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Close relations with Europe, especially but not only with the United Kingdom, have long been a consensual tenet of Canadian foreign policy, which has supported European integration since the 1970s. The UK's withdrawal from the European Union threatens to upset this consensus. While Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has consistently cast Brexit in a negative light, Conservative leaders Andrew Scheer and Erin O'Toole have commented positively on the UK's leaving the EU. Did their polarized views resonate in the population? To answer this question, this article analyzes the results of an original survey of voting-age Canadians. Findings show a strong degree of correspondence between positions expressed in party discourse and preferences in the Canadian population. This raises the possibility that the difference between two models of transatlantic relations, which we call Eurosphere and Anglosphere, could emerge as a new fault line in Canadian foreign policy.

The Eurozone financial crisis was widely seen as a challenge to the legitimacy of the European Union (EU). It raised concerns about the quality of its policy outputs, the democratic character of its decision-making, and the EU’s willingness to respect its own legal framework. This article examines how the legitimacy dimension of the crisis was reflected in media discourse. Using methods of political claims analysis, it studies newspaper reporting in four Eurozone states (Germany, Austria, Spain, and Ireland) between 2009 and 2014. It inquires whether the Eurozone crisis led to an increase in discourse that explicitly challenged the legitimacy of the EU and assesses which discourse constellations were particularly likely to result in de-legitimation. The analysis shows that there was no dramatic erosion of legitimacy in media discourse. EU-related reporting was dominated by statements from EU and member-state executives and largely had a technocratic focus, until the outcome of the 2014 European Parliament election made popular discontent with the EU impossible to ignore.

While it is undisputed that the Eurozone crisis has contributed to the politicization of European integration, existing research has not conclusively established which cleavages have structured the ensuing debates. To shed light on this question, we examine how the crisis was framed in parliamentary debates in four Eurozone states (Germany, Austria, Spain and Ireland) between 2009 and 2014. We engage with research findings that describe national parliaments’ response to the crisis as being structured primarily by a transnational cleavage, defined by attitudes towards European integration, rather than by the left-right divide. We use a combination of content and cluster analysis to identify the discursive frames that parliamentarians employed to make sense of the crisis, and then assess which factors affected how these frames were used. Our findings show that the left-right cleavage remained dominant in the four parliaments’ crisis discourse.

The Lisbon Treaty contained three institutional innovations that were designed to make the European Union (EU) more democratic: the Ordinary Legislative Procedure (OLP), the Early Warning Mechanism (EWM) for national parliaments, and the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI). This short article sets the stage for a symposium that assesses whether the three mechanisms have indeed contributed to the EU’s democratization. It situates OLP, EWM, and ECI in the EU’s system of multilevel democracy and raises the question of whether the mechanisms address the institutional and societal factors that cause the EU’s democratic deficit.

The withdrawal of the United Kingdom (UK) from the European Union (EU), if and when it occurs, will likely imply that Canada must conclude a new bilateral trade agreement with the UK. In the light of recent trends towards an increasing politicization of trade negotiations, this policy brief assesses in which respects a Canada-UK agreement could become politically controversial. Drawing on explanations for the politicization of recent trade deals, it identifies potential flashpoints for political conflict in the Canada-UK trade relationship. It then discusses which options policy makers have to channel trade-related controversies into the policy process in a way that contributes to inclusive and evidence-based public debates.

Political scientists use the concept of legitimacy to assess the rightfulness of political rule. Their research can approach legitimacy from two perspectives: When taking a normative approach, political scientists develop and justify their own evaluation of the rightfulness of political arrangements. When taking an empirical approach, they study how other people—such as political elites or citizens—evaluate the rightfulness of political rule. Both approaches have been used in research on the European Union. Scholarly discussions that approach the EU’s legitimacy from a normative perspective revolve around the question of which standards of rightfulness are appropriate for the EU. These depend largely on how the EU polity is conceptualized: as a technocratic regulatory agency, an intergovernmental organization, a federation, a demoi-cracy, or a system of multilevel governance. Since the EU is hybrid polity that possesses elements of each of these models, and is therefore difficult to classify, no consensus has emerged in this debate. Scholarship that approaches the EU’s legitimacy as an empirical phenomenon examines political attitudes and discourses in European society, asking whether, and why, societal actors treat the EU as legitimate. A diverse set of research methods—including public opinion surveys, content analysis of different kinds of texts, and qualitative interviews with citizens—have been applied to shed light on this question. While this research has not provided clear evidence of a “legitimacy crisis” of the EU, it does show that many Europeans relate to the EU with a sense of diffuse unease and skepticism, in part because they find it opaque and difficult to understand.

