Legitimacy and the European Union

The Contested Polity

Thomas Banchoff, Mitchell Smith, Thomas Banchoff, Mitchell Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134675609
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

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

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INTRODUCTION

Conceptualizing legitimacy in a contested polity

Thomas Banchoff and Mitchell P.Smith

The uncertain state of the European integration project at the close of the twentieth century raises questions about its very legitimacy. The 1992 Maastricht Treaty marked an ambitious effort to deepen the European integration process. Following the launching of the single market program, European Union (EU) leaders embraced the goals of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) and deeper political integration. During and after the Maastricht ratification debates, however, European integration lost political momentum. In 1992–93, Danish voters initially rejected the Treaty, French voters barely approved it, and a divisive British debate delayed its ratification. With an unanticipated persistence, Europeans began to question the need for, and costs and benefits of, the integration process. They displayed little enthusiasm for elections to the European Parliament, the EU's only directly representative body, and for the activist leadership of the European Commission under Jacques Delors. In this new context, European elites could no longer forge ahead as they had over the previous decade. The restrained ambitions of Delors's successor, Jacques Santer, reflected uncertainty about the future of integration, as did the modest outcome of the Maastricht follow-up conference that ended with the June 1997 Treaty of Amsterdam.

These developments have sparked a debate about a crisis of legitimacy within the EU. The growing scholarly literature focuses on two dimensions of the perceived crisis—a lack of popular identification with the EU and the undemocratic structure of its institutions. On the one hand, scholars have argued that Europeans do not recognize the EU as an appropriate sphere for politics, as they do the nation state. From this perspective, the EU lacks the levels of affective attachment and identification essential for legitimacy. On the other hand, scholars have contended that the European Parliament, unlike its national counterparts, is too weak to provide effective democratic representation. They critique the most powerful European institutions—the Council of Ministers and the Commission—as unaccountable to European citizens. While one set of scholars draws on survey data to confirm low levels of recognition, the other seeks to establish that institutions do not provide sufficiently for representation and accountability. From different directions, both converge around the diagnosis of a legitimacy crisis within the EU.

This book challenges this diagnosis. We define a legitimate polity as a broadly recognized framework for politics with representative institutions. But we argue that a focus on popular attitudes and central institutions reflects categories of analysis derived exclusively from the experience of the nation state, and which therefore do not capture the dynamics of recognition and representation in the EU. Increasingly, scholars of European integration have broken with those categories. They have reconceptualized the EU not as a superstate or an international organization, but as a multi-level polity marked by the coexistence and interaction of European and national institutions. This book examines the implications of this reconceptualization for the problem of legitimacy. It points to patterns of recognition and representation which, while they do not fit established categories, nevertheless constitute actual and potential sources of legitimacy. We argue, first, that while Europeans do not strongly identify with the EU, they increasingly recognize it as a framework for politics alongside existing national and subnational arenas; and, second, that while the EU lacks strong central democratic institutions, the integration process has created significant informal and pluralist forms of representation.

The book's subtitle, “The contested polity,” captures both dimensions of legitimacy within the EU. First, it highlights the fact that the EU has emerged as a recognized framework for contestation. Political mobilization around critical issues, from regional development policy and environmental and consumer protection to competitiveness and employment, is increasingly taking place on the European level. A wide range of actors, from consumer and environmental activists through political, business and labor elites, have come to recognize the EU as an appropriate place to contest policies. This recognition is not universal. Some nationalist critics, concerned about threats to established identities, reject integration in principle. In practice, however, European elites and publics have managed to participate in the integration process—to contest a variety of policies—while maintaining established identities, national and subnational. Such patterns of contestation, we argue, suggest not the weakness but the strength of the European polity. They provide evidence not of the absence of legitimacy but of its emergence. For while Europeans bring contrasting interests and identities to the integration process, they have increasingly come to recognize the EU as a productive arena in which to pursue their objectives.

“The contested polity” refers not only to political contestation at the European level, but also to the contested structure of the EU as a whole. European elites and European publics share no uniform sense of what the EU should look like and where it is headed; its competences and institutional make-up have been, and will likely remain, the object of political conflict. The fact that the EU is a contested, evolving, multi-level polity rules out established patterns of democratic representation through a fixed set of central institutions. At the same time, however, its structure allows for new forms of representation at the intersection of European and national institutions. Parties and interest groups—traditional democratic links between society and the state—are forging new patterns of representation at the European level. And key European institutions, the Commission and the Parliament in particular, are responding by interacting more closely with and becoming more responsive to societal interests. New forms of representation within the EU, less formal and centralized, are not displacing existing national forms, but are interacting with them in new ways. Moreover, these new patterns of representation, like the new patterns of recognition discussed above, do not require the emergence of an overarching European identity. They are compatible with—and indeed help to sustain—a variety of different national and subnational identities within the integration process.

