames.
3. For causal explanations of why the French voted the way they did,
including analyses of party political and campaign dynamics as well as the
relative impact of issue frames, attitudes, and specific framing coalitions,
see e.g. Hobolt 2009, Brouard and Tiberj 2006, Dehousse 2006, Duhamel
2005, Finchelstein 2005, Hainsworth 2006, Ivaldi 2006, Perrineau 2005,
Sauger et al. 2007. For a content analysis of French and British government
attempts to justify the Treaty, see Lord 2008, and of the French newspaper
debate from October 2004 to October 2005, Maatsch 2007. For an anal-
ysis of the French referendum debate as an instance of de-politicisation,
seen through the lens of President Chirac’s argumentative strategy, see
Glencross 2009.
 Notes 239

4. The socialist party (Parti Socialiste, PS) was split over the issue (see Crespy
2008). After an internal party referendum on 1 December 2004 with 59 per cent
in favour, the official party line was to support ratification. Notwithstanding,
numerous PS members, led by deputy party leader Laurent Fabius, opposed
the treaty, arguably with an eye to the 2007 presidential candidacy. The
Green Party equally supported ratification officially, but was divided over the
issue. Several trade unions recommended voting No while others embraced
the constitution. The parties to the left of the PS campaigned comparatively
cohesively against ratification. On the centre right, the Gaullist Union pour
un Mouvement Populaire (UMP) as well as its Giscardist junior party Union
pour la Démocratie Française (UDF, led by François Bayrou) supported the
proposed constitutional treaty, as did President Jacques Chirac. Prominent
opponents on the right were notably the Gaullist Nicolas Dupont-Aignan
(UMP), Philippe de Villiers (Mouvement pour la France, MPF), and on the
extreme right with Jean-Marie Le Pen (Front National, FN).
5. This was the title of a series in Le Figaro. See LF 07/03/2005, 07/04/2005,
LM 14/05/2005b, Libé 26/05/2005, 17/03/2005, and the Communist Party’s
referendum pamphlet cited in Milner 2006:257.
6. E.g. Slavoj Žižek in LM 26/05/2005b, see also Milner 2006:259.
7. LM 24/05/2005b, Libé 23/03/2005a, 16/09/2004; see contra, LM 31/03/2005,
14/04/2005.
8. E.g. Marie-George Buffet, in a televised debate organised by Le Monde and the
private television channel RTL, see LM 20/04/2005b.
9. E.g. LM 15/06/2005, 08/03/2005, 20/03/2004, Libé 17/03/2005a; see Duhamel
2005:15–17.
10. Duhamel 2005:15, see Libé 17/03/2005a, LM 27/04/2005, LF 10/05/2005.
11. E.g. LM 02/03/2005b, 06/03/2005, 07/04/2005, see Cambadélis 2005:31.
12. LM 28/05/2005, see 08/03/2005, 20/03/2004, 29/05/2005.
13. E.g. LM 05/05/2005, 26/05/2005c, Jean-Marie Le Pen in LF 11/05/2005.
14. LM 07/04/2005, 28/05/2005; see Glencross 2009.
15. See the negative list of what about social Europe would be threatened by the
constitution in LM 24/05/2005b (Jacques Nikonoff, president ATTAC France).
16. LM 20/04/2005a, 28/05/2005, see 20/04/2005b.
17. FAZ 28/05/2005a, see LM 28/05/2005, Milner 2006:259.
18. Cambadélis 2005:33, see Le Gall 2006:106. The extraordinary centrality of
the issue at the time of the referendum campaign has been compared to
that of ‘insecurity’ in the 2002 presidential elections (see LM 26/05/2005a,
Cambadélis 1995:33).
19. For an earlier appearance of the Polish plumber see Charlie Hebdo’s December
2004 edition.
20. Nicolas Sarkozy in LF 14/04/2005, see Minister of European Affairs Claudie
Haigneré in Libé 25/03/2005.
21. Interestingly it was this one particular aspect of the national-republican para-
digm discussed above in Chapter 4 that had survived, and played a central
role in the French constitutional debate. The other elements, limiting the
practice of democracy and citizenship to the confines of the nation, had
practically disappeared from the centre of attention in political philosophy
as well as the wider public and political debates (see Lacroix 2010:110 for the
political philosophy debate).
240 Notes

22. E.g. Libé 22/11/2004, LF 18/05/2005, 05/05/2005, 11/03/2005, 25/03/2005.

23. LM 28/05/2005, 21/04/2005, 23/03/2005a, 12/10/2004, LF 12/04/2005.
24. Dupont-Aignan in LF 07/04/2005, equally Fabius in LF 07/03/2005.
25. Le Gall 2005:106, see Alain Duhamel in Libé 23/03/2005b.
26. LM 12/04/2005. Le Pen remained relatively silent throughout the debate,
which some interpreted as a deliberate strategy for the No, since association of
Le Pen with the No may have played in favour of the Yes (Libé 23/03/2005b).
27. DZ 09/06/2005c, see 16/06/2005b, 02/06/2005, HAB 13/05/2005.
28. DZ 09/06/2005c, see 16/06/2005b, 02/06/2005.
29. SZ 04/02/2005, 25/05/2005, Spiegel 09/05/2005.
30. Bild 02/06/2005b. Gauweiler filed constitutional complaints against
Maastricht (see Chapter 4) and the Constitutional Treaty (i.e., its ratification
by Bundestag and Bundesrat), and more recently petitioned for a temporary
injunction against the European Central Bank’s buying sovereign bonds.
31. SZ 07/05/2005, Helmut Schmidt and Günter Verheugen in DZ 09/06/2005b
and 09/06/2005d, FAZ 28/05/2005a.
32. Spiegel 09/05/2005, see HAB 31/05/2005, FAZ 18/06/2005.
33. Bild 02/06/2005a, see DZ 09/06/2005c, 09/06/2005b.
34. DZ 09/06/2005c, see SZ 02/06/2005, Bild 02/06/2005a.
35. See the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern PDS’s arguments for voting against the
constitutional treaty in the Bundesrat on grounds that the treaty was too
market-oriented [‘zu marktwirtschaftlich ausgerichtet’] and catered too little
to social tasks, FAZ 28/05/2005b.
36. Bild am Sonntag 17/04/2005, cited Uterwedde 2007:70.
37. SZ 07/05/2005, DZ 09/06/2005d, FAZ 28/05/2005a.
38. SZ 04/06/2005, see FAZ 13/05/2005a, DZ 09/06/2005b, 02/06/2005.
39. See for all e.g. Bavarian Minister President Edmund Stoiber in SZ 13/05/2005,
or HAB 13/05/2005.
40. HAB 12/05/2005, SZ 13/05/2005, SZ 12/05/2005, FAZ 11/05/2005.
41. E.g. Spiegel 13/06/2005b, 14/03/2005, see later.
42. See Spiegel 13/06/2005b, see 06/06/2005, FAZ 12/05/2005.
43. DZ 09/06/2005e, see 23/05/2005a, 02/05/2005.
44. FAZ 31/05/2005, see Spiegel 06/06/2005 for an expansive collection of absurd
regulations.
45. DZ 09/06/2005c, see 09/06/2005d, 09/06/2005e.
46. See SZ 12/05/2005 on the arguments of Bundestag deputies.
47. Bild 02/06/2005b, see SZ 12/05/2005, FAZ 17/06/2005b.
48. SZ 06/06/2005, see constitutional justice Udo Di Fabio in DZ 16/06/2005b.
49. Grimm in SZ 01/06/2005, see Papier in DZ 16/06/2005b, 02/06/2005.
50. This may have been quite deliberate as several voices in the press celebrated
the constitutional controversy as a European-wide movement of public
deliberation, and as a proof of a shared public sphere.

7 The Story and the Literature: Democracy, Efficiency,

and the Contested Game of EU Politics
1. See e.g. Westle 2007, Thomassen 2009:115–224, Gilley 2006a,b, Van Ingelgom
forthcoming, Hobolt 2012a and b.
 Notes 241

2. Saurugger 2008:1275, see review in Finke 2007, see Greenwood 2007:333.

3. Bellamy 2010, Greenwood 2007, Heard-Lauréote 2010, Lindgren and Persson
2010, 2011, Skogstad 2003, Torres 2007.
4. Katz and Wessels 1999:6, see Höreth 2001:14, Rittberger 2003:206–7, Dahl
1994.
5. Bellamy 2010:3, see Skogstad 2003:322–5, White 2010c:59, but e.g. Tsakatika
2007, Grande 2000:129, Neyer 2003:687.
6. Greenwood 2007:339, Grande 2000:129–30, Saurugger 2008:1278, Magnette
2003.
7. E.g. Finke 2007:6–10, Greenwood 2007:340, Lindgren and Persson 2010:453,
see Lindblom 1965.
8. E.g. Hooghe and Marks 2007, Maier and Rittberger 2008, McLaren 2007,
Szczerbiak and Taggart 2003, Sørensen 2008; see overview in Hooghe and
Marks 2012.
9. De Wilde and Trenz 2012; Morgan 2005, Heine 2009, Duchesne and Van
Ingelgom 2008, Duchesne et al. 2013.
10. See Lacroix and Coman 2007, Crespy and Verschueren 2009; and Imig
2004:232, Tarrow 2005, Tarrow and Imig 2001, respectively.
11. See e.g. Marks and Steenbergen 2004, Liebert 2007, Daviter 2007, and the
framing literature discussed in Introduction.
12. De Wilde and Zürn 2012:137, see also Glencross 2009, Radaelli 1999:757, and
Risse 2010:8.
13. See, respectively, White 2010c:55 or 2010a, or Muirhead 2006; Mouffe 2010,
Tsakatika 2007, Tully 2007:75; Dahl 1956, Birch 2007:217–25, Lerner 1957,
Lindblom 1959.
14. ‘Narrative diversity’ regarding the nature of the EU, Europe, and what it
means to be European has similarly been described as normatively desirable
in its own right (Pélabay et al. 2010).
15. Arendt 1977:145–9, see Tully 1999:162 and his account in this chapter of
how the rules of such games remain open to constant modification and
contestation themselves, drawing on Wittgenstein, Skinner, and Foucault,
besides Arendt.
16 On norms and practices of mutual recognition, see Nicolaïdis 2007 and
Pélabay et al. 2010.
17. Mouffe 2000:81–2, see Schumpeter 1947, Downs 1957, Dahl 1971.
Bibliography

Ackerman, B. (1980) We the People: Foundations. Cambridge, MA, Harvard

University Press.
Adenauer, K. (1957) ‘Rede von Konrad Adenauer anläßlich der Unterzeichnung der
Römischen Verträge (25. März 1957)’, Bulletin des Presse- und Informationsamtes
der Bundesregierung., 59(27/03/1957), 505–6.
Akman, P. and Kassim, H. (2010) ‘Myths and Myth-Making in the European
Union: The Institutionalization and Interpretation of EU Competition Policy’,
Journal of Common Market Studies, 48(1), 111–32.
Almond, G. A. and Verba, S. (1963) The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and
Democracy in Five Nations, Princeton, Princeton University Press.
Arato, A. (1994) Dilemmas From the Power to Create Constitutions in Eastern
Europe. In M. Rosenfeld (ed.) Constitutionalism: Identity, Difference and Legitimacy.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 178–86.
Arendt, H. (1977) What is Authority? Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in
Political Thought. New York: Penguin Books, pp. 91–141.
Aristotle (1996) The Politics and the Constitution of Athens, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press.
Armand, L. (1958) ‘Discours de Louis Armand, président de la Commission de la
Communauté européenne de l’énergie atomique (Euratom), devant l’Assemblée
Parlementaire européenne à Strasbourg (23 juin 1958), Session ordinaire
1957–1958, Strasbourg.’, Service des Publications des Communautés européennes,
23.06.1958, 3–24.
Aron, R. (1956) Esquisse historique d’une grande querelle idéologique. In R. Aron
and D. Lerner (eds) La Querelle de la C.E.D. Essais d’analyse sociologique.
Recueil d’Ètudes. Cahiers de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politique,
no. 80. Paris: Armand Colin, pp. 1–23.
Attac (2005) ‘Constitution’ européenne. Ils se sont dit Oui. Attac leur répond,
Paris, Mille et une nuits.
Baker, K. M. (1990) Inventing the French Revolution, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press.
Baker, K. M. (1994) A Foucauldian French Revolution? In J. Goldstein (ed.)
Foucault and the Writing of History. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 187–205.
Balibar, E. (2001) Nous, citoyens d’Europe? Les frontières, l’Etat, le peuple, Paris,
Éditions la Découverte & Syros.
Balibar, E. (2005) Europe, constitution, frontière, Paris, Editions du passant.
Banchoff, T. (1999) National Identity and EU Legitimacy in France and Germany.
in T. Banchoff and M. P. Smith (eds) Legitimacy and the European Union: The
Contested Polity. London: Routledge, pp. 180–98.
Barker, R. (2001) Legitimating Identities: The Self-Preservations of Rulers and
Subjects, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Barry, A., Osborne, T. and Rose, N. (1996) Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism,
Neoliberalism and Rationalities of Government, Chicago, University of Chicago
Press.

242
 Bibliography 243

Bartolini, S. (2005) Restructuring Europe: Centre Formation, System Building

and Political Structuring Between the Nation-State and the European Union,
Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Bartolini, S. (2006) ‘Should the Union be ‘Politicised’? Prospects and Risks’, Notre
Europe Policy Paper, No. 19.
Bech, J. (1957) Address given by Joseph Bech at the ceremony held to mark the
signing of the Rome Treaties (Rome, 25 March 1957). Archives historiques du
Conseil de l’Union européenne, Bruxelles, Rue de la Loi 175. Négociations des
traités instituant le CEE et la CEEA (1955-1957), CM3. Conférence des minis-
tres des Affaires étrangères et signature des traités de la CEE et de la CEEA,
Rome, 25.03.1957, CM3/ NEGO/098.
Bee, C. (2008) ‘The “Institutionally Constructed” European Identity: Citizenship
and Public Sphere Narrated by the Commission’, Perspectives on European Politics
and Society, 9(4), 431–50.
Beetham, D. (1991) The Legitimation of Power, Basingstoke, Macmillan.
Beetham, D. and Lord, C. (1998) Legitimacy and the European Union, London,
Longham.
Beetham, D. and Lord, C. (2001) ‘Legitimizing the EU: Is there a ‘Post-parliamentary
Basis’ for its Legitimation?’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 39(3), 443–62.
Bell, D. (2003) ‘Mythscapes: Memory, Mythology, and National Identity’, British
Journal of Sociology, 54(1), 63–81.
Bellamy, R. (2009) The Republic of Reasons: Public Reasoning, Depoliticisation
and Nondomination. In S. Besson and J.-L. Marti (eds) Legal Republicanism:
National and International. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 102–20.
Bellamy, R. (2010) ‘Democracy without Democracy? Can the EU’s Democratic
‘Outputs’ be Separated from the Democratic ‘Inputs’ Provided by Competitive
Parties and Majority Rule?’, Journal of European Public Policy, 17(1), 2–19.
Bellamy, R. and Castiglione, D. (2003) ‘Legitimizing the Euro-‘Polity’ and its
‘Regime’: The Normative Turn in European Studies’, European Journal of Political
Theory, 2(1), 7–34.
Berezin, M. (2006) ‘Appropriating the “No”: The French National Front, the Vote
on the Constitution, and the “New” April 21’, PS: Political Science & Politics,
39(April PS Symposium: EU Constition: RIP), 269–72.
Best, E. (1994) The Maastricht Treaty: What Does It Actually Say and Do. In
F. Laursen and S. Vanhoonacker (eds) The Ratification of the Maastricht Treaty.
Issues, Debates and Future Implications. Maastricht: European Institute of Public
Administration, pp. 17–44.
Beuter, R. (1994) Germany and the Ratification of the Maastricht Treaty.
In F. Laursen and S. Vanhoonacker (eds) The Ratification of the Maastricht
Treaty: Issues, Debates and Future Implications. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff,
pp. 89–112.
Bickerton, C. J. (2011a) European Union Foreign Policy. From Effectiveness to
Functionality, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.
Biesheuvel, B., Dell, E. and Marjolin, R. (1979 [1980]) Report on European
Institutions. Presented by the Committee of the Three to the European
Council. Presented by the Committee of the Three to the European Council
(October 1979). Brussels: Council of the European Communities.
Birch, A. H. (2007) Concepts and Theories of Modern Democracy, London,
Routledge.
244 Bibliography

