Selling the EU: How Brussels legitimates European integration
New paper: how the EU has attempted to compensate for its lack of democracy legitimacy by relying on narratives that have functioned as tools of elite power, depoliticisation and imperial projection
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This is part one of a paper in which I argue that the EU has historically compensated for its lack of democratic legitimacy by cycling through a series of (self-)legitimising narratives — from postwar peace to market integration to “European values” — and reflect on how these have systematically failed to resolve the core tension between technocratic governance and democratic self-rule, and indeed have actually exacerbated this tension, leading both to an intensification of the EU’s imperial project but also to a growing backlash against it.
Abstract
The European Union has never possessed a democratic foundation in any meaningful sense of the term. In the absence of a European demos, a shared public sphere or any founding act of collective self-determination, the EU has historically compensated for its structural legitimacy deficit through the continuous production and rotation of legitimising narratives. This paper traces that evolution from the postwar peace project through market integration, monetary union and rights-based constitutionalism, to the emergence of an explicitly moral and geopolitical register centred on “European values”. It argues that this succession of narratives has never represented a maturing political identity but rather a series of compensatory symbolic adjustments — each one emerging from the exhaustion of the previous, none capable of resolving the underlying contradiction between technocratic supranational governance and democratic self-rule.
The paper further argues that the EU’s values discourse, far from reflecting a genuine normative commitment, has always functioned as an instrument of depoliticisation and elite power: a means of sacralising the integration project, narrowing the space of legitimate democratic contestation and externalising blame for domestically unpopular policies onto supranational necessity. Rather than opening politics, EU value narratives have consistently closed it, reframing fundamental political choices as moral imperatives, technical requirements or existential obligations beyond legitimate challenge.
This structural hypocrisy has now been definitively exposed. The EU’s loudly proclaimed commitments to the so-called rules-based international order, human rights, democratic sovereignty and the prohibition of aggression have been revealed as entirely conditional on geopolitical alignment. The contrast between the EU’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — framed as a civilisational struggle requiring unlimited solidarity and sacrifice — and its silence or active complicity in the face of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the strangling of Venezuelan sovereignty and US-Israeli military aggression against Iran lays bare what the values discourse has always concealed: that “European values” are not universal principles but instruments of Western geopolitical interest, deployed selectively and abandoned without embarrassment the moment they become inconvenient.
What emerges from this analysis is a portrait of the EU not as a community of shared values, but as a technocratic, anti-democratic juggernaut whose moral language has always served a dual imperial purpose: justifying the subordination of member-state democracies to supranational elite governance — a form of internal or “auto-colonisation” — while simultaneously providing ideological cover for the projection of Western power abroad. The paper concludes that the EU’s legitimacy crisis cannot be resolved through better narratives or more coherent values communication, but rather lies in the very model of supranational integration itself.
Introduction: political legitimacy, narrative and the European Union’s structural problem
The problem of political legitimacy is inseparable from the production of meaning. All political orders, whether democratic or authoritarian, depend on symbolic frameworks through which power presents itself as necessary, natural and justified. From founding myths and constitutional moments to everyday routines of governance, political authority is never sustained by coercion or performance alone. It requires narratives that define who belongs, what is at stake, which conflicts are legitimate and which horizons of action are conceivable. These meaning-making practices can be described as processes of legitimisation: symbolic, cultural and institutional operations through which political power seeks to justify both its policies and its very existence. Even in secularised societies, politics cannot function without such narratives. As the legal scholar Harold Berman observed, “in all societies” the law “derives its authority from something outside itself”. That “something” — logically prior to rules and procedures — constitutes the foundation of authority itself.
Historically, that foundation was located in religion, tradition and custom. From the eighteenth century onwards, new sources of legitimacy emerged: popular sovereignty, nationalism, science, ideology and charismatic leadership. In the decades following the Second World War, Western liberal-democratic regimes could still rely on powerful forms of what might be called “secularised religion” — encompassing mass ideologies, national narratives and, in many contexts, a customs-based version of Christianity itself. Over the past half century, however, Western societies have experienced a sustained erosion of these traditional “grand narratives”. Religion, nation and ideology have all lost much of their binding force. Yet this erosion has not eliminated the need for political legitimation; it has merely altered its form, temporality and stability.
In the post-1989 neoliberal era in particular, Western political elites sought to govern while simultaneously depoliticising decision-making. Legitimacy was increasingly grounded in expertise, legal rules, technocratic procedures and allegedly “natural” economic laws. Politics was reframed as administration, conflict as inefficiency and alternatives as irrational or irresponsible. This transformation was famously captured by Francis Fukuyama’s claim that liberal democracy and market capitalism represented the “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution”. Yet this consensus has now shattered. Since the global financial crisis of 2007-2008, politics — and political conflict — has forcefully returned, increasingly crystallising, however, not primarily around socio-economic ideological divisions, as in the past, but around values: identity, history, religion, sexuality, nationhood and sovereignty.
