European Social Movement Organisations as legitimate actors? The cases of the European Environmental organisations and the European Trade Unions.

How can European social movement organisations guarantee their legitimacy in the multi-level context of the European Union? While European social movement organisations (ESMOs) -and civil society organisations in general-, are often considered as an answer to the legitimacy deficit of the European Union, this paper focuses attention to the question if these organisations themselves are legitimate enough to fulfil this task. Departing from the finding that in order to influence EU policy social movements have to organise themselves at the different European governance levels (Imig&Tarrow 2001), the paper wants to see whether and how ESMOs, given their multi-level structure, succeed in guaranteeing sufficient legitimacy towards their members. As such, legitimacy issues within ESMOs should be studied by looking at the relation between ESMOs and their national affiliates.
The paper seeks to find this answer with two case studies: the case of the European Environmental movement in their actions on the REACH-regulation and the case of the European Trade unions in the dossier of the services directive. By focussing on how the mobilisation, the communication and the information exchange between the European and Belgian organisations is organised, we will look at how ESMOs are dealing with legitimacy issues in their organisation. While legitimacy of European social movement organisations is often defined in terms of representativeness and accountability, the paper will show that legitimacy for ESMOs can not be reduced to these terms. It is a much more difficult process in which tensions between input- and output-legitimacy have to be overcome at every stage of the mobilisation process.