If only it was a different constitution! This exclamation headed a commentary on the EU constitution published by BronisĆaw Wildstein in the Polish daily Rzeczpospolita back in October 2003, when the first Intergovernmental Conference on a draft version of the EU constitution was about to start. The exclamation pinpoints the dilemma that the European Union has faced to date: while its aspirations for joint problem-solving, prosperity and stability are largely acknowledged, there continue to be fierce political struggles about what polity such endeavours should be based on. Recent crises, such as the Eurozone crisis, the crisis of EU migration policy or the looming disaster of a âno dealâ-Brexit may have been temporarily contained. But this cannot conceal the fact that divisions have deepened over the question of how core projects of European integration ought to be shaped in future. Moreover, several aspects of EU polity that were taken for granted appear suddenly to be at risk. The way the recent crises were managed has strained the EUâs culture of consensus-seeking and burden-sharing and questioned its ambition to foster the union. Alternativist and rejectionist movements, that contest the EU in its very set-up (Leconte, 2015; Topaloff, 2014), have gathered momentum. And the rise of the radical right in many EU countries, of nationalism as a presentable governmental doctrine, and of hostility towards non-nationals suggests that âEurope is experiencing a renationalisation of political lifeâ that potentially rewinds the project of political union (Kupchan, 2010).
1.1 Legitimation in the European Union: Subject and Argument of the Book
This book establishes a different perspective, which offers itself to students of political science, sociology and discourse studies alike. The book reads recent events as a reminder that the EU is a polity in the making. The values and objectives underlying its association remain unsettled and contested. The current conjecture, then, appears as a moment of transition, rather than a lethal return of the past. It challenges and transforms the post-war compact, upon which European integration used to be based, as well as the established political forces, which used to carry it. What the compact had precariously settled currently re-emerges in the spotlight of public contestation: the tension between market-making and social protection, between supranational rules and democratic authorisation, between cosmopolitan social order and national community (Rosamond, 2017). In France and Poland, the two EU countries looked at in more detail in this book, the violent protests by the left-behinds of Emanuel Macronâs market-enhancing reforms (France) and the broad support for an illiberal government that boosts social policies (Poland) point to deeper social dislocations. In this situation, the nation and the nation-state appear as strongholds of the familiar. However, the experience of Brexit accumulated so far suggests that there is no simple return to the previous as the renationalisation scenario implies: the effort to disentangle the EU and British jurisdictions borders not only on the unmanageable but also deeply polarises society, alienating large parts of the population, who do not give up on their multiple attachments, including their attachments to the EU.
Against this backdrop, I suggest trying a new approach to the EUâs legitimation. Considering that we deal with a transformation of the post-war compact and with a dense entanglement of the European and the national scales of political association, existing approaches to the empirical study of the EUâs political legitimacy seem too narrow in their scope. Measuring popular support for existing EU institutions, the level of attachment to either the European or the national collective, or the salience of notions of political legitimacy trained on the nation-state will help to evaluate and orient political action. But as a research tool, such an approach might do little more than confirm existing âdeficit analysesâ, which attest to the EU a democracy, legitimacy, identity and communication deficit. The adjusted understandings of legitimacy, which might emerge in the age of the EUâs politicisation, will hardly be unravelled. Nor will we get to know what role the national might play in such a reformulation, as a possible source of cultural continuity that Charles Tully hinted at in his book on strange multiplicity, when spelling out the requirements for constitutional politics in multicultural entities:
The objective of the book is to develop a framework and conduct an empirical analysis that places the reformulation of the EUâs polity and the articulation of the scales of political association centre stage. The book investigates how, and by which discourse practices, the EU is legitimised and delegitimised during controversies over EU institutional reform. It highlights the process, instead of the outcome, of legitimation, looking into the emergence of practices across contexts of political communication. Particular attention is paid to the fact that, in contrast to nation-states set up in the post-war era, the EU derives its legitimacy not only from efficient system performance but also from its mission to build a union among European nations (Weiler, 2012). This mission, while also enjoying popularity among the broader public, has been specified by epistemic