Eppur Esiste!: Legitimacy and Longevity in the EU’s Long Decade of Crisis.
24 Pages Posted: 2 May 2022
Date Written: May 2, 2022
Abstract
This paper examines the legitimacy of the EU in the context of its ‘long decade’ of crisis. It reviews the conventional methods of assessing the EU’s legitimacy according to input, throughput and output legitimacy (the ‘orthodox view’), arguing that there is a tension between its diagnosis of a crisis-related deterioration in the EU’s legitimacy and the EU’s continued existence and expansion. This tension is explained by reference to the fact that the orthodox view assumes a form of legitimacy based on normative values which are presented as universal and prior to politics, ignores the question of authority and historical context in thinking about legitimacy, and leaves little room for pluralism about what political legitimacy requires. It sketches out an argument for an alternative, more realist, approach to thinking about EU legitimacy in the context of crisis based on the work of Bernard Williams. Williams’s alternative account of legitimacy, ‘political realism’, involves the securing of political authority as a first necessary condition of political legitimacy coupled with the historically-contextualised justification of that authority in normative terms. This approach, the contribution argues, constitutes an improved account of EU legitimacy in the context of crisis in that it provides a better, more realistic, explanation of the EU’s endurance and expansion during this period by showing how disagreement and context shape our understanding of normative values particularly in a complex, evolving, ‘in-between’ governing entity such as the EU.
Keywords: Crisis, European Integration, legitimacy, Political Realism, Bernard Williams
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