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More Integration, Less Federation: The European Integration of Core State Powers
... To answer this question, I combine survey data asking about support for the idea that the EU should allow Member States to either permanently or temporarily adopt different levels of integration with data on both voluntary and externally imposed exemptions from EU law in the highly salient policy areas known as core state powers (Genschel and Jachtenfuchs 2016). I find that exposure to voluntary differentiated integration increases support for permanent asymmetry. ...
... Citizens of countries with much exposure to sovereignty differentiation are generally more likely to future favor sovereignty differentiation than those with less exposure (Winzen and Schimmelfennig 2023). This is particularly likely to apply to opt-outs from highly salient "core state power" integration (Genschel and Jachtenfuchs 2016), which have typically been framed as a source of greater national autonomy (Adler-Nissen 2014; Todd 2016). Sovereignty differentiation likely triggers a a policy feedback similar to that posited by Lerman and McCabe (2017): Citizens may respond to the positive effects of being outside policy integration shown to have potentially negative consequences for a country, as was the case for the Eurozone during the sovereign debt crisis, and may become more favorable toward differentiated integration as a result. ...
Asymmetries in the formal obligations and rights afforded to sub-units are mainstays of many federations that have been extensively studied from many angles. However, we know relatively little about how these asymmetries shape views on federalism in the future. By leveraging data on differentiated integration in the European Union (EU), conceptually very similar to asymmetrical federalism, and survey data on attitudes toward the optimal future of it, I show that historical exposure to differentiated integration resulting from a bottom-up process of demands for sub-unit autonomy correlates to increased support for permanent differentiation in the future, especially among those critical of the EU. However, the opposite applies to differentiation imposed by the EU. A legacy of asymmetric federalism may thus breed opposition or support for unitary European federalism, depending on both the mode of past asymmetry that citizens have been exposed to and their views of the EU.
... Traditionally, the EU has intervened in the social and labour market policy fields mainly through regulation (Obinger et al., 2005). Since the Treaty of Rome (1957) and up to the 2000s, European initiatives in the social sphere did not imply 'capacity-building' (Genschel & Jachtenfuchs, 2016) at the EU level; instead, they were focused on the coordination of national social security regimes and on regulatory measures in specific policy areas, such as health and safety at work or gender equality (De la Porte & Madama, 2022). With the partial exception of the European Social Fund, which was originally established by the Treaty of Rome to finance vocational training programmes in the Member States, overall, welfare states' core redistributive function remained national. ...
... In the emerging area EU social policy capabilities, the Commission does not 'spend the money itself'; instead, similarly to what happens with the European Stability Mechanism or the Resilience and Recovery Facility in broader policy domains, the Commission transfers the funds to the Member States based on strict conditionality. As with the transfer of other 'core state powers' to the EU, both functional and political considerations militate in favour of preserving a role for Member States in their exercise (Genschel & Jachtenfuchs, 2016). ...
The EU has traditionally influenced the social and employment policies of Member States through regulation, leaving redistribution to national welfare states. The latter have, however, been gradually weakened by global socioeconomic change and by the expansion of EU market integration. A series of crises over the last 15 years made a bad situation worse: the longue durée erosion of the capacity of European welfare states has morphed into acute social aftershocks, especially in peripheral countries. After the austerity reflex in the early 2010s, the EU introduced new policy instruments with market‐correcting rationales that go beyond the regulatory approach. This article revisits the creation and functioning of four of these instruments that represent EU‐level capacity‐building in the social policy domain: the European Globalisation Adjustment Fund, the Youth Guarantee, the Just Transition Fund and SURE (the temporary Support to mitigate Unemployment Risks in an Emergency). We argue that the EU increasingly provides ‘buffer mechanisms’ to support stressed national welfare states in tasks they would otherwise be unable to accomplish, and we identify the political factors that drive the expansion of this ‘buffering’ logic in EU social policy.
... Moreover, the evolution of European integration since the Maastricht Treaty (1992) has brought additional problems. The last three decades have seen the development of what we will describe as the EU's "para-regulatory state": a term we use to denote increasing regulation by the EU in areas classically linked to core state powers (Genschel & Jachtenfuchs 2016. "Core state powers" entail key constitutive functions of states such as the capacity for coercive force (through military, police, and border control), the ability to tax and spend using an individual "coin" (fiscal and monetary policy), and the establishment of a centralized system of public administration (Genschel & Jachtenfuchs 2018, p. 179). ...
... Since the Maastricht Treaty, the scope of EU authority has expanded to areas at the heart of national sovereignty and thus not easily subject to supranational regulation, for example socio-economic governance, foreign and security policy, or justice and home affairs (Bickerton et al. 2015). These policy areas included core state functions that were earlier considered possible only within the national realm (Genschel & Jachtenfuchs 2016). However, the EU did not integrate core state powers by building supranational capacities, for example military and police forces or a large administrative apparatus (Genschel & Jachtenfuchs 2016, p. 43). ...
This article revisits Majone's famous argument about accountability in the regulatory state in reference to the European Union's (EU) Economic and Monetary Union. We show that the EU has entered the stage of a "para-regulatory state" marked by increasing EU regulation in areas linked to core state powers. Despite the redistributive and politicized nature of these policy areas, the EU's "para-regulatory state" has continued to rely on its regulatory model of accountability, focused on decisionmaking processes, and interest mediation. In line with Majone, we describe the model as procedural and contrast it to substantive accountability-which is necessary when regulation has clear redistributive implications. Using two case studies from fiscal policy and monetary affairs, we illustrate the predominance of procedural accountability as exercised by the European Parliament and EU Courts. We complement the empirical analysis with a normative discussion of how substantive accountability could potentially be rendered in both fields.
... Decisional mechanisms constitute one of the most crucial elements of contention when it comes to supranational military assets. Defence constitutes, by definition, the archetype 'high politics', the ultimate "core state power" (Genschel and Jachtenfuchs, 2016). Issues of defence are an essential element of national sovereignty, and their centrality to national sovereignty is recognised by several national constitution and constitutional courts, for instance the German Bundesverfassungsgericht in its 2009 decision on the Lisbon Treaty (BVerfG, 2009, p. 252). ...
While the Russian invasion of Ukraine has created a new momentum for EU defence integration, the political feasibility of such integration remains disputed, as it may entail both additional financial costs and a loss of sovereignty. Furthermore, design of defence integration is inherently multidimensional, differing in terms of scope and level, governance and sources of financing, among other dimensions. To determine the extent of public support for European security cooperation, we conducted the first conjoint experiment ever fielded on public support for alternative defence union designs. We carried out a pre-registered, randomised conjoint experiment on a highly representative sample of the French, German, Italian, Dutch and Spanish populations in November 2022. This multidimensional conjoint experiment allows us to determine the causal link between policy features of potential defence pacts, and public support or opposition to such policy. Our results show that policy packages receiving the most support require joint EU-level governance, joint purchases of military equipment through joint procurement, and repurposing of existing national expenditure as the preferred form of financing. All in all, our results show not only that there is considerable cross-border support for defence integration in Western Europe, but also that citizens in different Western European countries have generally aligned preferences regarding the actual design of such policy, indicating that a compromise policy is feasible and publicly supported. Furthermore, our results support ongoing research on the nature of European solidarity at times of crisis, suggesting that European citizens are willing to support the creation of joint institutions and policies to face issues of common concern, and therefore indicating that major crises open important windows of opportunity to reshape EU-level policies and institutions.
... Across all these dimensions, the EU has in the course of its history accumulated authority by covering ever more policy areas and territory. From humble beginnings as a customs union, the EU has matured into an Economic and Monetary Union and a "regulatory state" (Majone, 1997) with growing redistributive capacities (Caporaso et al., 2015;Schoeller & Weismann, forthcoming) and the ability to regulate "core state powers" that traditionally were national prerogatives (Genschel & Jachtenfuchs, 2016). Throughout seven enlargements, the EU spread from six to 28 countries, greatly increasing its heterogeneity and potential for conflict, until the unprecedented politicisation episode of "Brexit" culminated in the first withdrawal (Donoghue & Kuisma, 2022). ...
European integration is increasingly politicised. Contributing to a new strand of research that examines how EU institutions and Member State governments respond to this trend, this article focuses on the judicial arena. We explore whether authority transfers to the EU have provoked legal mobilisation by Member States before the Court of Justice of the EU, and we analyse the salience and polarisation of this litigation over time. Based on original data on interventions in all direct actions with government parties from 1954 to 2022, we find intensifying but differentiated judicial politicisation. Member States increasingly mobilise against European legislation, implementation, and enforcement. While challenges to legislation grew more salient but not more polarised over time, litigation against implementation decisions became more controversial but remained obscure. We argue that these varying trends mirror differential changes in the authority of EU institutions to enact, implement and enforce binding rules.
