The article surveys the current state of the academic debate about actorness and legitimacy of the European Union. It investigates various kinds of EU’s actorness, as well as concepts and categories of its legitimacy, and attempts to trace their relationships, which remains an underdeveloped aspect of the discussion. We examine a wide range of scholarly articles, books and other academic sources in assessing the quality and fairness of the respective discussions and suggest that, within the current mostly normative debate, a positive evaluation of the EU’s legitimacy is unattainable and that it is necessary to acquire a fairer notion of what kind of international actor the Union is.