The political legitimation (or de-legitimation) of the European Union (EU) has been the object of much empirical research. This paper argues that this research holds lessons that can inform debates about the legitimation of global governance more generally. After some conceptual clarifications, the paper presents a critical review of the literature on the EU’s legitimation, focusing on six crucial aspects – (1) the emergence and change of legitimation debates; (2) the arenas where legitimation occurs; (3) the role of the state as a reference point in legitimacy assessments; (4) the difference between various objects of legitimation; (5) the actors that trigger legitimation change; as well as (6) the relationship between legitimation and polity development. In each of these respects, the paper identifies important insights that can be gained from EU Studies, but also conceptual and methodological weaknesses in the EU-related literature that researchers working on other aspects of global governance ...

The concept of demoi-cracy has gained prominence in democratic theory, especially in applications to the European Union. This chapter explores whether it can inform scholarship on multilevel governance (MLG). The chapter starts by taking stock of challenges that MLG implies for democracy. It then reviews theories of demoi-cracy to assess how they address these challenges. The discussion reveals ambiguities in demoi-cratic theorizing, which are spelled out by distinguishing four variants: (1) demoi-cracy as consociationalism, (2) demoi-cracy as variable multilateralism, (3) demoi-cracy as network governance, and (4) demoi-cracy as multi-venue contestation. In principle, demoi-cracy—particularly in its fourth understanding—has the potential to make a valuable contribution to MLG scholarship, by highlighting the embeddedness of MLG in overlapping political communities and providing normative guidelines for the reconciliation of conflicting democratic objectives. However, the concept must be further specified, in dialogue with MLG approaches, to allow for this potential to be realized.

The idea of demoi-cracy, which proposes to base democratic institutions not on one demos but on multiple co-existing demoi, has gained increasing popularity in debates about the democratization of the European Union. Existing models of demoi-cracy have, however, paid relatively little attention to the qualities that Europeans would need to possess in order to effectively participate in European politics as demoi-cratic citizens. This contribution seeks to identify these qualities; it then looks at empirical evidence to assess whether it is realistic that Europeans will, at least in the medium term, be able to live up to these requirements. While there are some indications that Europeans adapt their patterns of political participation to demoi-cratic requirements, the danger remains that institutionalizing a system of demoi-cracy would further accentuate the existing participatory inequalities.

A growing literature in research on the European Union (EU) claims that European integration has become comprehensively politicized in the EU's population. The most convincing evidence for this assertion stems from research on political and societal elites — studies of party manifestos, interest groups' activities, news media reporting and the like. By contrast, evidence on politicization trends in the broader citizenry is much more ambiguous. This article raises the question of whether politicization is more than an elite phenomenon. Based on a differentiated conception of politicization, it analyzes focus groups conducted with EU citizens in four member states. It shows that, for most citizens, only the fundamentals of European integration have gained political saliency, while the EU's day-to-day activities remain largely non-politicized. In addition, patterns of politicization in the European population are conditioned by significant knowledge deficits.

The news media is a major forum for the discursive legitimation of the EU. This article analyses media debates in the context of three attempts at reforming EU primary law in the past decade: the Nice Treaty; the Constitutional Treaty; and the Lisbon Treaty. Focusing on four member states – the United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany and Austria – our study shows that the EU's legitimacy is discursively constructed according to distinct patterns, most of which are remarkably similar across countries and stable over time. In the context of the EU Constitution, legitimation debates became more intensive and more critical; however, these developments were largely reversed when the Lisbon Treaty was debated. This suggests that, in the media arena, the much-discussed politicization of European integration is an episodic occurrence, rather than a unidirectional trend.

This article discusses what implications the European Union’s (EU’s) multilevel structure has for its democratic legitimacy. It identifies three channels of democratic input in the EU – the European Parliament, national democratic processes influencing the Council of Ministers, and civil society participation in consultation procedures of the European Commission – and assesses them on the basis of a comprehensive set of criteria. The evaluation shows that the democratization of the EU faces three interlinked dilemmas. Most fundamentally, there is an incongruence in territorial scope between the issues requiring democratic control (increasingly European if not global) and the imagined communities necessary for the functioning of democratic procedures (primarily national). This ‘congruence dilemma’ intensifies contradictions between participation and deliberation, as well as between effectiveness and accountability in EU decision-making. Grand reforms that would solve these dilemmas once and for all are unlikely to be successful, but changes in the interplay of the three democratic channels – such as the disentanglement of political competencies, the formalization of inter-channel conciliation procedures, and the introduction of directly democratic mechanisms – promise to mitigate their negative effects.