communities who share knowledge of EU legal sources, procedures and rhetoric and have privileged access to public debates due to their professional positions in the political, judicial, journalistic or academic realms. Moreover, the EUâs polity-building mission is negotiated in the specific setting of Europeanised political communication, which is structured by the EUâs legislative and negotiation procedures and mediatised by news media targeting primarily national audiences. Hence, (de-)legitimising the EU most likely involves some sort of translation, or recontextualisation, as I call it, between different epistemic communities and fields of social practice.A constitution should be seen as a form of activity, an intercultural dialogue in which the culturally diverse sovereign citizens of contemporary societies negotiate agreements on their forms of association over time in accordance with the three conventions of mutual recognition, consent, and cultural continuity. (Tully, 1995, p. 30)
The book reveals how this character of political communication is implicated in the EUâs legitimation. It argues that the diversifying appropriation of EU-related issues to national debates and national polity discourse does not undermine, but enables, the construction and legitimation of the polity of the EU. Strong national biases in the discussion of EU matters signal that an EU issue is âdropped into the mess of [national] interdiscourse, as a result of which knowledge is being re-crystallisedâ (Link, 2003, p. 14, authorâs translation).1 They indicate that the discursive-cognitive ground is being prepared for adjusting accustomed polity discourse to the (changed) European condition. Paradoxically, divisive tendencies in struggles over the EUâs polity and categories of national politics are enhanced by Europeanised practices of political competition and communication, instead. This is unravelled through a combination of pragmatic-linguistic theory of discourse, field theory and constructionist-sociological notions of legitimation. The argument is grounded in both empirical and theoretical explorations.
Empirically, the book draws on the example of the controversy over the EU constitution in the early 2000s, which enshrined the EUâs current set-up and anticipated many of todayâs divisions.2 The EU constitutional debate is a watershed moment heralding the conjuncture we are currently in. It marked the beginning of a period of intensified politicisation of European integration and revealed fissures in the consensus on market-driven integration and open societies, which had been endorsed by centrist parties in both member and accession states throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Moreover, the upcoming accession of newcomers from the former Soviet bloc triggered struggles over the question of how the EU had to accommodate them, an issue surfacing with the parallel conflict over the US-led war on Iraq that was supported by the accession states. The study investigates how, against this backdrop, notions of legitimacy carved out during multilateral negotiations in the Convention and subsequent Intergovernmental Conferences were appropriated to media debates in Poland and France. The focus is on topics and discourse strategies occurring in core documents of the Constitution process, on the one hand, and in news articles and commentaries published in the broadsheets Gazeta Wyborcza, Rzeczpospolita, Le Monde and Le Figaro, on the other. The investigation of topics and discourse strategies of the EU constitutional debate, conducted with the help of a combined, computer-aided content and discourse analysis, reveals which constructions of legitimate political authority and association prevailed. To find out why certain discourse practices recur, these insights into the EUâs discursive legitimation are put in relation to an extensive and innovative analysis of practices of news production, which considers distribution and co-occurrence patterns, publication output, placement, text genres, choice of authors and so on and contrasts news articles with evaluative articles and clusters of arranged debates. The two country settings were chosen because, during the drafting period of the Constitution process, Poland and France stood out due to bilateral-intergovernmental and domestic polarisation over the EU constitution and the war on Iraq. The selected broadsheets arranged extended debates on these issues. They were associated with opposing camps in the centre of the political spectrum that supported EU integration, but were divided on its liberal imprint and power division as promoted by the EU constitution. Hence, the case study sheds light on one of those instances of an EU-related and mutually referential controversy in national media that are seen to be crucial for the communicative construction of EU identity and legitimacy. As Poland and France hold distinct experiences of nation-building, constitutionalism and EU membership, the case study also considers those aspects of national political culture that, in the literature, are expected to inform divergent conceptions of European integration (for more details on the case study, see Sect. 2.â4).
Theoretically, the book follows the line of âpluralist approachesâ to European integration (Rosamond, 2006) and looks for inspiration beyond established concepts. It draws on the pragmatic-linguis...