... This 'gave rise to strategies for enhancing living conditions for the world society, i.e. for all human beings' (Daase, 2010, p. 32). We have yet to see a similar global shift for domestic policies like social welfare and criminal justice, although there are of course numerous examples where these types of protective policies reach beyond the national realm, such as EU social policy and EU cooperation in justice or home affairs (Genschel & Jachtenfuchs, 2016;Graziano & Hartlapp, 2019). Moreover, research on policy diffusion has made a convincing case that 'domestic' policies are frequently not formulated in isolation, but subject to cross-border learning and emulation or top-down influences from international organizations. ...
... Issues with low or diffused costs, particularly if potential policy failures can be addressed in alternative venues (e.g., at the domestic level), are more likely to be politicised. Similarly, Genschel and Jachtenfuchs (2016) pointed at core state powers as potential targets of politicisation, especially if they involve a transfer of capacity-building (rather than just regulatory resources) to the EU since this leads to the identification of clear winners and losers. These arguments also support post-functionalist theories, which argue that politicisation is particularly notable in areas that can be mobilised through cultural and identity claims rather than raising purely functional conflicts (Hooghe & Marks, 2009). ...
p>Until recently, we knew very little about the role of populist governments in EU decision-making. The “crucial case” of refugee distribution in the EU demonstrated that their behaviour was ruled by “unpolitics”: they rejected formal and informal rules of decision-making if these were not conducive to their preferred outcome; they rejected traditional means of ensuring compromises; and they rejected solutions to perpetuate crises. However, to what extent is “unpolitics” a phenomenon unique to migration—an area prone to (nativist) populist capture? This thematic issue compares the behaviour of populist governments in the Council of the EU across different policy areas. The goal is to better understand under which conditions “unpolitics” is more likely to manifest in EU decision-making. We argue that “unpolitics” is intrinsically linked to vote-seeking strategies, where populist governments use EU decision-making to mobilise domestic audiences. Hence, “unpolitics” is more prone in “high gain” and “low risk” issues, since they can be more easily politicised. “Unpolitics” is also more likely to manifest in venues that act as a tribune, where populist actors can directly speak to domestic audiences. Finally, since “unpolitics” relies on the mobilisation of voters, it is essentially a two-level game largely determined by domestic political and socioeconomic conditions. Overall, we see that, although the EU institutions have proved relatively resilient, “unpolitics” is gradually unsettling and hollowing out norms, institutions, and discourses.</p
... Although the discussion on the European identity can be traced back to the 1950s, in the post-Maastricht times, political dynamics have placed European society at the center of the integration process (Cerruti, 2003;De Bruycker, 2017). As soon as the European institutions acquired competencies at the core of the nationstates' sovereignty, citizens started assimilating EU governance with the national political systems (Genschel & Jachtenfuchs, 2016). As an unintentional consequence, the debate around European political affairs has been subject to a progressive process of massification (De Wilde & Zürn, 2012). ...
The Maastricht Treaty remains a crossroad in the history of European integration. Since its ratification, policy areas at the core of the national sovereignties have been included in the Brussels agenda, the power balance between the European institutions has started to mutate, and the European Union affairs have progressively become a controversial issue in the public debate. The goal of the book is to provide a comprehensive analysis of the politicization of European affairs. The final aim is to assess the institutional and socio-political impact of EU politicization, detecting how the European elites could exploit the saliency gained by European affairs to enhance the legitimacy and effectiveness of the European institutions.
... In the EU, despite the strong functional pressures generated by the pandemic, authority centralization in public health policy could not be taken for granted. This domain qualifies as a "core state power" (Genschel and Jachtenfuchs 2016), as it is aimed at protecting the physical security of populations, and is therefore firmly associated with sovereignty, statehood, and national security. As with other core state policy fields, the upward delegation of authority to the EU level, and particularly to supranational institutions, has been limited and belated. ...
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic pushed the European Union (EU) to centralize several public health functions. With the European Health Union (EHU) initiative, four reforms have been adopted to strengthen the EU’s health security framework: the extension of the European Medicines Agency and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control’s mandates, the creation of the Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Authority, and the upgrading of the Decision on serious cross-border threats to health. This article analyses the reconfiguration of authority patterns resulting from these reforms. It argues that the EHU exemplifies a distinct mode of integration (expansive unification) in which national sovereignty is not transferred to the center but is jointly exercised at the center. This mode of integration is suitable for capacity building in core state domains when functional needs confront reluctance from constituent units to surrender control.
... However, it is far from certain if all of the modest taxes included in this agreement, including digital levy or a Financial Transaction Tax, will ever be implemented. Such a debate on the future of the Economic and Monetary Union often draws its inspiration from the historical experience of other systems of multilevel government that succeeded in establishing a viable economic union, such as the US (Genschel & Jachtenfuchs, 2016). Contrasting these two polities does not imply that one regards the EU as a federation; it only signals that integration is quite similar to the coming together of previously independent states into a multilevel polity, just as in the US case (Burgess, 2009, p. 30). ...
This article argues that the EU response to the pandemic, the Next Generation EU (NGEU), dubbed a “Hamiltonian moment” for Europe, can be better understood if compared to the US under the Articles of Confederation. The key aspect of the original Hamiltonian moment was the assumption of states’ debts after the Union was given tax power. None of this happened with the NGEU. The EU was not given any significant new sources of revenue, apart from some environmental levies, and was only allowed to borrow more on the financial markets to finance new fiscal solidarity mechanisms. In the US, this kind of borrowing power gave rise to monetary financing of the debt and enormous inflation. Instead of backing the enlarged borrowing powers with a fiscalization process leading to tax powers, the EU created a hybrid system of temporary, limited quasi-fiscalization in the form of the NGEU, which has legitimacy gaps. Simultaneously, the EU introduced enhanced fiscal regulation with conditionalities in the form of the new European Semester (an annual EU cycle of economic and fiscal coordination) tied to the allocation of the NGEU funds. Additionally, the EU has only promised to work in the future on various forms of revenue needed to pay the new debt. Hence, I will show that the NGEU could be better described as a “Morrisian moment” for Europe, as Robert Morris, the superintendent of finance of the US (1781–1784), was the very first finance minister of a similar kind of a union, with the power to borrow but no power to tax, governed by the unanimity rule in fiscal matters, which led to the failure of his proposals for national revenue.
... This monopoly enables concrete political and bureaucratic practices of EU statehood actors (Gerken, 2022, 733). It is based on legal competences, which assign responsibilities to the EU state apparatuses and involve them in "key functions of sovereign government" (Genschel & Jachtenfuchs, 2015). ...
This paper presents the European Green Deal (EGD) as a political project based on a renewed accumulation strategy with green growth at its heart and a new overall narrative of ‘green politics for the next generation’. Together both EGD pillars attempt to stabilise the EU’s statehood and legitimacy by establishing a new hegemonic statehood telos. An analysis of EGD’s reception by civil society is conducted to examine the efforts of the European Commission. From a critical perspective on statehood, which is treated as a social relation, perceptions of civil society actors are key to discussing EGD’s potentially stabilising success. The findings of the actor analysis as a part of a Historical Materialist Political Analysis (HMPA) indicate that EGD can be act as a starting point for a new hegemonic moment in European integration. However, further efforts must be made to safeguard this first positive discursive success.
... As I show below, the EU's climate change mitigation policy is largely target-and standard-setting. This is in line with the well-established insight in EU studies that the EU enjoys autonomous regulatory but not fiscal powers (Majone 1996) and that European integration is much more about regulating national state capacities than building such capacity at the EU level (Genschel and Jachtenfuchs 2014). This is not because EU policymakers did not consider that federal fiscal tools could be useful. ...
The debate on the necessity of a federal fiscal capacity in the EU has featured prominently on the EU's agenda over the past decade. New Generation EU marks a historic breakthrough in that regard. This breakthrough has been accomplished in order to fulfil macroeconomic stabilization functions, but the bulk of the funding has been earmarked for green transition projects. This paper asks whether a federal budget has added value in relation to the green transition and provides a theoretically informed answer. It ends with a call to revise articles 311 and 312 TFEU so as to grant fiscal powers to the EU.
