Selling the EU: How Brussels legitimates European integration — Part 2
Part two of a new paper on 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 and depoliticisation
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This is part two (link to 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.
In part one, I examined the theoretical and historical foundations of the EU’s legitimacy problem and showed how the peace narrative — the EU’s original legitimising frame — was never founded on genuine popular mobilisation but on elite-managed integration deliberately insulated from democratic politics, and how it has now been definitively exhausted by the war in Ukraine. In this second part, I will trace the EU’s successive attempts to legitimise deepening integration through economic and normative narratives — from the shift to market-based justifications in the 1980s, through the sacralisation of the euro and the rise of “Social Europe” as a rhetorical fig leaf, to the emergence of a “Europe of values” in the early 2000s.
3. Market Europe and Global Europe: The Rise of Economic Legitimation
By the late 1970s and early 1980s, the peace narrative had lost much of its mobilising force. European integration entered a new phase, increasingly legitimised through economic narratives centred on markets, competitiveness and globalisation. The completion of the internal market, the removal of barriers to capital and labour mobility, and the promise of efficiency gains became central justifications for deeper integration. This shift must be understood in the context of the crisis of the postwar Keynesian compromise. The economic turbulence of the 1970s — stagflation, declining profitability and intensified global competition — undermined the material foundations of social-democratic governance. In this context, European integration was progressively rearticulated as a solution to the perceived limits of national economic management.
Crucially, however, many of the constraints that were later invoked to justify further integration were not external or inevitable, but were themselves the product of earlier integration choices. The European Monetary System (EMS), established in 1979, introduced rigid exchange-rate constraints that sharply limited national monetary autonomy while exposing weaker economies to speculative pressures. Rather than revealing the intrinsic failure of sovereignty, these dynamics reflected the contradictions of an incomplete and asymmetric monetary regime that constrained states without providing compensatory democratic or fiscal mechanisms. Yet these pressures were consistently reinterpreted through a supranationalist lens: if supranational integration wasn’t delivering the expected results it was because there wasn’t enough of it. Under Jacques Delors’s leadership, supranationalism increasingly assumed an ideological character: national sovereignty was redefined as anachronistic, while supranational institutions were portrayed as guarantors of stability, efficiency and openness.
This ideological shift was reinforced by political developments on the left, particularly following the failure of François Mitterrand’s initial redistributive programme in the early 1980s. Confronted with currency pressures exacerbated by the EMS, the French government abandoned its domestic socialist agenda and embraced European integration as a constraint-based strategy. From this moment onwards, European integration was increasingly presented as the only realistic path for progressive politics. Supranational constraints — many of them self-imposed — were reinterpreted as protective shields against market forces rather than as instruments of depoliticisation and elite-oligarchic power. In this way, supranationalism ceased to be a means and became an end in itself, sustained by a narrative in which the problems produced by integration were continuously invoked to justify its further deepening.
4. The 1990s, Maastricht and the Sacralisation of the Euro
The Maastricht Treaty formalised a shift from market-building integration to functional integration, embedding monetary union, fiscal discipline and institutional constraints at the core of the European project. Monetary policy would be delegated to an independent central bank, fiscal policy constrained by convergence criteria and economic coordination framed as a matter of technical necessity. Integration was no longer justified primarily by peace or prosperity, but by credibility, stability and confidence.
At the same time, the 1990s saw the emergence of “Social Europe” as a legitimising counter-narrative. Social Europe functioned as a progressive alternative to Market Europe, promising that integration could be reconciled with social protection, labour rights and cohesion. It allowed centre-left parties and trade unions to support Maastricht while maintaining a rhetorical commitment to social justice. Yet Social Europe remained structurally subordinate to Market Europe. Social policies were weakly institutionalised, largely dependent on national implementation and systematically overridden by economic imperatives. The asymmetry between hard economic constraints and soft social coordination was not accidental but constitutive of the integration model.
The creation of the euro represents the most far-reaching and politically consequential step in the history of European integration. More than any previous integration step, the euro institutionalised depoliticisation. From the outset, the euro was not merely justified as an economic tool, but framed as an irreversible political achievement. By framing the euro as both necessary and irreversible, political elites pre-emptively delegitimised opposition and insulated the project from democratic contestation.
Italy: A Laboratory of Anticipatory Sacralisation
Italy provides a paradigmatic case of the early sacralisation of the euro. There, long before its material effects could be fully measured, the euro had already assumed a symbolic and political function far more ambitious: it became a substitute for politics itself. In the crisis-ridden Italy of the 1990s, the euro was elevated from an economic instrument to a theologico-political device, a secular faith meant to discipline society, absolve elites of responsibility and promise redemption through sacrifice.
Italian political elites mobilised the euro through the idea of the vincolo esterno, the external constraint. By binding the country to irreversible European rules, political leaders claimed they could finally impose reforms that Italy was allegedly incapable of choosing for itself. Decisions would no longer be political; they would be technical. Responsibility would no longer lie with elected governments; it would be outsourced to treaties, markets and supranational institutions.
The debate around the euro rapidly took on characteristics that are unmistakably religious. The euro became undiscussable — criticism was answered not with counterarguments, but with moral disqualification. Italy’s economic problems were reframed in terms of guilt: public debt was no longer treated as a historical and political outcome, but as a moral failing; austerity became penance and suffering became purification. A millenarian promise surrounded the currency: prosperity was always said to be just around the corner — once reforms were completed, once rules were fully internalised. This structure mirrors classic political theology: a doctrine placed above politics, immune to falsification and sustained by faith rather than evidence. Italy was not an exception but a precursor: a laboratory in which the logic of euro sacralisation was tested and refined.
Beyond Italy, with the formal introduction of the euro, sacralisation intensified and generalised across the Union. Monetary stability, price discipline and fiscal orthodoxy were elevated to quasi-moral principles. The euro thus functioned as a powerful boundary object. Membership signified inclusion within a community of discipline, credibility and virtue; exclusion or deviation carried moral stigma. This moralisation of economic governance reinforced existing power asymmetries, particularly between core and peripheral economies, while simultaneously obscuring their political origins.
5. The Early 2000s: The Rise of the “Europe of Rights” and “Europe of Values”
At the turn of the millennium, European integration entered what many political leaders and institutional actors interpreted as a constitutional moment. With the launch of the euro imminent or already underway and the prospect of eastern enlargement raising fundamental questions about cohesion and identity, the European Union faced an increasingly visible legitimacy problem. Economic integration had deepened substantially, yet political identification and democratic attachment lagged far behind. In this context, EU institutions and supportive elites began turning to normative narratives centred on rights, values and constitutionalism as a means of compensating for the growing democratic deficit.
