The Crisis of the European legitimacy
The Crisis of the European legitimacy

Summary/Abstract: The current economic crisis reveals the limits of the political texts regulating the European Union, especially the “Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe” of 29 October 2004. Contrary to its ambition to possess a double legitimacy – that of intergovernmental treaties and that of the citizens’ rights to participation and representation – the European Union suffers from the fact that there is not the slightest beginning of a true “European citizenship” in the full constitutional sense of the term. One may even have doubts about the existence of a European public space, a European “politische Öffentlichkeit”. In the absence of such a constitutional foundation and a true institution of a European citizenship or at least the development of a European public space, Habermas suggests that we actually rather consider peoples as “the other constituting subject”. This proposition is very ambiguous and can be misunderstood. While it seems to reintroduce a substantial conception of the people or the nation I here defend the assumption that as long as we cannot lean on a really existing European citizenship, the question is how we can ensure a continuing transition and translation (not a transfer or a relinquishment) between national citizenship and European citizenship. This is not an abstract but a very concrete and pragmatic question. If – as Habermas rightly states – the integration medium is citizen solidarity, then the sine qua non to the existence of a European public space is a convergence of economic and social policies – that is exactly the contrary of the neoliberal destruction of national and transnational solidarities which characterizes the current management of the “crisis”.

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