Legitimating the European Union: The Contested Meanings of an EU Constitution
| dc.contributor.author | OBERHUBER, Florian | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2007-10-22T08:57:05Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2007-10-22T08:57:05Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2007 | |
| dc.description.abstract | Following up on a previous study on the Convention on the Future of Europe, the present article investigates the reception of the EU’s constitutional experience in the public. A qualitative analysis of the press coverage of the various phases of constitutionalisation between the decision on establishing a Convention in December 2001 and the provisional suspension of ratification in 2005 is carried out. While it is pointed out that the constitutional project entailed a bid for legitimacy which implied a strong engagement of the public, the reception of constitutionalisation in the press did not result in a democratic process of mobilisation. However, the failure of such an interpretation of the European Union as a democracy in the making did not amount to a de-legitimation of the EU in the coverage analysed. Rather, another semantic framework for making meaning of the Europolity was found which was based on a predominantly statist reading of its constituents and which legitimated co-operation over unilateral action, namely constructing a normative discourse of the EU member-states in search of a common “European” as opposed to their “national” interests. Hence, the article proposes to take note of the fact that discourses about the European Union show a large degree of polysemia and contestedness, and it develops a framework for empirically studying legitimation as a semiotic process involving the justification of the political system and its output. | en |
| dc.format.mimetype | application/pdf | |
| dc.identifier.issn | 1028-3625 | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/1814/7160 | |
| dc.language.iso | en | en |
| dc.relation.ispartofseries | EUI RSCAS | en |
| dc.relation.ispartofseries | 2007/25 | en |
| dc.rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess | |
| dc.subject | Constitution building | en |
| dc.subject | European public space | en |
| dc.subject | Media | en |
| dc.subject | European Convention | en |
| dc.subject | Qualitative analysis | en |
| dc.subject | Austria | en |
| dc.subject | Legitimacy | en |
| dc.subject | Democracy | en |
| dc.title | Legitimating the European Union: The Contested Meanings of an EU Constitution | en |
| dc.type | Working Paper | en |
| dspace.entity.type | Publication | |
| eui.subscribe.skip | true |
