In the past five years the EU’s political officials have faced an “existential crisis, not just for the EU but for the notion of Europe as a whole” (Jones 2012: 53). Two pillars of the integration process – the Economic and Monetary Union and the Schengen area – have been put at risks. To prevent disintegration and collapse, policy-makers and experts have called for new institutional arrangements, based on new sources of legitimacy and accordingly, new principles on which to base power. Against this background, it has been argued that European institutions must adopt more flexible decision-making procedures “if they are to traverse this period of uncertainty with their legitimacy intact” (Schmidt 2009). Drawing on recent European debates, this article examines the sources of legitimacy and the normative models of policy justification, which may lead to different institutional arrangements in the Schengen governance.
