The Contested Legitimacy of Regional Integration

Abstract

This volume set out to explore the impact of regional integration on the politics of Europe and the Americas and, more specifically, its resonance in public opinion and discourses, elections and civil society mobilization. Our objective was to find out whether regional integration itself has become politically salient and whether the legitimacy of regional governance arrangements has been explicitly contested. Such politicization and (de)legitimation processes would indicate that regional integration has ceased to be an elite affair, a political development with policy relevance but otherwise relatively insulated from the political debates that engage citizens, and it would thus signal that regional governance has become an issue of contentious politics and public deliberation in European and American democracies.