Borneman, J. and Fowler, N. (1997) ‘Europeanization’, Annual Review of

Anthropology, 26, 487–514.
Borrás, S. and Conzelmann, T. (2007) ‘Democracy, Legitimacy and Soft Modes
of Governance in the EU: the Empirical Turn’, Journal of European Integration,
29(5), 531–48.
Bottici, C. (2007) A Philosophy of Political Myth, New York, Cambridge University
Press.
Brouard, S. S. and Tiberj, V. (2006) ‘The French Referendum: The Not So Simple
Act of Saying Nay’, PS, Political Science & Politics, 39, 261–8.
Bruter, M. (2005) Citizens of Europe? The Emergence of a Mass European Identity,
Basingstoke and New York, Palgrave Macmillan.
Bundesregierung (1957a) ‘Ein Schritt nach vorn’, Bulletin des Presse- und
Informationsamtes der Bundesregierung., 61(29/03/1957), 61–2.
Bundesregierung (1957b) ‘Europa lebt’, Bulletin des Presse- und Informationsamtes
der Bundesregierung., 126(13/07/1957), 1191.
Bundestag (1993) ‘Deutscher Bundestag. Plenarprotokoll 12/126 (02/12/1992)’,
10809–909.
Burchell, G., Gordon, C. and Miller, P. (1991) The Foucault Effect. Studies in
Governmentality, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
Burgess, M. (1989) Federalism and European Union: Political Ideas, Influences,
and Strategies in the European community, 1972–1987, London; New York,
Routledge.
Burgess, M. (2000) Federalism and European Union: The Building of Europe,
1950–2000, London; New York, Routledge.
Cafruny, A. W. and Rosenthal, G. G. (1993) The State of the European Community:
the Maastricht Debates and Beyond, Boulder, L. Rienner.
Cain, B. E., Dalton, R. J. and Scarrow, S. E. (2003) Democracy Transformed?
Expanding Political Opportunities in Advanced Industrial Democracies,
Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Calleo, D. P. (2001) Rethinking Europe’s Future, Princeton University Press.
Cambadélis, J.-C. (2005) Pourquoi le ‘non’ a été irrésistible. In G. Finchelstein
(ed.) Le jour où la France a dit non. Comprendre le référendum du 29 mai 2005.
Paris: Fondation Jean-Jaurès, pp. 26–36.
CDU/CSU (1957) Motion for a resolution tabled by the CDU, CSU and the
German Party parliamentary groups (Bonn, 4 July 1957). Internationaal
Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis, Amsterdam. Comité d’action pour les
États-Unis d’Europe (1955–1975). Dossier sur les ratifications des traités du
25 mars 1957, 13.
CEC (1958) First General Report on the Activities of the Community (1 January
1958 to September 17, 1958).
CEC (1959a) ‘Second General Report on the Activities of the Community
(10 September 1958–20 March 1959)’.
CEC (1960a) ‘Third General Report on the Activities of the Community (21 March
1959–15 May 1960)’.
CEC (1961a) ‘Fourth General Report on the Activities of the Community (16 May
1960–30 April 1961)’.
CEC (1972a) ‘Report of the Working Party Examining the Problem of the
Enlargement of the Powers of the European Parliament. “Vedel Report”’,
Bulletin of the European Communities, Supplement 4/72.
 Bibliography 245

CEC (1973a) Working Program in the Field of ‘Research, Science and Education’
(Personal Statement by Mr. Dahrendorf). SEC (73) 2000/2, Brussels, 23 May.
CEC (1973b) ‘For a Community Policy on Education. Report by Henri Janne’,
Bulletin of the European Communities, Supplement 10/73.
CEC (1973c) ‘Document on the European Identity Published by the Nine Foreign
Ministers in Copenhagen on 14 December 1973, ‘Declaration on European
Identity’’, Bulletin of the European Communities, 1973(12), 118–22.
CEC (1976) ‘European Union. Report by Mr. Leo Tindemans, Prime Minister of
Belgium, to the European Council, 27 December 1975’, Bulletin of the European
Communities, Supplement 1/76, 11–35.
CEC (1985a) Communication to the Council on a People’s Europe. Brussels: COM
(85) 640 final.
CEC (1985b) Completing the Internal Market. White Paper from the Commission
to the European Council (Milan, 28–29 June 1985). COM (85) 310 final,
14 June 1985.
CEC (1985) ‘Programme of the Commission for 1985. Statement by Jacques
Delors, President of the Commission, to the European Parliament and His Reply
to the Ensuring Debate, Strasbourg, 12 March 1985.’, Bulletin of the European
Communities, Supplement 4(85).
CEC (1985d) ‘Reports from the Ad Hoc Committee on a People’s Europe, Brussels,
chaired by Pietro Adonnino, 25 and 26 June 1985, and 29 and 30 March 1985’,
Bulletin of the European Economic Community, Supplement 7/85, 2–33.
CEC (1986) ‘Voting Rights in Local Elections for Community Nationals. Report
from the Commission to the European Parliament transmitted for Information
to the Council in October 1986. Supplement based on COM (86) 487 final,
7 October 1986’, Bulletin of the European Communities, Supplement 7/86.
CEC (1987a) Second report from the Commission to the Council and the
European Parliament on the implementation of the Commission’s White Paper
on completing the internal market. COM(87) 203 final. Luxembourg: Office for
Official Publications of the European Communities.
CEC (1988a) ‘A People’s Europe. Communication from the Commission to the
European Parliament (7 July 1988). COM 88 331/final’, Bulletin of the European
Communities, Supplement 2.
CEC (1988b) The Costs of Non-Europe: an Assessment Based on a Formal Model
of Imperfect Competition and Economies of Scale. By Alasdair Smith, Brussels,
Directorate-General for Economic and Financial Affairs.
CEC (1990) Avis de la Commission du 21 octobre 1990 relatif au projet de révi-
sion du Traité instituant la Communauté économique européenne concernant
l’Union politique, COM (90) 600 final. Brussels.
CEC (1993c) Report from the Commission on the Citizenship of the Union.
Brussels: COM (93) 702 final.
CEC (1993d) ‘Growth, Competitiveness, Employment: The Challenges and Ways
Forward into the 21st Century. White Paper’, Bulletin EC, S-6/93(COM (93) 700
final. 05.12.1993).
CEC (1993e) Reflection on Information and Communication Policy of the European
Community: Report by the Group of Experts Chaired by Willy De Clercq,
Luxembourg, Office for Official Publications of the European Communities.
CEC (1994) Information, Communication, Openness. Report by Joăo de Deus
Pinheiro. Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European
246 Bibliography

Communities and Directorate-General X for Information, Communication,

Culture, Audiovisual.
CEC (1995a) ‘Report on the Operation of the Treaty on European Union (presented
by the Commission)’ (SEC (95) 731 final. 10/05/1995).
CEC (1995b) Green Paper on the Practical Arrangements for the Introduction
of the Single Currency, Luxembourg, Office for Official Publications of the
European Communities.
CEC (1996) ‘Reinforcing Political Union and Preparing for Enlargement.
Commission Opinion’, (COM (96) 90 final. 28/02/1996).
CEC (2001) ‘European Governance. A White Paper’ (COM (2001) 428 final.
25.07.2001).
CEC (2002) ‘Communication from the Commission to the Council, the European
Parliament, the Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the
Regions on an Information and Communication Strategy for the European
Union’, (COM (2002) 350 final/2. 02.10.2002).
Cecchini, P., Catinat, M. and Jacquemin, A. (1988) 1992: the European Challenge.
The Benefits of a Single Market, Aldershot, Wildwood House.
Cederman, L.-E. (ed.) (2001) Constructing Europe’s Identity. The External Dimension,
Boulder, Lynne Rienner Publishers.
Chapuis, M. (ed.) (2009) Preserving our Heritage, Improving our Environment.
Volume I: 20 Years of EU Research into Cultural Heritage Brussels, European
Commission, Directorate-General for Research Environment.
Chapus, R. (1953) La loi d’habilitation du 11 juillet 1953 et la question des décrets-
lois, Paris, Librairie générale de droit et de jurisprudence.
Checkel, J. T. and Katzenstein, P. J. (2009) European Identity, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press.
Checkel, J. T. and Moravcsik, A. (2001) ‘A Constructivist Research Programme in
EU Studies?’, European Union Politics, 2(2), 219–49.
Chevènement, J.-P. (1992) Une certaine idée de la République m’amène à ... Paris,
Albin Michel.
Christiansen, T., Jorgensen, K. E. and Wiener, A. (2001) The Social Construction of
Europe, London, Sage.
Cichowski, R. A. (2007) The European Court and Civil Society: Litigation, Mobilization
and Governance, Cambridge, New York, Cambridge University Press.
Clark, I. (2007) Legitimacy in International Society, Oxford, Oxford University
Press.
Closa, C. (2004) The Convention Method and the Transformation of EU
Constitutional Politics. In E. O. Eriksen, J. E. Fossum and A. Menendez (eds)
Developing a Constitution for Europe. London: Routledge, pp. 183–206.
Coicaud, J.-M. (2002) Legitimacy and Politics: A Contribution to the Study of
Political Right and Political Responsibility. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Collier, D., Daniel Hidalgo, F. and Olivia Maciuceanu, A. (2006) ‘Essentially
Contested Concepts: Debates and Applications. Introduction to Special Issue’,
Journal of Political Ideologies, 11(3), 211–46.
Conway, M. and Depkat, V. (2010) Towards a European History of the Discourse of
Democracy: Discussing Democracy in Western Europe 1945–60. In M. Conway
and K. K. Patel (eds) Europeanization in the Twentieth Century: Historical
Approaches. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 132–56.
 Bibliography 247

Conway, M. and Romijn, P. (2004) ‘Introduction to Theme Issue: Political

Legitimacy in Mid-Twentieth Century Europe’, Contemporary European History,
13(04), 377–88.
Conway, M., Romijn, P. and Carter, E. (2008) The War on Legitimacy in Politics and
Culture 1936–1946, Oxford and New York: Berg.
Coudenhove-Kalergi, R. N. (1924) Pan-Europa, Wien und Leipzig, Pan-Europa-
Verlag.
Council (1984) ‘Conclusions of the Sessions of the European Council (1975–
1990), Fontainebleau, 25 and 26 June’, Bulletin of the European Communities,
6(1984), 10–11.
Council (1985) Conclusions of the Presidency on the Brussels European Council,
29 and 30 March. Bulletin of the European Communities 7/85. pp. 15.
Council (1992a [1994]) European Council in Lisbon (26/27 June 1992).
Conclusions of the Presidency. In F. Laursen and S. Vanhoonacker (eds) The
Ratification of the Maastricht Treaty: Issues, Debates and Future Implications.
Maastricht: European Institute of Public Administration/Martinus Nijhof,
pp. 393–406.
Council (1992b [1994]) European Council of Birmingham (16 October 1992).
Conclusions of the Presidency. In F. Laursen and S. Vanhoonacker (eds) The
Ratification of the Maastricht Treaty: Issues, Debates and Future Implications.
Maastricht: European Institute of Public Administration, pp. 407–10.
Council (1992c [1994]) European Council in Edinburgh (11/12 December 1992).
Conclusions of the Presidency and Annexes. In F. Laursen and S. Vanhoonacker
(eds) The Ratification of the Maastricht Treaty: Issues, Debates and Future
Implications. Maastricht: European Institute of Public Administration/Martinus
Nijhof, pp. 411–41.
Council (1988a) ‘Conclusions of the Presidency on the Hannover European
Council, 27–28 June 1988’, http://www.europarl.europa.eu/summits/hannover
/he Pres_en.htm (11/05/2013).
Council (1988b) ‘Conclusions of the Presidency to the European Council in
Rhodes, 2 and 3 December’, Bulletin of the European Communities, 12, 8–13.
Council (1990) ‘Conclusions of the Presidency on the Dublin European Council,
25 and 26 June 1990’, http://www.europarl.europa.eu/summits/dublin/default_
en.htm (11/05/2013).
Council (2000) ‘Declaration on the Future of the Union to be Included in the Final
Act of the Conference/Declaration No. 23 Annexed to the Treaty of Nice’.
Council (2001) ‘Presidency Conclusions of the Laeken European Council (14 and
15 December 2001): Annex I: Laeken Declaration on the future of the European
Union’, Bulletin of the European Union, 2001(12), 19–23.
Council (2006) ‘Common Position adopted by the Council with view to the
adoption of a Decision of European Parliament and of the Council concerning
the implementation of a programme of support for the European audiovisual
sector (MEDIA 2007). Brussels, 20/06/2006’, Interinstitutional File 2004/0151
(COD), (6223/06).
Council, EP and Commission (1993) ‘Interinstitutional Declaration on democ-
racy, transparency, and subsidiarity’, Bulletin of the European Communities, 10,
118–20.
Couve de Murville, M. (1966 [20 October 1965]) Statement in the National
Assembly by Mr. Couve de Murville, French Minister for Foreign Affairs, on
248 Bibliography

the Common Market Crisis (20 October 1965). A retrospective view of the polit-
ical year in Europe 1965. Western European Union Assembly, General Affairs
Committee, pp. 109–13.
Crespy, A. (2008) ‘Dissent over the European Constitutional Treaty within the
French Socialist Party: Between Response to Anti-Globalization Protest and
Intra-Party Tactics’, French Politics, 6(1), 23–44.
Crespy, A. and Verschueren, N. (2009) ‘From Euroscepticism to Resistance to
European Integration: An Interdisciplinary Perspective’, Perspectives on European
Politics and Society, 10(3), 377–93.
Dahl, R. A. (1956) A Preface to Democratic Theory, Chicago, University of Chicago
press.
Dahl, R. A. (1971) Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition, New Haven, Yale
University Press.
Dahl, R. A. (1994) ‘A Democratic Dilemma: System Effectiveness versus Citizen
Participation’, Political Science Quarterly, 109(1), 23–34.
Dalem, A. (2001) Les discours de légitimation de l’union européenne. Mémoire
de D.E.A. sous la direction de Jean Leca. Cycle supérieur de pensée politique. Paris:
Institut d’études politiques.
Davies, B. (2008) ‘Meek Acceptance? The West German Ministeries’ Reaction
to the Van Gend en Loos and Costa Decisions’, Journal of European Integration
History, 14(2), 57–76.
Davies, B. (2011) Dealing with the Fallout: West Germany’s Response to the
Solange Decision (1974). European Union Studies Association, Twelfth Biennial
International Conference. Boston, Massachusetts. March 3–5, 2011.
Davies, B. (2012) Resisting the European Court of Justice. West Germany’s
Confrontation with European Law, 1949–1979, New York, Cambridge
University Press.
Daviter, F. (2007) ‘Policy Framing in the European Union’, Journal of European
Public Policy, 14(4), 654–66.
Daviter, F. (2011) Policy Framing in the European Union, Basingstoke and New York,
Palgrave Macmillan.
De Clerq, W. (1993) Reflection on Information and Communication Policy of
the European Community. Report by the Group of Experts chaired by Mr Willy
De Clercq. European Parliament. Brusssels: Commission of the European
Communities.
de Gaulle, C. (1960) Press Conference on 05/09/1960. Discours et messages. Tome
III: Avec le renouveau 1958–1962 (published 1970). Paris: Plon, pp. 244–6.
de Gaulle, C. (1962) Press Conference on 15/05/1962. In C. de Gaulle (ed.)
Discours et messages. Tome III: Avec le renouveau 1958–1962 (published 1970).
Paris: Plon, pp. 402–9.
de Gaulle, C. (1965) Twelfth press conference held by General de Gaulle as President
of the Fifth Republic at the Elysee Palace on 09/09/1965. http://aei.pitt.edu/5356/
(11/06/2013).
de Lapparent, O. (2010) Raymond Aron et l’Europe: itinéraire d’un Européen
dans le siècle, Bern, New York, Lang.
De Schutter, O., Lebessis, N. and Paterson, J. (2000) Governance in the European
Union, Brussels, Office for Official Publications of the European Communities.
de Villiers, P. (1992) Notre Europe sans Maastricht, Paris, Albin Michel.
 Bibliography 249

de Wilde, P. (2011) ‘No Polity for Old Politics? A Framework for Analyzing the
Politicization of European Integration’, Journal of European Integration, 33(5),
559–75.
de Wilde, P. and Trenz, H.-J. (2012) ‘Denouncing European Integration:
Euroscepticism as Polity Contestation’, European Journal of Social Theory,
15(4), 537–54.
de Wilde, P. and Zürn, M. (2012) ‘Can the Politicization of European Integration
be Reversed?’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 50(Supplement s1), 137–53.
Dean, M. (1999) Governmentality. Power and Rule in Modern Society, London,
Sage.
Debray, R. (1992) Contretemps. Éloges des idéaux perdus, Paris, Gallimard.
Dedman, M. J. (2010) The Origins and Development of the European Union
1945–2008. A History of European Integration, Abingdon, Routledge.
Dehousse, F. (1960) ‘Rapport général par le président du groupe de travail. In:
Rapport fait au nom la commission des affairs politiques et des questions insti-
tutionnelles sur l’élection de l’Assemblée parlementaire européenne au suffrage
universel direct’, EP Session Documents 1960–61, 30 April 1960, Document 22,
pp. 7–18.
Dehousse, R. (1995) ‘Constitutional Reform in the European Community: Are
there Alternatives to the Majority Avenue?’, West European Politics, 18(3),
118–36.
Dehousse, R. (2006) ‘The Unmaking of a Constitution: Lessons from the European
Referenda’, Constellations, 13(2), 151–64.
Delanty, G. (1995) Inventing Europe. Idea, Identity, Reality, London, Macmillan.
Delanty, G. and Rumford, C. (2005) Rethinking Europe. Social Theory and the
Implications of Europeanization, London and New York, Routledge.
Delgado Moreira, J. M. (2000) ‘Cohesion and Citizenship in EU Cultural Policy’,
Journal of Common Market Studies, 38(3), 449–70.
della Sala, V. (2010b) ‘Political Myth, Mythology and the European Union’,
Journal of Common Market Studies, 48(1), 1–19.
della Sala, V., guest editor (2010a) ‘Special Issue: Political Myth, Mythology and
the European Union’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 48(1), 1–190.
Delors, J. (1989) ‘Address to mark the 40th Anniversary of the College of Europe
in Bruges (21/10/1989)’, Europe Documents, (1576), 1–8.
Delors, J. (1993) Address to the European Parliament. http://www.gov-news.org
/gov/eu/news/address_by_jacques_delors_european_parliament/67694.html
(12/05/2013).
Deringer, A. (1962) ‘The reality of the Common Market – as seen by a member of
the European Parliament. Lecture by Arved Deringer, Attorney-at-law, of Bonn,
Member of the German Bundestag and the European Parliament. October
1962’, http://aei.pitt.edu/14840/ (13/05/2013).
Diez, T. (1999) ‘Speaking ‘Europe’: the Politics of Integration Discourse’, Journal of
European Public Policy, 6(4 Special Issue), 598–613.
Dinan, D. (1999) Ever Closer Union: An Introduction to European Integration,
Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.
Dimitrakopoulos, D. G. (2008) Collective Leadership in Leaderless Europe:
A Sceptical View. In J. E. S. Hayward (ed) Leaderless Europe. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, pp. 288–304.
250 Bibliography

