 The Problem of Legitimacy in the European Polity. Is Democratization the Answer?Claus Offe and Ulrich K. Preuss The Constitutionalism Web-Papers from University of Hamburg, Faculty for Economics and Social Sciences, Department of Social Sciences, Institute of Political Science Abstract: The authors discuss potential sources of legitimacy of the EU, i. e. of the normative bindingness of its decisions. After rejecting the views that such legitimacy is either not needed, not feasible, or provided for already, they focus upon the corrosive impact of the EU upon democratic legitimacy within member states. Brussels-based 'governance' is essentially uncontested and can hardly provide for the legitimacy that results from the interplay between government and opposition within nation states. The problem boils down to achieving legitimacy in the absence of the political community of a 'demos'. The paper outlines a solution to this problem that relies on the apparently oxymoronic model of a 'republican empire' - a political community, that is, which is held together not by the bonds of some presumed sameness, but, to the contrary, by the shared contractual recognition of the dissimilarity of its constituent parts from which legitimacy can flow. Keywords: democracy; legitimacy; diversity/homogeneity; governance; democratization (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:erp:conweb:p0028 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in The Constitutionalism Web-Papers from University of Hamburg, Faculty for Economics and Social Sciences, Department of Social Sciences, Institute of Political Science |
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