Schmidt Gives Lecture on Europe’s Crisis of Legitimacy
Vivien Schmidt, Professor of International Relations and Political Science at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, gave a March 15, 2019 lecture for the EU Horizon 2020 research network RECONNECT at the Norwegian Embassy’s Norway House in Brussels.
Schmidt gave a lecture entitled “Europe’s Crisis of Legitimacy: Governing by Rules and Ruling by Numbers in the Eurozone.”
In her talk, Schmidt argued that the EU’s (euro) crisis of legitimacy centers on problems related to (a lack of) policy effectiveness, political responsiveness, and procedural quality. She also contends that in pursuit of legitimacy as much as in response to deteriorating economics and increasing political volatility, EU institutional actors—ECB, Council, Commission, and EP—incrementally reinterpreted the rules and recalibrated the numbers ‘by stealth,’ that is, without admitting it in their public discourse. To theorize about such processes of ideational innovation and discursive legitimation during the Eurozone crisis, Prof. Schmidt uses the neo-institutionalist framework of discursive institutionalism.
Schmidt is Jean Monnet Professor of European Integration at Boston University. Her research focuses on European political economy, institutions, democracy, and political theory. She has published a dozen books, over 200 scholarly journal articles or chapters in books, and numerous policy briefs and comments, most recently on the Eurozone crisis. Her current work focuses on democratic legitimacy in Europe, with a special focus on the challenges resulting from the Eurozone crisis, and on methodological theory, in particular on the importance of ideas and discourse in political analysis (discursive institutionalism). She is a 2018 recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for a US-EU comparative study of the ‘rhetoric of discontent.’ She is a Chevalier in the French Legion of Honor — France’s highest honor.