While the book challenges the thesis of a legitimacy crisis, we do not deny that the EU is engaged in a difficult legitimation process. Some Europeans still refuse to acknowledge the EU as an appropriate venue for politics and policy-making. And new forms of democratic representation are not adequately developed; in many respects, the EU remains an elite-dominated enterprise. Moreover, there is no denying the perception of a legitimacy crisis, whether justified or not. In casting the legitimacy problem in a new light, this book is not intended to dismiss perceptions of a crisis or to serve as an apology for the status quo. Instead, it aims to conceptualize the legitimacy issue in terms that better fit the reality of the EU as a contested and evolving polity. In the process, it points to often overlooked sources of legitimacy, actual and potential.

This chapter sets out the analytical approach that informs the entire volume. A first section discusses the treatment of the legitimacy problem in political theory and integration theory. Political theory points to the importance of combining the recognition and representation dimensions of legitimacy—and to possible ways of doing so outside the established context of the nation state. For the most part, however, approaches to legitimacy in the theoretical literature on European integration draw on statist models. A second section then critiques the two established research agendas in EU studies that address the legitimacy problem: work on public opinion, which often casts citizen orientations in static terms that obscure the significant degree of recognition of the EU as a framework for politics; and work on the “democratic deficit,” which tends to focus narrowly on formal institutions and to miss other forms of representation. A third section sets out an alternative approach to legitimacy, recognition, and representation, grounded in an understanding of the EU as a multi-level polity. The final section shows how subsequent chapters draw on, illustrate, and extend that approach in a variety of empirical contexts.

Legitimacy in the theoretical literature

Neither political theorists nor theorists of European integration have devoted much attention to the problem of legitimacy in the context of the EU. Classic theories of legitimacy developed in the context of city states, empires and nation states; their assumptions naturally reflect the political environments within which they emerged. Nevertheless, contemporary political theory does provide a starting point for thinking about legitimacy in the context of the EU. By contrast, major theories of European integration, to the extent that they have addressed the legitimacy issue at all, have done so obliquely. Neofunctionalism suggests a valuable approach to legitimacy in terms of recognition by elites of the European polity, but neglects its representation dimension. Intergovernmentalism and federalism, while attentive to both dimensions of the legitimacy problem, approach it within familiar statist categories. As a result, the established theoretical approaches cannot capture the dynamics of EU legitimacy in the 1990s.

Max Weber's conceptualization of legitimate domination provides a backdrop for contemporary discussions of political legitimacy Weber defined legitimacy in empirical terms as “belief in legitimacy” (Weber, 1978:213). Where political subjects recognize rule as legitimate, he argued, it can be considered legitimate. Weber set out a threefold typology distinguishing rational-legal, traditional, and charismatic foundations for legitimate authority. Legitimacy, he maintained, could consist of the recognition of efficiency and the rule of law, of continuity with valued past practices, or of the personal qualities of individual leaders. In keeping with his commitment to value-free social science, Weber did not consider some foundations of legitimacy superior to others. His approach to legitimacy as an empirical, not a normative, matter informed much subsequent research. After the Second World War, for example, Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba used newly developed survey techniques to measure legitimacy in terms of aggregate levels of support for and identification with particular institutions (Almond and Verba, 1963).

While the Weberian tradition approaches legitimacy as an empirical problem, democratic theory considers it a normative one as well (Held, 1984; Connolly, 1984; Beetham, 1991). Whatever their internal differences, democratic theorists insist that legitimacy entails not only recognition but representation. During the early modern period, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that legitimate rule derived from the will of subjects expressed through representative institutions. The nature of representation in a legitimate polity—the proper relationship between ruler and ruled—remains the object of ongoing controversy. To what degree should leaders be accountable? To what degree should citizens participate in governance? Despite the proliferation of answers to these and other questions, democratic theory remains the dominant normative approach to the problem of legitimacy. Fascist and Marxist—Leninist alternatives have fallen by the wayside over the course of this century. As a result legitimacy has become almost synonymous with democratic legitimacy (Dahl, 1989).

