EU Institutional Actors’ Pathways to Legitimation for Their Changing Crisis Responses

EU institutional actors faced with increasingly bad economic results and growing citizen disaffection have been changing the rules by which they have been governing the economy.  They have for the most part however not been able to do this formally, given the preference-based, institution-related, and ideationally charged obstacles to change.  Under the pressure of material events and failing solutions, EU institutional actors have instead been informally and incrementally reinterpreting the rules.  But they have been doing this without admitting it in their discourse to the public as well as without having any rules for bending if not breaking the rules.   Engaging in such informal adjustment to the rules ‘by stealth’ has posed problems of legitimation that these EU actors have sought to resolve in their own particular ways, following their differing institutional configurations and frameworks for legitimation.  This essay is primarily a theoretical inquiry into the political dynamics of crisis resolution. It considers first EU institutional actors’ different pathways to legitimation, with illustrative empirical examples.  It then explores how the process itself can be understood in terms of differing neo-institutional theories, with an emphasis on discursive institutionalism and how it can enhance explanations that come out of rational choice, historical, and sociological institutionalist approaches.  The conclusion considers briefly whether and how the EU’s current political dynamics could produce a positive evolution over time.