A Weberian Look at the Roots of European Union: Legitimacy of the European Economic Community as a Legal Authority

Melike Akkaraca KÖSE

This article discusses how the European Economic Community developed into a legal authority at the first thirty years of the European integration and the legitimacy sources of this supranational legal authority by utilizing the thoughts of Max Weber and by tailoring them to our time. Such an endeavor shows us that the European Union (the European Economic Community until 1993) is still under the influence of the impasses of the modern paradigms expressed by Weber, despite to the fact that it shows many characteristics of an entity of beyond modernity. Secondly, the explanative power and the previsions of Weber’s theory go much beyond its own age and illuminate our time – implying that the domination relation between authority and subject has not changed much but only developed more in favor of authority and at the expense of layman at our age, especially as regards to supranational authorities. This is so despite to, in some cases due to, complex and anarchic nature of the supra-national politics.

Weber’s brilliant analysis about the interaction between legal sphere and economic sphere during the progress of modern law and market economy in Europe provide many conceptual and theoretical tools that are applicable to the evolution of supranational autonomous legal and economic spheres since the establishment of the European Economic Community by the Rome Treaty in 1957 and to the Community’s assertion itself as a legal authority with legitimacy sources such as international legality and economic success. Accordingly, first two sections of the article briefly present the concept of legal-rational authority and bureaucracy as its apparatus as defined by Max Weber. Third section discusses how the Community transformed into an autonomous legal order and how this order affected and being affected by the common market project and by its economic rationality. Fourth section is on the bases of legitimacy for the Community until the Single European Act (1987) and last section is a critical evaluation of the Community as a technocratic agency and of the European Commission as the bureaucratic apparatus of this technically and legally rational authority.

A. Rational-Legal Authority in Weberian Theory

Weber categorizes the authority into three types: traditional, charismatic and rational authority. One of the most distinguishing features of rational authority is its impersonality. So obedience is not to the personal authority but to the system and norms. It is not an ordinary system but a system of consciously made rational rules. The person(s) in the power has their position by designation of the rules and their power legitimated by that system of rational norms.¹ Thus it is domination by virtue of “legality”: the legitimacy claims of the authorities are based on the belief in the legality of enacted rules and the right of those elevated to authority under such rules to issue commands (legal authority).² The subjects may find an order legitimate because of positive enactment which is believed to be legal. Such legality may be treated as legitimate because …it is imposed by the authority which is held to be legitimate and therefore meets with compliance.³