Institutional Ideas in Times of Crises: Tracing Legitimation in the Discourse of the European Commission During the Eurozone and Covid-19 Crises

Ideas and their articulation in the discourse are key mechanisms to foster legitimacy in politics. In times of large-scale and global crises, the political legitimacy of supranational institutions can particularly be jeopardized as they are expected to play a coordination and support role without interfering with the measures taken at the national level. Moreover, crises usually require political actors to take accountability for their previous actions and the crisis measures—a burden that national governments tend to pass onto supranational instances, such as the EU institutions, in order to preserve their electoral and political legitimacy. These practices may strip the EU of some credibility, both with regard to the legitimacy of its actions and of the whole European integration process.

In response, EU institutions mobilize and disseminate ideas through their official institutional discourses to maximize their legitimacy and role in crisis management and resolution. With the aim of identifying the ideas generated in EU institutional discourse in times of crisis, this paper provides a comparative analysis of the types of arguments (e.g., economy-related, identity-based) adduced by the European Commission to legitimize the decisions and measures during two major crises: the Eurozone and Covid-19 crises. Building on official and open-source documents, it sets out to identify the range of ideas in the European Commission’s crisis discourse to investigate the similarities in the argumentative patterns and the ideologies vehiculated through these ideas (e.g., liberalism, solidarity). This paper provides comparative insights into the role of institutional ideas as legitimizing arguments through ideology dissemination in times of crisis.