International organizations increasingly resort to strategies of legitimation in order to justify their authority and policies. This article explores one such strategy of the European Commission that targets organized interest groups with the aim to build a legitimating constituency. The members of this constituency not only contribute expertise to a policy, but also benefit from that policy and, therefore, participate in the development and confirmation of a claim to the policy's legitimacy that is put forward by EU officials. As a consequence, the agents seeking legitimacy and the addressees granting it become closely associated and “get cozy” with each other. EU officials address their claim to legitimacy to a community of co-opted elites who are likely to confirm this claim and in whose own interests it is to do so. The result is legitimation as a collaborative activity with preordained outcomes. Taking the case of the European Commission's research and innovation policy, and building in part on an ethnographic practitioner's account, the article provides an original insight into how this legitimation strategy works in everyday EU policymaking.

中文翻译：

---

变得舒适，或欧盟委员会如何在欧盟产生合法性

国际组织越来越多地诉诸合法化战略，以证明其权威和政策的合理性。本文探讨了欧盟委员会的一项此类战略，该战略针对有组织的利益集团，旨在建立一个合法的选区。该选区的成员不仅为政策贡献了专业知识，而且还从该政策中受益，因此，他们参与了欧盟官员提出的政策合法性主张的制定和确认。结果，寻求合法性的代理人和授予合法性的收件人变得密切相关并彼此“变得舒适”。欧盟官员向一群可能证实这一主张的精英群体表达他们对合法性的主张，这样做是为了他们自己的利益。结果是合法化作为具有预定结果的协作活动。本文以欧盟委员会的研究和创新政策为例，并部分基于人种学从业者的观点，对这种合法化战略如何在欧盟日常政策制定中发挥作用提供了独到的见解。