Introduction: Approaching Legitimacy through Discursive Meanings

In common with international institutions more broadly, the European Union (EU) is a relatively recent phenomenon on the stage of world politics. Still, it has drastically changed the conditions of political life in Europe. Its significant power has been established and exercised not least by invoking certain conceptions of which solutions for Europe were necessary, desirable, and legitimate over others, by rooting certain ideas more successfully than others in the public imagination. Lately, the Euro crisis has shaken both the EU and its claims to legitimacy to their foundations. To be sure, commentators and decision-makers had widely agreed that the EU’s legitimacy was in crisis ever since the momentous political and popular resistance to the Maastricht Treaty (which, in the early 1990s, provided not least for the common currency). Yet current discursive charges exceed previous challenges in their relentlessness, seriously undermining claims that the EU is delivering what it was set up to provide above all: peace and prosperity in Europe, and undercutting claims that the EU is in touch with what its citizens want. Even if the EU is likely to survive its possibly most severe crisis to date, it will have to cope with increased societal concern regarding its legitimacy. That the future of the EU depends partly on its ability to develop a legitimate form of political order is a widely shared view, and a large and vibrant literature scrutinises how far it has come in this direction.