ABSTRACT
Introduction ‘Europe is asking us to do it’: in contemporary political debates it is now commonplace for politicians, commentators and journalists to make reference to Europe to justify unpopular measures or to legitimize their own political positioning on domestic issues or specific interests.1 The practice is by no means new: more than a century before the start of the process of European integration, at the time of the Congress of Vienna – the foundational moment of contemporary Europe – political ideas and actions were frequently legitimized ‘in the name of Europe’.2
