Transnational Leadership as a Blindspot in EU Democracy

This paper unpacks and discusses the notion of EU leadership, a concept that - like democracy – is more often invoked than defined in public discourse. Its proposed taxonomy distinguishes and defines several typologies of EU leadership – the institutional, the political, and the external ‘leaderships’ of and in the European Union. It argues that despite the existence of these distinct characterisations, no genuine, EU-wide European leadership exists today insofar as the EU does not constitute ‘a distinct, coherent, and autonomous political space’. This lack of political integration has, in turn, contributed to yet another form of leadership, technocratic in nature. While technocracy is not new in EU integration, it nevertheless lacks any form of democratic legitimacy. Among the obstacles to the emergence of a genuinely European leadership is that citizens have got used to this ‘democracy without politics’. At the same time, EU leaders are being pushed to clarify their goals and step forward, not the least due to external forces acting against the EU. The paper predicts that numerous attacks on the EU project—be it from the US administration and its plutocratic supporters, Russia’s hybrid campaigns, or China’s trade and geopolitical projections—are set to further put the very notion of EU leadership to the test while giving it the chance to acquire new meaning.