| Popis: |
The early 1990s constituted a watershed for the Commission’s articulations on legitimacy, marking an immense proliferation of democratic representations of a legitimate EC while other concepts of legitimacy were almost completely marginalized (see Figure 4.2). When the Commission talked about legitimacy, it was invariably referring to democracy. In other words, the democracy discourse had assumed a hegemonic position. How had this drastic discursive change been made possible? I will answer this question in two steps. First, I argue that the rise of the democracy discourse has to be seen within the broader discursive context of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The political upheavals and democratic transformation processes in Central and Eastern Europe confronted European political elites with an image of the Community that had long been ‘forgotten’, namely that of a ‘political union’ based on democratic principles and the rule of law. Democratic representations of the EC proliferated not only in the Central and Eastern European context, but also in a variety of other discursive arenas, providing the discursive background against which the Commission’s democracy discourse unfolded. The proliferation of democratic representations of the EC in different discursive arenas, however, is only the first step in understanding the rise of the democracy discourse. |
