Communicative Legitimacy of EU Foreign Policy

Existing scholarship on EU foreign policy has not adequately theorised the question of whether, and through what processes, EU external action is publicly justified, deliberatively contested, and ultimately accepted as legitimate by the European public. The rationalist tradition has focused on explaining EU external action through the strategic interests of member state governments (Moravcsik, 1998; Moravcsik & Vachudova, 2003; Schimmelfennig & Sedelmeier, 2004; Wagner, 2003); the constructivist tradition through shared norms and identity (Checkel, 1999, 2001; Lucarelli & Manners, 2006; Manners, 2002); the geopolitical turn through boundary formation and great-power rivalry (Demirci et al., 2025; Lavenex et al., 2021; Leuffen et al., 2024). Each has generated important insights but share a structural limitation as they tend to treat legitimacy principally as an attribute of policies that are derived from their strategic rationale, their normative quality, or their procedural correctness. This workshop examines the logic of deliberation as the cornerstone of the process of legitimising EU foreign policy. Drawing on the literatures on communicative action (Habermas, 1996; Risse, 2000, 2004) and legitimacy (Beetham, 1991, 2013; Börzel & Zürn, 2021; Burlyuk et al., 2024; Finnemore, 2009; Scharpf, 1999; Schmidt, 2013; Sjursen, 2018; Tallberg & Zürn, 2019; Wajner, 2019), the workshop seeks to develop a novel perspective on how the communicative legitimacy of EU foreign policy is constructed through justification, deliberation and persuasion. By adopting a deliberative approach, the workshop aims to generate new insights about how deliberation among policy makers, citizens, and policy experts in the EU can legitimise EU foreign policy.

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1: How can communicative legitimacy of EU foreign policy be conceptualised?
2: Through what communicative mechanisms is the legitimacy of EU foreign policy constructed and contested?
3: How do EU and national political elites construct or undermine EU foreign policy legitimacy through argumentation?
4: How do citizens contest or accept EU foreign policy, and under what conditions do these responses affect legitimacy?
5: What role do expert communities play in mediating the legitimation of EU foreign policy?

1: Conceptual papers that rethink EU foreign policy legitimacy through communicative approaches
2: Papers that unpack the argumentation (historic, strategic, normative, emotional) of EU and national elites
3: Papers that unpack European citizens’ acceptance, contestation, rejection or indifference to EU foreign policy
4: Papers that unpack how expert communities translate, evaluate, validate and challenge EU foreign policy
5: Papers involving cases studies from any domain/s of EU external action (trade, migration, climate, enlargement...)
6: Papers employing various methods - historical, discourse analysis, survey analysis and experiments ...
7: Comparative papers that trace legitimation dynamics across different domains or crises of EU external action
8: Papers that examine how legitimation narratives and justificatory strategies shift or change over time