Achim Hurrelmann

Legitimacy in an age of global politics

Introduction: Legitimacy in an Age of Global Politics A.Hurrelmann, S.Schneider & J.Steffek PART ONE: LEGITIMACY AND LEGITIMATION: THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES Democratic Legitimation: What is It, Who Wants It, and Why? R.Barker Criteria of Democratic Legitimacy H.Abromeit & M.Stoiber Legitimacy, Authority, and Political Obligation G.Klosko Legitimacy and the Practice of Political Judgement S.Mulligan PART TWO: LEGITIMACY AND LEGITIMATION: EMPIRICAL APPROACHES Political Beliefs and Attitudes: Legitimacy in Public Opinion Research B.Westle Exploring the Communicative Dimension of Legitimacy: Text Analytical Approaches S.Schneider, F.meier & A.Hurrelmann Challenging Legitimacy: Repertoires of Contention, Political Claims-Making, and Collective Action Frames S.Haunss PART THREE: INTERNATIONALIZATION AND THE LEGITIMACY OF GOVERNANCE ARRANGEMENTS BEYOND THE DEMOCRATIC NATION STATE Legitimacy in International Relations: From State Compliance to Citizen Consensus J.Steffek Legitimacy in International or World Society? I.Clark Legitimacy Deficits Beyond the State: Diagnoses and Cures A. Follesdal Conclusion A.Hurrelmann, S.Schneider & J.Steffek

Transforming the golden-age nation state

The Golden-Age Nation State and its Transformation: A Framework for Analysis A.Hurrelmann, S.Leibfried, K.Martens & P.Mayer Europe, the Nation State and Taxation S.Uhl Internationalization of Intervention? UN and EU Security Politics and the Modern State S.Mayer & S.Weinlich From Diffusion to Interplay: Rethinking the Constitutional State in the Age of Global Legal Pluralism M.Herberg Transformations of Commercial Law: New Forms of Legal Certainty for Globalized Exchange Processes? G.Calliess, T.Dietz, W.Konradi, H.Nieswandt & F.Sosa Breaking the Nation State Shell: Prospects for Democratic Legitimacy in the International Domain J.Steffek Governing the Internet: The Quest for Legitimacy and Effective Rules: R.Bendrath, J.Hofmann, V.Leib, P.Mayer & M.Zurn The Internationalization of Education Policy: Towards Convergence of National Paths? K.Martens & A.Weymann The Role of the Nation State in the Internationalization of Accounting Regimes J.Zimmermann The Transformation of the Golden-Age Nation State: Findings and Perspectives A.Hurrelmann, S.Leibfried, K.Martens & P.Mayer

Democratic dilemmas in EU multilevel governance: untangling the Gordian knot

This article discusses what implications the European Union’s (EU’s) multilevel structure has for its democratic legitimacy. It identifies three channels of democratic input in the EU – the European Parliament, national democratic processes influencing the Council of Ministers, and civil society participation in consultation procedures of the European Commission – and assesses them on the basis of a comprehensive set of criteria. The evaluation shows that the democratization of the EU faces three interlinked dilemmas. Most fundamentally, there is an incongruence in territorial scope between the issues requiring democratic control (increasingly European if not global) and the imagined communities necessary for the functioning of democratic procedures (primarily national). This ‘congruence dilemma’ intensifies contradictions between participation and deliberation, as well as between effectiveness and accountability in EU decision-making. Grand reforms that would solve these dilemmas once and for all are unlikely to be successful, but changes in the interplay of the three democratic channels – such as the disentanglement of political competencies, the formalization of inter-channel conciliation procedures, and the introduction of directly democratic mechanisms – promise to mitigate their negative effects.

Exploring the Communicative Dimension of Legitimacy: Text Analytical Approaches

Is the democratic nation state experiencing a globalization-induced erosion of legitimacy? Are the foundations of regime support merely being transformed? Or do both scenarios of change underestimate the stability of regime support and its foundations? The debate between proponents of crisis diagnoses and more sanguine observers remains unsettled. This inconclusiveness is partly due to the fact that ‘diagnostic’ assessments are not always properly disentangled from empirical assessments. Normatively grounded evaluations of democratic quality and empirical inferences on citizen support for real-world political orders may yield highly divergent results, but the findings of genuinely empirical legitimacy research often appear inconclusive — even contradictory — as well.