It is within this broader condition of late or hypermodern politics — characterised by individualisation, fragmented public spheres, declining institutional trust, permanent crisis and the return of value-based conflict — that the European Union must be situated. The EU is often portrayed as a technocratic, post-political and output-oriented polity that historically has relied on performance rather than symbolism. Yet over the past decades, and with increasing intensity since the early 2000s, the EU has become hyperactive in narrative production, largely as an attempt to compensate for the absence of a shared demos, strong collective identity and any deep-seated form of pre-political attachment to the Union. Far from signalling strength, this narrative proliferation is symptomatic of the EU’s structural legitimacy deficit.
The European Union constitutes a particularly revealing case for the study of political legitimation. Unlike modern nation-states, it lacks many of the classic foundations of democratic authority: a unified people, a common language, a shared public sphere and a single moment of constituent power. Its authority does not derive from an act of collective self-determination, but from a dense web of treaties negotiated largely by national elites and ratified with limited popular involvement. As a result, the EU has historically relied on indirect forms of legitimacy: technocratic expertise, legal authority, economic performance and elite mediation.
In recent years, scholars have addressed the issue of the EU’s (self-)legitimising narratives from various angles. A particularly noteworthy contribution to the debate is François Foret’s The European Union in Search of Narratives. The core problem Foret addresses is simple: how does a polity that lacks a shared people, a common language, a unified public sphere and a strong emotional bond seek legitimacy? Foret does not treat narratives as superficial communication strategies, but as structuring frameworks of domination, belonging and meaning.
His work highlights how the EU increasingly relies on symbolic, moral and cultural narratives to justify authority in a context of disenchantment and permanent crisis. This paper builds on Foret’s insights, but shifts the analytical centre of gravity: instead of asking whether the EU can eventually succeed in finding a unifying narrative, it asks whether narrative legitimation can ever compensate for the EU’s structural democratic deficits.
It does so by advancing a critical argument: the European Union is not merely a polity struggling to find the “right” narrative; it is an intrinsically elite-driven, top-down and structurally anti-democratic project whose legitimacy problem cannot be resolved through narrative innovation alone. EU narratives do not fail because they are poorly communicated, insufficiently emotional or inadequately participatory — though they generally tend to be all of the above. They fail because they attempt to compensate symbolically for a political system that systematically displaces popular sovereignty, narrows democratic choice and externalises decision-making away from citizens.
The EU’s reliance on constantly shifting legitimising narratives — from peace and prosperity to values, rights, emergency and geopolitics — should therefore be read not as a learning process or narrative maturation, but as a series of ad hoc symbolic adjustments designed to stabilise an elite-driven, and increasingly contested, governance structure. These narratives are reactive rather than constitutive: they emerge in response to crises of authority, politicisation and popular dissent, and they are abandoned or reconfigured once they lose persuasive power. Rather than generating durable legitimacy, they expose the underlying contradiction between supranational technocratic governance and democratic self-rule.
This paper offers a comprehensive account of this trajectory. The analysis proceeds chronologically, tracing the evolution from the postwar peace project through market integration, monetary union, rights and values discourse, emergency governance and the current era of geopolitical moralisation. But it also advances a structural argument: that the values turn represents not a deepening of European normative identity, but its instrumentalisation — and that the mounting hypocrisy of that instrumentalisation has now rendered the crisis of legitimacy irreversible.
1. Theoretical framework: EU narratives as top-down legitimation
Supranationalism, depoliticisation and elite power
A recurring theme in EU narratives is the celebration of supranationalism as an intrinsic good. Integration is framed as a rational, progressive response to globalisation, interdependence and complexity. National sovereignty is depicted as obsolete, while supranational governance is presented as the only viable horizon of effective action. This narrative transforms a contingent political choice into an apparent necessity.
Critical political-economy approaches have shown that supranationalisation does not simply weaken nation-states; it reconfigures them. Throughout the decades-long process of European integration, national governments have not been passive victims of European integration, but rather have often been active participants in a process that has allowed them to externalise responsibility, discipline domestic actors and implement policies that would otherwise have been difficult to justify democratically. The EU has thus acted — and continues to act — as a powerful tool of depoliticisation, where decisions are presented as the outcome of external constraints, rules or market imperatives rather than political choice.
From this perspective, EU narratives function as legitimising devices for both supranational and national elites. By invoking “Europe” as an external authority — whether in the name of markets, rules, values or security — national political leaders can shift blame, neutralise opposition and reduce the scope of democratic contestation. The paradox of supranationalism is therefore that it simultaneously weakens popular sovereignty and national democracy while strengthening executive power, not just at the supranational level but at the national one as well. Yet this process does not produce corresponding affective ties to supranational institutions. On the contrary, supranationalisation repeatedly collides with the fact that the regulation of identities, loyalties and political belonging remains firmly anchored at the level of the nation-state.
