Political community formation is largely considered to be a matter of perception, requiring a certain kind of psychology among the constituent power(s) (e.g. Müller 2011; Nicolaïdis 2012). It is therefore fitting that the nature of political community be explained by a concept like collective intentionality (Searle 1996), as a psychological mechanism of perception, rather than by the traditionally employed civic-ethnic distinction (Habermas 2001; Bruter 2005; van Parijs 2011) which is poorly descriptive of social reality and conceptually detached from the nature of human perception (Brubaker 1999). Crucially, I employ Michael Saward’s (2010) notion of the ‘representative claim’ as that creative force which binds the ideas of collective intentionality and political community formation together. Effectively, it is only through representative claims, drawing on certain kinds of contextualised cultural resources, that the kind of political community required to undergird a political system can be formed.
In an effort to demonstrate the utility of collective intentionality as a concept I apply it to the EU political system. Following David Easton (1957), a political system can be analysed in terms of its political community, its regime and its current government. The well-functioning of a political system depends on the level of support for each of these elements. While in most nation-states citizens’ collective intentionality fails to distinguish between the political community and the regime (ibid), I argue in the case of the EU that it is the regime and the government that are normally not psychologically distinguished by the people(s). The ability of the EU to weather the current legitimacy crisis of its regime/government, I insist, is in large part dependent on the continued separation of the European political community and its regime/government – a psychological distinction that has shown signs of faltering among the European people(s) (Eurobarometer data employed).