... A second line of response has been that this story is not about democracy as a type of regime but about democratic processes (in the spirit of Dahl, 1989). EU legitimacy calls for 'demoicratization' which is the process by which the continuous pull for uplifting national competences to EU level, especially core state powers (Genschel and Jachtenfuchs, 2016), is counterbalanced by a parallel commitment to ever greater anchoring of European action in national or local democracies (Cheneval, Lavenex, Schimmelfennig, 2015) In this view, vertical demoi-cratization has seen both the empowerment of the European Parliament (EP) and the strengthening of parliamentary oversight at the national level (see Costa's chapter). By contrast, horizontal demoi-cratization has been promoted by governments as an alternative to majoritarian and legally binding policy-making in core areas of statehood, and to coercive and redistributive policy-area. ...
... Drawing from established demand-supply models in EU scholarship, international relations, and public policy (Majone 1996;Mattli 1999;Genschel and Jachtenfuchs 2014;Schoeller 2019), the article argues that France and Germany emerge as (potential) leaders in crises and supply leadership if they consider status quo costs to have become prohibitively high. This usually is the case when the further existence of the EU or the European integration process is at stake. ...
Not least in view of the past decade, crises in the European Union (EU) have attracted much scholarly attention. At the same time, difficult decision-making situations and turning points have always been parts of the European integration process. Moreover, as founding and the two largest member states, France and Germany have been key drivers in the development of today’s EU polity. Strikingly, a systematic analysis of major crises covering the entire integration process and the comparative role that France–Germany have played, so far is lacking. Scholars tend to focus on instances of ‘successful’ crisis resolution or, more recently, on a presumably hegemonic Germany. This article, by contrast, argues and demonstrates why and how France and Germany, together, have been essential for the management and resolution of European-level political controversies and deadlock. To do so, the article considers nine major integration crises. It highlights different ways and means of bilateral leadership and their resulting impact on European integration. Case selection includes both successful crisis management and instances of failed or absent leadership.
... LI was developed in a historical period in which most of the process of European integration regarded regulatory issues (Majone 1996), rather than the core of national sovereignty. On the contrary, between 2010 and 2013, changes impacted on national fiscal policies, with noticeable distributional effects (Genschel and Jachtenfuchs 2014). Nevertheless, LI proved to be resilient enough to assess most of the EU institutional evolutions after the eurozone crisis (Schimmelfennig 2018a;2018b;2015a). ...
This article presents an in-depth qualitative case study on the negotiations underlying the introduction of an Independent Fiscal Institution and a Constitutional Balanced Budget Rule in Italy. The article looks at the interests of the relevant actors in the negotiation process of the Six Pack, Euro Plus Pact, Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance, and Two Pack by conducting interviews with the negotiators and analyses of parliamentary records and press declarations. The article demonstrates that functional mechanisms explain the outcome of such negotiations better than the consolidated literature of Liberal Intergovernmentalism, which expects that the preferences of the constellation of national actors are the key drivers of EU grand bargains impacting on member states’ core state powers. As a matter of fact, Italian negotiators decided to accept the introduction of such instruments because they were potentially helpful in reducing macroeconomic risks both domestically and in other EU member states without having particular political costs, and not because domestic actors showcased clear preferences in favour of them. The results contribute to the academic debate on the integration of the Economic and Monetary Union by testing hypotheses deriving from traditional EU integration and International Relations literature and paves the way for future research allowing for a greater generalisation.
... According to Hooghe and Marks (2009), core state power integration has encountered more opposition than market integration in the post-Maastricht era. However, a strong degree of fragmentation and politicisation seem less prevalent in foreign and defence policy than in other policy areas close to core national sovereignty and identity (Genschel and Jachtenfuchs 2016). Over the past three decades, Eurobarometer results demonstrate robust and consistent pro-EU defence attitudes (average around 70%), suggesting that defence integration is more popular than the integration of other policy domains (Schilde et al. 2019). ...
Given the push to strengthen European defence cooperation, the topic of whether a European strategic culture is emerging has become widely contested. Since convergence between member states is the key that would unlock the way to a European strategic culture, this paper examines how they perceive crucial aspects of strategic culture and in what aspects they have converged and diverged. This study selected Germany, Poland, and Ireland as cases of the EU-27 member states. It compared the three national strategic cultures in three aspects: strategic environment, cooperation patterns, and strategic goals and means, by conducting a computer-based content analysis of strategic documents and official speeches of high-level national policymakers between 2000 and 2020. This study found that despite the persistent divergence in strategic goals and means, the three countries have shown greater convergence in their perceptions of the strategic environment and that while their preferences on cooperation patterns are largely unchanged, they seem to be accepting the EU as a legitimate and favourable platform for security and defence cooperation. These findings suggest that the prospects for the emergence of a European strategic culture and further developments of the EU’s Common Security and Defence Policy are both challenging and promising.
... Scholars depicting the EU as a 'regulatory state' (Majone, 1994) have long argued that the use of soft law which relies on national processes to achieve Community objectives allows the EU to govern in ways that far exceed mere regulation (Caporaso, 1996). Partly, the EU appears to lack central governance capacity becausein line with the argument of the previous sectionit can harness and shape the resources and administrative structures of its member states to carry out its policies (Caporaso et al., 2015;Genschel & Jachtenfuchs, 2014;Majone, 1994, p. 8). As a result, Keleman (2014, p. 220) notes, whilst it lacks independent power to tax and spend, the EU is more active than the contemporary US or Swiss federal governments in regulating the rate and shape of the taxes of its member states and in shaping their fiscal policies through EU regulations and European Court of Justice (ECJ) rulings. ...
Unlike state-building in medieval Europe, America, and Africa, where a combination of security threats and economic incentives led to a swift consolidation of central authority, post-war Europe has lacked an essential ingredient of successful state-building: an existential threat. The result, argue Keleman and McNamara, has been a ‘gradual, uneven, and dysfunctional’ integration process, stopping short of statehood. Ironically, their comparative historical explanation for the EU's shortcomings is strangely ‘ahistorical’, failing to consider the specific world-historical time at which the EU was born. The EU emerged at a time when (a) existing nation-states were relatively solidly formed, and (b) the territorial state is increasingly anachronistic as a means of amassing and projecting power. In a globalized world, providing for citizens’ security and welfare demands global alliance-building more than coercive taxation to build large standing armies. War-deprivation is therefore not what explains the EU’s limited statehood. As security threats loom on the EU’s borders, concentration of fiscal capacity and coercive power in Brussels remains unlikely. The good news is that – by historical standards – the EU appears to be managing external crises remarkably well with limited ‘core state powers’.
... In other words, the EU makes use of flexible arrangements in order to facilitate policy making in domains characterised by salient and heterogeneous government and societal preferences (Scharpf 2010). Thus, DI is especially likely in issue areas with core state powers, such as immigration and asylum (Genschel and Jachtenfuchs 2014), where sovereignty concerns threaten to thwart agreements on common policy. ...
Pressures to comply with EU rules have allegedly eroded opportunities for national governments to adopt policies that they support. Conversely, research into differentiated implementation underlines that governments use their discretion to tailor supranational policies to national contexts. This study addresses these competing arguments using unique data on the implementation of EU migration issues. On the one hand, compliance with EU rules is expected to compel governments to transpose liberal migration policies, even when they favour restrictive measures. However, increased politicisation and differentiated integration are likely to increase governments’ autonomy to pursue restrictive policy preferences during transposition. The findings suggest that the constraining effect of EU policies is conditional on the importance that governments place on immigration issues and differentiated participation in the EU. Thus, it is important to consider both domestic and supranational conditions to understand fully the impact of external constraints on government policy implementation.
... On the one hand, differentiation has accommodated member states, such as the UK and Denmark, which have strong concerns about protecting their national sovereignty and identity (Winzen, 2016: 103). They have been seeking to opt-outs in areas of core state powers, such as Justice and Home affairs but also monetary and fiscal policy (Genschel and Jachtenfuchs, 2016;Winzen, 2016). As rich member states can afford to only partly participate in EU policies, differentiation-seeking behavior is connected to wealth (Winzen, 2016). ...
Noncompliance and differentiated integration are two strategies to cope with heterogeneity between European Union member states. This article explores the relationship between the two strategies of coping with heterogeneity. We start from the observation that research has linked cross-country variation in differentiated integration and noncompliance to similar root causes—diverging preferences and differential capacity. Addressing the same issues of heterogeneity, we hypothesize that differentiated integration is likely to reduce member states’ noncompliance. In order to test this hypothesis, we combine novel data on differentiated integration and noncompliance. We find that differentiation increases rather than reduces the likelihood of noncompliance. We conclude by discussing why differentiated integration does not serve as a strategy to prevent noncompliance.
