The Struggle for EU Legitimacy: Public Contestation, 1950-2005

01 02 What would it mean for the EU to be a legitimate body, and where do our ideas on this question come from? In this award winning book, Claudia Schrag Sternberg explores some of the most significant questions surrounding the legitimacy of the European Union. Specifically, The Struggle for EU Legitimacy traces the history of constructions and contestations of the EU's legitimacy, in discourses of the European institutions and in public debate. Through an interpretive, non-quantitative textual analysis of an eclectic range of sources, it examines both long-term patterns in EU-official discourses and their reception in member-state public spheres, specifically in the German and French debates on the Maastricht and Constitutional Draft Treaties. The story told portrays the history of legitimating the EU as a never-ending contest over the ends and goals of integration, as well as a balancing act - which was inescapable given the nature of the integration project - between 'bringing the people in' and 'keeping them out', and between actively politicising and deliberately de-politicising the stakes of EU politics. Schrag Sternberg suggests that continuous contestation is not only a defining feature of this history, but a source of legitimacy in its own right. 16 02 This book differs from other existing academic monographs and edited volumes in the crowded field of European Studies in two ways: firstly, by virtue of my focus on the space in between existing normative (e.g. Kohler-Koch and Rittberger 2007) and existing empirical accounts of legitimacy (see McLaren 2006). Secondly, this discourse-historical study contributes to an emerging body of empirical studies of the relationship between the EU and its citizen that use diverse methods from anthropology, intellectual history, discourse analysis, sociology etc. (e.g. White 2011, Risse 2010, Fligstein 2008, Foret 2008, Favell 2008, Guiraudon and Favell 2011, Checkel and Katzenstein 2009, Delanty and Rumford 2005). The distinguishing idea behind this book, however, is to break the ground beyond that already ploughed by existing quantitative content or frame analyses (Medrano 2003) as well as by studies that combine quantitative with interpretative approaches (Schneider et al. 2010). I hope to do so through my method of interpreting dynamics of narrative and argumentative construction (see also Della Sala 2010, Lacroix and Nicolaïdis 2010, Lucarelli et al. 2010, Howarth and Torfing 2005), which in my case is e