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In the spring of this year, within only a couple of weeks, the institutional order of the European Union (EU) has been thoroughly shaken, turning into sheer institutional "disorder". After the referenda on the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe held in France and in the Netherlands, hardly anybody will question that the Union finds itself in an utterly dramatic situation. Seen from the point of view I am going to sketch out in the following sections, what became manifest with the turbulences of May and June 2005 are the symptoms of a crisis that had remained more or less latent for a longer period of time. The trends culminating in the rejection of the European Constitution by a majority of French and Dutch citizens reflect a crisis of political legitimation. I will argue that this crisis is basically the crisis of 2 specific mode of political legitimation, or, to be more precise, a consequence of the tendencies to link governance in the EU primarily to this mode. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]