Introduction

Abstract

Since the 1990s, democratic legitimacy and the relationship between the EU and its citizens have often been considered as the ‘Achilles heel’ (Wilkinson 2002) of the European integration process. Irrespective of their normative or epistemological premises, a growing number of scholars have argued that the main challenge of democratization at a European level is not institutional reform, but communication and substantiation of a shared identity among the citizens of Europe. Gerard Delanty, for one, notes that the ‘search for new principles of European legitimacy is inextricably bound up with the attempt to create a space in which collective identities can be formed’ (1995: viii, see 9). It is the interest in the real — or alleged — incongruity between an increasing Europeanization in the political and economical sphere and in the realm of communication and deliberation that has prompted the following investigation.¹