Legitimation Challenge or Public Policy Problem? The Public Communication of EU Elites in the Eurozone Crisis

The Eurozone financial crisis has been described by José Manuel Barosso, the former President of the European Commission, as “the biggest challenge in the history” of the EU. Between 2010 and at least 2012, the crisis rattled the EU’s flagship project of Economic and Monetary Union, and attempts to deal with it overshadowed virtually all other EU activities. One aspect that made the crisis particularly threatening for the EU was that it seemed to undermine economy-focused legitimation arguments, which have traditionally been effective in generating public support for European integration. Against this background, this paper examines the public communication of the EU’s supranational and intergovernmental elites in the crisis years. It asks whether, in the course of the crisis, these elites devised recognizable legitimation strategies, or whether their communication continued to treat the crisis primarily as a public policy problem. The paper addresses this question by studying newspaper reporting about twelve European Council Summits between 2008 and 2013, employing methods of political claims analysis. It focuses on four Eurozone member states, namely Spain, Ireland, Germany, and Austria. The paper’s empirical analysis examines, inter alia, the objects of EU-related communication (European integration in principle; the EU and its institutions; EU-level policy-making; domestic policy influenced by the EU) as well as the justifications proposed for EU-related evaluations and demands (pragmatic/outcome-oriented; ethical/identity-oriented; moral/justice-oriented). It seeks to position the interventions by European and member-state politicians in a context of increasing, crisis-induced politicization of EU governance, and asks whether there is evidence for a growing elite-public gap. The paper maps how the communication of EU elites, as picked up by the media, changed over the six years examined in this study, asking in particular whether the crisis triggered increasing attention to the need for explicit legitimation of European integration.