Selling the EU: How Brussels legitimates European integration — Part 3
Part three 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 the third and final part 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 part two, I traced 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.
In this third and final part, I trace the accelerating decomposition of EU legitimacy from the eurozone crisis through the polycrisis era and the war in Ukraine. I show how the “Europe of values” narrative — revived in the aftermath of the financial crisis as a moral counterweight to the social devastation wrought by austerity — in fact deepened rather than resolved the legitimacy deficit, by transforming political disagreement into a struggle over identity and moral standing. I further examine how, in the polycrisis era, emergency governance and value-based legitimation fused into a single architecture of permanent exception, with instruments like the CERV programme operationalising “European values” as tools of narrative consolidation and proxy propaganda. And finally I argue that the war in Ukraine has accomplished the definitive and irreversible exposure of the values discourse as a selective political instrument: the same Union that framed its response to Russia’s invasion as a civilisational struggle has maintained silence or active complicity in the face of genocide in Gaza, demonstrating beyond any reasonable doubt that “European values” were never universal principles but directional instruments of Western geopolitical interest.
6. The Late 2000s-Late 2010s: The End of Implicit Consent and the Values Revival
The eurozone crisis that followed the global financial crisis marked the definitive exhaustion of the permissive consensus that had long underpinned European integration. Adjustment programmes, fiscal surveillance mechanisms and structural reforms imposed direct and uneven social costs on broad segments of the population, particularly in southern Europe. Integration ceased to be a distant or largely technocratic process and became an everyday experience of constraint, discipline and loss of policy autonomy.
This was not merely a crisis of economic outcomes but of political authority. The widespread and accurate perception that key decisions were taken without democratic input and often in direct contradiction to popular preferences fundamentally undermined the normative foundations of the EU project. National parliaments were marginalised, technocratic governments were installed and social rights were subordinated to fiscal targets. The eurozone crisis thus constituted a watershed moment: the point at which European integration began to be experienced less as cooperation among states and more as a system of rule.
The euro thus functioned simultaneously as sacred object and disciplinary instrument. Its preservation justified the suspension of democratic norms, including the marginalisation of parliaments, the imposition of technocratic governments and the subordination of social rights to fiscal targets. Emergency became the dominant grammar of governance. Debtor countries were cast as irresponsible, profligate or insufficiently disciplined, while creditor countries were associated with virtue, prudence and credibility. Economic imbalance was recoded as moral failure.
The Revival of the “Europe of Values” Narrative
Confronted with mounting contestation in the aftermath of the eurozone crisis, EU institutions revived and significantly intensified the “Europe of values” narrative. Democracy, the rule of law, human rights, tolerance and pluralism were increasingly foregrounded as defining features of European identity. This renewed emphasis served a dual function. Internally, it was presented as a moral counterweight to the social dislocation and political alienation produced by crisis management. Externally, it reaffirmed the EU’s self-image as a normative power committed to upholding universal principles in an unstable world.
Yet this revival also had a distinctly disciplinary dimension. Values were no longer invoked merely as aspirational ideals but increasingly mobilised to draw boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate political positions. Dissent from EU policies risked being reframed as opposition to European values themselves. In 2018, the European Council adopted a recommendation on common values, inclusive education and the European dimension of teaching, which called for educational strategies designed to ensure that young people “understand the importance of and adhere to” the values enshrined in Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union. The promotion of values was explicitly linked to combating populism, xenophobia, divisive nationalism and the spread of “fake news”, thereby framing political dissent and alternative interpretations of democracy as threats to be managed through pedagogical and normative intervention.
This approach, however, further exposed structural contradictions. While European values were selectively mobilised to criticise “illiberal” developments in certain member states, they remained conspicuously absent from debates about the governance of the monetary union itself, where social rights, democratic participation and political choice were subordinated to fiscal discipline and technocratic imperatives. The asymmetry between proclaimed values and practised governance undermined the credibility of the narrative. Rather than resolving the EU’s legitimacy crisis, the intensified mobilisation of values further highlighted the gap between moral discourse and political reality, reinforcing perceptions of double standards and deepening existing conflicts.