... In the history of European integration, differentiation has been used in two contexts predominantly: treaty revisions including the integration of core state powers and the accession of new member states (Schimmelfennig and Winzen, 2020). Whereas enlargement has typically produced temporary 'multi-speed integration', the integration of core state powers (Genschel and Jachtenfuchs, 2014)such as defence, interior, monetary and fiscal policieshas led to durable DI to accommodate those member states that were most concerned about the preservation of their sovereignty, redistribution to poorer members or other states' capacity to implement the policy. ...
Do integration crises reinforce legal differentiation in European integration? Are differentiated EU policies under stress prone to cascading opt-outs? We argue that integration crises as such are unlikely to cause further fragmentation in already differentiated EU regimes. If the EU decides to adopt new treaties and laws in response to the crises, however, these are likely to reproduce and extend pre-existing patterns of differentiation. Empirically, this study offers within-case counterfactual analyses of differentiation in the Euro and the migration crises. Whereas the Euro crisis triggered a major institutional change in the Eurozone, the member states could not agree on a thorough reform of the asylum system. Correspondingly, we observe excess differentiation in the Euro crisis but stable differentiation in the migration crisis.
... While not a nation, European integration can be understood as a process of state building (Genschel and Jachtenfuchs, 2016;Ignácz, 2021). What started in 1958 as an international organization of tightly defined thematic competences developed over the years to a governance system sui generis. ...
Is there a case to be made for a centre-periphery cleavage in European Union politics? I argue that the EU institutionalises a power imbalance between rich countries of the centre and poorer countries in the peripheries. My analysis investigates whether this centre-periphery divide structures individuals' willingness to show solidarity with other EU countries. I use a Heckman-style probit model with sample selection for survey data from 13 European countries by the European University Institute and YouGov (Genschel, Hemerijck et al., 2020). The results show that citizens in centre countries are more likely to show solidarity with other centre countries than with periphery countries, and vice versa. These findings suggest that there is a spatial-relational dimension to European fiscal solidarity, and that the characteristics of recipient countries matter for citizens willingness to show European solidarity.
... The rise of differentiation as one of the most enduring, if not defining, features of European integration can be ascribed, in particular, to the dual transformation undergone by the European Communities from the late 1980s and early 1990s -first, from an economic community to a (differentiated) political union, including core state powers (Genschel and Jachtenfuchs 2015); and second, through the adoption of the new, ambitious enlargement agenda that followed the end of the Cold War. Differences between groups of member states and in decision-making procedures were crystallised, above all, by the establishment of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) in 1992 and a treaty-based recognition of differentiation, first with the Maastricht Treaty (in 1992/ 1993, which allowed for opt-out clauses) and then with the Amsterdam Treaty (in 1997/ 1999, which allowed for closer/enhanced cooperation). ...
We present here the key theoretical underpinnings and general approach of the Special Issue “Governing Differentiation and Integration in the European Union: Patterns, Effectiveness and Legitimacy”, which collects contributions of a group of experts and scholars from the Horizon 2020 EU IDEA – Integration and Differentiation for Effectiveness and Accountability project. The key concepts for the analysis are clarified, namely differentiation, differentiated integration, effectiveness, legitimacy and sustainability. The basic claim of the Special Issue is that differentiation is not only necessary to address current challenges more effectively by making the Union more resilient and responsive to citizens. By introducing a useful degree of flexibility in the complex EU machinery, differentiation is also desirable, so long as such flexibility is compatible with the core principles of EU constitutionalism and identity, sustainable in terms of governance and acceptable to EU citizens, member states and affected third partners.
... If the Single European Act entrenched a certain course of economic integration, the Maastricht Treaty represented a qualitative shift in the process of integration, leading the EU to increasingly intrude on 'core state powers'. 28 In the RN's eyes, the EU's newly acquired powers represented an unacceptable relinquishing of national sovereignty, which led it to develop its critique of the EU as a power-hoarding body aimed at destroying the sovereignty of European nations. Finally, opposition to European integration also offered a strategic advantage to the RN. ...
... European integration has also been understood as a process that has reduced territorial tensions between centre and periphery within many EU member states and has fostered peaceful cooperation among them (Linz and Stepan 1996;Bremberg 2018). Others suggest that member state sovereignty in the EU has been undermined as an increasing number of 'core state functions' have gradually been integrated into the EU's political system (Genschel and Jachtenfuchs 2016;Mair 2013). Still others point to the fact that despite decades of integration EU member states have been able to reassert their influence on decision-making in the EU, not least in the context of the growing importance of the European Council (van Middelaar 2013). ...
... European integration has also been understood as a process that has reduced territorial tensions between centre and periphery within many EU member states and has fostered peaceful cooperation among them (Linz and Stepan 1996;Bremberg 2018). Others suggest that member state sovereignty in the EU has been undermined as an increasing number of 'core state functions' have gradually been integrated into the EU's political system (Genschel and Jachtenfuchs 2016;Mair 2013). Still others point to the fact that despite decades of integration EU member states have been able to reassert their influence on decision-making in the EU, not least in the context of the growing importance of the European Council (van Middelaar 2013). ...
... European integration has also been understood as a process that has reduced territorial tensions between centre and periphery within many EU member states and has fostered peaceful cooperation among them (Linz and Stepan 1996;Bremberg 2018). Others suggest that member state sovereignty in the EU has been undermined as an increasing number of 'core state functions' have gradually been integrated into the EU's political system (Genschel and Jachtenfuchs 2016;Mair 2013). Still others point to the fact that despite decades of integration EU member states have been able to reassert their influence on decision-making in the EU, not least in the context of the growing importance of the European Council (van Middelaar 2013). ...
... Yet Member States were not inclined to delegate such competences to the Commission. As macroeconomic and fiscal policy coordination were 'core state powers' -central to national sovereignty and the understanding of statehood in modern politics -Member States opted for a particular governance arrangement that ensured that the EU would not turn into a federation (Genschel and Jachtenfuchs 2016). Careful of the Commission's standing as the main EU supranational institution and a proactive 'engine of integration' in the past (Pollack 1998;Sweet and Sandholtz 1997), governments sought to curtail its competences in the EMU from the onset. ...
This book provides the first in-depth empirical study of the European Parliament's powers of scrutiny of the executive in the European Union (EU) political system, focusing on the politically salient field of the Economic and Monetary Union. The expansion of executive decision-making during the euro crisis was accompanied by an empowerment of the European Parliament through legislative oversight. This book examines how the European Parliament exercises that oversight on a day-to-day basis and thus contributes to political accountability at the EU level. Building on an innovative analytical framework for the study of parliamentary questions and answers, Adina Akbik sheds light on the European Parliament's possibilities and limitations to hold EU executive bodies accountable more generally. Case studies cover the period 2012 to 2019 and include the European Central Bank in banking supervision, the European Commission, the Eurogroup, and the Economic and Financial Affairs Council. This title is Open Access.
This article explains how the European Commission steers the incorporation of entities from specific geographic areas and specialising in specific thematic domains into international research-intense projects through detailed guidance elaborated in the documentation of open calls for project applications. This hoop-test guided process tracing study aims to better understand what factors come into play in the formation and facilitation of the engagement of the European Southern Neighbourhood-based entities in the European Research Area through projects funded by the European Union’s Framework Programmes. This category-driven, qualitatively-oriented text analysis is based on the coding of various policy-relevant geographic reference points to clarify the exact contextual background that played a decisive role in including entities from Morocco and Tunisia in project consortiums.
This article explains how the European Commission steers the incorporation of entities from specific geographic areas and specialising in specific thematic domains into international research-intense projects through detailed guidance elaborated in the documentation of open calls for project applications. This hoop-test guided process tracing study aims to better understand what factors come into play in the formation and facilitation of the engagement of the European Southern Neighbourhood-based entities in the European Research Area through projects funded by the European Union’s Framework Programmes. This category-driven, qualitatively-oriented text analysis is based on the coding of various policy-relevant geographic reference points to clarify the exact contextual background that played a decisive role in including entities from Morocco and Tunisia in project consortiums.
