The Crisis of Grand Narratives in EU Integration: A Postmodern Reading through Jean-François Lyotard

This working paper argues that the European Union is experiencing a structural delegitimation crisis rooted in the exhaustion of its founding modernist metanarrative. Drawing on Jean-François Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition (1984), it analyses five dimensions of this crisis: the metanarrative architecture of EU founding documents; delegitimation through the différend of austerity; incommensurability of language games in rule-of-law conflicts with Hungary and Poland; the proliferation of petits récits through sovereigntist and populist movements; and the EU's retreat into performativity as a symptom of narrative exhaustion. Three original analytical extensions are developed: a Habermas-Lyotard counterpoint on communicative rationality; a Zielonka-Lyotard convergence reading the neo-medieval empire thesis as an inadvertent validation of Lyotardian pluralism; and an analysis of the European Green Deal and Strategic Autonomy as attempted re-narration projects. The paper concludes that the EU inhabits a permanently post-narrative condition in which legitimation is irreducibly plural, contested, and cannot be restored through any single grand narrative. Produced as a working paper at the Manipal Institute of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts (MISHA), Manipal Academy of Higher Education, India, June 2026.