ABSTRACT
Is there a European identity? Whether there is or not, what impact does this have on the legitimacy of the European Union? Can the EU be legitimate even without a European ‘we-feeling’ based on identity? And whether this can or cannot be the case, what impact might legitimacy have on European identity? These are the kinds of question which have generated countless detailed arguments and counter-arguments within a wide range of disciplines over the past decades. But rather than generating a cross-disciplinary give-and-take producing fruitful debates over the concepts of identity and legitimacy, they mainly produced a cacophony of separate disciplinary voices. The aim of this book is to take us beyond the limits of the literature and let scholars from different disciplines and theoretical perspectives interact with each other on specific ways of looking at the two concepts, that is, on issues of identity and legitimacy in relation to Europe and the European Union (EU). The result, I believe, is interesting and challenging at the same time: not only have different understandings of the concepts and their interrelations emerged, but different views of possible pathways to the construction of a political identity and legitimacy in/for the EU have also been proposed. A further intellectual challenge is represented by the contrasting views over the most suitable research methods to study issues of identity and legitimacy, in general and in the EU in particular. In the rest of this conclusion I will deal with each of these three results and will close with an overall evaluation of the state of research on this topic as well as on the future of identity and legitimacy in/of the EU.
