With governance widening at international or supranational scale, international organisations are under increased pressure to justify their activities. This is particularly true for the European Union where decision-making competence is distributed among various actors at different levels of territorial government. In this setting, not only justification, but legitimacy is at stake; the winning of public and popular approval of shared sovereignty in light of malfunctioning mechanisms of democratic control. In light of this “legitimacy crisis”, EU institutions have developed positive self-representations with explicit reference to notions of legitimacy, be that in terms of good governance, citizenship rights, or responsiveness to Eurobarometer polls. The Constitution process (2001-2005), which was meant to endow the European Union with the aura of modern constitutional government, is the most recent example of such top-down initiated self-justification. However disappointing the Constitution process might have been for the generation of popular support, it triggered controversies on criteria of legitimate multilevel governance and, through that, introduced (discursive) practices of legitimation. This paper investigates practices of legitimation that were involved in the formulation of the constitutional agenda following and their appropriation in French and Polish media debates (2002-2004). I argue that the translation of “constitutional talk” generated by EU-attuned forums into existing (nationally specific) discourses of legitimate government is the conjuncture point where crucial practices of legitimation arise. Linguistic-discursive devices that establish plausible intertextual linkage (“plausibilisation strategies”) between EU constitutional talk and national polity discourse render multilevel governance intelligible and practicable. This argument is based on Bernstein’s theorem of recontextualisation, applied in a discourse-analytical framework that combines a view on discourse formation with a view on intertextual linguistic practice. Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s introductory speech at the inauguration of the Convention and its adaptation to media debates in Gazeta Wyborcza and Le Monde is used for illustration.
