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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 wellknown 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 performancebased 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 governanceoriented 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
