Public discourse, identity and the problem of democratic legitimacy

Abstract

In German debates over the European Union, in general, and its ‘democratic deficit’ in particular, the following quotation by Peter Graf Kielmansegg has become almost canonical: ‘Europe, even limited to Western Europe, is not a community of communications, barely a community of memory, and only a very limited community of experience’ (Kielmansegg 1994).1 The formulation suggests that a political community has to be a community of memory, of experience and of communication as a precondition for having a common, legitimate, democratic political order. Other sceptical objections against further centralization of powers and responsibilities and against the possibilities of further democratization have also pointed to a lack of collective identity and a missing European public sphere. On closer inspection, however, these familiar formulas begin to look somewhat enigmatic. It is not only that the basic terms of these equations are very much contested and used with different meanings. Much has been written, for example, on democracy and legitimacy, and yet there remain not only differences of opinion, quite naturally, but also certain conceptual ambiguities that hinder the debate. Also, there are well-known controversies about the notion of collective identity and the concept of a European public sphere. In addition, the relationships between these basic terms are not very well specified. That is, very often even the precise meanings of the propositions that supposedly spell out some of these relations remain somewhat fuzzy or ambiguous. So by necessity, the questions asked about these relationships remain fuzzy, too. What exactly are the supposed relationships between these terms – or between the real phenomena that they denote? Are they conceptual, normative, or empirical? In addition, how should we specify the contents of these different kinds of relationship? The main purpose of this chapter is to clarify some of these terms and some of these problem formulations. I will apply the conceptual framework to the substantive questions about the future of the European Union that form the topic of this volume: what kind of political community or political order should the EU become, what kind of European project should we undertake and what might be the basis of the political legitimacy of the projected model of a European political order?