Focusing on media discourses, this article maps the communicative reproduction of legitimacy in Great Britain, the United States, Germany and Switzerland. It argues that political communication constitutes a distinctive dimension of legitimation that should be studied alongside public opinion and political behaviour. Research on legitimation discourses can help us understand why the legitimacy of established democracies remains stable in spite of the challenges of globalisation: Delegitimating communication tends to focus on relatively marginal political institutions, while the core regime principles of the democratic nation-state, which are deeply entrenched in the political cultures of Western countries, serve as anchors of legitimacy. These democratic principles also shape the normative benchmarks used to evaluate legitimacy, thus preventing a ‘de-democratisation’ of legitimation discourses. Finally, the short-lived nature of media interest as well as ritualistic legitimation practices shield the democratic nation-state from many potentially serious threats to its legitimacy.

While normative debates about the legitimacy of the European Union (EU) have reached a high level of sophistication, we know considerably less about the Union's legitimacy in an empirical sense, that is, about the ways in which its institutions are assessed in the population. This article argues that the survey-oriented methods commonly used to study such assessments have a number of deficiencies, and that they should therefore be complemented by research that focuses on political communication. One advantage of this approach is that it can better map constructions of multilevel legitimacy: assessments that establish linkages between the legitimacy of the EU and that of its member states. This article demonstrates the utility of this approach by examining media debates in Great Britain and Germany. It sheds new light on the construction of legitimating and delegitimating assessments of EU institutions, on the criteria used in them, as well as on the ways in which evaluations of the EU are related to evaluations of its member states.

The draft Constitution was an attempt to democratise the EU, while taking account of the problematic social preconditions for democracy at the Union level. Its failure demonstrates the need to pay greater attention to the nature of public support for the EU, and to the ways in which this support is related to the democratic quality of EU institutions. Contrary to what is often assumed, EU support can still be quite adequately described by the figure of a ‘permissive consensus’. For better or worse, attempts to democratise EU institutions might undermine this form of support.

It is widely accepted that internationalization and the increasing loss of parliamentary control over political power challenge the legitimacy of national democratic systems and their core institutions. We first present results from a study of public communication, which, when examined in the context of theories of legitimation, indicate that these processes do not necessarily lead to the erosion or breakdown of popular support for the nation state. The idea that there is a linear cause-and-effect relationship is overly simple, and a more detailed analysis is called for. Legitimation of a political system through public communication is a back-and-forth process which is determined by the system's specific institutional arrangements and by the fortuitous twists and turns of public debate. Nation states have more extensive, diverse and deeply rooted sources of legitimation than is often assumed. Legitimacy in the nation-state: what do we know? The idea of democracy is at the heart of the modern western state, whose institutions reflect what Robert A. Dahl called the ‘second democratic transformation’, i.e. the transfer of democratic self-government from the city-state to nations and large-scale societies. For a long time, this transfer was remarkably successful. Institutions of representative democracy at the national level secured effective citizen participation in political decision-making and they themselves became a central source of popular support for the nation state's political arrangements.

Shifts of political authority to regional integration projects such as the European Union (EU) are a key element of the globalization and denationalization trend in today’s world (for many, see Keohane and Milner 1996; Zurn 1998; Kahler and Lake 2009). The EU is, of course, the most prominent and advanced example of regional governance, but it is hardly the only case that deserves scholarly attention: The literature on the ‘new’ (wave of) regionalism documents that integration projects running the gamut of varieties — from free trade arrangements to more ambitious projects at least partially inspired by the EU — have become ubiquitous (van Langenhove 2011; de Lombarde and Soderbaum 2013). As a consequence, European and regional integration studies have come full circle: The genuinely comparative perspective assumed by the neo-functionalist pioneers of the 1950s and 1960s (Haas 1971; Schmitter 1970), abandoned by most Europeanists in the following decades, is increasingly rediscovered today (Borzel 2011, 2013; Borzel et al. 2012).

This volume set out to explore the impact of regional integration on the politics of Europe and the Americas and, more specifically, its resonance in public opinion and discourses, elections and civil society mobilization. Our objective was to find out whether regional integration itself has become politically salient and whether the legitimacy of regional governance arrangements has been explicitly contested. Such politicization and (de)legitimation processes would indicate that regional integration has ceased to be an elite affair, a political development with policy relevance but otherwise relatively insulated from the political debates that engage citizens, and it would thus signal that regional governance has become an issue of contentious politics and public deliberation in European and American democracies.

