Webinar: RECONNECT Horizon 2020 project

On Wednesday Oct 23, I was the featured speaker for a webinar of the RECONNECT Horizon 2020 project.  The event had approximately 100 registrations, with approximately following the event live.  Using PowerPoint, I presented my forthcoming book with Oxford University Press: Europe’s Crisis of Legitimacy:  Governing by Rules and Ruling by Numbers in the Eurozone.

In the webinar I discuss how the EU’s (euro) crisis of legitimacy centers on problems related to (a lack of) policy effectiveness, political responsiveness, and procedural quality.  I also contend 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, I use the neo-institutionalist framework of discursive institutionalism. Prof. Kolja Raube (Leuven Centre for Global Governance Studies, KU Leuven) served as discussant.

The webinar was moderated by Alex Andrione-Moylan (Leuven Centre for Global Governance Studies, KU Leuven).