ABSTRACT
The absence of a shared collective identity is often considered the most serious of the obstacles to the development of political legit imacy at the European level. There are two ways in which people might claim that governance is not ‘rightful’: one is to say that decisions are taken in the right political unit but by an illegitimate procedure; the other is to say that decisions have been taken by an acceptable procedure but in a collectivity that has no right to expect their cooperation. Where people do not feel a part of the unit in question, its acts may be experienced as an outrageous interference, rather than as a pleasing exercise in self-governance by a well-defined community. In the case of liberal democratic value systems, the link between the legitimacy of the unit and that of the political process is a peculiarly intimate one. Not only does the principle of popular sovereignty presuppose that the question of who constitutes the people has been settled to mutual agreement (Rousseau, 1963: 173; Dahl, 1989); the procedures of democratic decision making, especially that of majority decision, require suffi cient trust between citizens for them to accept that being outvoted does not constitute a threat to their identity or essential interests. At the level of the state, it is nationhood that has historically been seen as providing the necessary sense of common identity and mutual trust for democracy to work. Can there be an equivalent at the European level?