While the Eurozone crisis has contributed to Europeanisation trends in the domestic politics of EU member states, it has not to the same extent triggered citizen mobilisation in EU-level democratic procedures. Theories that treat politicisation as an undifferentiated phenomenon tend to miss this important distinction. This article suggests that the weakness of supranational citizen mobilisation is linked to factors that restrict the citizens’ receptiveness to EU-related messages: limited knowledge of the EU and a weak sense of political efficacy, a discursive framing that conceptualises the EU as a consortium of member states rather than a supranational entity, and attributions of responsibility for the crisis that de-emphasise the role of EU policies. These factors constitute cultural opportunity structures that influence politicisation patterns; they imply that politicisation is, under present conditions, more likely to result in a renationalisation than in a supranationalisation of EU politics.

The institutions, decision-making processes and outputs of regional governance arrangements are often portrayed as neither legitimate nor illegitimate, but simply ‘a-legitimate’ (Steffek 2007: 190) in the eyes of citizens — so remote from their day-to-day political experiences that they are not seen as being in need of popular legitimation. This changes when regional governance becomes politicized — that is, when citizens gain awareness of its political significance, begin to develop opinions about it and treat it as salient in their political discourses and activities. The European Union (EU) is widely cited as an example of a regional organization that has experienced this kind of politicization. Since the debate about the Maastricht Treaty in the early 1990s, the ‘permissive consensus’ on EU-related issues in the European population has presumably weakened, and therefore EU institutions are said to be increasingly faced with explicit challenges to their legitimacy.

Taking the theory of deliberative democracy as a starting point, the article examines the role of meetings in the process of political decision-making. Focussing on micro-social processes of interaction, it discusses to what extent interaction rules — which are described as “disciplines of communication” — can guarantee that political decisions are reached through argumentative discussion. A comparison of meetings and internet discussions reveals that deliberative decision making requires rules that secure a rational exchange of arguments as well as the personal commitment of the participants. In order to gain a better understanding of these two aspects of decision-making processes, Marcel Mauss’ theory of “gift exchange” is applied to argumentation theory.

Tuesday, February 14, 2006, was a typical winter day in Strasbourg with mild rain and moderate temperatures. Yet the crowd that had gathered outside the European Parliament building was anything but typical: 50,000 demonstrators had heeded a call by the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) to protest against the European Commission’s proposal for a Services Directive. Two days ahead of a European Parliament vote on the directive, their speeches, banners, and sirens signaled an unequivocal ‘no’ — in various languages — to the European Commission’s plans. The rally in Strasbourg was the culmination of a months-long campaign, directed mainly against the ‘country of origin principle’ contained in the draft directive, a rule that would have allowed service providers from any European Union (EU) state to work elsewhere in the Union under their home country’s labor and safety standards. When the European Parliament passed its own version of the directive two days later, the ‘country of origin principle’ had been eliminated. ‘A major victory for European workers,’ boasted ETUC in a press release (2006b). John Monks, its General Secretary, declared, ‘Trade unions are a political force to be reckoned with’ (ETUC 2006a).

Our study questions the frequently hypothesized erosion of the democratic nation state’s legitimacy in the age of globalization. In public spheres and media discourses, whose important role in the generation and maintenance of regime support motivated us to develop the novel text analytical perspective of this book, the legitimacy of Western democracies appears remarkably stable. There is little, if any, evidence for a general or full-fledged erosion of legitimacy in the quality press of the four countries examined — Switzerland, Germany, Britain, and the United States — over the last fifteen years.

According to one of the more recent Eurobarometer public opinion surveys, 40 per cent of Germans and 30 per cent of the British trusted — while 54 and 64 per cent, respectively, distrusted — their national government in the autumn of 2007. In the same year, a mere 48.3 per cent of the population participated in the national elections of Switzerland while 61.7 per cent of the ‘voting-eligible’ population turned out in the United States presidential and congressional elections a year later.1 And, while observers such as the political scientist Marc J. Hetherington (2004: 26) or the Washington Post journalist E. J. Dionne (1991) bluntly claim that Americans ‘hate’ the government and politics of their nation, the 14 March 2004 issue of the Post draws on the traditional imagery of the United States as a ‘city on a hill’ to suggest that the country is ‘a beacon of morality and justice, and a fit model for other nations…’. We posit that these and similar pieces of evidence reveal something about the legitimacy of political systems such as Switzerland, Germany, Britain, and the United States. But what exactly do they reveal — and what do we mean by the term ‘legitimacy’ to begin with?

