Claudia Schrag Sternberg

Political legitimacy between democracy and effectiveness: trade-offs, interdependencies, and discursive constructions by the EU institutions

This paper addresses the relationship between political legitimacy arising from a link with the ‘will of the people’, and political legitimacy arising from beneficial consequences for them. Questioning the common assumption of an inherent trade-off between ‘input’ and ‘output legitimacy’, it suggests that the two necessarily go together, and that their relationship is continuously reconstructed through discursive contestation. These claims are first substantiated conceptually, in reference to the legitimacy literature in European Union (EU) Studies, which is situated in the broader fields of Political Theory and Comparative Politics. In a second step, the argument is developed on the grounds of empirical case material: an interpretive, non-quantitative reconstruction of the changing discourses on EU legitimacy by the European institutions from the 1950s to the early 2000s.

The Setting: The Greco-German Affair on the Euro Stage

This opening chapter introduces the object of the book’s empirical enquiry, referred to somewhat playfully as ‘the Greco-German affair’ during the Greek debt crisis. The authors discuss their methodology and the relevant literature and explain the import of the concept of mutual recognition for their study. Even after the devastating impact of the Euro crisis, they argue, the EU’s transnational set-up remains distinctive in its tentative move towards a demoicracy, which entails an ongoing experimentation with the promise and limits of mutual recognition, and with the challenge of building binding trust among the European peoples.

The Ethos of the Game: Recovering the Promise of Mutual Recognition

In this concluding chapter, the authors attempt to draw some lessons from the ‘affair’ while calling on each reader to draw their own. They ask, in particular, how we may learn to better live together in the EU and how an ethos of mutual recognition might be recovered from the wars of stereotypes and mutual ascription discussed in the book. They argue that we must start by becoming more aware of how we construct ourselves and others and how the two are intimately related. They also point to how, by engaging with each other’s internal controversies, Greeks and Germans learned about themselves, too, and were led to question long-held prejudices. The question is left open as to whether this prolonged engagement through conflict will help us to develop bonds of trust and recover the promise mutual recognition, not only between Greeks and Germans but also among other Europeans.

The Name of the Game: Shaping Europe Through Self and Other

Chapter 3 moves on from the book’s two central characters to the overall game in which their fraught relationship is embedded. How has the Greco-German saga affected the rest of the EU story? More specifically, how have the mutual ascriptions of Greeks and Germans affected their representations of the EU, and how has their perception of the EU game evolved as a result? The chapter discusses, in particular, the narratives of the EU’s promise of prosperity, turned into a threat thereof during the crisis; the ‘re-nationalisation’ of politics in Europe; and the fate of ‘the EU as an agent of progress’.

The Players: Greeks vs Germans

Chapter 2 explores the multifaceted ways conjured up by Greeks and Germans to represent each other in the newspaper coverage of the Greek debt crisis. It is structured around five thematic patterns, each exhibiting a different kind of entanglement between the images of the Self and the Other: the emergence and contestation of the stereotypes of lazy but merry Greeks versus hard-working and miserly Germans; the different ‘moral languages’ invoked on each side; the psychosocial undercurrents of identifying the Other with one’s own innermost demons; the politics and manipulation of memory; and the topoi of power and resistance.

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 continuously, 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 addition, 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 constitutive of it.

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 questions 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 particular, 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 planning in the context of the financial and economic crises of the 1970s.

A Constitutional Moment? The Constitution in the French and German Debates

To what extent, then, were the academic and EU institutional communities 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 representations 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 legitimacy change during these key moments of discursive re-construction and contestation?

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 referential 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 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.