Ideational power and pathways to legitimation in the euro crisis

Abstract

How have European Union institutional actors sought to build, defend or undermine the legitimacy of crisis management during the euro crisis? Scholars have tended to investigate the euro crisis from either a pragmatic and prescriptive perspective – asking which reforms are necessary to build legitimacy in the governance structure of the Eurozone – or an analytical perspective focused on the power wielding of actors useful for understanding what actors have done and why they have been influential or not. The paper argues that rather than bifurcating the issues of legitimacy and power politics, much may be gained by investigating the relationship between legitimacy and power. Specifically, the paper employs the concept of ideational power to analyze the strategies through which actors have sought to defend their claims to three constitutive dimensions of legitimacy – input, output and throughput legitimacy – and proposes a matrix of nine pathways to legitimation that played into processes of legitimacy battles in the Eurozone crisis.

KEYWORDS:

• Power
• legitimacy
• ideas
• discourse
• euro crisis
• European Union

Acknowledgments

Thanks are due to the editors as well as three anonymous reviewers for their insightful and constructive comments. Thanks also to Len Seabrooke, Ramona Coman, and Amandine Crespy. The usual disclaimer applies.

Funding

The research presented in the paper was supported by the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme, ‘ENLIGHTEN–European Legitimacy in Governing through Hard Times: The Role of European Networks.’ (#649456-ENLIGHTEN)

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.