Three different scenarios of change — each arguably representing a distinct form of crisis — dominate current research on the legitimacy of the democratic nation state. One may speak of an erosion or collapse of legitimacy (our type I and II scenarios) when citizens withdraw their support for a political order. By contrast, a mere transformation of legitimacy (type III) may be diagnosed where a regime continues to enjoy popular support while the democratic foundations of its legitimacy are superseded by non-democratic ones. But is there indeed a clear trend among Western democracies in any of these three directions, away from secure democratic legitimacy? How can the scope or nature of legitimacy be gauged to begin with, and how are the foundations of legitimacy reproduced, challenged, or transformed?

Our first foray into the empirical material, as presented in Chapter 3, has yielded few, if any, unequivocal indications for a legitimacy crisis in the public spheres of the four countries examined. Contrary to the claims advanced by much of the recent literature on globalization and its impact on the democratic nation state, we found little evidence for substantial scepticism towards these political systems and their basic structures or norms. So far, however, our argumentation has been centred on one specific understanding of legitimacy crises, namely, that such crises unfold, or must be diagnosed, if the volume and share of delegitimating communication increases beyond a given threshold. Where delegitimating evaluations of political systems and their institutional foundations come to prevail — and not just temporarily — we speak of an erosion or collapse of democratic legitimacy, that is, of type I or II legitimacy crises. The reference category of our typology is represented by the notion of secure democratic legitimacy — a state in which key legitimation objects, not least the political community and system as a whole, tend to be assessed positively, on the basis of democratic criteria of legitimation.

Have internationalization and deparliamentarization led to a legitimacy crisis of the democratic nation state? In this chapter, we turn to our empirical material and investigate to what extent the ‘erosion of legitimacy’ or ‘collapse of legitimacy’ hypotheses are correct, that is, whether there are indications of a type I or II legitimacy crisis in Swiss, German, British, and American legitimation discourses. If one of these crisis scenarios holds, media communication should be characterized by a predominance of delegitimating rather than legitimating evaluations of the four political systems and their core institutions, and legitimacy levels should fall as globalization progresses. However, in order to assess the existence of a clear and general trend in media communication towards more delegitimating evaluations, we first require a better understanding of the inner workings of legitimation discourses: how do such discourses arise, develop, and fade? The first section of this chapter reports on some pertinent insights gleaned from our examination of short-term discursive dynamics. The second section presents an overview of legitimating and delegitimating communication in Switzerland, Germany, Britain, and the United States. The third section offers a more detailed picture of the way in which specific political institutions and regime principles — legitimation objects — are evaluated in each of the four countries.

Our central finding up to this point has been the continuing prominence of democratic forms of legitimation in the public spheres of the four political systems examined, notwithstanding some clearly identifiable threats to the democratic foundations of their legitimacy. All in all, the legitimacy of the democratic nation state appears to be solidly grounded in broadly supported anchor institutions; legitimation discourses, moreover, reveal a liberal bias with regard to the standards against which these core institutions and principles are evaluated — that is, with regard to the normative criteria on which support for them is based. In terms of methodology, these findings were derived from the coding of individual statements in accordance with our legitimation grammar, and from the interpretation of aggregate frequency distributions for each of its variables. However, we have already briefly discussed combinations of statements, notably in the previous chapter, where we pointed to the frequent use of comparative argumentations — that is, propositions in which two or more legitimation objects are evaluated together — in the four national legitimation discourses, and demonstrated that the inherent tension between legitimation patterns linked to human rights and popular sovereignty may be resolved in different ways. We will now further pursue this path of analysis, as it enables us to demonstrate that the surprising robustness of the democratic nation state’s legitimacy can to some extent be understood as the result of discursive strategies connecting two or more statements.

Is the democratic nation state experiencing a globalization-induced erosion of legitimacy? Are the foundations of regime support merely being transformed? Or do both scenarios of change underestimate the stability of regime support and its foundations? The debate between proponents of crisis diagnoses and more sanguine observers remains unsettled. This inconclusiveness is partly due to the fact that ‘diagnostic’ assessments are not always properly disentangled from empirical assessments. Normatively grounded evaluations of democratic quality and empirical inferences on citizen support for real-world political orders may yield highly divergent results, but the findings of genuinely empirical legitimacy research often appear inconclusive — even contradictory — as well.