The Eurozone’s Crisis of Democratic Legitimacy. Can the EU Rebuild Public Trust and Support for European Economic Integration?

In response to the Eurozone’s crisis of democratic legitimacy, EU institutional actors have sought to ameliorate the Eurozone’s deteriorating ‘output’ policy performance and to respond to citizens’ increasingly volatile political ‘input’ by reinterpreting the ‘throughput’ processes focused on ‘governing by the rules and ruling by the numbers’ without admitting it. Such reinterpretation ‘by stealth’ risks generating further problems for legitimacy. After defining the three criteria of legitimacy and how they play out differently for political and technical actors through fast and slow burning phases of the crisis, the paper focuses more closely on the legitimation problems of each of the major institutional actors in turn — ECB, Council, Commission, and EP — as they responded to the crisis in coordination with other policy actors and in communication to the public. The paper also offers proposals for short and medium term remedies to Eurozone problems, with a final note on the future of EU governance.