The Story and the Literature: Democracy, Efficiency, and the Contested Game of EU Politics

Abstract

The struggle for its legitimacy, then, is as old as European integration itself. Over the past six decades, a wealth of rival and mutually referential discourses has been competing to make the project look more — or less — legitimate. They have battled over how to make sense of the EU (and its predecessors) in the first place, over what it would mean for them to be legitimate, and over how legitimate they were. To varying degrees, the discourses on offer from EU-level official statements pushed and responded to discourses in the national public spheres, and the other way round. What holds the different episodes analysed in the individual chapters together, and what lessons are there to be drawn from the discursive history of this struggle? This chapter weaves the episodes of my individual chapters into one story, and relates it to developments in the academic literature on EU legitimacy. The emphasis in it is not on summarising the book’s analyses, but on bringing their interpretations into dialogue with specific important sites of investigation, controversies, and structuring concepts in the pertinent scholarship.