Dinan, D. (2004) Europe Recast. A History of European Union, Basingstoke, Palgrave

Macmillan.
Downs, A. (1957) An Economic Theory of Democracy, New York, Harper.
Duchesne, S. and Frognier, A.-P. (2002) ‘Sur les dynamiques sociologiques et poli-
tiques de l’identification à l’Europe’, Revue Française de science politique, 52(4),
355–73.
Duchesne, S. and Van Ingelgom, V. (2008) ‘Comment les discussions deviennent
politiques, lorsque des Français, des Angalis ou des Belges francophones parlent
de l’Europe?’, Politique Européenne, 24, 145–9.
Duchesne, S., Frazer, E., Haegel, F. and Van Ingelgom, V. (2013) Citizens’ Reactions
to European Integration Compared: Overlooking Europe. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Duhamel, O. (2005) Des raisons du ‘non’, Paris, Seuil.
Easton, D. (1965) A Systems Analysis of Political Life, New York, Wiley.
Easton, D. (1975) ‘A Reassessment of the Concept of Political Support’, British
Journal of Political Science, 5, 435–57.
Economic and Social Committee of the European Communities (1985) Chairman
Muhr’s speeches to the ad hoc Committee for Institutional Affairs and a People’s
Europe. In the Office for Official Publications of the European Communities
(ed.) European Union, a People’s Europe and the Economic and Social Committee.
Luxembourg, pp. 46–71.
ECJ (1963) ‘Van Gend and Loos v. Nederlandse Administratie Belatingen. Case
26/62’, ECR, 1, 12.
ECJ (1964) ‘Costa v. Ente Nazionale per L’Energia Elettrica (ENEL). Case 6/64’,
ECR, 583.
Eder, M. D. (1932) ‘The Myth of Progress. An Address to the Chair of the Medical
Section of the British Psychological Society, delivered on January 27th, 1932’,
British Journal of Medical Psychology, 12(1), 1–14.
Eichenberg, R. and Dalton, R. (1993) ‘Europeans and the European Community:
The Dynamics of Public Support for European Integration’, International
Organization, 47, 507–34.
Eichenberg, R. C. and Dalton, R. J. (2007) ‘Post-Maastricht Blues: The
Transformation of Citizen Support for European Integration, 1973-2004’, Acta
Politica, 42(2/3), 128–52.
Eilstrup-Sangiovanni, M. (2006) Debates on European Integration: A Reader,
Basingstoke and New York, Palgrave Macmillan.
Elbe, S. (2001) ‘‘We Good Europeans ... ’: Genealogical Reflections on the Idea of
Europe’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 30(2), 259–83.
Elster, J. and Slagstad, R. (1988) Constitutionalism and Democracy, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press.
EP (1962) ‘Résolution de l’Assemblée parlementaire européenne, du 30 mars 1962,
relative à la dénomination de l’Assemblée’, Journal officiel des Communautés
européennes, 26/04/1962, 1045.
EP (1963a) ‘Résolution du Parlement européen, du 27 juin 1963, sur les
compétences et les pouvoirs du Parlement européen’, Journal officiel des
Communautés européennes, 12/07/1963(106), 1916–63.
EP (1963b) ‘Rapport fait au nom de la commission politique sur les compétences
et les pouvoirs du Parlement européen. Rapporteur Hans Furler. Documents de
séance 31, 14 juin 1983 [Report on behalf of the Political Committee on the
 Bibliography 251

competencies and powers of the European Parliament]’, EP Session Documents

1963–64, 31, 14 June 1963, 1–37.
EP (1968) European Parliament: the First Ten Years, 1958–1968, Luxembourg,
General Secretariat of the European Parliament.
EP (1969) ‘Résolution relative à l’élection des membres du Parlement européen
au suffrage universel direct (12 mars 1969). Translated by the CVCE’, Journal
officiel des Communautés européennes, 41(01/04/1969), 12.
EP (1970) ‘Résolution sur la réalisation par étapes de l’union économique et
monétaire de la Communauté’, Journal officiel des Communautés européennes,
C 151.
EP (1972) ‘Rapport fait au nom de la commission politique sur les résultats
de la Conférence au sommet des Chefs d’Etat ou de gouvernement. Avec,
en annexe, la déclaration de la conférence des chefs d’état ou de gouvern-
ment des états membre ou adhérents des communautés européennes, Paris
19–21 Octobre 1972’, Documents de séance, document 194/72.
EP (1983) Report on the Rights of Citizens of a Member State Residing in a Member
State Other Than Their Own to Stand for and Vote in Local Elections. ‘Macciocchi
Report’. Document PE 81.699 final (29 April 1983). European Parliament, Legal
Affairs Committee.
EP (1984) ‘Draft Treaty Establishing the European Union, Adopted on
14 February 1984 (“Spinelli Draft”)’, Bulletin of the European Communities,
1984(2).
EP (1992) ‘Résolution du Parlement européen sur les résultats des Conférences
intergouvernementales (7 avril 1992): A3–123/92’, Journal officiel des Communautés
européennes, 17/05/1992 (No. C 125).
EP (1995) Reflection Group’s Report. A Strategy for Europe. Messina, 02/06/1995,
and Brussels, 05/12/1995. http://www.europarl.eu.int/enlargement/cu/agree-
ments/reflex1_en.htm (25/10/2010).
EP (2006) ‘Resolution on the Commission White Paper on a European
Communication Policy (16/11/2006)’, P6_TA-PROV(2006)0500.
EPA (1960a) ‘Textes relatifs à l’élection de l’Assemblée parlementaire européenne
au suffrage universel direct – Texts on the Election of the Parliamentary Assembly
by Direct Universal Suffrage’, Official Journal of the European Communities, 60,
2 June 1960 834/60-841/60.
EPA (1960b) ‘Rapport fait au nom la commission des affairs politiques et
des questions institutionnelles sur l’élection de l’Assemblée parlementaire
européenne au suffrage universel direct. [Rapport on behalf of the Committee
on Political Affairs and Institutional Questions on the election of the European
Parliamentary Assembly by universal direct elections.] Rapporteurs Emilio
Battista, Fernand Dehousse, Maurice Faure, W.J. Schuijt, and Ludwig Metzger’,
EP Session Documents 1960–61, 30 April 1960, Document 22, pp. 1–52.
Eriksen, E. (2005) ‘An Emerging European Public Sphere’, European Journal of
Social Theory, 8(3), 341–63.
Eriksen, E. O. and Fossum, J. E. (eds) (2000) Democracy in the European Union.
Integration through Deliberation?, London and New York, Routledge.
Eriksen, E. O. and Fossum, J. E. (2002) ‘Democracy through Strong Publics in the
European Union?’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 40(3), 401–24.
Etzioni, A. (2007) ‘The Community Deficit’, Journal of Common Market Studies,
45(1), 23–42.
252 Bibliography

Everson, M. (1995) The Legacy of the Market Citizen. In J. Shaw and G. More
(eds) New Legal Dynamics of European Union. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
pp. 73–89.
Fairclough, N. (2003) Analysing Discourse. Textual Analysis for Social Research,
London and New York, Routledge.
Favell, A. (2008) Eurostars and Eurocities: Free Movement and Mobility in an
Integrating Europe, Malden, MA, Oxford, Blackwell.
Favell, A. (2009) Immigration, Migration, and Free Movement in the Making of
Europe. In J. T. Checkel and P. J. Katzenstein (eds) European Identity. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, pp. 167–89.
Favell, A. and Guiraudon, V. (2009) ‘The Sociology of the European Union: An
Agenda’, European Union Politics, 10(4), 550–76.
Featherstone, K. (1994) ‘Jean Monnet and the “Democratic Deficit” in the
European Union’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 32(2), 149–70.
Ferry, J.-M. (2000) La question de l’état européen, Paris, Gallimard.
Ferry, J.-M. (2005) L’état européen. In R. Kastoryano (ed.) Quelle identité pour
l’Europe? Le multiculturalisme à l’épreuve. 2nd, revised and expanded ed. Paris:
Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, pp. 231–90.
Ferry, J.-M. and Thibaud, P. (1992) Discussions sur l’Europe, Paris, Calmann-Lévy.
Finchelstein, G. (ed.) (2005) Le jour où la France a dit non. Comprendre
le référendum du 29 mai 2005, Paris, Fondation Jean-Jaurès/Plon.
Finke, B. (2007) ‘Civil Society Participation in EU Governance’, Living Reviews in
European Governance, 2(2 ), http://www.livingreviews.org/lreg-07–2 (06/07/2010).
Fischer, J. (2000) From Confederacy to Federation: Thoughts on the Finality of
European Integration. Speech at the Humboldt University in Berlin.
Fligstein, N. (2001) ‘Institutional Entrepreneurs and Cultural Frames. The
Case of the European Union’s Single Market Program’, European Societies, 3,
261–88.
Fligstein, N. and Mara-Drita, I. (1996) ‘How to Make a Market: Reflections on the
Attempt to Create a Single Market in the European Union’, American Journal of
Sociology, 102(1), 1–33.
Føllesdal, A. (2000) Subsidiarity and Democratic Deliberation. In E. O. Eriksen
and J. E. Fossum (eds) Democracy in the European Union. Integration through
Deliberation? London and New York: Routledge, pp. 85–110.
Føllesdal, A. (2006) ‘Survey Article: The Legitimacy Deficits of the European
Union’, The Journal of Political Philosophy, 14(4), 441–68.
Føllesdal, A. and Hix, S. (2006) ‘Why There is a Democratic Deficit in the EU: A
Response to Majone and Moravcsik’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 44(3),
533–62.
Fontaine, P. (2006) Europe in 12 Lessons, Brussels, European Commission,
Directorate-General for Communication.
Foret, F. (2008) Légitimer l’Europe. Pouvoir et symbolique à l’ère de la gouvern-
ance, Paris, Presses de Sciences Po.
Fossum, J. E. and Menendez, A. J. (2005) ‘The Constitution’s Gift? A Deliberative
Democratic Analysis of Constitution Making in the European Union’, European
Law Journal, 11(4), 380–440.
Fossum, J. E. and Schlesinger, P. (2007) The European Union and the Public
Sphere: A Communicative Space in the Making?, London and New York,
Routledge.
 Bibliography 253

Foucault, M. (1984) Truth and Power. In P. Rabinow (ed.) The Foucault Reader.
Harmondsworth: Penguin, pp. 51–75.
Foucault, M. (2007) Security, Territory and Population, Basingstoke and New York,
Palgrave Macmillan.
Foucault, M. (2008) The Birth of Biopolitics, Basingstoke and New York, Palgrave
Macmillan.
Freeden, M. (2005) Liberal Languages: Ideological Imaginations and Twentieth-
Century Progressive Thought, Princeton, Princeton University Press.
Gadamer, H.-G. (1989) Das Erbe Europas: Beiträge, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp.
Gallie, W. B. (1956) ‘Essentially Contested Concepts’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society, 56, 167–98.
Garcia, G. and Van Ingelgom, V. (2010) ‘Etudier les rapports des citoyens à
l’Europe à partir d’entretiens collectifs : Une illustration des problèmes de la
comparaison internationale en méthodologie qualitative’, Revue internationale
de politique comparée, 17(1), 131–63.
García, S. (ed.) (1993) European Identity and the Search for Legitimacy, London, Pinter.
Gaus, D. (2010) Two Kinds of Democratic Legitimacy for the EU? Input- and Output-
Oriented Legitimacy as a Case of Conceptual Misformation. Paper presented at
the conference ‘Democracy as Idea and Practice’. Oslo, 14–15 January 2010 (unpub-
lished manuscript).
Gaxie, D., Hube, N. and Rowell, J. (eds) (2011) Perceptions of Europe. A Comparative
Sociology of European Attitudes, Colchester, ECPR Press.
Georgakakis, D. and Weisbein, J. (2010) ‘From Above and from Below: A Political
Sociology of European Actors’, Comparative European Politics, 8(1), 93–109.
Geuss, R. (2001) History and Illusion in Politics, Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press.
Gilbert, M. (2008) ‘Narrating the Process: Questioning the Progressive Story of
European Integration’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 46(3), 641–62.
Gilley, B. (2006a) ‘The Determinants of State Legitimacy: Results for 72 Countries’,
International Political Science Review, 27(1), 47–71.
Gilley, B. (2006b) ‘The meaning and measure of state legitimacy: Results for
72 countries’, European Journal of Political Research, 45(3), 499–525.
Gilley, B. (2009) The Right to Rule. How States Win and Lose Legitimacy, New
York, Columbia University Press.
Gillingham, J. (1991) Coal, Steel, and the Rebirth of Europe, 1945–1955. The
Germans and French from Ruhr Conflict to Economic Community, Cambridge
and New York, Cambridge University Press.
Gillingham, J. (2003) European Integration, 1950–2003: Superstate or New Market
Economy?, Cambridge; New York, Cambridge University Press.
Giscard d’Estaing, V. (2003) Kissinger Lecture at the Library of Congress,
Washington, D.C., 11/02/2003.
Glencross, A. (2009) ‘The Difficulty of Justifying European Integration as a
Consequence of Depoliticization: Evidence from the 2005 French Referendum’,
Government and Opposition, 44(3), 243–61.
Goetze, S. and Rittberger, B. (2010) ‘A matter of habit The sociological founda-
tions of empowering the European Parliament’, Comparative European Politics,
8(1), 37–54.
Goffman, E. (1974) Frame Analysis: an Essay on the Organization of Experience,
Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press.
254 Bibliography

Grande, E. (2000) Post-National Democracy in Europe. In M. T. Greven and

L. W. Pauly (eds) Democracy Beyond the State? The European Dilemma and the
Emerging Global Order. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 115–38.
Greenwood, J. (2007) ‘Organized Civil Society and Democratic Legitimacy in the
European Union’, British Journal of Political Science, 37(02), 333–57.
Griffiths, R. (2006) A Dismal Decade? European Integration in the 1970s. In
D. Dinan (ed.) Origins and Evolution of the European Union. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, pp. 169–90.
Grimm, D. (1994) Die Zukunft der Verfassung. In U. K. Preuss (ed.) Zum Begriff der
Verfassung. Die Ordnung des Politischen. Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, pp. 277–303.
Guiraudon, V. and Favell, A. (2011) Sociology of the European Union, Basingstoke
and New York, Palgrave Macmillan.
Haahr, J. H. (2005) ‘Governmentality and the Problem of Democracy in European
Integration’, Centre for Democratic Network Governance, Roskilde University,
Denmark. Working Paper, 2005(1).
Haas, E. B. (1958) The Uniting of Europe. Political, Social, and Economic Forces,
1950–1957, Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press.
Haas, E. B. (1960) Consensus Formation in the Council of Europe, Berkeley, University
of California Press.
Haas, E. B. (1964) Beyond the Nation-State: Functionalism and International
Organization, Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press.
Haas, E. B. (1968 [1963]) Technocracy, Pluralism and the New Europe. In J. Nye
(ed.) International Regionalism: Readings. Boston, MA: Little Brown, pp. 149–76.
Habermas, J. (1973) Legitimation Crisis, Boston, Beacon.
Habermas, J. (1976) ‘Legitimationsprobleme im modernen Staat’, Merkur, 332,
37–56.
Habermas, J. (1992) Citoyenneté et identité nationale. Réflexions sur l’avenir de
l’Europe. In J. Lenoble and N. Dewandre (eds) L’Europe au soir du siècle. Identité
et démocratie. Paris, Esprit, pp. 17–38.
Habermas, J. (1996) Between Facts and Norms. Contributions to a Discourse
Theory of Law and Democracy, Cambridge, Polity.
Habermas, J. (1998) The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory,
Cambridge, MIT Press.
Habermas, J. (2001) ‘Why Europe Needs a Constitution’, New Left Review, 11(Sept.
/Oct.), 5–26.
Habermas, J. (2008) Ach, Europa, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp.
Hainsworth, P. (2006) ‘France Says No: The 29 May 2005 Referendum on the
European Constitution’, Parliamentary Affairs, 59(1), 98–117.
Hajer, M. A. (1995) The Politics of Environmental Discourse. Ecological
Modernization and the Policy Process, Oxford, Clarendon.
Hajer, M. A. (2005) ‘Coalitions, Practices, and Meaning in Environmental Politics:
From Acid Rain to BSE.’ In D. Howarth and J. Torfing (eds) Discourse Theory in
European Politics. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 297–315.
Hall, P. A. (1989) The Political Power of Economic Ideas: Keynesianism Across Nations,
Princeton, Princeton University Press.
Hall, P. and Taylor, R. (1966) ‘Political Science and Three New Institutionalisms’,
Political Studies, 44(5), 936–57.
Hallstein, W. (1951) Der Schuman-Plan. Nachschrift des am 28. April 1951 in der
Aula der Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main gehaltenen
 Bibliography 255

