The question of the EU’s normative legitimacy remains a live policy issue and not just a matter of academic concern. Roughly speaking, two broad approaches have been adopted towards the problem, both in the literature and in practice. The first stresses the justice, as opposed to the...

Differentiated integration (DI), whereby some MS opt out or are excluded from certain common EU policies for sovereignty or capacity reasons, may be thought to undermine the EU’s functioning as what John Rawls called a fair scheme of cooperation, grounded in norms of impartiality and...

pt. I. Meanings, themes and narratives -- pt. II. The rise of the regulatory state and network governance -- pt. III. Regional integration and the development of multilevel governance -- pt. IV. Globalization and the quest for global governance -- pt. V. Governance and democracy issues and...

Constitutional politics is often contrasted with normal politics as being more deliberative and so able to produce a principled consensus rather than a compromise. This article qualifies this view. The authors argue that the potential exists for reasonable disagreement even over such basic...

The crisis of the eurozone has severely tested the political authority of the European Union (EU). The crisis raises questions of normative legitimacy both because the EU is a normative order and because the construction of economic and monetary union (EMU) rested upon a theory that stressed the...