Split-Level Legitimacy and Politicization in EU Governance

Chapter 3 explores the dilemmas of the EU’s “split-level” legitimacy, where output and throughput operate primarily at the EU level and input at the national, and then examines the impact of politicization on both national and EU levels. The chapter begins by considering the EU’s legitimacy problems stemming from the fragmentation of its governing activities, with policies and processes located mainly at the EU level while politics remains national. While the EU has been largely successful in improving legitimacy in all three categories over time, it has faced major challenges to legitimacy. In the Eurozone crisis, citizens’ sense of EU legitimacy has suffered even if their EU-related identity may not have. The chapter then focuses on the EU’s biggest challenge, the politicization of EU governance. After briefly describing the longstanding depoliticization of EU technocratic governance, this section argues that the EU’s politicization has been increasing not only at the bottom, as evidenced by the weakening of mainstream parties to the benefit of populist challengers, or from the bottom up, as national politics influences EU actors, but also at the top, where EU actors have become more politicized. The chapter uses the debates about who is in charge or control of EU governance to show how scholars’ defense of “their” actor through “new” or traditional versions of intergovernmentalism, supranationalism, and parliamentarism actually demonstrates the EU’s increasingly political dynamics of interaction. This chapter ends with the question: Is such politicization a good thing or a bad thing?