Vortrages. Translated by the Centre Virtuel de la Connaissance sur l’Europe

(CVCE). Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, pp. 7–29.
Hallstein, W. (1955) ‘Auf dem Weg zur europäischen Einheit. German radio
broadcast on the decisions taken at Messina in June 1955’, Bulletin des Presse-
und Informationsamtes der Bundesregierung., 06/12/1955 (No. 228).
Hallstein, W. (1959a) ‘Moves Toward Integration. Article by Professor Walter
Hallstein, President of the Commission of the European Economic Community’,
The Times Review of Industry, January 1959.
Hallstein, W. (1959b) ‘Record of a speech by Professor Walter Hallstein, President of
the Commission of the European Economic Community, at the annual dinner
of the Foreign Press Association. The Hague, 24 January 1959. 381/1/59-E’.
Hallstein, W. (1959c) ‘Remarks by Walter Hallstein, President of the Commission
of the European Economic Community, at the National Press Club Luncheon.
Washington, DC, 11 June 1959’.
Hallstein, W. (1960a) Address by the President of the Commission of the European
Economic Community to the Joint Session of the European Parliament and the
Consultative Assembly of the Council of Europe. Strasbourg, 24 June 1960.
Commission of the European Communities, X/3564/60-E. http://aei.pitt.
edu/14959/.
Hallstein, W. (1964) ‘Some of our “faux problems”’. Fourteenth Sir Daniel
Stevenson Memorial Lecture of the Royal Institute of International Affairs,
Chatham House, London. December 4, 1964’, Community Topics, 17.
Hallstein, W. (1965) Address by Professor Dr. Walter Hallstein President of the
Commission of the European Economic Community, given at the British
Institute of International and Comparative Law, London 25 March 1965, 3574
/X/65-E: Commission of the European Economic Community.
Hansen, L. and Williams, M. C. (1999) ‘The Myths of Europe: Legitimacy,
Community and the ‘Crisis’ of the EU’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 37(2),
233–49.
Hart, H. L. A. (1961) The Concept of Law, Oxford, Clarendon Press.
Hay, C. and Rosamond, B. (2002) ‘Globalization, European Integration and the
Discursive Construction of Economic Imperatives’, Journal of European Public
Policy, 9(2 April), 147–67.
Heard-Lauréote, K. (2010) European Union Governance: Effectiveness and
Legitimacy in European Commission Committees, Abingdon, New York,
Routledge.
Heathcote, N. (1966) ‘The Crisis of European Supranationality’, Journal of Common
Market Studies, 5, 140–71.
Heine, S. (2009) Une gauche contre l’Europe? Les critiques radicales et altermondi-
alistes contre l’Union européenne en France, Bruxelles, Ed. de l’Université de
Bruxelles.
Heinelt, H. (2007) Participatory Governance and European Democracy. In
B. Kohler-Koch and B. Rittberger (eds) Debating the Democratic Legitimacy of the
European Union. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 217–32.
Held, D. (2006) Models of Democracy, Stanford, Stanford University Press.
Herman, V. and Lodge, J. (1978) ‘Democratic legitimacy and direct elections to
the European parliament’, West European Politics, 1(2), 226–51.
Héritier, A. (1999a) ‘Elements of Democratic Legitimation in Europe: an
Alternative Perspective’, Journal of European Public Policy, 6(2), 269–82.
256 Bibliography

Héritier, A. and Rhodes, M. (2010) New Modes of Governance in Europe Governing

in the Shadow of Hierarchy, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.
Hix, S. (1999) ‘Dimensions and Alignments in European Union Politics: Cognitive
Constraints and Partisan Responses’, European Journal of Political Research, 35(1),
69–106.
Hix, S. (2008) What’s Wrong with the European Union and How to Fix it,
Cambridge, Polity Press.
Hix, S. and Høyland, B. (2011) The Political System of the European Union,
Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.
Hobolt, S. B. (2009) Europe in Question: Referendums on European Integration,
Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Hobolt, S. B. (2012a) Public Opinion and Integration. In E. Jones, A. Menon and
S. Weatherill (eds) The Oxford Handbook of the European Union. Oxford, Oxford
University Press, pp. 716–33.
Hobolt, S. B. (2012b) ‘Citizen Satisfaction with Democracy in the European
Union’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 50, 88–105.
Höffe, O. (2007) Democracy in an Age of Globalisation, Dordrecht, Springer.
Hoffmann, S. (1966) ‘Obstinate or Obsolete? The Fate of the Nation-State and the
Case of Western Europe’, Daedalus, 95(3), 862–915.
Hooghe, L. and Marks, G. (2007) ‘Special Issue: Understanding Euroscepticism’,
Acta Politica, 42(2–3).
Hooghe, L. and Marks, G. (2009) ‘A Postfunctionalist Theory of European
Integration: From Permissive Consensus to Constraining Dissensus’, British
Journal of Political Science, 39(1), 1–23.
Hooghe, L. and Marks, G. (2012) Politicization. In E. Jones, A. Menon and
S. Weatherill (eds) The Oxford Handbook of the European Union. Oxford, Oxford
Univ Press, pp. 840–53.
Hooghe, L., Marks, G. and Wilson, C. (2002) ‘Does Left/Right Structure Party
Positions on European Integration?’, Comparative Political Studies, 35, 965–89.
Höpner, M. and Schäfer, A. (2010) ‘A New Phase of European Integration:
Organised Capitalisms in Post-Ricardian Europe’, West European Politics, 33(2),
344–68.
Hörber, T. (2006) The Foundations of Europe: European Integration Ideas
in France, Germany and Britain in the 1950s, Wiesbaden, VS Verlag für
Sozialwissenschaften.
Höreth, M. (2001) ‘The European Commission’s White Paper on Governance: a
“Tool-kit” for Closing the Legitimacy Gap of EU Policy-making’, ZEI Discussion
Paper, C 95.
Horne, C. (2009) ‘A Social Norms Approach to Legitimacy’, American Behavioral
Scientist, 53(3), 400–15.
Howe, P. (1995) ‘A Community of Europeans: The Requisite Underpinnings’,
Journal of Common Market Studies, 33(1), 27–44.
Howarth, D. and Torfing, J. (2005) Discourse Theory in European Politics: Identity,
Policy, Governance, Basingstoke and New York, Palgrave Macmillan.
Howarth, D. and Varouxakis, G. (2003) Contemporary France. An Introduction to
French Politics and Society, London, Arnold.
Hrbek, R. and Bofinger, P. (1992) Der Vertrag von Maastricht in der wissenschaftli-
chen Kontroverse. Beiträge für das Jahreskolloquium des Arbeitskreises Europäische
Integration e.V., 12–14. November 1992 in Bonn, Baden-Baden, Nomos.
 Bibliography 257

Hubert, A. and Caremier, B. (2000) Democracy and the Information Society in Europe,
Brussels, Office for Official Publications of the European Communities.
Huizinga, J. (2000 [1949]) Homo Ludens. A Study of the Play-Element in Culture,
Abingdon, Routledge.
Hurd, I. (1999) ‘Legitimacy and Authority in International Politics’, International
Organization, 53(2), 379–408.
Hurrelmann, A. (2007) Transforming the Golden-Age Nation State, Basingstoke,
Palgrave Macmillan.
Imig, D. (2004) Contestation in the Streets: European Protest and The Emerging
Europolity. In G. Marks and M. R. Steenbergen (eds) European Integration and
Political Conflict. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Inglehart, R. (1970) ‘Cognitive Mobilization and European Identity’, Comparative
Politics, 3(1), 45–70.
Ipsen, H. P. (1972) Europäisches Gemeinschaftsrecht, Tübingen.
Ipsos (2005) Référendum 29 Mai 2005: Le sondage sorti des urnes (30/05/2005).
Ivaldi, G. (2006) ‘Beyond France’s 2005 Referendum on the European
Constitutional Treaty: Second-Order Model, Anti-Establishment Attitudes
and the End of the Alternative European Utopia’, West European Politics,
29(1), 47–69.
Jachtenfuchs, M. (2002) Die Konstruktion Europas. Verfassungsideen und institu-
tionelle Entwicklung, Baden-Baden, Nomos.
Jachtenfuchs, M., Diez, T. and Jung, S. (1998) ‘Which Europe? Conflicting Models
of a Legitimate Political Order’, European Journal of International Relations, 4(4),
409–45.
Jolly, M. (2005) ‘A Demos for the European Union?’, Politics, 25(1), 12–8.
Jung, S. (1999) Europa, made in France. Eine Analyse des politischen Diskurses
Frankreichs zur Zukunft der Europäischen Gemeinschaft – von den Anfängen
bis heute, Baden-Baden, Nomos.
Kadelbach, S. (2003) ‘Union Citizenship’, Jean Monnet Working Papers, 9/03.
Kaul, I., Grunberg, I. and Stern, M. (1999) Global Public Goods: International
Cooperation in the 21st Century, New York, Oxford University Press.
Kauppi, N. (2003) ‘Bourdieu’s Political Sociology and the Politics of European
Integration’, Theory and Society, 32(5/6), 775–89.
Kauppi, N. (2010) ‘The Political Ontology of European Integration’, Comparative
European Politics, 8(1), 19–36.
Katz, R. S. and Wessels, B. (1999) The European Parliament, the National
Parliaments, and European Integration. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Keraudren, P. and Dubois, N. (1994) France and the Ratification of the Maastricht
Treaty. In F. Laursen and S. Vanhoonacker (eds) The Ratification of the Maastricht
Treaty. Issues, Debates and Future Implications. Maastricht: European Institute of
Public Administration, pp. 147–79.
Kirchhof, P. (1993) ‘Europäische Einigung und der Verfassungsstaat der
Bundesrepublik Deutschland’. In J. Isensee (ed.) Europa also politische Idee und
als rechtliche Form. 2nd edn. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot.
Knapp, A. and Wright, V. (2006) The Government and Politics of France, London,
New York, Routledge.
Kohler-Koch, B. (1999) The Evolution and Transformation of European
Governance. In B. Kohler-Koch and R. Eising (eds) The Transformation of
Governance in the European Union. London: Routledge, pp. 14–35.
258 Bibliography

Kohler-Koch, B. (2000) ‘Framing: the Bottleneck of Constructing Legitimate

Institutions’, Journal of European Public Policy, 7(4), 513–31.
Kohler-Koch, B. and Rittberger, B. (2006) ‘The ‘Governance Turn’ in EU Studies’,
Journal of Common Market Studies, 44(s1), 27–49.
Kohler-Koch, B. and Rittberger, B. (2007) Debating the Democratic Legitimacy of the
European Union, Lanham, Rowman & Littlefield.
Koslowski, R. (1999) EU Citizenship: Implications for Identity and Legitimacy.
In T. Banchoff and M. P. Smith (eds) Legitimacy and the European Union – The
Contested Polity. London: Routledge, pp. 167–85.
Kraus, P. A. (2004) ‘Die Begründung demokratischer Politik in Europa. Zur
Unterscheidung von Input- und Output-Legitimation bei Fritz W. Scharpf’,
Leviathan, 32(4), 558–67.
Kraus, P. A. (2008) A Union of Diversity: Language, Identity and Polity-building
in Europe, New York, Cambridge University Press.
Kraus, P. A. (2012) ‘The Politics of Complex Diversity: A European Perspective’,
Ethnicities, 12(1), 3–25.
Kristeva, J. (2000) Crisis of the European Subject, New York, Other Press.
Kurzer, P. (2001) Markets and Moral Regulation: Cultural Change in the European
Union, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Laborde, C. (2001) ‘The Culture(s) of the Republic: Nationalism and Multiculturalism
in French Republican Thought’, Political Theory, 29(5), 716–35.
Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C. (1985) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a
Radical Democratic Politics, London, Verso.
Lacroix, J. (2005) Euroscepticism among the Intellectuals (... and how it can help
to understand the true nature of the European construct). Paper presented at the
Workshop on ‘National Identity and Euroscepticism: A Comparison Between
France and the United Kingdom’, Oxford University, Department of Politics
and International Relations, European Research Group, 13/05/2005.
Lacroix, J. (2008) La pensée française à l’épreuve de l’Europe, Paris, Grasset.
Lacroix, J. (2010) Borderline Europe. In J. Lacroix and K. Nicolaïdis (eds) European
Stories: Intellectual Debates on Europe in National Contexts. Oxford and New York:
Oxford University Press, pp. 105–22.
Lacroix, J. and Coman, R. (eds) (2007) Les résistances à l’Europe. Cultures nationales,
idéologies, Brussels, Editions de l’Université de Bruxelles.
Lacroix, J. and Nicolaïdis, K. (2010) European Stories: Intellectual Debates on Europe
in National Contexts, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press.
Lagerfeld, S. (1990) ‘Europhoria’, Wilson Quarterly, 14, 57–67.
Laffan, B. (1993) The Treaty of Maastricht: Political Authority and Legitimacy. In
A. W. Cafruny and G. G. Rosenthal (eds) The State of the European Community.
Vol. 2. The Maastricht Debates and Beyond. Essex, Longman, pp. 35–51.
Laffan, B. (1996) ‘The Politics of Identity and Political Order in Europe’, Journal of
Common Market Studies, 34, 81–102.
Lagerfeld, S. (1990) ‘Europhoria’, Wilson Quarterly, 14, 57–67.
Laïdi, Z. (2008) Norms Over Force. The Enigma of European Power, New York,
Palgrave Macmillan.
Lamassoure, A. (2004) Histoire secrète de la convention européennne, Paris,
Albin Michel.
Larner, W. and Walters, W. (2004) Global Governmentality: Governing International
Spaces, London, New York, Routledge.
 Bibliography 259

Lauring Knudsen, A.-C. (2011) On the Social Dimension of Democratic

Legitimacy. The European Parliament and Inter-Parliamentary Relations
prior to 1979. Draft Paper Prepared presented on 21/06/2011 on the Panel
‘Legitimacy and the Institutions of the European Union’. Transformations of the
State. Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Oxford.
Laursen, F. and Vanhoonacker, S. (eds) (1994) The Ratification of the Maastricht
Treaty: Issues, Debates and Future Implications, Dordrecht, Martinus Nijhoff.
Le Gall, G. (2005) La démythification d’un ‘non’ tribunitien. In G. Finchelstein
(ed.) Le jour où la France a dit non. Comprendre le référendum du 29 mai 2005.
Paris: Fondation Jean-Jaurès, pp. 100–23.
Lebessis, N. and Paterson, J. (2000) ‘Developing New Modes of Governance’,
Working Paper, European Commission Forward Studies Unit.
Lenaerts, K. (2003) The Merits and Shortcomings of the Draft Constitution for
Europe: a First Appraisal. http://www.law.kuleuven.be/ccle/pub_EU_draft_
constitution_(K._Lenaerts)_print.htm (14/04/2012).
Leonard, M. (ed.) (2000) The Future Shape of Europe, London, Foreign Policy Centre.
Lerner, M. (1957) America as a Civilization. Life and Thought in the United States
Today, New York, Simon and Schuster.
Leucht, B. (2010) ‘Expertise and the Creation of a Constitutional Order for Core
Europe: Transatlantic Policy Networks in the Schuman Plan Negotiations’. In
W. Kaiser, B. Leucht and M. Gehler (eds) Transnational Networks in Regional
Integration: Governing Europe 1945-83. Studies in EU Politics Series. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 18–37.
Leucht, B. (2011a) Panel ‘Legitimacy and the Institutions of the European Union’
at the Conference ‘Transformations of the State: Interdisciplinary Perspectives’.
Oxford University, 21/05/2011.
Leucht, B. (2011b) The Origins of the Crisis of Legitimacy of the European
Union? The Design of the High Authority and the European Commission.
Paper presented on 21/05/2011 on the Panel ‘Legitimacy and the Institutions
of the European Union’. Transformations of the State: Interdisciplinary Perspectives.
Oxford University.
Levi, M., Sacks, A. and Tyler, T. (2009) ‘Conceptualizing Legitimacy, Measuring
Legitimating Beliefs’, American Behavioral Scientist, 53(3), 354–75.
Liebert, U. (2007) ‘Special Issue: Europe in Contention. Debating the Constitutional
Treaty’, Perspectives on European Politics and Society, 8(3).
Lindberg, L. N. (1963) The Political Dynamics of European Economic Integration,
Stanford, California, Stanford University Press.
Lindberg, L. N. and Scheingold, S. A. (1970) Europe’s Would-Be Polity. Patterns of
Change in the European Polity, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, Prentice-Hall.
Lindblom, C. E. (1959) ‘The Science of “Muddling Through”’, Public Administration
Review, 19(2), 79–88.
Lindblom, C. E. (1965) The Intelligence of Democracy: Decision Making Through
Mutual Adjustment, New York, Free Press.
Lindgren, K.-O. and Persson, T. (2010) ‘Input and Output Legitimacy: Synergy or
Trade-off? Empirical Evidence from an EU Survey’, Journal of European Public
Policy, 17(4), 449–67.
Lindgren, K.-O. and Persson, T. (2011) Participatory Governance in the EU.
Enhancing or Endangering Democracy and Efficiency? Basingstoke and
New York, Palgrave Macmillan.
260 Bibliography