Heritage, Culture and Memory: The Endless Quest for Moral Legitimation
Alongside the revival of values discourse, EU institutions intensified efforts to construct a shared European memory and identity as sources of legitimation. Whereas early integration had been oriented primarily towards the future, the erosion of faith in economic growth and the exhaustion of forward-looking narratives prompted a gradual shift towards the past. European institutions began to act as “memory entrepreneurs”, seeking to construct a common European memory as a substitute for the weakening mobilising power of functional and economic integration. This approach increasingly emphasised a negative identity: Europe as a space defined by the rejection of past horrors — war, totalitarianism, genocide — and by a commitment to never repeat them.
A telling illustration of the persistent belief among EU elites that legitimacy deficits could be addressed through narrative engineering was the A New Narrative for Europe project, implemented by the European Commission between 2013 and 2014. The initiative epitomised the conviction that culture, memory and values could be mobilised to compensate for the absence of a shared demos. Yet this ambition immediately ran into a structural impasse. While EU leaders acknowledged that passive acquiescence could no longer be assumed, they proved unable to specify what substantive values or historical references could plausibly serve as the foundation of a renewed political narrative. Values capable of sustaining authority cannot simply be manufactured on demand.
The mobilisation of civil society and academic institutions as vectors of values promotion must also be understood as a response to the EU’s weakened legitimacy. The transformation of the Erasmus programme is particularly illustrative. Originally conceived as a modest student exchange scheme, Erasmus+ was progressively expanded into an instrument for the active promotion of EU values, policy priorities and political alignment. The Jean Monnet Programme, incorporated into Erasmus+ and significantly expanded, evolved into a dense network of professorial chairs, modules and centres of excellence functioning as the EU’s academic outreach arm (for a detailed analysis of the Jean Monnet Programme see here). Faced with governments that openly contested the EU’s normative authority, EU institutions increasingly relied on indirect governance mechanisms to bypass national political arenas and shape societal norms from above. This strategy can be understood as a form of “propaganda by proxy”: rather than directly mobilising institutional communication, the Commission relies on ostensibly independent civil society actors to disseminate pro-EU narratives, shape public debate and marginalise dissenting perspectives.
The Backlash Against Value-Based Legitimation
The highly polarised political context of the early-to-late 2010s exposed the structural limits of value-based narratives as instruments of legitimation. Rather than unifying Europeans around a shared moral horizon, the “Europe of rights” and “Europe of values” increasingly became sites of division and contestation. Far from generating a sense of common belonging, these narratives accentuated national differences, cultural anxieties and competing interpretations of universalism.
In this context, rights discourse operated simultaneously as a resource and as a weapon in struggles over sovereignty and identity. Progressive actors mobilised human rights language to defend migrants, minorities and supranational authority, while populist actors reframed the same discourse as evidence of elite moralism, cultural relativism and democratic overreach. This dynamic was particularly visible in the politicisation of LGBTIQ+ rights, which came to be presented as emblematic of European modernity and emancipation, while generating strong antagonism in more conservative societies where the association of the EU with sexual liberalisation was perceived as a form of cultural imperialism.
The backlash against value-based legitimation was also expressed through the populist reappropriation of “Christian Europe”. Whereas postwar Christian democrats had conceived Christianity as a transnational moral horizon compatible with supranational integration, contemporary conservative actors increasingly framed it as a cultural marker of national identity. Christianity was stripped of its universalist theological content and reinterpreted in secular and cultural terms. This shift exemplifies a broader process of counter-sacralisation: as EU institutions elevated abstract values to justify authority, populist actors sacralised alternative referents — nation, culture, religion — to challenge supranational legitimacy.
These tensions came sharply into focus during debates in the European Parliament on developments in Hungary. EU institutions framed Hungary’s constitutional choices as threats to the secular, liberal values of the Union, while Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán responded by explicitly reclaiming the language of European values, insisting that his government’s reforms were grounded in them. The controversy thus revealed two competing conceptions of nationhood and legitimacy: one grounded in procedural rule-following and expert authority, the other in tradition, collective memory and popular sovereignty. The paradox of the EU’s position was striking: while the EU frequently celebrated diversity, tolerance for divergent moral orientations across national contexts appeared sharply limited.