Introduction: Legitimacy in an Age of Global Politics

It is now widely assumed that the processes of economic globalization and political internationalization have led to the demise of the so-called ‘national constellation’ that characterized the political reality of western democracies in the aftermath of the Second World War (Zurn 1998a; Albrow 2003;Leibfried and Zurn 2005;Hurrelmann et al. 2007). Although the contours of the evolving ‘post-national constellation’ (Habermas 1998) remain vague, it is clear that democratic nation states have lost much of their erstwhile autonomy vis-a-vis international regimes and organizations, the European Union, and non-state actors. Due to the internationalization and privatization of decision-making competencies, and to the increasing pressure from financial and business interests, nation states now find themselves tied into a web of multiple and interconnected centres and layers of political authority. Their citizens, whether or not they are fully aware of it, have come to live in an age of global politics in which many decisions that affect their lives are taken in political arenas beyond nation-state control.

The Eurozone crisis and citizen engagement in EU affairs

While the Eurozone crisis has contributed to Europeanisation trends in the domestic politics of EU member states, it has not to the same extent triggered citizen mobilisation in EU-level democratic procedures. Theories that treat politicisation as an undifferentiated phenomenon tend to miss this important distinction. This article suggests that the weakness of supranational citizen mobilisation is linked to factors that restrict the citizens’ receptiveness to EU-related messages: limited knowledge of the EU and a weak sense of political efficacy, a discursive framing that conceptualises the EU as a consortium of member states rather than a supranational entity, and attributions of responsibility for the crisis that de-emphasise the role of EU policies. These factors constitute cultural opportunity structures that influence politicisation patterns; they imply that politicisation is, under present conditions, more likely to result in a renationalisation than in a supranationalisation of EU politics.

6 Is there a legitimation crisis of the nation-state?

It is widely accepted that internationalization and the increasing loss of parliamentary control over political power challenge the legitimacy of national democratic systems and their core institutions. We first present results from a study of public communication, which, when examined in the context of theories of legitimation, indicate that these processes do not necessarily lead to the erosion or breakdown of popular support for the nation state. The idea that there is a linear cause-and-effect relationship is overly simple, and a more detailed analysis is called for. Legitimation of a political system through public communication is a back-and-forth process which is determined by the systems specific institutional arrangements and by the fortuitous twists and turns of public debate. Nation states have more extensive, diverse and deeply rooted sources of legitimation than is often assumed.

Conclusion: Legitimacy — Making Sense of an Essentially Contested Concept

Scholarly interest in the legitimacy of political orders appears to follow a decidedly cyclical pattern, with a pronounced renewal of interest occurring in phases of intense political conflict or massive change. The present volume suggests that economic globalization and political internationalization have opened the latest frontier in the field of legitimacy research. Most observers agree that these developments represent a serious challenge for the democratic nation state and its core institutions, eroding their legitimacy or, at the very least, transforming the foundations of legitimate political authority. But such crisis diagnoses, as widespread as they may be, also have more optimistic counterparts, and similar debates rage in the burgeoning literature on the legitimacy of governance arrangements at the international level. What, then, is the current state and future of legitimacy, understood both as a normative concept and as an empirical phenomenon? Does the post-national constellation of global politics imply a decline of legitimacy, or a shift towards post-democratic forms of legitimation?

Demoi-cratic citizenship in Europe: an impossible ideal?

ABSTRACT The idea of demoi-cracy, which proposes to base democratic institutions not on one demos but on multiple co-existing demoi, has gained increasing popularity in debates about the democratization of the European Union. Existing models of demoi-cracy have, however, paid relatively little attention to the qualities that Europeans would need to possess in order to effectively participate in European politics as demoi-cratic citizens. This contribution seeks to identify these qualities; it then looks at empirical evidence to assess whether it is realistic that Europeans will, at least in the medium term, be able to live up to these requirements. While there are some indications that Europeans adapt their patterns of political participation to demoi-cratic requirements, the danger remains that institutionalizing a system of demoi-cracy would further accentuate the existing participatory inequalities.

The legitimation of the European Union in the news media: three treaty reform debates

The news media is a major forum for the discursive legitimation of the EU. This article analyses media debates in the context of three attempts at reforming EU primary law in the past decade: the Nice Treaty; the Constitutional Treaty; and the Lisbon Treaty. Focusing on four member states – the United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany and Austria – our study shows that the EUs legitimacy is discursively constructed according to distinct patterns, most of which are remarkably similar across countries and stable over time. In the context of the EU Constitution, legitimation debates became more intensive and more critical; however, these developments were largely reversed when the Lisbon Treaty was debated. This suggests that, in the media arena, the much-discussed politicization of European integration is an episodic occurrence, rather than a unidirectional trend.