Lindseth, P. L. (2010) Power and Legitimacy: Reconciling Europe and the Nation-
State, Oxford University Press.
Lipset, S. M. (1959) ‘Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development
and Political Legitimacy’, The American Political Science Review, 53(1), 69–105.
Lodge, J. (1994) ‘Transparency and Democratic Legitimacy’, Journal of Common
Market Studies, 32(3), 343–68.
Lodge, J. and Herman, V. (1978) ‘Institutional Reform in the European
Community: The Case for Bicameralism’, Canadian Journal of Political Science
/Revue canadienne de science politique, 11(03), 575–600.
Lord, C. (2001) ‘Assessing Democracy in a Contested Policy’, Journal of Common
Market Studies, 39(4), 641–61.
Lord, C. (2008) ‘Two Constitutionalisms? A Comparison of British and French
Government Attempts to Justify the Constitutional Treaty’, Journal of European
Public Policy, 15(7), 1001–18.
Lord, C. and Harris, E. (2006) Democracy in the New Europe, Basingstoke and
New York, Palgrave Macmillan.
Lord, C. and Magnette, P. (2004) ‘E Pluribus Unum? Creative Disagreement about
Legitimacy in the EU’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 42(1), 183–202.
Loth, W. (2001) Crises and Compromises: the European Project 1963–1969, Baden-
Baden, Nomos.
Loth, W. (ed.) (2002) Entwürfe einer europäischen Verfassung. Eine historische
Bilanz, Bonn, Europa Union Verlag.
Lucarelli, S., Cerutti, F. and Schmidt, V. A. (2010) Debating Political Identity and
Legitimacy in the European Union: Interdisciplinary Views, London, Routledge.
Ludlow, N. P. (2006) From Deadlock to Dynamism. The European Community in
the 1980s. In D. Dinan (ed.) Origins and Evolution of the European Union. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, pp. 218–32.
Lukes, S. (2005) Power. A Radical View, New York, Palgrave Macmillan.
Luns, J. (1957) Address given by Joseph Luns at the ceremony held to mark the
signing of the Rome Treaties (Rome, 25 March 1957). Archives historiques du
Conseil de l’Union européenne, Bruxelles, Rue de la Loi 175. Négociations des
traités instituant le CEE et la CEEA (1955–1957), CM3. Conférence des minis-
tres des Affaires étrangères et signature des traités de la CEE et de la CEEA,
Rome, 25.03.1957, CM3/ NEGO/098.
Maas, W. (2005) ‘The Genesis of European Rights’, Journal of Common Market
Studies, 443(5), 1009–25.
Maatsch, S. (2007) ‘The Struggle to Control Meanings: The French Debate on the
European Constitution in the Mass Media’, Perspectives on European Politics and
Society, 8(3), 261–80.
Magnette, P. (2001) ‘Appointing and Censuring the European Commission: The
Adaptation of Parliamentary Institutions to the Community Context’, European
Law Journal, 7(3), 292–310.
Magnette, P. (2003) ‘European Governance and Civic Participation: Beyond Elitist
Citizenship?’, Political Studies, 51(1), 144–60.
Magnette, P. (2005) The European Ombudsman: Protecting Citizen’s Rights
and Strengthening Parliamentary Scrutiny. In P. N. Diamandouros (ed.)
The European Ombudsman. Origins, Establishment, Evolution. Commemorative
Volume Published on the Occasion of the 10th Anniversary of the Institution.
 Bibliography 261

Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities,

pp. 106–25.
Magnette, P. and Nicolaïdis, K. (2004) ‘The European Convention: Bargaining in
the Shadow of Rhetoric’, West European Politics, 27(3), 381–404.
Maier, J. and Rittberger, B. (2008) ‘Shifting Europe’s Boundaries’, European Union
Politics, 9(2), 243–67.
Mair, P. (2007) ‘Political Opposition and the European Union’, Government and
Opposition, 42(1), 1–17.
Mair, P. and Thomassen, J. (2010) ‘Political Representation and Government in
the European Union’, Journal of European Public Policy, 17(1), 20–35.
Majone, G. (1996) Regulating Europe, London, Routledge.
Majone, G. (1998) ‘Europe’s Democratic Deficit: The Question of Standards’,
European Law Journal, 4(1), 5–28.
Major, J. (1994) Europe: A Future that Works, William and Mary Lecture, Leiden
University, 07/09/1994.
Manent, P. (2003) ‘Current Problems of European Democracy’, Modern Age, Winter.
Manin, B. (1997) The Principles of Representative Government, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press.
Mansholt, S. (1958a) ‘Summary of the speech by Dr. S. L. Mansholt, Vice-President
of the Commission of the European Economic Community, delivered at the
plenary meeting of the contracting parties. 17 October 1958. GATT-Thirteenth
Session, delegation release’, MGT/110/58.
Mansholt, S. (1958c) Address given by Sicco Mansholt at the Agriculture
Conference of the EEC Member States (Stresa, 3–12/071958). In Communauté
européenne (ed.) Recueil des documents de la Conférence agricole des Etats
membres de la Communauté économique européenne à Stresa du 3 au 12 juillet
1958. Translated by the CVCE. Luxembourg: Service des publications des
Communautés européennes, pp. 231–6.
Mansholt, S. (1962) ‘On the Threshold of a Common Agricultural Policy’, Bulletin
of the European Economic Community, 1962(3), 5–6.
Marcussen, M., Risse, T., Engelmann-Martin, D., Knopf, H. J. and Roscher,
K. (1999) ‘Constructing Europe. The Evolution of French, British, and German
Nation-State Identities’, Journal of European Public Policy, 6(4), 614–33.
Marjolin, R. (1958) The free world’s stake in the Common Market. Address by
the Honorable Robert Marjolin, Vice-President of the Commission of the
European Economic Community, before a joint meeting of the International
Press Institute and the American Society of Newspaper Editors. Washington,
D.C., 17 April 1958 http://aei.pitt.edu/14404/ (12/05/2013).
Marks, G., Hooghe, L., Nelson, M. and Edwards, E. (2006) ‘Party Competition and
European Integration in the East and West: Different Structure, Same Causality’,
Comparative Political Studies, 39(2), 155–75.
Marks, G. and Steenbergen, M. R. (2004) European Integration and Political Conflict,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Marquand, D. (1979) Parliament for Europe, London, Jonathan Cape.
Marsh, D. (1994) Germany and Europe. The Crisis of Unity, London, William
Heinemann.
Martino, G. (1957) Address given by Gaetano Martino at the ceremony held
to mark the signing of the Rome Treaties (Rome, 25 March 1957). Archives
262 Bibliography

historiques du Conseil de l’Union européenne, Bruxelles, Rue de la Loi 175.

Négociations des traités instituant le CEE et la CEEA (1955–1957), CM3.
Conférence des ministres des Affaires étrangères et signature des traités de la
CEE et de la CEEA, Rome, 25.03.1957, CM3/ NEGO/098.
Mather, J. (2006) Legitimating the European Union. Aspirations, Inputs and
Performance, Houndsmill, Basingstoke, and New York, Palgrave Macmillan.
Mattli, W. and Slaughter, A.-M. (1998) ‘Revisiting the European Court of Justice’,
International Organization, 52(1), 177–209.
Mayntz, R. (2005) ‘Embedded Theorizing. Perspectives on Globalization and
Global Governance’, Max-Planck-Institut für Gesellschaftsforschung Discussion
Paper, 05(14).
McAllister, R. (1997) From EC to EU: An Historical and Political Survey, London,
Routledge.
McAllister, R. (2010) European Union: An Historical and Political Survey,
Abingdon, Routledge.
McLaren, L. M. (2006) Identity, Interests, and Attitudes to European integration,
Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.
McLaren, L. (2007) ‘Explaining Mass-Level Euroscepticism: Identity, Interests,
and Institutional Distrust’, Acta Politica, 42(2–3), 233–51.
Medrano, J. D. (2003) Framing Europe: Attitudes to European Integration in
Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom, Princeton, Princeton University
Press.
Meehan, E. (1993) Citizenship and the European Community, London, Sage.
Mény, Y. (2003) ‘De La Démocratie en Europe: Old Concepts and New Challenges’,
Journal of Common Market Studies, 41(1), 1–13.
Merlingen, M. (2003) ‘Governmentality: Towards a Foucauldian Framework for
the Study of IGOs’, Cooperation and Conflict, 38(4), 361–84.
Meyer, C. (1999) ‘Political Legitimacy and the Invisibility of Politics: Exploring
the European Union’s Communication Deficit’, Journal of Common Market
Studies, 37(4), 617–39.
Mihelj, S., Koenig, T., Downey, J. and Stetka, V. (2008) ‘Mapping European
Ideoscapes. Examining Newspaper Debates on the EU Constitution in Seven
European countries’, European Societies, 10(2), 275–301.
Miller, D. (1995) On Nationality, Oxford, Claredon.
Miller, P. and Rose, N. (2008) Governing the Present:. Administering Economic, Social
and Personal Life, Cambridge; Malden, MA, Polity Press.
Milliken, J. (1999) ‘The Study of Discourse in International Relations: A Critique of
Research and Methods’, European Journal of International Relations, 5(2), 225–54.
Milner, H. (2006) ‘“YES to the Europe I want; NO to this one.” Some Reflections
on France’s Rejection of the EU Constitution’, PS: Political Science & Politics,
39(April PS Symposium: EU Constition: RIP), 257–60.
Milward, A. S. (2000) The European Rescue of the Nation-State, 2nd edn, London,
Routledge.
Mitrany, D. (1933) The Progress of International Government, New Haven, Yale
University Press.
Mitrany, D. (1943) A Working Peace System, London, Institute of International
Affairs.
Monnet, J. (1962) ‘L’Europe unie sera démocratique’, Bulletin de la Communauté
économique européenne, Mars 1962, no 3.
 Bibliography 263

Monnet, J. (1978) Memoirs, London, Collins.

Moravcsik, A. (1998) The Choice for Europe: Social Purpose and State Power from
Messina to Maastricht, London and New York, Routledge.
Moravcsik, A. (2002) ‘In Defense of the “Democratic Deficit”: Reassessing
Legitimacy in the European Union’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 40(4),
603–43.
Moravcsik, A. and Sangiovanni, A. (2002) ‘On Democracy and ‘Public Interest’ in
the European Union’. In W. Streeck and R. Mayntz (eds) Die Reformierbarkeit der
Demokratie. Innovationen und Blockaden. Frankfurt: Campus.
Morgan, G. (2005) The Idea of a European Superstate: Public Justification and
European Integration, Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press.
Mottier, V. (2005) ‘From Welfare to Social Exclusion: Eugenic Social Policies and
the Swiss National Order’. In D. Howarth and J. Torfing (eds) Discourse Theory
in European Politics: Identity, Policy, Governance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
pp. 255–74.
Mouffe, C. (1992) Preface: Democratic Politics Today. In C. Mouffe (ed.) Dimensions
of Radical Democracy. London: Verso, pp. 1–39.
Mouffe, C. (2000 [2009]) The Democratic Paradox, London, New York, Verso.
Mouffe, C. (2005) On the Political, London, New York, Routledge.
Mouffe, C. (2010) Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism? In J. Gripsrud
and M. Eide (eds) The Idea of the Public Sphere: a Reader. Lanham, MD: Lexington
Books pp. 270–8.
Mourlon-Druol, E. (2010) ‘Filling the EEC Leadership Vacuum? The Creation of
the European Council in 1974’, Cold War History, 10(3), 315–39.
Muirhead, R. (2006) ‘A Defense of Party Spirit’, Perspectives on Politics, 4(04),
713–27.
Müller, J.-W. (2010) In the Shadow of Statism. Peculiarities of the German Debates
on European Integration. In J. Lacroix and K. Nicolaïdis (eds) European Stories:
Intellectual Debates on Europe in National Contexts. Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press, pp. 87–104.
Münch, R. (2010) European Governmentality. The Liberal Drift of Multilevel
Governance, London, Routledge.
Neyer, J. (2003) ‘Discourse and Order in the EU’, Journal of Common Market Studies,
41(4), 687–706.
Nicolaïdis, K. (2004a) ‘The New Constitution as European Demoi-cracy?’, Critical
Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 7(1).
Nicolaïdis, K. (2004b) ‘We, the Peoples of Europe ... ’, Foreign Affairs, 83(6), 97–110.
Nicolaïdis, K. (2007) ‘Trusting the Poles? Constructing Europe through Mutual
Recognition’, Journal of European Public Policy, 14(5), 682–98.
Nicolaïdis, K. (2010) ‘The JCMS Annual Review Lecture Sustainable Integration:
Towards EU 2.0?’, JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies, 48, 21–54.
Nicolaïdis, K. (2012) The Idea of European Demoicracy. In J. Dickson and
P. Eleftheriadis (eds) Philosophical Foundations of European Union Law. Oxford:
Oxfrod University Press, pp. 247–75.
Nicolaïdis, K. (2013) ‘European Demoicracy and Its Crisis’, Journal of Common
Market Studies, 51(2), 351–69.
Nicolaysen, G. (2004) Die Europäische Union als Rechtsgemeinschaft. In
W. Weidenfeld (ed) Die Europäische Union: Politisches System und Politikbereiche.
Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, pp. 109–24.
264 Bibliography

Norris, P. (ed.) (1999) Critical Citizens: Global Support for Democratic

Government, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Nylander, J. (2001) ‘The Construction of a Market. A Frame Analysis of the
Liberalization of the Electricity Market in the European Union’, European
Societies, 3(3), 289–314.
Obradovic, D. (1996) ‘Policy Legitimacy and the European Union’, Journal of
Common Market Studies, 34(2), 191–221.
Offe, C. (1984) The Contradictions of the Welfare State, London, Hutchinson.
Olson, M. (1965) The Logic of Collective Action. Public Goods and the Theory of
Groups, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press.
Pachirat, T. (2006) We Call it a Grain of Sand: the Interpretive Orientation and
a Human Science. In D. Yanow and P. Schwartz-Shea (eds) Interpretation and
Method. Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn. Armonk, N.Y.:
M.E. Sharpe, pp. 373–79.
Pantel, M. (1999) Unity-in-Diversity: Cultural Policy and EU Legitimacy. In
T. Banchoff and M. P. Smith (eds) Legitimacy and the European Union. London
and New York: Routledge, pp. 46–65.
Parsons, C. (2003) A Certain Idea of Europe, Ithaca, Cornell University Press.
Paterson, W. E. and Nugent, N. (2010) Hastening Slowly: European Union Studies
Between Reinvention and Continuing Fragmentation. In M. Egan, N. Nugent
and W. E. Paterson (eds) Research Agendas in EU Studies: Stalking the Elephant.
Basingstoke, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 398–420.
Pélabay, J., Nicolaïdis, K. and Lacroix, J. (2010) Echoes and Polyphony: In Praise
of Europe’s Narrative Diversity. In J. Lacroix and K. Nicolaïdis (eds) European
Stories: Intellectual Debates on Europe in National Contexts. Oxford; New York:
Oxford University Press, pp. 334–62.
Pennings, P. (2002) ‘The Dimensionality of the EU Policy Space: The European
Elections of 1999’, European Union Politics, 3(1), 59–80.
Pentland, C. (1981) Political Theories of European Integration: Between Science
and Ideology. In D. Lasok and P. Soldatos (eds) The European Communities in
Action. Brussels: Bruylant.
Perrineau, P. (2005) Le référendum français du 29 mai 2005. In P. Perrineau (ed.) Le
vote européen 2004–2005: de l’élargissement au référendum français. Paris: Presses
de Sciences Po, pp. 234–40.
Peterson, J. (2001) ‘The Choice for EU Theorists: Establishing a Common
Framework for Analysis’, European Journal of Political Research, 39(3), 289–318.
Pineau, C. (1957) Address given by Christian Pineau at the ceremony held to mark
the signing of the Rome Treaties (Rome, 25 March 1957). Archives historiques
du Conseil de l’Union européenne, Bruxelles, Rue de la Loi 175. Négociations
des traités instituant le CEE et la CEEA (1955–1957), CM3. Conférence des
ministres des Affaires étrangères et signature des traités de la CEE et de la CEEA,
Rome, 25.03.1957, CM3/ NEGO/098.
Pitkin, H. F. (1967) The Concept of Representation, Berkeley/Los Angeles, University
of California Press.
Preuß, U. K. (1995) Citizenship and Identity: Aspects of a Political Theory of
Citizenship. In R. Bellamy, V. Bufacchi and D. Castiglione (eds) Democracy
and Constitutional Culture in the Union of Europe. London: Lothian Free Press,
pp. 107–20.
 Bibliography 265

Preuß, U. K. (1996) The Political Meaning of Constitutionalism. In R. Bellamy (ed)

Constitutionalism, Democracy and Sovereignty: American and European Perspectives.
Aldershot: Avebury, pp. 11–27.
Prodi, R. (1999a) ‘Address Delivered to Parliament by Romano Prodi, President-
designate of the Commission, on 21 July’, Bulletin of the European Union,
7/8–1999.
Prodi, R. (1999b) Speech by Romano Prodi, President of the European Commission
to the European Parliament, 14 September. In CEC (ed.) RAPID. The Press and
Communication Service of the European Commission. SPEECH/99/114. Brussels.
Prodi, R. (2000) ‘Speech to the European Parliament on 15/02/2000. ‘Shaping the
New Europe’’, http://ec.europa.eu/governance/docs/archives_en.htm (05/12/2006).
Prodi, R. (2001) ‘Speech to the European Parliament on 04/09/2001. ‘The
European Union and its Citizens: a Matter of Democracy’’, http://ec.europa.eu
/governance/docs/archives_en.htm (05/12/2006).
Prodi, R. and Reding, V. (2002) Message from Mr. Prodi and Mrs. Reding. http://
ec.europa.eu/education/archive/million/message_en.html (01/07/2008).
Rabier, J.-R. (2003) Entretien avec M. Jacques-René Rabier, fondateur de
l’Eurobarmomètre, 21 octobre 2003. http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/anni-
versary_fr.htm (21/01/2010).
Radaelli, C. (1999) ‘The Public Policy of the European Union: Whither Politics of
Expertise?’, Journal of European Public Policy, 6(5), 757–74.
Rein, M. and Schön, D. (1991) Frame-reflective Policy Discourse. In P. Wagner,
C. Hirschon Weiss, B. Wittrock and H. Wollmann (eds) Social Sciences and Modern
States: National Experiences and Theoretical Crossroads. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, pp. 262–89.
Ricard-Nihoul, G. (2005) ‘The French “No” Vote on 29 May 2005: Understanding
and Action’, Notre Europe. Etudes & Recherches, 44(November).
Riker, W. H. (1986) The Art of Political Manipulation, New Haven, Yale University
Press.
Risse, T. (2006) Transnational Governance and Legitimacy. In Y. Papadopoulos
and A. Benz (eds) Governance and Democracy. Comparing National, European and
International Experiences. London, New York: Routledge, pp. 179–99.
Risse, T. (2010) A Community of Europeans? Transnational Identities and Public
Spheres, Ithaca, Cornell University Press.
Risse-Kappen, T. (1996) ‘Exploring the Nature of the Beast: International Relations
Theory and Comparative Poliocy Analysis Meet the European Union’, Journal of
Common Market Studies, 34(1), 53–80.
Rittberger, B. (2003) ‘The Creation and Empowerment of the European
Parliament*’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 41(2), 203–25.
Rittberger, B. (2005) Building Europe’s Parliament: Democractic Representation
Beyond the Nation State, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Rittberger, B. (2006) ‘‘No Integration without Representation!’ European
Integration, Parliamentary Democracy, and Two Forgotten Communities’,
Journal of European Public Policy, 13(8), 1211–29.
Rosamond, B. (2000) Theories of European Integration, Basingstoke and New York,
Palgrave Macmillan.
Rose, N. and Miller, P. (1992) ‘Political Power Beyond the State: Problematics of
Government’, British Journal of Sociology, 43(2), 173–205.
266 Bibliography