Both dimensions of legitimacy—recognition and representation—are relevant in the context of the EU. Until recently, however, political theorists have explored these dimensions mainly in the context of the nation state. Weber defined the state in unitary terms as a monopoly of legitimate violence within a given territory. His statist orientation is of limited relevance to the European Union, with its divided and overlapping sovereignties. And democratic theorists from Locke and Rousseau onward have tended to focus on legitimate governance within a statist framework. Their emphasis on popular sovereignty and central democratic institutions does not fit the reality of a European Union in which nation states and supranational institutions exist side by side. These analytical categories reflect the political context within which modern empirical and normative theory developed: the rise and consolidation of nation states. The challenge in the EU context is to apply theoretical insights to new circumstances, to rethink recognition and representation in a new kind of polity.

Contemporary political theory suggests some of the directions that such a rethinking might take. Jürgen Habermas, for example, has sought to move democratic theory away from its focus on the “people” conceived as part of a nation. Legitimate rule, he argues, emerges instead where rational discourse, not bonds of ethnicity or culture, informs collective action (Habermas, 1984). Charles Taylor has addressed the implications of national, ethnic and cultural diversity for democracy. He argues that the mutual recognition of difference, both within and across societies, is vital for political legitimacy (Taylor, 1992). David Held has underscored the importance of reconceptualizing politics and democratic theory in an international context. Limits on national sovereignty and the emergence of a global civil society, he argues, challenge established statist approaches to the legitimacy issue (Held, 1995). These and other political theorists have not developed new approaches to recognition and representation explicitly in the context of the European Union. But their efforts to examine the issues outside the context of the nation state provide a starting point for thinking about legitimacy and the EU.

Established theories of integration, while they approach the problem of legitimacy and the EU more directly, do so inadequately (Caporaso and Keeler, 1995). Neofunctionalism goes furthest in addressing the issue (Haas, 1958; Lindberg and Scheingold, 1970). As a theoretical perspective, neofunctionalism views integration as an elite-led self-sustaining process driven by the logic of spillover. Writing in the 1950s, Ernst Haas acknowledged the recognition dimension of legitimacy. He argued that political elites had increasingly come to recognize the relevance and value of supranational policies (Cram, 1997:16). Further developing the thrust of Haas's argument, Leon Lindberg and Stuart Scheingold contended that those elites with the greatest stake in the economic aspects of the Community—“industrialists, bankers, traders” and government officials responsible for national economic policy—had come to view it as a critical arena in which to pursue their objectives (Lindberg and Scheingold, 1970: 78). They noted that “one of the most striking phenomena of European integration has been the extent to which interest groups, parties, and other elites have come to accept the emerging Community system as a proper and legitimate framework in which to seek to achieve their goals” (Lindberg and Scheingold, 1970:122).

The neofunctionalist approach to legitimacy has limited relevance in the postMaastricht context. In some respects, Haas and Lindberg and Scheingold broke with statist categories in their approach to legitimacy as recognition. Haas's original formulation did suggest the possibility of movement beyond the nation state: a broad shift in identification toward a “new centre” and the creation of “a new political community, superimposed over the pre-existing ones” (Haas, 1958:16). But Lindberg and Scheingold, more cautious about the prospects of a “new centre,” anticipated the possibility of multiple, coexistent levels of government, and less centralized patterns of recognition. The greater problem with the neofunctionalist approach to legitimacy is its neglect of the representation dimension. Haas posited that a permissive societal consensus would continue to sustain integration as an elite-driven, technocratic process. By contrast, Lindberg and Scheingold recognized the potential for integration to activate constituencies among broader segments of society. They discerned, for example, the emergence of a “supranational interest group network.” At the same time, however, they viewed politicization not as a means toward greater legitimacy, but as a potential danger for the “legitimacy of the technocratic Community system” (Lindberg and Scheingold, 1970:269).

Two other established approaches to European integration, intergovernmentalism and federalism, are attentive to both the recognition and representation dimensions of the legitimacy problem. But they continue to take the model of the nation state as their analytical point of departure. Intergovernmentalism rests on the assumption that nation states and national interests drive the integration process. The intergovernmental perspective is closely bound up with a realist tradition that conceives of E...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction Conceptualizing legitimacy in a contested polity
• 1 Legitimacy and EU Policies
• 2 Legitimacy and Institutions
• 3 Legitimagy and Identity
• Index