Post-crisis accounts of economic governance in Europe have often analysed the monetary policy decisions of the supranational European Central Bank and the fiscal policy coordination of the intergovernmental Council and Eurogroup separately. This is unfortunate since both policy fields are closely linked and increasingly interdependent. We put forward a theory of monetary-fiscal interactions in the Economic and Monetary Union based on the notion of de-commitment and re-commitment. In juxtaposition to the grand theories of neo-functionalism and liberal intergovernmentalism, we argue that EU institutions serve not only to tie the member states to policy commitments but also to untie them from previous policy commitments that have become outdated and harmful. The European Central Bank’s main contribution to safeguarding the Eurozone in 2012 and 2020 has not been to enforce but to relax the monetary financing prohibition of the Treaty, and the Council’s main contribution in 2020 was not to double down on the no bail-out clause but to re-commit to risk-sharing and burden-sharing through the NextGenerationEU programme. We argue and show that economic governance in Europe has progressed through three stages of commitment. Whereas monetary-fiscal interactions followed a commitment logic during the first decade of the Economic and Monetary Union (the “old normal”), the defining feature of the second decade has been de-commitment (the “new normal”). In the Covid-19 crisis, economic governance finally entered a phase of re-commitment (taking the Economic and Monetary Union “back to the future”). The analysis has implications for our understanding of the purpose and power of supranational institutions in overcoming the problem of outdated commitments post-crisis.
Why do Member States agree to create supra-state institutions? Do institutional frameworks affect outcomes? This study employs theory-testing process tracing to contribute to liberal intergovernmentalism by examining the configuration process of the European External Action Service, negotiated within two innovative institutional settings: the Convention and the Quadrilogue. The study concludes that liberal intergovernmentalism needs to be nuanced, as institutional settings are crucial in building supra-state institutions by shaping actors’ behaviour through available choices and conclusions. The bargaining was supra-state rather than intergovernmental. Preference formation was domestic but not liberal, as no interest group, other than the diplomatic corps, was involved. The European External Action Service was agreed upon as a package deal based on benefits to Member States and EU institutional actors, along with control mechanisms. Evidence comes from sixty in-depth elite interviews with EU officials and member state representatives directly involved in the negotiations.
Since limiting judicial independence in Hungary and Poland, the politics of the rule of law crisis have been examined by various scholars discussing conflicts within and between EU and domestic institutions. The rule of law is no longer a purely national affair – it is of high political salience both for the Member States and the EU polity. The question addressed here is: how has the rule of law crisis reshaped the EU’s modes of governance? We argue that to safeguard this common value, the EU is evolving into a regulatory polity (3.0). This development marks a shift from Majone’s EU regulatory state’s focus on regulating markets (1.0) and regulation in core state powers in times of crises (2.0) to regulation on the core values of the polity (3.0). The article shows that in a context of growing dissensus over the rule of law, EU institutional actors have sought to strengthen “rulemaking,” “rule monitoring” and “rule enforcement” through a regulatory approach anchored in a market logic. It also shows that shifting from the traditional regulatory state 1.0 to regulation in core state powers 2.0, the regulatory polity 3.0 strengthens the EU’s institutional capacity to act when the rule of law is under strain through depoliticised “rule monitoring” and politicised “rulemaking“ and “rule enforcement“ as illustrated in the cases of Hungary and Poland discussed in this article.
This chapter examines the evolution of the EU Council Presidency, focusing on its roles, functions, and the extent to which it has been studied in the field of EU studies. It highlights that significant institutional changes and successive crises have played a pivotal role in shaping the formal and informal institutionalization of the EU Council Presidency. Despite its undeniable centrality and dynamic trajectory, academic attention devoted to this topic remains relatively limited compared to other European institutions. Prior to the Maastricht Treaty, only a few scholarly works were dedicated to analysing the rotating presidencies of the Council. It was only after the adoption of the Lisbon Treaty that academic interest began to flourish. The majority of research has focused on in-depth case studies, as well as analyses and conceptualizations of the internal functioning of the institution, its role in decision-making processes, and the patterns of voting and coalition formations. Building on the existing literature, this chapter offers a comprehensive overview of the Council Presidency as discussed within the realm of EU studies. Moreover, it introduces the structure of the book, which seeks to investigate how the Council Presidency has adapted to both institutional and context-related changes during the decade of crises that followed the Lisbon Treaty.
Should the European Union regulate criminal justice? This open access book explores the question forensically, establishing whether a compelling normative justification for EU action in the field exists.
It develops an integrated standard based on the perspectives of the effective allocation of regulatory authority between the EU and the Member States, representation-based political theories, and harm-based theories of criminal law. This is a work that will be welcomed not only by EU criminal law scholars, but also by practitioners, judges and policymakers.
Volume 124 in the Series Modern Studies in European Law
Ernst Haas initially formulated neofunctionalism as a theory of incremental regional polity formation, treating crises as anomalies. Subsequent revisions of the theory incorporated crises as recurring phenomena. This paper introduces a novel conceptualisation and analysis of recent European Union crises, framing them as effects of and challenges to its regulatory polity. It distinguishes between ‘failures’ and ‘attacks’, aligning them with the capacity and community-building dimensions of polity formation. Failures, rooted in capacity deficits, prompt capacity development to sustain common policies, varying with international interdependence among member states. In contrast, attacks arise from contestations of constitutive values, necessitating community demarcation through enhanced unity among defenders and exclusion of attackers. The speed and scope of demarcation depend on the attacker's membership position. Through a comparative analysis of the euro, migration, Covid, Brexit, rule of law, and Russia crises, the study illustrates and substantiates its theoretical argument.
Globalisation, generally, and European integration, more specifically, have led to calls for the minimisation of legal diversity which can result in transaction costs and the lack of level-playing field for cross-border actors. One of the prevailing methods to achieve such level-playing field is legal harmonisation.
In the European Union in particular, harmonisation serves as a key tool for the integration of the internal market. The rationale behind such approach is that the European Union would be more appealing to external economic actors and investors if they only had to tackle one regime, instead of twenty-eight (one supranational and twenty-seven national) different ones. It is also argued that disparities between national legal systems create obstacles to the proper functioning of the internal market by producing competitive advantages for some actors with cross-border activities and by deterring foreign investment. It is thus not surprising that legal harmonisation has been at the top of the European institutions since the creation of the European Union.
However, legal harmonisation is not without its challenges. Although on the one hand, integrationists argue that European integration has achieved seminar milestones since the inception of the European Union—Europe has enjoyed the longest period of peace in its history; the European Union is one of the world’s most prosperous marketplaces; one of the largest trading entities; and an important source and recipient of foreign direct investment—Eurosceptics have claimed, on the other hand, that European integration has weakened national sovereignties, resulted in a lack of accountability and transparency on behalf of the European institutions, and that it operates from a circle of out-of-touch technocratic elites.
These challenges have been exacerbated by the multi-faceted crisis which has been hitting the European Union for the last decade or so, contributing to a politicisation of European integration and an increasing Eurosceptic mobilisation across borders. One of the main issues with the rise in Euroscepticism is that it questions the legitimacy of the European Union and the authority of the European institutions. Member States are reluctant to embrace further integration, including by means of harmonisation, accused of being the product of private legislators, heavily influenced by lobbying groups seeking to promote their own economic interests and working in an environment of scant accountability. Further, in times of crises, Member States tend to fall back on state-centric solutions, rather than pursuing common, coordinated policies to tackle these crises.
The United Kingdom’s vote to leave the European Union in 2016, the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the energy crisis, mark the culmination of these tensions; the European Union is currently at a crossroads in the history of its integration. For the first time, it is witnessing direct disintegration. This chapter discusses the role that legal harmonisation can play in the convergence of legal systems in times of crises. It first determines whether harmonisation is desirable, before addressing the best approach in times of crises.
A contribution to legal theories of accountability, this book offers pioneering research on the position of the individual in the EU's Economic and Monetary Union. Its premise is that the EU's response to the financial crisis placed undue emphasis on equality of Member States, to the detriment of political equality of citizens. As a remedy, this book reimagines legal accountability as the vehicle for achieving the common interest, by presenting a novel understanding of the relationship between solidarity and equality. Institutionally, the author argues that, by carrying out intensive review of the duty to state reasons, courts can ensure that decision-makers act in the common interest. The book explores judicial review in financial assistance, the monetary policy mechanisms of the European Central Bank, and the Single Supervisory Mechanism. Looking into the future, it tests its theoretical and normative propositions on the newly established Next Generation EU. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
The European Union (EU) is a democratic organization but faces severe cases of democratic backsliding. The literature deems the EU a hospitable environment for and reluctant to reign in backsliding. This study focuses on the tactics that backsliding governments employ to preserve this hospitable environment and the conditions under which they succeed. I argue that backsliding governments seek to repurpose the practice of accommodation that permeates EU decision-making for the protection of their backsliding projects. Doing so promises backsliders an escape from their precarious bargaining position in a democratic organization but comes with constraints. Backsliders must limit opposition carefully to a subset of EU competences, backsliding-inhibiting competences, that threaten their backsliding projects the most. Moreover, they can only rely on accommodation in the Council if the democratic member states perceive opposition as justified and remain insulated from political accountability by Europe’s parliaments. I present evidence based on quantitative and qualitative analyses of bargaining positions, processes, and outcomes in EU decision-making. The results have implications for understanding the EU’s autocratic predicament, the opportunities of backsliding governments, and the role of autocracies in regional and international organizations.
