Communication, Legitimation and Morality in Modern Politics: Studying Public Justification by Uriel Abulof & Markus Kornprobst

Author:Uriel Abulof & Markus Kornprobst [Abulof, Uriel & Kornprobst, Markus]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138554948
Google: ci7iswEACAAJ
Goodreads: 39230400
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-12-05T00:00:00+00:00

How is legitimacy related to the state? Different kinds of multilevel assessments

As the EU constitutes a relatively new and unfamiliar addition to the political landscape – an ‘unidentified political object’, as former European Commission President Delors (1985, p. 2) famously put it – the formation of legitimation discourses related to its institutions and activities does not necessarily follow established patterns. Unsurprisingly, more conventional political objects, especially the state and its procedures of representative democracy, often serve as a reference point for EU-related legitimation discourses. Many authors argue that, when assessed against the democratic institutions and principles that define the state, the EU will necessarily fall short, as its decision-making processes do not conform to state-based benchmarks of democratic legitimacy. Even if democratic accountability in the EU was expanded beyond the status quo, explains Philippe Schmitter, this problem would persist, as ‘the nonstate European policy [would] have to come up with novel institutions in order to democratize itself’, and as a result, politicians and citizens accustomed to state-based democracy ‘would have considerable difficulty in recognizing these novel rules and practices as “democratic”’ (Schmitter, 1999, p. 14).

The assumption that the state and its legitimacy, justified by democratic standards, constitutes the most important reference point for the EU is also at the core of many explicitly critical assessments of the legitimacy of the European integration process. Not only Thatcherite British Eurosceptics, such as Laughland (1998), but also academics with social democratic leanings, including Scharpf (1994, 2009), have interpreted the process of European integration as one in which high-legitimacy state institutions lose powers, whereas low-legitimacy EU bodies become politically more visible and influential, with a double-negative effect on overall legitimacy. Yet while this analysis may be defensible as a normative assessment, it should not be assumed that it also adequately represents the EU’s empirical legitimacy. First, empirical legitimation research has shown that the normative criteria privileged in democratic theory do not represent the only, and often not even the dominant, criteria by which a state’s legitimacy is assessed (Gilley, 2006; Hurrelmann, Krell-Laluhová, Nullmeier, Schneider, & Wiesner, 2009). Second, in real-world legitimation processes, member states of the EU are not everywhere assessed positively, nor is the EU always seen negatively. As a result, the relationships established between the EU and its member states are significantly more diverse than the zero-sum (or even negative-sum) models cited above, which assume that the traditional, non-internationalized state enjoys full legitimacy, and everything that diverges or moves away from this model will necessarily be perceived as deficient. Rather, there may be multiple constellations of state-related and EU-related legitimacy assessments. Based on public opinion data, Martinotti and Stefanizzi (1995) have distinguished ‘integrated’ citizen orientations (positive assessments of both the EU and one’s member state) from orientations that are ‘nation-statist’ (negative assessment of the EU, positive assessment of one’s member state), ‘innovative/escapist’ (positive assessment of the EU, negative assessment of one’s member state), or ‘alienated’ (negative assessments of both the EU and one’s member state). Martinotti and Stefanizzi show that all four

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.