Rose, N. S. (1999) Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought, Cambridge,

New York, Cambridge University Press.
Rothstein, B. (2009) ‘Creating Political Legitimacy. Electoral Democracy Versus
Quality of Government’, American Behavioral Scientist, 53(3), 311–30.
Rowell, J. and Mangenot, M. (2010) A Political Sociology of the European Union:
Reassessing Constructivism, Manchester, Manchester University Press.
Rumford, C. (2002) The European Union: A Political Sociology, Oxford, Blackwell.
Rye, L. (2009) The Origins of Community Information Policy: Educating
Europeans. In W. Kaiser, B. Leucht and M. Rasmussen (eds) The History of the
European Union: Origins of a Trans- and Supranational Polity 1950-72. New York:
Routledge, pp. 148–66.
Sájó, A. (2004) Constitutional Enthusiasm. Towards Network Constitutionalism?
In J. H. H. Weiler and C. L. Eisgruber (eds) Altneuland: The EU Constitution in a
Contextual Perspective. Jean Monnet Working Paper 5/04.
Sangiovanni, A. (2012) Solidarity in the European Union. In J. Dickson and
P. Eleftheriadis (eds) Philosophical Foundations of European Union Law. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, pp. 385–411.
Santer, J. (1985) ‘Déclaration de Monsieur Jacques Santer, Président du Gouvernement,
Président en exercise du Conseil Européen sur la Session du Conseil Européen de
Milan les 28 et 29 juin 1985’, Bulletin de documentation, 4, 14–8.
Sauger, N. N., Brouard, S. S. and Grossmann, E. (2007) Les Français contre l’Europe?
Les sens du référendum du 29 mai 2005, Paris, Presses de Sciences Po.
Saurugger, S. (2008) ‘Interest Groups and Democracy in the European Union’,
West European Politics, 31(6), 1274–91.
Saurugger, S. and Mérand, F. (2010) ‘Special Issue: Mainstreaming Sociology in EU
Studies’, Comparative European Politics, 8(1).
Schaar, J. H. (1984) Legitimacy in the Modern State. In W. Connolly (ed.)
Legitimacy and the State. New York: New York University Press, pp. 104–33.
Scharpf, F. (1997) ‘Economic Integration, Democracy and the Welfare State’,
Journal of European Public Policy, 4(1), 18–36.
Scharpf, F. (1999) Governing in Europe. Effective and Democratic?, Oxford, Oxford
University Press.
Scharpf, F. (2009) ‘Legitimacy in the Multilevel European Polity’, European Political
Science Review, 1(02), 173–204.
Schattschneider, E. E. (1957) ‘Intensity, Visibility, Direction and Scope’, The
American Political Science Review, 51(4), 933–42.
Schattschneider, E. E. (1960) The Semisovereign People: a Realist’s View of
Democracy in America, New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Schimmelfennig, F. (2003) The EU, NATO and the Integration of Europe: Rules and
Rhetoric. Cambridge, UK, New York: Cambridge University Press.
Schlesinger, P. R. (2001) From Cultural Protection to Political Culture? In
L.-E. Cederman (ed.) Constructing Europe’s Identity: the External Dimension.
Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, pp. 91–114.
Schmidt, V. (2000) Values and Discourse in the Politics of Adjustment. In F. Scharpf
and V. Schmidt (eds) Welfare and Work in the Open Economy. Volume I: From
Vulnerability to Competitiveness? Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 229–309.
Schmidt, V. A. (2004) ‘The European Union: Democratic Legitimacy in a Regional
State?’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 42(5), 975–97.
 Bibliography 267

Schmidt, V. A. (2008) ‘Discursive Institutionalism: The Explanatory Power of

Ideas and Discourse’, Annual Review of Political Science, 11(1), 303–26.
Schmidt, V. (2010) ‘Democracy and Legitimacy in the European Union
Revisited. Input, Output and Throughput’, KFG Working Paper Series (Kolleg-
Forschergruppe ‘The Transformative Power of Europe’, Freie Universität Berlin),
No. 21 (November 2010).
Schneider, S., Hurrelmann, A., Krell-Laluhova, Z. and Nullmeier, F. (2010)
Democracy’s Deep Roots. Why the Nation State Remains Legitimate, Basingstoke,
Palgrave Macmillan.
Schneider, S., Nullmeier, F. and Hurrelmann, A. (2007) Exploring the
Communicative Dimension of Legitimacy: Text Analytical Approaches. In
A. Hurrelmann, S. Schneider and J. Steffek (eds) Legitimacy in an Age of Global
Politics. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 126–55.
Schumpeter, J. A. (1947) Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, New York, London,
Harper & Bros.
Scott, J. (1998) Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve Human Condition
Have Failed, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press.
Servan-Schreiber, J.-J. (1967) Le Défi américain, Paris, Denoël.
Shaw, J. (1997) ‘Citizenship of the Union: Towards Post-national Membership?’,
Jean Monnet Working Papers, 07/97.
Shaw, J. (2003) ‘Process, Responsibility and Inclusion in EU Constitutionalism’,
European Law Journal, 9(1), 45–68.
Shlaim, A. (1973) ‘The Vedel Report and the Reform of the European Parliament’,
Parliamentary Affairs, 27(1973 Dec), 159–70.
Shore, C. (1993) ‘Inventing the ‘People’s Europe’: Critical Approaches to European
Community ‘Cultural Policy’’, Man (New Series), 28(4 (December 1993)),
779–800.
Shore, C. (2000) Building Europe: The Cultural Politics of European Integration,
London and New York, Routledge.
Shore, C. (2006) ‘Government Without Statehood? Anthropological Perspectives
on Governance and Sovereignty in the European Union’, European Law Journal,
12(6), 709–24.
Siedentop, L. (2000) Democracy in Europe, London, Penguin.
Skach, C. (2005) ‘We, the Peoples? Constitutionalizing the European Union’,
Journal of Common Market Studies, 43(1), 149–70.
Skogstad, G. (2003) ‘Legitimacy and/or Policy Effectiveness? Network Governance
and GMO Regulation in the European Union’, Journal of European Public Policy,
10(3), 321–38.
Sloterdijk, P. (1994 [2002]) Falls Europa erwacht, Franfurt/Main, Suhrkamp.
Sørensen, C. (2008) ‘Love Me, Love Me Not ... A Typology of Public Euroscepticism’,
Sussex European Institute Working Paper, 101.
Spaak, P. H. (1957) ‘Discours à l’occasion de la signature des Traités instituant
la Communauté Economique Européenne et la Communauté Européenne
de l’Energie Atomique (25/03/1957)’, Archives historiques des Communautés
européennes, Florence, Villa Il Poggiolo. Fonds des institutions communautaires
européennes, EC. Conseil des ministres, CM., CM 3 NEGO 091.
Spénale, G. (1975) ‘Statement by Georges Spénale following the Rome European
Council (1 and 2 December 1975)’, Bulletin of the European Communities, 11, 10.
268 Bibliography

Spinelli, A. (1966) The Eurocrats: Conflict and Crisis in the European Community
[Rapporto sull’Europa], by Altiero Spinelli. Translated by C. Grove Haines,,
Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Press.
Stavrakakis, Y. (2005) Passions of Identification: Discourse, Enjoyment, and
European Identity. In D. Howarth and J. Torfing (eds) Discourse Theory in
European Politics: Identity, Policy, Governance. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, pp. 68–92.
Steed, M. (1971) ‘The European Parliament: the Significance of Direct Election’,
Government and Opposition, 6(4), 462–76.
Sternberger, D. (1990) Verfassungspatriotismus. Gesammelte Schriften. Frankfurt
/Main: Insel, pp. 13–16.
Szczerbiak, A. and Taggart, P. (2003) ‘Theorising Party-based Euroscepticism.
Problems of Definition, Measurement and Causality’, Sussex European Institute
Working Paper, 69.
Taguieff, P.-A. (2001) Résister au bougisme: démocratie forte contre mondialisa-
tion techno-marchande, Paris, Mille et une nuits.
Tarrow, S. and Imig, D. R. (2001) Contentious Europeans. Protest and Politics in an
Integrating Europe, Lanham, MD; Oxford, Rowman & Littlefield.
Tarrow, S. G. (2005) The New Transnational Activism, New York, Cambridge
University Press.
TF1 (1992) 03/09/1992. ‘Aujourdh’hui l’Europe’. transcript available at http://
www.vie-publique.fr/cdp/927010500.html (16/06/2008).
Thatcher, M. (1988) Speech to the College of Europe, 20 September 1988 http://
www.margaretthatcher.org/document/107332 (13/05/2013).
The Governments of Belgium, France, the German Federal Republic, Italy,
Luxembourg and and the Netherlands (1951) ‘Joint Declaration of the Ministers
Signatory to the Treaty Establishing the European Coal and Steel Pool (18 April
1951)’, Archives historiques du Conseil de l’Europe – Historical archives of the Council
of Europe, Strasbourg, 1 (Exchange of information and publicity), 24215.
Theiler, T. (2001) Why the European Union Failed to Europeanize its Audiovisual
Policy. In L.-E. Cederman (ed.) Constructing Europe’s Identity. The External
Dimension. Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, pp. 115–40.
Theiler, T. (2003) ‘Culture and European Integration’, Journal of European Public
Policy, 10(5), 841–8.
Thomassen, J. J. A. (2009) The Legitimacy of the European Union after Enlargement,
Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Trenz, H.-J. and Eder, K. (2004) ‘The Democratizing Dynamics of a European
Public Sphere: Towards a Theory of Democratic Functionalism’, European
Journal of Social Theory, 7(1), 5–25.
Tsakatika, M. (2005) ‘Claims to Legitimacy: The European Commission between
Continuity and Change’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 43(1), 193–220.
Tsakatika, M. (2007) ‘Governance vs. Politics: the European Union’s Constitutive
‘Democratic Deficit’’, Journal of European Public Policy, 14(6), 867–85.
Tsoukalis, L. (2005) What Kind of Europe?, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Tully, J. (1999) ‘The Agonic Freedom of Citizens’, Economy and Society, 28(2),
161–82.
Tully, J. (2007) ‘A New Kind of Europe? Democratic Integration in the European
Union’, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 10(1), 71–86.
 Bibliography 269

Tully, J. (2008) Public Philosophy in a New Key. Volume II, Imperialism and Civic
Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Turner, V. (1974) Dramas, Fields and Metaphors. Symbolic Action in Human
Society, Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press.
Uterwedde, H. (2007) Les allemands face à la mondialisation. In E. Fabry (ed.)
Les européeens face à la mondialisation. Sondage international. Analyses qualita-
tives comparées. Paris: Kairos Future, Fondation pour l’innovation politique,
pp. 63–97.
van der Stoel, M. (1976) Speech by the President of the Council of the European
Communities, Max van der Stoel, to mark the signing of the Act concerning the
election of the representatives of the European Parliament by direct universal
suffrage (20 September 1976). in Directorate-General for Information (ed.)
European Elections May–June 1978. Luxembourg.
Van Ingelgom, V. (forthcoming) Integrating Indifference: a Comparative, Qualitative
and Quantitative Approach to the Legitimacy of European Integration.
Van Ingelgom, V. (2010) Intégrer l’indifférence: une approche comparative, quali-
tative et quantitative, de la légitimité de l’intégration européenne. Thèse de
doctorat. Institut d’études politiques. Université catholique de Louvain.
Vanke, J. (2006) Charles de Gaulle’s Uncertain Idea of Europe. In D. Dinan (ed.)
Origins and Evolution of the European Union. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
pp. 141–66.
Veil, S. (1979) ‘Speech to the Newly Elected European Parliament (17 July 1979)’,
Debates of the European Parliament, 20–4.
Wæver, O. (1990) ‘Three Competing Europes: German, French, Russian’,
International Affairs, 66(3 July), 477–93.
Wæver, O. (2004) Discursive Approaches. In A. Wiener and T. Diez (eds) European
Integration Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 197–15.
Wæver, O. (2005) European Integration and Security: Analysing French and
German Discourses of State, Nation, and Europe. In D. Howarth and J. Torfing
(eds) Discourse Theory in European Politics. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, pp. 33–67.
Wallace, H. (1993) ‘European Governance in Turbulent Times’, Journal of Common
Market Studies, 313, 293–303.
Wallström, M. (2005) ‘Bridging the Gap: How to Bring Europe and its Citizens
Closer Together? Speech by the Vice President of the European Commission
responsible for Institutional affairs and communication strategy at the
Stakeholders’ Forum co-organised by the European economic and Social
Committee and the European Commission, Brussels, 08/11/2005’.
Walters, W. and Haahr, J. H. (2005a) ‘Governmentality and Politcal Studies’,
European Political Science, 4(3), 288–300.
Walters, W. and Haahr, J. H. (2005b) Governing Europe. Discourse, Governmentality
and European Integration, London and New York, Routledge.
Warleigh, A. (2003) Democracy in the European Union, London, Sage.
Weiler, J. (1995) ‘Does Europe Need a Constitution? Demos, Telos and the German
Maastricht Decision’, European Law Journal, 1(3), 219–58.
Weiler, J. (1999) The Constitution of Europe, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Weiler, J. (2002) ‘A Constitution for Europe? Some Hard Choices’, Journal of
Common Market Studies, 40(4), 562–80.
270 Bibliography

Weiler, J., Haltern, U. R. and Mayer, F. C. (1995) European Democracy and its
Critique. In J. Hayward (ed.) The Crisis of Representation in Europe. London:
Frank Cass, pp. 4–39.
Weiler, J. and Wind, M. (eds) (2003) European Constitutionalism Beyond the State,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Werner, P. (1970) Report to the Council and the Commission on the Realization
by Stages of Economic and Monetary Union in the Community (‘Werner Plan’),
Luxembourg, Office for Official Publications of the EC.
Westle, B. (2007) Political Belief and Attitudes: Legitimacy in Public Opinion
Research. In A. Hurrelmann, S. Schneider and J. Steffek (eds) Legitimacy in an
Age of Global Politics. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 93–125.
White, J. (2003) ‘Theory Guiding Practice: the Neofunctionalists and the Hallstein
EEC Commission’, Journal of European Integration History, 9(1), 111–32.
White, J. (2009) ‘The Social Theory of Mass Politics’, The Journal of Politics, 71(1),
96–112.
White, J. (2010a) ‘Europe and the Common’, Political Studies, 58(1), 104–22.
White, J. (2010b) ‘Europe in the Political Imagination’, Journal of Common Market
Studies, 48(4), 1015–38.
White, J. (2010c) ‘European Integration by Daylight’, Comparative European
Politics, 8(1), 55–73.
White, J. (2011) Political Allegiance after European integration, Basingstoke and
New York, Palgrave Macmillan.
White, J. and Ypi, L. (2010) ‘Rethinking the Modern Prince: Partisanship and the
Democratic Ethos’, Political Studies, 58(4), 809–28.
White, J. and Ypi, L. (2011) ‘On Partisan Political Justification’, American Political
Science Review, 105(2), 381–96.
Wiener, A. (1997) ‘Making Sense of the New Geography of Citizenship: Fragmented
Citizenship in the European Union’, Theory and Society, 26(4, Special Issue on
Recasting Citizenship), 529–60.
Wiener, A. and della Sala, V. (1997) ‘Constitution-Making and Citizenship
Practice – Bridging the Democracy Gap in the EU?’, Journal of Common Market
Studies, 35(4), 595–614.
Williams, B. (2005) Realism and Moralism in Political Theory. In G. Hawthorn (ed.)
In the Beginning Was the Deed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 1–17.
Yanow, D. (2006) Thinking Interpretively: Philosophical Presuppositions and
the Human Sciences. In D. Yanow and P. Schwartz-Shea (eds) Interpretation and
Method. Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn. Armonk, N.Y.: M.E.
Sharpe, pp. 5–26.
Zaller, J. R. (1992) The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press.
Zhao, D. (2009) ‘The Mandate of Heaven and Performance Legitimation in
Historical and Contemporary China’, American Behavioral Scientist, 53(3),
416–33.
Zimmermann, A. and Favell, A. (2011) ‘Governmentality, Political Field or Public
Sphere? Theoretical Alternatives in the Political Sociology of the EU’, European
Journal of Social Theory, 14(4), 489–515.
Zürn, M. (2004) ‘Global Governance and Legitimacy Problems’, Government and
Opposition, 39(2), 260–87.
Index