The purpose of the article is to analyze ESP in the context of different modes of governance. Assuming that ESP is a unique and multidimensional product of dynamic political, technological, and social processes and ideas coordinated by the EU, its member states as well as non-member ones and implemented in an international environment, there are some research questions to be answered. First, is there any particular mode of governance that should be applied to the analysis of ESP implementation? Second, in what way the EU introduced space policy and space assets to the European agenda? Third, how ESP can be framed within the overall process of European integration? A qualitative research approach has been applied as well as theoretic apparatus embedded in European integration studies and political science. The main finding of the article is that the most promising way of governance within ESP is experimentalist governance. The originality of the article results from the application of the newly established experimentalist governance theory to an analysis of the increasingly important segment of EU activity.
This book provides the first in-depth empirical study of the European Parliament's powers of scrutiny of the executive in the European Union (EU) political system, focusing on the politically salient field of the Economic and Monetary Union. The expansion of executive decision-making during the euro crisis was accompanied by an empowerment of the European Parliament through legislative oversight. This book examines how the European Parliament exercises that oversight on a day-to-day basis and thus contributes to political accountability at the EU level. Building on an innovative analytical framework for the study of parliamentary questions and answers, Adina Akbik sheds light on the European Parliament's possibilities and limitations to hold EU executive bodies accountable more generally. Case studies cover the period 2012 to 2019 and include the European Central Bank in banking supervision, the European Commission, the Eurogroup, and the Economic and Financial Affairs Council. This title is Open Access.
How has the European Union (EU) developed in reaction to the Russo-Ukrainian war, its most severe military threat since the end of the Cold War? In a ‘bordering’ analysis of political development, this article studies changes in the closure and control of the EU’s boundaries with Russia and Ukraine as well as its internal boundaries between 2013 and August 2022. It finds that the EU’s response has hitherto consisted in a regulatory process of community building without concomitant capacity building. Whereas the EU has increasingly closed its boundaries with Russia, it has progressively opened its boundaries towards Ukraine. By contrast, the war so far has not had a discernible impact on the EU’s internal boundary configuration and its authority and capacity for boundary control. These preliminary findings are in line with the EU’s developmental path as a ‘regulatory state’. More than half a year into the invasion, they stand in contrast to ‘bellicist’ expectations of centralised capacity building in response to military threats.
What are the policy consequences of constitutional differentiation in core state powers? We argue that the most important consequence is not necessarily the exclusion of the constitutional outs from the policies of the ins, but their reintegration by different means. The outs often have strong functional and political incentives to re-join the policies they opted out from, and the ins have good reasons to help them back in. We develop a theoretical framework that derives the incentives for reintegration from the costs of a policy exclusion. We use a novel dataset of reintegration opportunities to map trends and patterns of reintegration across policy fields and member states. We analyze selected cases of reintegration to probe the plausibility of our theoretical argument.
How does the European Commission, guardian of the treaties and the main agenda setter, shape the EU’s rule of law policy? This chapter discusses how, over the past decade, the Commission has established a series of soft policy tools to deal with rule of law concerns in EU member states, including: the European Semester, the EU Justice Scoreboard, the Rule of Law Framework, and the Annual Rule of Law Report. The creation of these tools met with resistance from some member states in the Council as an illustration of their “sovereignty-defending reflex” and this all happened in a context of assertive dissensus and contestation over the rule of law in all EU institutions. Not only was the political opportunity of such tools contested but also their legality. I argue that against this backdrop, the Commission strategically sought to assert its legitimised expert power. Two strategies were at stake: agency seeking and policy seeking. The chapter is organised as follows: Section 4.1 starts with a discussion about the transforming role of the Commission in its relations with member states. Section 4.2 discusses the “economisation” of the rule of law through the European Semester and the EU Justice Scoreboard, while Section 4.3 focuses on the creation and the use of the Rule of Law Framework.
This book examines the gradual establishment of a rule of law policy at the EU level. This chapter explains what is examined in the book, why and how. To do so, it goes back to the beginning of the 2010s to the moment when some EU member states’ governments have limited the independence of their judiciaries. Institutional actors at the European level have been slow to react. A series of tools have been designed incrementally over the past ten years, yet not without difficulty, and with little result in practice. How does the EU respond when the common values on which it is based are under strain? I argue that what is at stake here is more than a clash between national and supranational actors about the relationship between law and politics in a polity beyond the state. The emerging rule of law policy is shaped by a clash between liberal and anti-liberal ideas, marking a shift from an overemphasised rule of law consensus (idealised in the 1990s) to increased dissensus and contestation (since the 2010s). © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
This chapter summarises this book’s findings, concluding that what is at stake in the rule of law debate is a twofold foundational conflict in an area of core state power. While dissenters reject the idea of reconfiguring the rule of law at the supranational level—on grounds of legality above all but also by pointing out issues related to consent and control, neglecting the more substantive dimensions (rights)—contesters, in contrast, put forth different ways of reconfiguring the rule of law beyond the state, without questioning legality, but rather by advocating different views about control, consent and, depending on the arena, substance. Consensus is the compromise which comes from the clash between contesters and dissenters. In terms of outcomes, consensus is translated into a piecemeal rule of law policy, combining soft and hard tools. The emerging definition of the rule of law and the subsequent policy are anchored in the EU polity marking a step forward towards further integration but leaving the question of enforcement still open. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
How does the public form preferences about differentiated integration (DI)? The literature on mass- elite linkages offers two perspectives: top-down, political elites cue the public, or bottom-up, political elites react to public preferences. This paper develops expectations based on both perspectives, and presents novel empirical data on citizens, political parties, and governments to test them. We distinguish preferences over differentiated policy integration, like “Opt-Outs”, from preferences over polity differentiation, such as “Two-Speed Europe”. Although our evidence is observational and therefore cannot establish causal relationships between elites and the mass public, our results are most compatible with the notion of a top-down linkage. This is because DI preferences are generally of low salience, and first revealed at the European level in the context of negotiations. Subsequently, this revelation of DI preferences shapes domestic discussions about DI, especially at the level of political parties. Yet, this mostly pertains to situations when governments do not yet have clear DI preferences of their own, meaning government preferences are not yet formed and revealed in the context of the supranational negotiations. Overall, this study suggests that mass-elite linkage in the preference formation on DI might be more tenuous than either the top-down or bottom-up perspective might assume.
This article explores public preferences for European unemployment programs explicitly discussed in actual policymaker debate. European policymakers have been considering European-level Unemployment Risk Sharing (EURS) to stabilize member-state economies and provide a safety net for the unemployed. Using a conjoint experiment conducted in 13 European member states, we analyze public support across six crucial policy dimensions of EURS. The findings reveal that (a) overall support for EURS policies is broad and substantial, but sensitive to particular policy mixes; (b) citizen support is conditional on the program being generous and on coverage being limited to countries providing education and training and individual beneficiaries looking for and accepting work; and (c) cross-country variation is modest and most prominent with respect to cross-country redistribution.
This chapter focuses on liberal intergovernmentalism (LI), which has acquired the status of a ‘baseline theory’ in the study of regional integration: an essential first-cut explanation against which other theories are often compared. The chapter argues that LI has achieved this dominant status due to its theoretical soundness, empirical power, and utility as a foundation for synthesis with other explanations. After providing an overview of LI’s main assumptions and propositions, the chapter illustrates LI’s scope and empirical power with two recent cases: migration policy and the euro. It closes by considering common criticisms levelled against LI, as well as the scope conditions under which it is most likely to explain state behaviour. This chapter concludes by emphasizing LI’s openness to dialogue and synthesis with other theories and reiterating its status as a baseline theory of European integration.
So far the news coverage on the EU and on Europe within regional newspapers has not
been subject to the research on European public spheres, although regional papers target
a broader readership than quality papers and in contrast to TV news also cover regional
and local issues along with international and national topics. Therefore, our study aimed
at analysing, in how far the European integration process is reflected in the regional
press across countries and from a longitudinal perspective. In order to do so, we conducted
a standardized content analysis of the political reporting in Danish, German,
French, British, Austrian and Polish regional papers from 1982 until 2008. The results
show patterns that are already known from the analysis of quality and tabloid reporting:
Until the year 2003 the visibility of EU institutions indicate a significant trend of vertical
Europeanization, while the references towards other EU member countries point to a
slight tendency of horizontal Europeanization, however already starting from a fairly
high level. Hardly visible were indicators of processes of identification with Europe:
there were only a small number of We-references and the category „the Europeans“
even became less important. At the same time, the already strong role of nation states
partly gained even more importance as a reference point in the newspaper coverage,
especially in between 2003 and 2008.
