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Introduction: European politics nowadays ] 17 legitimacy, which its institutions are the most in control of - is a matter of mainstream scholarly consensus. As formulated by Vivien A. Schmidt: “The EU initially favored technocratic throughput over popular input to produce optimal output” (Schmidt 2020, 8). Zielonka translates this into a more political language by claiming that the EU’s main rationale has always been efficiency, based on the modernist notion of competence and progress, rather than on the traditional notions of loyalty, trust, and affection (Zielonka 2018, 102-103). The successive crises of the past decade have proven to be a heavy blow to the Union's output legitimacy. However, this is embedded in its longer-term legitimacy decline since the early 1990s. Christian Schweiger gives us the full story: under the traditional permissive consensus, citizens had a sufficient level of trust in the problem-solving capacity of EC institutions and policies. This form of legitimacy was rational and passive in nature, and largely neglected the channels of input legitimacy, producing “policies without politics” (see also Schmidt 2006). Then, broadening EU competences and successive EU enlargements, with growing internal diversity, increased the complexity of the Union's governance system, making it more difficult to react to internal and external challenges. This has weakened the Unions problem-solving capacity, undermined its output legitimacy, and replaced the permissive consensus by constrained dissensus. The end result today is that Member States and EU institutions muddle through - rather than solve - problems, which undermines their popular credibility and strengthens euro-sceptic populism (Schweiger 2017, 189-191). EU and Member State political leaders are fully aware that they need to consolidate and enhance the Union’s social legitimacy if they wish to keep European integration alive. Therefore, they try to compensate output legitimacy losses by input legitimacy gains. Early moves in this direction were the 1999-2000 Convention that drafted the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, and the 2002-2003 Convention that produced the draft Constitutional Treaty. Both took place with a robust participation of national parliamentarians from Member States, but without a formal involvement of civil society and citizens. The current Conference on the Future of Europe follows a partly different approach, as it is expected to deliver its conclusions with the direct participation of a selected group of citizens and civil society representatives. Whether this project may produce any genuine value added remains to be seen. It was also in the same spirit that the first ever instrument of EU direct democracy, the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) was introduced in the Lisbon Treaty (2007/09). Beyond the fact that no such initiative is binding on the Commission, the ECI has proven to be a disappointment so far. According to Schweiger, it turned out to be of very limited value, as it has
