Between Constitutional Mirage and Functional Imperative: Federalism in French and German Discourse over the Crisis of the Eurozone

European integration has become not only increasingly contentious but also increasingly visible and politicized over the past two decades. This has made political leaders’ legitimizing discourses more crucial than ever. Against this background, this paper elucidates how Angela Merkel and the two successive French Presidents Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande have legitimized the new steps towards economic integration in response to the debt crisis in the Eurozone from 2011 and 2013. At the empirical level, the analysis consists in the lexicometric analysis of about fifty press conferences held by the leaders prior or after European Council summits. From an analytical point of view, it rests on the distinction between constitutional and functional federalism and sheds light on a fundamental paradox : in the way it is articulated in political discourse, federalism is like a mirage which is displaced in a remote future as every crisis or summit brings the Europeans closer to a federal union. At the same time, the functional imperative is constantly invoked to legitimize major policy and institutional reform which are possibly more constraining than arrangements existing in other federal polities. From a more normative point of view, this is arguably likely to exacerbate the legitimation crisis of the European Union.