Description
'(Re)Integrating Sovereignty into EU Legitimacy Discourse' This paper looks at legitimacy discourses in European integration. Siding with what it terms the ‘constitutional’ approach to legitimacy in the EU, it accepts that the EU cannot trade on the legitimacy enjoyed by classic international organizations due to its increasingly invasive policies and its evolving constitutionalization. It then analyzes deliberative solutions to EU legitimacy problems and argues that they are insufficient, by themselves, to solve the legitimacy problems particular to the European Union as an evolving polity. It argues that these problems can be overcome by retracing the idea of legitimacy in the broader concept of sovereignty who’s existence, it is claimed, is an ontological prior to any legitimacy problems in a constitutional setting. It argues that the acknowledgment of the sovereignty claims of the European Union, provides a vital frame or anchor to deliberative solutions to legitimacy which makes them more relevant to the specific legitimacy problems affecting the European Union as an evolving polity.| Period | 15 Feb 2009 |
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| Event type | Conference |
| Location | New York, United StatesShow on map |