Adonnino Reports on a People’s support, 101, 202; as legitimacy-

Europe, 83, 86, 93–6, 102; enhancing, 103
see also People’s Europe as mere ‘ornament’, 120
agency, see under voluntarism and and popular sovereignty, will of
agency, hope, social engineering, the people, 84, 106; see also under
‘social’ versus ‘liberal’ Europe separate entries
automaticity re-constitution of Europeans as
through timetables, 37 political and rights-bearing
see also under integration, (Union) citizens, 82, 99–104;
‘inner logic’ of as well as culturally embedded
human beings, 82, 198
Basic Law (Grundgesetz), 45–6, as solution to democratic deficit,
127, 184 151–2, 200
Beetham, David, 6, 10–11, 16, civil society involvement, see under
209, 213 governance; participatory
Bolkestein, Fritz, 165–6, 170–1 democracy
bringing the people in versus keeping closeness of Europe to the citizens or
them out, 198–9, 202–4 people, 86, 204
Bundesbank, 111, 114, 132 through transparency and
bureaucracy, 40 subsidiarity, 141, 143, 144,
see also bureaucracy 146, 157
see also distance between EU and
Chirac, Jacques, 114, 164–6, 171–2, Europeans
188, 194 Cold War, 20, 23–4, 80, 116–17
citizen expectations, see people, will Commission [38]
of the and Council, 67–8
citizenship, Union as effective bureaucracy, 40 see also
as an aggression on French under technocracy
citizenship, 120–2 and EP, 53, 59
constitution of the Community and governance, see under
through the constitution of its governance
citizens, 99 as impartial and politically
and ECJ judicial activism, 103–4 neutral, 40
granting of rights on grounds as ‘repository of the European
of economic logic, 100; versus General Will’, 32
European voting rights as a Common Agricultural Policy, 37, 80, 81
matter of entitlement, 102–3; common good, European, 25–33,
market citizens, 82, 100, 199 69, 74–5, 198
as identity-building or projecting as embodied by Commission, 32–3
a move towards post-national EU as favouring ‘the economy’ over
identity, 99, 103, 124, 152, 200; ‘the common good’, 166
and as creating a link between as indivisible, 27; ideal public good
EU and citizens, and popular theory, 48; integration as

271
272 Index

common good, European – continued definitional and representational, 5

positive-sum game, 28, 69; literature on patterns of, 221–2
short-term sacrifices outweighed of national interests, 30, 78, 106,
by long-term benefits, 28 191; overcome by ‘human effort’
narrative of a consensus on its and technocratic government,
existence and nature, 69 38, 42; partisan, class, and
need to establish belief in it in ideological, 169; superseded in
European hearts and minds, to European ‘common good’, 47;
‘organise the commonality of see also separate entry
interests’, 29–30 need for open approach to, 169,
ontological status: in existence 223–8, 233–4, 238–9; see also
versus in need of reinfocrement, contestation; politicisation
29–30 over distribution of costs and
as opposed to Community benefits, and objectives and
interest, 32 forms of integration, 74–5,
common market, see single market 186, 217, 221, 237; and
communication and information de-politicisation dynamics, see
policies, 62, 83, 86–93 separate entry; papered over by
as educating European pre-1970s economic growth,
citizens, 62 73–4
EU legitimacy gap as information redistributive conflicts in context of
gap, 135 EMU, 119; challenge to reliance
focus on concrete benefits from on output legitimation, 186
integration, 90–1 consensus
linked with identity-building, narrative of a general consensus on
96, 153 integration, its objectives, and
‘marketing’ Europe, 89–91 European common good, 69, 79,
multiplied efforts in 1990s, 135 198–9, 228, 268
silence as a communication of 1950s and 60s on aspiration to
strategy, 135, 200 ‘caring state’, 73
see also Eurobarometer, and under constitutional moment, 156,
identity-building 160ff., 237
communism constitutional patriotism, 128, 133,
threat of, 20, 73 154–5, 158, 192, 200;
transformed international situation see also under identity, European;
after fall of, 116–17 identity-building
as a unifying ‘other’, 153 constitutionalisation
competences of Community law, 44–6
attributed to national and of economic policy, moving it
supranational levels according to beyond the realm of democratic
criterion of efficiency, 185 contestation, 169
clearer division and definition of, construction, narrative and
146, 156–7 argumentative, 1, 6, 8
competence creep, 67, 146 constructivism, 9
return of competences to the and knowledge production, 6
member-states, 185 legitimacy as an object of, 3–10
competitiveness, international, 91–2 contestation, 5
concept, essentially contested, 4 case for conceptualising EU as a
conflict framework and forum for
 Index 273

political contestation, and debates, but in different senses

practicalities of doing so, 238–9; from official rhetoric, 200–1
see also conflict, need for an as main challenge to EU legitimacy,
open approach to 136, 190; equation with EU’s
contested stakes of integration legitimacy deficit, 140
politics, 24, 56; see also political as a matter of: balance between
nature of integration politics Council and Commission,
contest over, rather than match 120, 138–9; citizen alienation,
between citizen preferences and 160, 182; executive-legislative
goals of EU action as measure of balance, 58, 78, 138; the EU’s
EU legitimacy, 220 open finalité, 186–7, 190–1;
desirable as a basis for political lacking popular support, 130,
community, 226, 238; as 185–6; top-down integration,
enabling practice of democracy, 185–6, 190
224; on grounds of alternatives, proto-versions of critique, 57–8;
222–3 classical democratic deficit
dynamics of, 8; history of contests theory, 137; as manipulable
over meaning, 8 catchphrase, 137
see also conflict; politicisation to be remedied through Union
Convention, European (or on the citizenship, identity- and
Future of Europe), 144, 156–7, demos-building, 151–2, 200;
190, 193, 204–5 non-majoritarian forms of
comparison to the Philadelphia democracy, 137; as well as greater
Convention, 156 transparency, subsidiarity, and
Copenhagen Declaration on governance, see separate entries
European Identity, 96–8, 103, de Gaulle, Charles, 65–72, 78,
129; see also under identity, 122, 204
European; identity-building Dehousse Report (EPA 1960b),
Council, 38 55–6, (60), 62, 217
and Commission, 68 delegation, normative-legal
and EP, 53, 59 principle, 41
gradual establishment of Delors, Jacques, 41, 80–1, 86, 139–40
leadership, 67–8 democracy
as location of real power, 68 meanings stretched in official
as standing for consensus discursive management of post-
politics, 70 Maastricht legitimacy crisis,
crisis, empty chair, 65–6 particularly in transparency,
cultural policies, 95–6; see also under subsidiarity, and governance
identity-building discourses, 136–51, 157–8, 201,
203; see separate entries
deficit, democratic 14, 137 national differences in meanings
as focus of post-Maastricht legitimacy associated with democracy in
discourses, partly in response to EU contexts, 131, 137, 190, 201;
French and German critiques insistence on more classical,
of EU democracy in Maastricht majoritarian understandings
debates, 200; but also distracting in French and German case
from EMU, 139, 158, 200 studies, 202; see also national-
key theme in French and German republicanism; no-demos
Maastricht and constitutional critiques
274 Index

democracy – continued beyond the realm of political

not necessarily prominent in contestation, 11, 42, 47, 169
post-war legitimation discourses, techniques: appeal to the law and
50–1, 53, 198; but federalist legality, 42–6; common-good
visions of, 52–3, 203 narrative, 25–33; indispensability
possibility of democracy at EU narrative, 19–25; logic of rational
level, 119–30, 157, 200 social engineering, 33–42; on
shifting and concurrent emphases their sustained success, 56
in conceptualisations of in tension between politicising and
official and public discourses: de-politicising tendencies, 198,
electoral, 56, 77, 202; European 206, 241
Parliament as main repository dialogue with the European citizens,
of democratic legitimacy, 53, 83, 93, 150
138; governance as a more discourse, 2
genuine form of democracy, definition, 2
148–9; majoritarian versus discourse analysis, 232
non-majoritarian, 41, 137, discursive contests, 3
148, 202; parliamentary, 51–2, focus on contents rather than
77, 139–40; participatory actors of, 9
democracy, 14, 148; distance between EU and Europeans,
supranational, 51, 77 160, 173, 204
shifting emphases in academic citizen alienation, 128, 160, 182
literature, 209–12; resonances as key meaning of the democratic
between academic, and public deficit, 185–6
and official discourses on, as a problem for EU legitimacy
215–16 and the feasibility of deepened
see also deficit, democratic integration, 129, 160, 173
demos-building, 151–7 subsidiarity as solution, 144–6
difference between demos and see also closeness of Europe to the
identity, 128 citizens or people
as remedy to democratic deficit, diversity
making plausible that there ‘billiard-ball view’ of cultural
could be democracy at the EU diversity in EU identity politics
level, counter-acting national- (Peter Kraus), 106, 158
republican and no-demos in Copenhagen Declaration, 31, 96
critiques, 152, 200; see separate narrative, 14, 235
entries ‘unity in diversity’, 154
see also identity-building dumping
de-politicisation, as a legitimation and Eastern enlargement, 175
technique, 19–47, 198–9 salary and social, as key motif
challenged by counter-discourses in Germany at time of
and developments underlining constitutional debate, 173
the contestedness of integration social and fiscal, as enabled by
politics, 49–79, 115, 187, 191, constitutional treaty167
198–9; see also permissive and Turkey, 172
consensus Draft Treaty Establishing the
glossing over controversial and European Union, 83, 205
contested stakes of integration as a demos-building exercise,
politics, moving them 155–6
 Index 275

as an ex post and ex ante need to involve citizens in

legitimation exercise, 190, 192 determining, 192
impact on EU democracy, 180–1 enlargement
and democracy: people ‘never
Economy consulted’ about Eastern
catching up, 21–2 enlargement, 170–2
economic integration as obvious Eastern enlargement as over-
choice, 24 charging latently xenophobic
Europe’s economic weight, 22 population, 172
post-war recovery, 21–2 Eastern enlargement as
Economic and Monetary Union, providing link between EU and
110–15 unemployment, 176
central focus of Maastricht debates, perception of EU as a threat since
199 Eastern enlargement, 176
and fears or warnings of inflation, resistance to constitutional treaty
recession, unemployment, and as ex-post objection to Eastern
tax increases, 112–13, 119 enlargement, 177–8
and German hegemony, 111 Spain and Portugal, 80, 81
and lack of solidarity, 113 Eurobarometer, 87, 204
and national vs common European as construct as well as measure of
interests, 115 popular opinion, 87
and national identity, 111–13 on Maastricht crisis, 6, 135
and national sovereignty, 111 as measuring public opinion,
as a ‘straightjacket’ on some but also tailoring Community
member-states, necessitating action and communication
compensatory payments, policies towards public
112–13 opinion, 88–9
as undercutting responsiveness as providing evidence of initially
narrative, 114–15 high levels of popular support,
elections, European, 52–4 87–8
as counterweight to technocracy, as a tool of informing citizens of
54–5 different member-states about
demanded on grounds of political each other, 87
nature of integration, 55 Eurocracy, 75, 82; see also
electoral symbolism, 60 technocracy
as enabling people of Europe to European Central Bank, 111, 167,
choose between different forms 195, 199
of society, 57 European Court of Justice, 43
and legitimacy, 53 constitutionalisation of EU law,
as legitimacy-boosting, 60–1, 78 legal integration, 44–5
as means to associate people to implied powers, doctrine of,
integration project, 56–7, 60–1 36, 44
see also under European Parliament integration through law, 45
elitism, 40–1, 135 and supranationalism, 67
ends and goals of integration supremacy and direct effect,
narrative of a consensus on, 198–9, doctrines of, 44
217, 228 European Defence Community,
versus never uncontested, 74–5, 66, 68
186, 217, 221, 237 European Parliament, 52–3, 67, 203
276 Index

European Parliament – continued and enlargement, 187

advocacy of expanded powers and Habermas’s vision, 186–7
direct election, 51–5, 63 openness as a problem of
and Commission, 59, 139 democratic legitimacy,
and Council, 58 186, 190–1
as counter-weight to Foucault, Michel, 5, 15
intergovernmentalist or frame research or analysis, 8, 9,
anti-integration forces, 63–4 15, 233
as different from national Furler Report (EP1963b), 59–60
parliaments, 58–9 freedom, 20–1
expansion of its powers, 81; fundamental freedoms, 155
as answer to democratic of movement and residence, 95
deficit, 138–9, see also deficit, of thought and conscience, 163
democratic; elections to, see of trade, 175
elections, European
and legitimacy, 51–2 game, European politics as a,
as motor of integration, 63–4, 78 226, 238
as repository of democratic Germany
legitimacy, 53; to be containment of, 20
strengthened so as to redress Franco-German relations, 20
unbalance of executive and see also Chapters 4 and 6
legislative powers in Community globalisation, 168–70
institutional setup, 78 debate on Germany as an
as ‘sounding board’ and economic ‘site’ (Standortdebatte),
‘stimulator’ of public opinion, 179
61, 64, 86; strengthened and EU as an agent of, 168–9, 189
directly elected EP as means of EU as bulwark against, 168–9, 179; as
associating the peoples with a way of mastering, 179, 189, 239
integration project, 56–7, 60, 78 and governance, 147, 150
Eurosclerosis, 81, 199 as making European cooperation
Eurozone crisis, 1, 206, 216, 223, 231, indispensable, 177–8
237, 239–40 rather than the EU blamed for
everyday welfare-state restructuring,
experience of Europe, 16, 76, recession, or unemployment,
104, 153 114, 150, 176
life and institutional settings, 232 governance, 147–51, 200
presence of Europe in everyday life, as bringing EU closer to citizens,
82, 90, 94, 199, 215 147, 202
experts, rule of as challenging subsidiarity as an
and arrogant ‘integration from organising principle, 147–8
above’, 185 as effectively more focused on
modernist confidence in expert output- than input-based
rationality, 38–9, see also under legitimacy claims, 150
social engineering as means of ensuring
see also technocracy responsiveness to citizen needs,
150; as only efficient answer
finalité, 206 to challenges of globalisation
to be defined in European or climate change, 147, 150,
constitution, 156, 191 prioritising responsiveness
 Index 277

and efficient catering to citizen and constitutional patriotism,

expectations over democratic 128, 154–5
control, representation, or EU legitimacy gap as symptomatic
accountability, 200 of an identity, cultural, or
as a more ‘authentic’ form of community deficit, 152
democracy, 148–9, 200 as post-national, 124
and participation; civil society thick versus thin, 154
involvement, 149; network unity in diversity, as contributing
pluralism and its normative to the actualising national
problems, 149–50, 200 identities, 154
as strengthening technocracy and and values, 155
Commission as ‘guardian’ of the see also identity-building
treaty, 151 identity, national
as way of overcoming as actualised in European identity,
supranationalism– in unity in diversity, 154
intergovernmentalism essentialist and exclusive definitions
dichotomy, 147 revived in Maastricht debates,
governmentality, 9–10, 13–15, 37, 112, 131
143, 233 as threatened by EMU and European
Grimm, Dieter, 42, 178, 184–5 regulation, 111–12, 130, 136
identity-building, 93–9, 151–7
Habermas, Jürgen, 7, 10–11, 16. 74, as instrumental to overall
128, 133, 154–6, 171, 174, 184–7, integration aims and specific
213, 230–1 policy goals, 97
Hallstein, Walter, 20ff., 31, 33, 35, 42, as a means of overcoming
43, 62, 65, 72 nationalism, 97–8; creating
high versus low politics, 70–1, 78 a European demos and
history constitutional patriotism, 128;
integration as a historical increasing popular support,
imperative, 26, 117 99, 152
see also peace and prosperity; war, through Community symbols and
memory of tangible material benefits, 94–5;
hope collaboration in media policies,
hope, progress, and agency through 95; cultural and communication
planning and expert knowledge, policy, 95–6, 152–3; discourse,
19, 33 96; European constitution,
rejection of constitutional treaty as 155–6; ‘pedagogy’, 128–9;
an act of, 162 redefining national identities as
‘human’ face of integration, 82, 92 fundamentally European, 98–9;
People’s Europe campaign as Union citizenship, 99–104
addressing Europeans as not only see also identity, European
market citizens, but also political indispensability, 19, 66, 198
citizens and, culturally embedded association of indispensability-to-
human beings, 82, 199 peace and indispensability-to-
rebuffed in Maastricht debates, 130 prosperity discourses, 24
integration as a matter of no
identity, European, 14 alternative, of survival, 20–1, 23.
as compatible rather than conflicting 28, 30–1; indispensability due to
with national identities, 98 globalisation, 168–9, 177–8;
278 Index

indispensability – continued sustainability of, 24, 38, 55

indispensability to peace and interests
prosperity, 1, 19–24, 31, 74, common European, see under
81, 118 common good, European
as subject of ‘pedagogy’, 128–9 the ‘Community interest’, 32
inflation, 73–4, 80, 112, 119 economic, 31
information policies, see EMU as framed in terms of
communication and information national vs common European
policies interests, 114–15
input-based legitimacy claims institutional division of labour
and the constitutional project, 190 in representing national vs
and European elections, 214 common interests, 31–2, 36
and the People’s Europe, 105–6 national, 31, as counter to
and post-Maastricht focus on supranationalism, 66; as
democratic deficit as distracting fundamentally conflicting vs
from performance difficulties converging, 69
and fears of EMU, 139, 158, interdependence, 23, 72
214–15 actively enforced, 29
and Union citizenship, 213–14 ‘common problems require
see also input- versus output-based common solutions’, 23, 91
legitimacy claim; output-based as an exogenous development, 23
legitimacy claims and subsidiarity, 145
input- versus output-based legitimacy technological, economic, and
claims political, 23–4
in academic literature, 207–20 intergovernmental versus
balance in Commission discourses, supranational, 28–9, 31–2,
139; in French and German 65–72, 78
dabate, 119, 183, 191–2, 215; in intergovernmentalism as linked
governance discourses, 150 with ‘politics’ and the
nexus, 76, 191–2, 212–14, 216–20, protection of national interests,
239–41 66–8
shifting overall balance, 150, supranationalism as linked with
191–2, 198, 206, 214–15, 241 technocracy, 67–8
institutionalism, discursive, 14 as zero-sum game, 68–9;
integration supranationalism as conflicting
from above, 54, 86, 185, 203 with national interests, 66
economic benefits of, 24–5 interpretive approach, 8; see also
as dependent on political will, 40, under methodology
55, 62–3, 84
feasibility of, 5, 38, 55 Kohl, Helmut, 114, 119, 144
as furthering European common
good, see under common good, Lacroix, Justine, 3, 122–8, 133,
European 154, 195
as humanist ‘ascent of man’, 27, 33 Laeken Declaration, 143, 145
‘inner logic’ of, 36–7 legality as a legitimating principle,
as man-made progress, 33 42–6
as a positive-sum game, 69 legitimacy, EU
purpose of, 23, 24 challenges to, late 1970s and early
sectoral limitation, 71–2 1980s, 80–2
 Index 279

