European integration and democratic legitimacy: a historical assessment of the institutional and economic roots of populist Euroscepticism

This paper looks at the question of how Euroscepticism and populism became entangled. Historically distinct phenomena, their convergence nonetheless has roots that go a long way back. The heuristic hypothesis is that the prerequisites of this dynamic should be seen as part of the peculiar historical course of political democracy in Europe following the second World War – and, specifically, as the consequence of the attempt to isolate democracy from its national foundations and to adapt it to an unprecedented model of post-state and post representational constitutionalism. The pooling of negotiated shares of state sovereignty among EC members meant that from its very beginning the European Community presented itself as a political unicum. The devolution to European institutions of economic and political prerogatives that were once subject to the will of the people have helped set in motion an early dynamic of multiplication of the sources and profiles of democratic legitimacy. The growing feeling of distrust towards the public decision-maker is the other side of that process of decentralisation of democracy, which has now found its most audacious field of experimentation in the multilevel horizontal accountability model of European policy making.