Seite 18 [18]
16 | Zoltan Simon
the EU’s continued expansion and neighbourhood policy, the reversals in
Eastern Europe’s transformation, and the negative attributes of contemporary
capitalism would be the more hidden ones (Berend 2017, 5).
Not only the sources but also the nature of this poly-crisis is multifaceted,
making it a perfect storm in the eyes of many. Webber describes it as a
combination of four traits: its above-mentioned multidimensional character,
its longevity or duration, its unprecedented level of mass politicisation,
and the high costs of inaction (Webber 2019, 9-13). As it seems to be
constantly mutating, others call it a “wicked crisis’, where any attempt to
mitigate a given aspect generates new troubles elsewhere, leading to a reverse
spillover effect (Dinan et al. 2017, 361). Moreover, what initially started as
a financial and a migratory challenge, has in the meantime evolved into
fully-fledged social, political, cultural, and even ideological turbulences
(Zielonka 2018, 108).
However, if we wish to understand this protracted crisis and its consequences,
we have to focus on its core: the crisis of legitimacy. Legitimacy has always been
an issue in the process of European integration, for three main reasons: first,
because of the sui generis nature of the concept, the process, and the polity;
second, because of the derived competences of the EU, pending Member
States’ will to transfer certain parts of their sovereignty to the supranational
level; and third, because of the Union being a regulatory state that shapes
European societies through creating rules, and can only function and survive
therefore if these rules are effectively implemented by national and subnational
actors — which is far from being obvious.
Legitimacy is a complex and complicated concept. Max Weber's well¬
known classification distinguished between three types of legitimacy: the
authority of the “eternal yesterday’, or traditional domination; the charismatic
domination of a leader; and the domination by virtue of legality based on
rationally created rules (Weber 1946 [1919], 4). The first category cannot
be applied to the Union due to its sui generis nature, nor can the second due
to the lack of a locus of power in the EU’s political system, leaving us with
the third.
However, any effective legal legitimacy is conditioned on the social
legitimacy of the given political system. This is composed of performance¬
based output legitimacy, i.e. the extent to which policy choices serve the public
good in a productive way (policy performance); participation-oriented input
legitimacy, i.e. the extent to which these choices reflect the preferences of
citizens through their involvement (political responsiveness); and governance¬
oriented throughput legitimacy, i.e. the “procedural quality of policy-making
processes, including the efficacy of the policy-making, the accountability of the
actors, the transparency of their actions, and their openness and inclusiveness
with regard to civil society” (Schmidt 2020, 8).
The fact that European integration has been constructed, right from its
beginning, on an output legitimacy platform - combined with throughput