crisis of, following Maastricht improved through integration,

controversies, 134 21–2, 35, 47, 50, 81
as flowing from national versus Luxembourg compromise, 66
supranational representatives and
institutions, 70, see also elections, Maastricht Treaty, 107–9
European difficult ratification, 109; as
reduction to democratic legitimacy ushering in crisis of EU
versus focus on efficient delivery legitimacy, 134, 199
of peace and prosperity, 136 French and German ratification
legitimacy, political debates, 107–33, 199–200
contested nature of, 3, 6; as an issue Market, common or single, 68
never fully resolvable, 192–3, ‘market, the’ versus ‘the social’,
236 189, 201
definition as justifiability in as antithetical in French discourses,
terms of people’s beliefs, 3, 10; 166–7; German market-hostile
approach from the perspective of discourses, 177–8
the production of such beliefs, EU and constitutional treaty as
semantics, and knowledge, 5, favouring ‘the market’ and ‘the
9–12, 239 economy’ over ‘the common
functions in exercise and good’ and ‘the social, 166–7
establishment of power, 5 as mutually enabling, 167–8, 178;
normative ideals of, 6; versus as market forces, the EU, and the
belief, social legitimacy, or welfare state, 173, 177–8
popular or regime support, 7–8; meaning
see also under opinion, public production of, 4, 6
objects of, 3 methodology, 8, 11
legitimating narratives, see closeness genealogical, 8–9
of Europe to the citizens or people inductive, 11
democracy; indispensability, interpretive, 8
integration, as a matter of no non-causal or -explanatory, 8–9
alternative, of survival; living non-exhaustive sample, 8
condition and, standard of living, non-quantitative, 8, 15
improved through integration; statements of, 8, 11
peace and prosperity; People’s textual analysis, 8
Europe; ‘what the citizens want’, Merkel, Angela, 175–6, 185
aligning Europe with modernism, 34–5, 38, 47; see also
legitimation social engineering
crisis of the capitalist welfare state monetary policy
of the 1970s, 73–4 Bretton Woods, 73–4
discursive politics of, 6 Monnet, Jean, 19, 26, 30, 31, 34,
problem of audience, 205–6 37–8, 40, 50–2, 65, 67, 150, 203,
as a slow, messy, partial process, 4 204, 217
liberalism, see ‘social’ versus ‘liberal motor of integration, see under
Europe’ integration, ‘inner logic’ of
listening to the people, 76, 84, 86, myth, 6, 118
188, 230 of modernity, 34–5
living conditions and, standard of
living National Assembly, 66, 120–3
impact of integration on, 174 nationalism, 98
280 Index

nationalism – continued opinion, public, 7–8

association with war, 26, 39, 97 versus basis of legitimacy claims,
economic nationalism, 112, 117 84–6
EMU and commitment to and Commission, 61–2
European integration as on draft constitutional treaty,
necessary to condemn nationalist 160–1
revival across Europe, 118 and EP, 61
integration as antithesis to, 26 as a key factor in EU politics,
and the xenophobic attacks in 134–5; driver of integration, 62
Germany in 1992, 116 as object of manipulation, 29–30,
and Yugoslav wars, 117–18 61, 64, 84
national-republicanism, 201 social legitimacy of 1950s and
democracy as presupposing a 60s, 73
strong sense of belonging and see also Eurobarometer; support,
shared values, 123 popular
EU as antithesis to political output-based legitimacy claims,
voluntarism, 125, 126 25, 83, 104–6, 185, 239–40
in French political theory aligned with ‘what the people
(Lacroix), 122 want’, or linked with claims to
nation as only framework for responsiveness to the citizens, 76
the practice of democracy bias of early legitimation
and citizenship, and political discourses, 79, 83
voluntarism, 122–3, 125 dependent on input-oriented
State as presupposing nation, 123–4 complements, 139–41; e.g. in
nation-state case of redistributive decisions,
defence of the, as the natural place 186; requiring some element
of democracy and the protection of input authenticity regarding
of individual liberty, 183–4 goals of EU action, 213, 233–4
see also under national- evidence from public opinion
republicanism research, 90
narrative, 6, 12 see also input-based legitimacy
narrative constructions in the claims; input- versus output-
historiography of the EU, 14 based legitimacy claim
neofunctionalism, 32, 37–8 ownership of citizens over EU or
and European identity, 97 link?, 82, 202
and popular support, 106–7
New Deal, 39 parliaments, national, 37, 38, 51–2,
Nicolaïdis, Kalypso, 3, 16, 24, 66, 54, 57–9, 70, 125, 137–43, 157,
143–4, 224, 226 182, 209, 230
no-demos critiques, 113, 122, and constitutional convention, 156
126–8, 184 participatory democracy, 61
association demos and ethnos, and governance as more genuine
popular and national form of democracy, 148–9, 200
sovereignty, 127–8 network pluralism and its
prospects of creating a European normative problems, 149–50
demos and constitutional stakeholder participation and civil
patriotism, 128 society consultation, 41
peace and prosperity, 1, 19–24,
oil shocks, 73, 80, 92, 214 74, 81
 Index 281

challenges to the integration-equals- performance, EU problem-solving,

peace narrative, 115–18 22, 104
link between peace and prosperity challenges to, 72–7, 78
as promises of integration, 115 versus democracy as grounds for
pedagogy, 128–9 claims to legitimacy, 139
people, the see also peace and prosperity
asserted as a powerful actor with permissive consensus, 17–18, 134, 199
Maastricht controversies, 57, plumber, Polish, 165–6, 175, 195
134; emergence of a ‘European policies, individual
electorate-people’ (Wahlvolk), cohesion, social, environmental,
174 and social, 81, 89, 97
associate people to integration see also separate entries
project, 56–7, 60–1, 82, 202 ‘political, the’
right to, and lack of, open-ended association with
consultation, 56, 149, 171, 177, intergovernmentalism, opposition
204–5, 239 to supranationalism, 67, 71
see also demos-building; no-demos EU as technocratic antithesis
critiques; people, will of the; to ‘the political’ and political
sovereignty, popular voluntarism, 124–5, 137
people, will of the France as ‘the political country par
ambiguous status, 84, 86, 105, 202, excellence’ refusing the ‘primacy
203; as independent source and of economics’ over politics by
standard of legitimacy, 85; as rejecting the constitution, 169
object of manipulation, 62, 86 as opposed to technocratic, elitist,
and citizen expectations, 84, 106, 202 administrative, logics, 66
as necessary for both justifying and as in political will-formation and
advancing integration, 85 contestation as opposed to
need to redefine objectives of decision-making based on expert
integration in line with citizen rationalities, 169
expectations, 85; claim to political nature of integration politics
responsiveness to citizens’ most high and divisive stakes of
important concerns, 89 integration, 56
and popular sovereignty, 85, 106, political nature of integration as
see also separate entry ground for demanding European
taking into account the citizen elections and counter-acting
perspective, 85 technocratic bias, 55, 77
turn in official legitimation rhetoric true nature of Community
towards focus on ‘what the political, 24
citizens want’, 85–6; see under ‘political union’, 24, 119–20,
‘what the citizens want’ 132, 186–7
see also under Eurobarometer; aspiration to ‘political unity’, 24
national-republicanism; as condition for EMU, 119–20
no-demos critiques; sovereignty, and constitution, 186–7
popular in French Maastricht debate, 132
People’s Europe, 76, 80–106, 199, 203, politicisation, 220–33
205, 215, 217–18, 225, 230 academic literature on, 198,
as official policy goal, 82–3 220–33; advocated on grounds
synonymous use with Citizens of threatening alternatives,
Europe, 82 222–3; empirical accounts of,
282 Index

politicisation – continued 124; challenged by national-

221–2; implicit underlying republicanism, 133; see also
normative assumption, 222; of separate entry
inevitability, 223; progress
of instrumentality to other belief in, integration as making
normatively desirable ends, progress possible, 17ff., 21–3, 26,
including a European public 32–6, 39, 118, 227
sphere or political bond, 225; social progress, 167, 214
of normative grounds, towards common market, 199
including pluralism and counter- prosperity, see peace and prosperity
acting technocracy, 224 protectionism, 22–3, 125, 179
acknowledgment of contested
nature of EU politics as a quantification of costs or benefits as
condition of plausibility for any a legitimating technique, 86, 92
legitimacy claims, 237
constitutive tension in EU rebate, British, 80, 81
legitimation history between recession or stagnation, 73–4, 80, 93,
politicising and de-politicising 110–15
tendencies, 198, 206, 241 Rechtsgemeinschaft, 43
discursive history of EU recognition, mutual, 235
legitimation as offering grounds redefinition of question at stake in
for adopting a contestation- referendum, 161–4
appraising approach, 225–6; see representation, democratic, 50, 57,
also under contestation; game, 60–1, 100, 102, 119, 123, 130,
European politics as a 138, 140, 148–51, 182, 200, 207,
gradual politicisation, over last five 209, 222, 224
decades, challenging discourses responsiveness to what the citizens
of common European good and wanted, 76, 85, 89, 202
converging national interests, emphasis on, over accountability,
206, 225, 239–41 representation, representations,
history of contests over EU 202
legitimacy as history of governance as means of ensuring
politicisation; discursive responsiveness to citizen needs,
dynamics of, 11, 56, 77; see 149–50, 200, 202
also de-politicisation, as a narrative rebuffed in French and
legitimation technique German Maastricht and EMU
possibility, conditions of, 8 debates, 114–15
post-nationalism, 97 reunification of Germany, 116
calls to leave ‘national thinking’ and European integration ‘two
behind, 26–7, 72; challenged by sides of the same coin’, 117
Gaullist Europe des Nations, 66,
69–70, 72 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 167–8, 178
EU as a post-national entity, 5; Scharpf, Fritz, 11, 185, 207–14, 220
legitimacy in the post-national Schattschneider, Elmer Eric, 5, 224
constellation, 5, 207, 209 Schuman Declaration, 29, 51, 62
German identity as post-national, services directive, 165–6, 170–1, 177–8
112 debate as giving rise to market-
Union citizenship, and post- hostile discourses, 177–8
national identity and democracy, see also under unemployment
 Index 283

simplification a spanner in the works of an

and abolishment of certain integration process hitherto
EU rules as a way to counter beyond their reach, 200–1, 231
perception of omnipotent and will of the people, 85, 106
bureaucracy, 183 see also under national-
of the EU political system, need to, republicanism; people, will of the
143–4, 157 sovereignty, transfers of, 38, 70–2
single market, 81, 91 as antithetic to supranationalism, 68
appeal to public opinion, 92 as undermined by interdependence;
framed in terms of international ‘no such thing as a fully sovereign
competitiveness, 91 national state’, 72
quantification of its promises, 92 warranted through the sectoral
social engineering, 33 limitation of integration, 72;
confidence in expert knowledge, depending on policy spheres,
technology, and science, 38–9 70–1
as embodying hope, progress, and sphere, public
agency, 19, 33–4 constitutional debates as a sign of
myth of modernity, 34–5 an EU-wide public sphere, 156,
planning, 34 173, 181, 184, 196
see also under technocracy European-wide, as a condition of EU
‘social’ versus ‘liberal Europe’, legitimacy, 7, 123, 173,
163–70, 201 180–1, 225
agency, political voluntarism, and national public-spheres, and
humanism versus domination by their interactions with official
impersonal forces of ‘the market’ discourses, as level of analysis,
and globalisation, 163, 168–70, 2–3, 13, 18, 197, 205–6; see also
189, 201 e.g. 107, 126, 131, 152, 200–1, 218
French and European social models, plausibility in the public spheres as
164, 168 a condition of persuasive power
liberalism, 164–5 of claims about legitimacy, 232
parallel opposition of ‘the market’ theories of the, 7, 231, 238
to ‘the social’, 166–7 Spinelli, Altiero, 52–3, 65, 203
unemployment, 165–6; relocations, spillover
Polish plumber, 165–7 and European identity, 97
sources used, statements regarding, judicial, 45
2–3, 8, 18, 49, 131, 193–4 and neofunctionalism, 32, 37–8
Soviet Union, 20, 22, 116 as a threat to sovereignty, 68
sovereignty, popular, 60, 102 state, active, 39
association with national struggle, 1ff., 241
sovereignty, 45, 127–8 subsidiarity, 144
and European elections, 60 application matter of contestation,
practice of popular sovereignty tied 146; hence better definition of
to context of the nation in French competences necessary, 146
national-republicanism and challenged as an organising
German no-demos critiques, 67, principle by governance
121, 123, 127 discourse, 147–8; see also under
resistance to constitutional treaty governance
as a statement of popular support, popular, 82
sovereignty, as citizens throwing as closeness to the citizens, 144, 146
284 Index

support, popular – continued in advocacy of European

equated with democratic elections, 54
legitimacy, 77; to be increased EU as technocratic antithesis to ‘the
through more democratic political’, political voluntarism,
institutions and efforts at and practice of democracy and
legitimation, 130 citizenship, 124–6
as a function of level of and supranationalism, 68
information about European and governance, 151
affairs, 135 as a political, 39; victory of
as indispensable to building economics over politics, 39
Europe, 129 see also under Eurocracy
lack of, 62, 77, 129, 144 tensions, constitutive of struggle for
as a magical weapon against citizen EU legitimacy, 197–8
alienation and democratic between bringing the people in
deficit, 144–6 and keeping them out, 198–9,
as safeguard against ‘ever more 202–4
Europe’, 145–6 between de-politicising and
to be strengthened through politicising dynamics, 188, 196,
identity-building and cultural 215, 219, 222, 224, 230
policies, 152 between input- and output-based
treaty definition, 144 legitimacy claims, 198
supranationalism Tindemans Report, 75, 84
association with technocracy, 68 transparency and openness, 62,
challenges in name of national 129, 141–4
sovereignty, 49 as closeness to the citizens, 129,
Commission as supra-national, 32 141, 143, 146
disputes over how supranational focus on access to information
integration should be, 64, rather than control or influence,
65–72, 199 142–3
early advocacy, 28–9; strict sectoral as improving access to decision-
limitation, 40 making process of national
and the ECJ, 43, 45 parliaments and citizens, as well
efficiency as an argument in as accountability, 142
favour, 185 as remedy to EU’s democratic
supranational democracy, 51–2, deficit, 140
54–7, 60, 63–4 and understandability, 143
see also intergovernmental versus see also under simplification of the
supranational EU political system, need to
survival, unite in order to ensure, treaties
20–1, 31 outline or framework treaty, 41–2, 56
linked to political integration, 31 as re-balancing the institutional
power balance, 67
technology, 23 Rome, Paris, 19, 26, 51–2
technocracy, 38–9, 82 Single European Act, 81
counterbalanced by European Maastricht and EU legitimacy,
elections, 54–5 108–10
critiques of EU’s technocratic draft constitutional, 2, 69
bias, 41, 125, 185; major theme Lisbon, 51, 206
 Index 285

Turkish accession qualified majority voting,

and the finalité question, 187 81–2
as incompatible with ‘Europe’s unanimity, 70
values’, 172
as linked with social dumping and war, 70
unemployment, 172, 176 as arising from nationalism and
‘No’ to constitution as way to national thinking, 26, 39, 97
prevent it, 171–2, 189; association made impossible through
with popular sovereignty, 201 integration, 29
separate referendum, 171 memory of, 19–20
and xenophobia, 172 as ‘other’ to integration, 17,
‘turns’ in EU studies 26, 97–8
governance, 147 post-war reconstruction, 73
normative, 135–6 as reason for integration, 17–20
participatory, 14, 148 responsibility arising from
sociological, 16 history, 26
Yugoslav wars, 24, 115–18, 158
unemployment, 80, 89, 188, 201 welfare state, 89
blamed on the EU and/or French (and European) social
constitutional treaty, 165, model, 164–8, 170
176–7, 189 integration as rescuing European
Eastern enlargement as providing welfare states, 30
new link between EU and and Maastricht convergence
unemployment, 175, 176, 189 criteria, 114
the EU as protecting Germany from and market forces, 173, 178, 201
even higher unemployment, 177 pressures on, 73–4, 89
German abattoir scandal, 174–5 ‘what the citizens want’
as a home-made problem of governance as means of ensuring
German labour law, 175–6 responsiveness to citizen needs
relocation of jobs abroad and expectations, 150
(délocalisations), 165 turn in official legitimation rhetoric
services directive and Polish towards a focus on, 76, 82, 85,
plumber, 165–6, 175, 177 202; see also under people, will of
utilities, public, 162–4 the
‘which Europe do we want’,
Vedel Report, 35, 52, 54–5, 61–2 161–3, 188
voluntarism and agency White Paper on European
EU as opposed to political Governance, see governance
voluntarism and agency,
125–6, 168 xenophobia
integration and EU as enabling assaults in Germany in 1992, 116
voluntary action on the world, post-nationalism as a remedy,
34–5, 168–9 26–7, 72
as limited to the framework of the reproach to opponents of
nation-state, 122–3, 125; see also constitution’s ratification to be
national-republicanism instrumentalising or nurturing,
voting rules 172
This page is intentionaly left blank