In this sense, the backlash against the EU’s value-based legitimation revealed the limits of moralised authority. Rather than closing the legitimacy gap, the elevation of values intensified conflict by transforming political disagreement into a struggle over identity, history and the sources of authority. The result was not the emergence of a shared European moral community, but a polarised landscape in which competing sacralisations confronted one another — supranational values versus national traditions — each claiming exclusive legitimacy.
7. Polycrisis Europe: Permanent Emergency and the Sacralisation of Post-Democratic Governance
From 2020 onwards, European integration entered what has widely been described as an era of polycrisis. The COVID-19 pandemic, disruptions to global supply chains, energy crises and escalating geopolitical tensions followed one another in rapid succession, producing a condition of permanent instability. Rather than constituting discrete shocks, these crises overlapped and reinforced each other, consolidating emergency as a normal mode of governance.
In this context, the narrative grammar forged during the eurozone crisis was generalised and intensified. Exceptional measures were again justified as necessary, temporary and value-driven. Yet the exception proved durable. Emergency ceased to be an episodic deviation from normal politics and became its organising principle. The COVID-19 pandemic provided the most explicit manifestation of the state of exception as a form of sacralisation: the imperative to “protect life” functioned as an absolute value, limiting the space for democratic contestation. In the EU context, the pandemic reinforced sacralised beliefs about the necessity of supranational coordination, technocratic expertise and regulatory uniformity.
A defining feature of the polycrisis era is the convergence between securitisation and supranationalisation. Socio-economic issues — public health, supply chains, energy — are increasingly framed as security matters, justifying both extraordinary measures and the transfer of authority to the European level. The EU is consecrated as the default solution to crisis management. Emergency thus reinforces integration not through consent, but through necessity. The sacralisation of Europe becomes less about inspiring collective identification and more about establishing non-negotiable limits to political action.
“Europe of Values” Redux: The CERV Programme
The polycrisis era has been marked by an intensified reliance on the “Europe of values” narrative. Concepts such as resilience, solidarity, democracy and fundamental rights are increasingly presented as defining features of European identity and as guiding principles of crisis management. Rather than counterbalancing emergency governance, however, this renewed normative emphasis has become deeply entangled with it. Values no longer operate primarily as limits on power, but as justificatory resources within a broader architecture of exception.
This shift is visible in the growing institutional centrality of values discourse. The assignment of the portfolio “Values and Transparency” to a Vice-President of the European Commission during the 2019-2024 term symbolised the elevation of values from rhetorical reference to an organising principle of EU governance. At the same time, “European values” have acquired a self-performative role in judicial and regulatory politics, functioning as axiomatic reference points that narrow the scope of legitimate contestation.
A key institutional expression of this development is the increasing use of budgetary instruments to promote compliance with EU-defined values. While mechanisms such as rule-of-law conditionality have attracted public attention, a less scrutinised but equally significant trend concerns the proactive deployment of values-oriented funding programmes. Chief among these is the Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values (CERV) programme, launched in 2021 (see my paper on this here). Through CERV and similar instruments, the European Commission channels substantial public funding to civil society organisations, NGOs, think tanks, municipalities and academic institutions tasked with promoting “EU values” and fostering identification with the European project. Since its inception, thousands of organisations have received support under the programme, with funding concentrated among large transnational advocacy networks active in areas such as anti-discrimination, gender equality, racial justice and minority rights.
At first glance, many of the programme’s objectives appear unobjectionable. Combating discrimination, opposing racism and protecting individuals from violence and exclusion are goals that command broad support. Yet the political significance of these initiatives lies not simply in their stated aims, but in how they blur the line between protecting individuals from harm and promoting — often enforcing — specific cultural norms and ideological frameworks. The promotion of equality and dignity increasingly extends beyond the prevention of discrimination into the active reshaping of language, institutional practices and social norms in ways that frequently collide with prevailing cultural understandings within member states.
