From the Crisis of Corporatism to the Crisis of Governance

The turn to governance, as unfolded over the last decades, implied a turn to informality, hybridity of public and private and soft law. Taking a long term perspective this paper highlight that there is nothing new about these features as they also were a central element of earlier corporatist set-ups at the national as well as the European level. Both corporatism and governance have however ended in profound crises of both in both functional and legitimacy terms. This paper will discuss the reasons and consequences of this with a particular focus on the legitimacy of EU administrative governance