This contribution analyses the relevance of neofunctionalist theory and the various spillover mechanisms for explaining the management of the crisis and the drive towards a more complete Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). The management of the crisis resulted in integrative outcomes owing to significant functional dissonances that arose from the incomplete EMU architecture created at Maastricht. These functional rationales were reinforced by integrative pressures exercised by supranational institutions, transnational organized interests and markets. The contribution concludes that, despite shortcomings, neofunctionalism provides important insights for understanding the integrative steps taken during the crisis.
National diplomacy is challenged by the rise of non-state actors from transnational companies to non-governmental organisations. In trying to explain these challenges, scholars tend to either focus on a specific new actor or argue that states will remain the dominant diplomatic players. This article develops an alternative Bourdieu-inspired framework addressing symbolic power. It conceptualises diplomacy in terms of a social field with agents (field incumbents and newcomers alike) who co-construct and reproduce the field by struggling for dominant positions. The framework is applied to the EU's new diplomatic service (the European External Action Service, EEAS), which is one of the most important foreign policy inventions in Europe to date. I show that the EEAS does not challenge national diplomacy in a material sense – but at a symbolic level. The EEAS questions the state's meta-capital, that is, its monopoly of symbolic power and this explains the counter-strategies adopted by national foreign services. The struggles to define the ‘genuine’ diplomat reveal a rupture in the European diplomatic field, pointing towards a transformation of European statehood and the emergence of a hybrid form of diplomacy. A focus on symbolic power opens up new avenues for the study of transformations of authority in world politics.
I employ a theoretical framework developed on the basis of the writings of Max Weber to analyze historical developments in the formation of international police organizations. I rely on a comparative analysis of selected cases of international police networks and centrally focus on the most famous and enduring of such structures, the International Criminal Police Commission, the forerunner of the organization since 1956 known as "Interpol." Using a Weberian perspective of bureaucratization, I maintain that the formation of international police organizations was historically made possible when public police institutions were sufficiently detached from the political centers of their respective states to function autonomously as expert bureaucracies. Under such circumstances of institutional autonomy, police bureaucracies fostered practices of collaboration across the borders of their respective national jurisdictions because and when they were motivated by a professionally defined interest in the fight against international crime. In conclusion to this analysis, I argue for the value of sociological perspectives of social control that are not reductionist, but that instead bring out the specific socially and sociologically significant dimensions of control mechanisms.
The Euro crisis presents a puzzle to the post-functionalist approach to European integration. In spite of unprecedented social hardships, politicization, loss of popular support and political turmoil in the Eurozone, the Euro crisis has produced major new steps of technocratic supranational integration. This article shows that integration during the euro crisis can be sufficiently explained by a neofunctionalist account based on path dependency, endogenous preference change and functional spill over. Finally, it explores three mechanisms that have helped to shield EU-level reform from a constraining dissensus: euro-compatible government formation, avoidance of referendums and delegation to technocratic supranational organizations.
Since the latest financial and economic crisis took hold of the European Union (EU), its economic governance architecture has been undergoing crucial changes. Research into the institutional consequences of these reforms is still fragmented — especially with regard to the function of the European Commission. This article seeks to fill this void by analysing the supranational executive’s role in the four areas that have witnessed the most important changes: financial stability support, economic policy surveillance, coordination of national polices and supervision of the financial sector. The empirical evidence suggests that the Commission continues to be a powerful player in EU economic governance, but its primary role is changing. While its agenda-setting power is decreasing, most decisions in economic governance depend on the Commission to make them work. With more and stronger implementation competences, it may be less visible. But it is not less important. This finding qualifies the degree of intergovernmentalism in economic governance.
The smooth adoption of the European Union (EU) defence procurement directive in 2009 is puzzling, because member states had fiercely opposed legislation for the sensitive defence-industrial sector before. We argue that the Commission's strategic usage of judicial politics changed member states' opportunity structure and, by this, transformed a blocking majority of member states into legislative consensus. As it drew on new case law, the Commission pushed member states and threatened to leave the regulation of defence procurement uncontrolled to the European Court of Justice (ECJ). In parallel, it promised member states to restore legal certainty and political control if they would approve EU legislation on defence procurement. Following a process-tracing logic, we compare the failed Commission initiatives until 2005 with the adoption of the directive in 2009. Finally, the available evidence is checked against alternative explanations.
Differentiation has become a salient feature of European integration. Yet systematic empirical evidence is lacking about its origins, duration and variation across countries and policies. This article provides such evidence from a new data set on differentiation in European Union treaty law. In addition, it is argued that two logics of treaty-based differentiation are at work. ‘Instrumental differentiation’ originates in enlargement and is motivated by efficiency and distributional concerns. ‘Constitutional differentiation’ has its origins in treaty revisions and is motivated by concerns about national sovereignty and identity. It is driven by Eurosceptic Member States that are opposed ideologically, or fear popular resistance, to the supranational centralization of core state powers.
Explaining the 'task expansion' of the European Community has been at the heart of neofunctionalism. While previous studies have focused on the transfer of competencies from the national to the European level, this paper also looks at the procedures according to which policy decisions are taken at the European level ( scope). Distinguishing between scope and level reveals an interesting puzzle. It is common wisdom that the integration of external and internal security has seriously lagged behind. Since the Maastricht Treaty we have witnessed a significant task expansion of the EU into these two last bastions of national sovereignty. But while the achieved level of integration is rather similar, the scope of integration differs significantly. Justice and home affairs have subsequently been brought under the supranational framework of the first pillar. Common foreign and security policy and European defence policy, by contrast, are still firmly confined to the realm of intergovernmentalism. This disparity between level and scope of European integration poses a serious theoretical challenge - not only to neofunctionalism.
Compared to early expectations, the process of European integration has resulted in a paradox: frustration without disintegration and resilience without progress. The article attempts to develop an institutional explanation for this paradox by exploring the similarities between joint decision making (‘Politikverflechtung’) in German federalism and decision making in the European Community. In both cases, it is argued, the fact that member governments are directly participating in central decisions, and that there is a de facto requirement of unanimous decisions, will systematically generate sub-optimal policy outcomes unless a ‘problem-solving’ (as opposed to a ‘bargaining’) style of decision making can be maintained. In fact, the ‘bargaining’ style has prevailed in both cases. The resulting pathologies of public policy have, however, not resulted either in successful strategies for the further Europeanization of policy responsibilities or in the disintegration of unsatisfactory joint-decision systems. This ‘joint-decision trap’ is explained by reference to the utility functions of member governments for whom present institutional arrangements, in spite of their sub-optimal policy output, seem to represent ‘local optima’ when compared to either greater centralization or disintegration.
The European administrative space is the area in which increasingly integrated administrations jointly exercise powers delegated to the EU in a system of shared sovereignty. Its development has been evolutionary and fluid. Its structures have been established on a case-by-case basis in different policy areas. Despite this differentiation, the phenomenon of administrative cooperation has led to an 'integrated administration' in the form of an intensive and often seamless cooperation between national and supranational administrative actors and activities. This article explores the reasons for and consequences of this development.
Preferences over jurisdictional architecture are the product of three irreducible
logics: efficiency, distribution and identity. This article substantiates the
following claims: (a) European integration has become politicized in elections
and referendums; (b) as a result, the preferences of the general public and of
national political parties have become decisive for jurisdictional outcomes; (c)
identity is critical in shaping contestation on Europe.
