In view of the decrasing levels of public support to successive EU enlargements, the aim of this paper is to contribute to explain this growing elites-public gap by underling a factor which has been widely neglected: coherence between elites’ deliberation process at EU level and direct political communication at national level. Drawing insights from Discursive Institutionalism and Post-structural Discourse Analysis, the paper argues that debates on enlargement at the EU and national levels have been growing apart since the 1970s and discusses the implications of this discursive gap for the public legitimation of future enlargements.

seminari_ibei_herranz