The Public and EU Legitimacy: A Framework for Understanding the Meaning of Public Opinion for European Integration

How do citizens make sense of the European Union? How far do citizens understand themselves as citizens of the Union and as members of a public that is a public of the European Union? How, more generally, do citizens understand power, justifications for power, systems of government, and abstract forms of collectivity such as political community? It is hard to devise methods of answering those questions that are not limited by their empirical and normative presuppositions. Opinion surveys frame questions in particular ways. Political philosophers assume norms and standards even where they evaluate political orders by what they take to be citizens' own values. The chapter argues for focus groups of a kind that would allow citizens to do more to explore and justify for themselves what they think and feel about questions of European integration.