Bulletin n. 1/2017
June 2017
INDICE
  • Section A) The theory and practise of the federal states and multi-level systems of government
  • Section B) Global governance and international organizations
  • Section C) Regional integration processes
  • Section D) Federalism as a political idea
    • Weale Albert
    Dilemmas of political legitimacy in the European Union: a contractarian analysis
    in European Union Politics , vol. 18, n. 3, special issue "Europe in Times of Crisis. Political Legitimacy and Crisis Management in the European Union" ,  2017 ,  348-362
    The European Union (EU) is a compound polity, which requires its member states to make credible commitments about their complying with the terms of their inter-state contract. Using contemporary social contract theory, the paper analyses what conditions of inter-state credibility are necessary in order for such a contract to be successful. However, since member states make their commitments as representatives of their peoples, those same commitments must also be acceptable at the domestic level, but the domestic political accountability of collective agents calls into question the extent to which inter-state commitments can be credible. Since the domestic legitimacy is tied up with the overall advantages of the international contract, and no government can irrevocably bind its successors, the level of inter-state commitment required by any agreement may be impossible to achieve. The central problem of political legitimacy for the EU arises therefore from the conflict between inter-state commitment and the principle that political authority derives from the people, which can at best only justify a delegated, instead of a transferred, authority to supra-state institutions. This is especially true in the case of the monetary union, in which some national key powers are subjected to irrevocable and time unlimited inter-state commitments and limitations. Conversely, the conditions for direct normative legitimacy from the peoples of Europe to the EU do not exist. Alongside the monetary construction flaws of the EMU, this is the core of its structural political flaws, for which no way out has yet been found.
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