Legitimation

public opinions relate to each other. The speaker is neither in a position to adapt freely to the perceived identity of the audience, nor capable of creating the audience entirely at his or her own will, but is instead constrained by personal and social identities that prefigure any concrete utterance. However, possibilities for change arise in the speaker’s ability to use the identities that exist beforehand creatively and to reconfigure the relationships between them.

The three identificatory strategies that Burke enumerates are means by which speakers may establish new collective actors and create the agency needed for altering the social and political context in which they speak. Analysis of the rhetorical strategies, which are employed in

constituting the textual positions of the first, second, and third personae, begins from the

assumption of the recursive relationship between individual utterances and social settings. The aim of the analysis is both to explain how the social identities existing prior to the utterance constrain communicative interaction, and to investigate the concrete and perhaps altered possibilities for collective action that arise in and through the utterance. Analysis of this kind will complement the study of textual and contextual relationships in the investigation of the European debate.

of a decision demands further persuasion), but investigation of this feature is not relevant to the present study. Exploring the possible rhetoricity of juridical legitimacy is, however, of great importance. Since the status of the constitutional text is pivotal to the legal and social scientific evaluations and recommendations for the EU, the full connection between the rhetorical perspective and the legal and social scientific understanding cannot be made before the relationship between rhetoric and legality has been explored. Also, this exploration is a justification of the claim that the rhetorical study of the debate on the future of Europe may, indeed, offer insight into which

theoretical recommendation for the constitution of Europe is to be preferred.

The traditional view of law is that it is a collection of autonomous rules and

principles; in this view law is separated from politics and popular discourse, and rhetoric is granted no constitutive role in its creation (Hasian, 1994, p. 44). Recently, however, the opinion has

emerged that there is no legal recourse outside of culture and that the foundational legal text is thus not an embodiment of universal principles, but a creative expression of contextually bounded norms and values. James Boyd White puts the point thus:

It [the law] is always communal, both in the sense that it always takes place in a social context, and in the sense that it is always constitutive of the community by which it works. The law is an art of persuasion that creates the objects of its persuasion, for it constitutes both the community and the culture it commends (White, 1985, p. 35).

The claim that the legal text has a genuinely community forming capacity is also an argument for the rhetorical nature of formal legality. Or put otherwise, the constitutional text cannot be separated from the political and social processes for which it provides the formal and procedural framework.

Quite to the contrary law and community stand in a mutually constitutive relationship³⁰ that is parallel to the relationships between personal and public opinions and between individual and collective identities discussed above.

The rhetorically informed understanding of the reciprocal relationship between legal texts and social formations at once lends support to and seems to contradict the various postnational arguments about the development of a European polity. On the one hand, the rhetorical perspective argues the dynamic and thoroughly constituted character of all communities, but on the other hand it casts doubt on the feasibility of separating cultural and political identities, it questions whether it makes sense to distinguish ‘thin’ political affiliations from ‘thick’ cultural ties.³¹ If meaning and

30 J. Peter Burgess (2002) gives a particularly illuminating account of this relationship, expounding how the law must represent the community but can never become identical with it.

31 As stated earlier these questions must be empirically studied, but I am now providing rhetorical reasons for the doubts that were previously raised intuitively.

identity is somehow interrelated as White suggests (White, 1984, p. 3) and as Ramírez’ theory of action implicitly supports, then there is no way of upholding a cultural identity apart from the political discussions in which one participates.

The creation of societal identity and the establishment as well as the legitimation of corresponding political structures cannot be separated from the specific contexts in which these processes occur. However, the understanding of the dynamic interdependencies also leads to a realisation that “…the ‘we’ is not unitary but constituted and that no actor is ever entitled to speak for all of us” (White, 1985, p. 239). Thus, the rhetorical position actually endorses the view that a societal formation and its political institutions are never symbiotic, and that no political system is ever a natural expression of a community. Rather, social collectivities, political structures, and legal frameworks are mutually formative, and the constitutive power lies exactly in the tension between the social, political, and legal dimensions. Understanding the dynamic relationship between the social, political, and legal dimensions that in combination constitute democratic legitimacy is a third objective of the study. This objective will not be reached by means of specific analytical tools.

Instead, the issue of legitimacy will be considered in and through the analyses of opinion formation and identification, and the concern with this issue will find its culmination in the evaluation of the various theoretical conception of the European constitutional entity.

The consideration of possible points of interpenetration between the social scientific concepts and the rhetorical perspective leads to a focus on the dynamic relations between the individual articulation and the general manifestation of each concept and on the interdependencies between legitimacy, identity and public opinion. The rhetorical emphasis on the communicative creation of meaning in a sense puts opinion formation at the centre of attention. It would, however, be more correct to say that legitimacy, identity and public opinion are all regarded as results of interactions in the communicative network of the public sphere; all are constituted in and through meaningful rhetorical acts. The following study will attempt to explain how this constitution of meaning is achieved in the debate on the future of Europe. The recursive relationship between the individual utterance and the general concepts will be studied in order to show how already existent understandings condition the debate and how the debate in turn alters the concepts. Having

established the theoretical perspective and the conceptual framework I can now turn to the specific preparations for the analytical task. Accordingly, the next chapter will present the employed procedures for collecting the empirical data and introduce the two analytical rounds in which this material is studied.

4.

Procedures for selecting and