This book is about the complex and changing relationship between levels of governance in the US and the European Union. On the basis of a transatlantic dialogue between scholars concerned about modes of governance on both sides, it is a collective attempt at analysing the ramifications of the legitimacy crisis in these multi‐layered democracies, and possible remedies to this. Starting from a focus on the current policy debates over ‘devolution’ and ‘subsidiarity’, the book engages the reader into the broader tension of comparative federalism. Its authors believe that in spite of the fundamental differences between them, both the EU and the USA are in the process of re‐defining a federal vision for the twenty‐first century. The book is a contribution to the study of federalism and European integration, and seeks to bridge the divide between the two. It also bridges the traditional divide between technical, legal or regulatory discussions of federal governance and philosophical debates over questions of belonging and multiple identities. It is a multi‐disciplinary project, bringing together historians, political scientists and theorists, legal scholars, sociologists and political economists (more than 20 authors are involved), and includes both innovative analysis and prescriptions on how to reshape the federal contract in the USA and the EU. Included are introductions to the history of federalism in the USA and the EU, the current debates over devolution and subsidiarity, the legal framework of federalism and theories of regulatory federalism, as well as innovative approaches to the application of network analysis, principal‐agent models, institutionalist analysis, and political theories of citizenship to the federal context. The introduction and conclusion by the editors draws out cross‐cutting themes and lessons from the thinking together of the EU and USA experiences, and suggest how a ‘federal vision’ could be freed from the hierarchical paradigm of the ‘federal state’ and articulated around concepts of mutual tolerance and empowerment. The seventeen chapters are arranged in five sections: I. Articulating the Federal Vision (two chapters)—views of federalism in its USA and EU versions; II. Levels of Governance in the USA and the European Union: Facts and Diagnosis (four chapters)—an overview of the history and current state of federalism in the USA and EU; III. Legal and Regulatory Instruments of Federal Governance (three chapters); IV. Federalism, Legitimacy, and Governance: Models for Understanding (four chapters); V. Federalism, Legitimacy, and Identity (four chapters)—a discussion of the deeper roots of legitimacy in federal systems; there is also an appendix, which discusses the basic principles for the allocation of competence in the USA and EU.
The European Union (EU) has been conceptualized as a regulatory state, i.e., an emerging polity that differs from the classic Westphalian state. Unable to engage in redistribution and stabilization, the EU has specialized in a range of regulatory functions related to market creation and management of externalities. We argue that the European financial crisis is pushing the EU to move beyond regulation. We explore the origins of and responses to the crisis, and examine the ways in which the crisis is creating pressures for stabilization and fiscal policy. Indeed, we argue that significant inroads into these areas have already been made and further changes in the direction of stabilization and fiscal policy are likely, though whether such competences are centralized or decentralized is an open question.
This article analyses how the European Union's response to the euro-crisis has altered the constitutional balance upon which its stability is based. It argues that the stability and legitimacy of any political system requires the structural incorporation of individual and political self-determination. In the context of the EU, this requirement is met through the idea of constitutional balance, with ‘substantive’, ‘institutional’ and ‘spatial’ dimensions. Analysing reforms to EU law and institutional structure in the wake of the crisis – such as the establishment of the ESM, the growing influence of the European Council and the creation of a stand-alone Fiscal Compact – it is argued that recent reforms are likely to have a lasting impact on the ability of the EU to mediate conflicting interests in all three areas. By undermining its constitutional balance, the response to the crisis is likely to dampen the long-term stability and legitimacy of the EU project.
This article takes issue with the ‘no demos’ thesis about the European Union. Empirically speaking, a ‘demos’ requires a sense of community among the citizens, on the one hand, and a lively public spheres in which political issues are debated, on the other. It is argued in this article, first, that a majority of European citizens has developed dual identities – to their nation-state and to Europe – and this Europeanization of national identities is sufficient to sustain carefully crafted (re-)distributive policies on the European level. Second, the euro crisis has strongly increased the politicization of national public spheres and has also led to their growing Europeanization with regard to issue salience and to the actors represented.
In recent years, a growing literature has argued that European Union (EU) member states have undergone a profound transformation caused by international institutions and by the EU, in particular. However, the state core – the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force, embodied by the police – seemed to remain intact. The literature has argued that in this area, international institutions are weak, and cooperation has remained informal and intergovernmental. We take issue with these claims and evaluate the strength of international institutions in two core areas of policing (terrorism and drugs) over time. We find that in terms of decision-making, precision, and adjudication, international institutions have become considerably stronger over time. Even when international institutions remain intergovernmental they strongly regulate how EU member states exercise their monopoly of force. Member states are even further constrained because adjudication is delegated to the European Court of Justice. Thus, even the state core is undergoing a significant transformation.
Neofunctionalism, a framework rather than a theory, has long played an important role in EU scholarship. Yet initial versions were overly comprehensive, incompletely specified and, as a result, non-falsifiable. Once concrete claims about the history of the EU are specified more precisely, they tend to be invalid: national preferences rarely result from unintended spillover, supranational entrepreneurs are rarely decisive - findings often disguised by poor theoretical specification and selection bias in EU scholarship. For the study of the EU today, the most important weakness of neofunctionalism is that its focus on 'ever doser union' obscures the emergence over the past decade of a stable constitutional equilibrium - a European Constitutional Compromise. This compromise is unlikely to be undermined by substantive, institutional, or ideological developments over the medium term - because current constitutional arrangements are suostantively effective, institutionally protected, and democratically legitimate. The EU has reached constitutional maturity.
Since the last note on Current Developments in this area, the Amsterdam Treaty has entered into force on 1 May 1999, leading to a number of important developments in the legal system governing EU Justice and Home Affairs (JHA) law. In addition, the Court of Justice has clarified several aspects of the relationship between the first and third pillars.
Until recently, dominant theoretical paradigms in the comparative social sciences did not highlight states as organizational structures or as potentially autonomous actors. Indeed, the term 'state' was rarely used. Current work, however, increasingly views the state as an agent which, although influenced by the society that surrounds it, also shapes social and political processes. The contributors to this volume, which includes some of the best recent interdisciplinary scholarship on states in relation to social structures, make use of theoretically engaged comparative and historical investigations to provide improved conceptualizations of states and how they operate. Each of the book's major parts presents a related set of analytical issues about modern states, which are explored in the context of a wide range of times and places, both contemporary and historical, and in developing and advanced-industrial nations. The first part examines state strategies in newly developing countries. The second part analyzes war making and state making in early modern Europe, and discusses states in relation to the post-World War II international economy. The third part pursues new insights into how states influence political cleavages and collective action. In the final chapter, the editors bring together the questions raised by the contributors and suggest tentative conclusions that emerge from an overview of all the articles. As a programmatic work that proposes new directions for the analysis of modern states, the volume will appeal to a wide range of teachers and students of political science, political economy, sociology, history, and anthropology.
Journal of Democracy 10.4 (1999) 19-34
For those of us interested in the spread and consolidation of democracy, whether as policy makers, human rights activists, political analysts, or democratic theorists, there is a greater need than ever to reconsider the potential risks and benefits of federalism. The greatest risk is that federal arrangements can offer opportunities for ethnic nationalists to mobilize their resources. This risk is especially grave when elections are introduced in the subunits of a formerly nondemocratic federal polity prior to democratic countrywide elections and in the absence of democratic countrywide parties. Of the nine states that once made up communist Europe, six were unitary and three were federal. The six unitary states are now five states (East Germany has reunited with the Federal Republic), while the three federal states -- Yugoslavia, the USSR, and Czechoslovakia -- are now 22 independent states. Most of postcommunist Europe's ethnocracies and ethnic bloodshed have occurred within these postfederal states.
Yet in spite of these potential problems, federal rather than unitary states are the form most often associated with multinational democracies. Federal states are also associated with large populations, extensive territories, and democracies with territorially based linguistic fragmentation. In fact, every single longstanding democracy in a territorially based multilingual and multinational polity is a federal state.
Although there are many multinational polities in the world, few of them are democracies. Those multinational democracies that do exist, however (Switzerland, Canada, Belgium, Spain, and India), are all federal. Although all these democracies, except for Switzerland, have had problems managing their multinational polities (and even Switzerland had the Sonderbund War, the secession of the Catholic cantons in 1848), they remain reasonably stable. By contrast, Sri Lanka, a territorially based multilingual and multinational unitary state that feared the "slippery slope" of federalism, could not cope with its ethnic divisions and plunged headlong into a bloody civil war that has lasted more than 15 years.
In addition to the strong association between multinational democracies and federalism, the six longstanding democracies that score highest on an index of linguistic and ethnic diversity -- India, Canada, Belgium, Switzerland, Spain, and the United States -- are all federal states. The fact that these nations chose to adopt a federal system does not prove anything; it does, however, suggest that federalism may help these countries manage the problems that come with ethnic and linguistic diversity. In fact, in my judgment, if countries such as Indonesia, Russia, Nigeria, China, and Burma are ever to become stable democracies, they will have to craft workable federal systems that allow cultural diversity, a robust capacity for socioeconomic development, and a general standard of equality among their citizens.
Consider the case of Indonesia, for example. It seems to meet all the indicators for a federal state. It has a population of over 200 million, and its territory is spread across more than 2,000 inhabited islands. It has great linguistic and ethnic fragmentation and many religions. Thus it is near the top in virtually all the categories associated with federalism. If Indonesia is to become a democracy, one would think that it would have to address the question of federalism or decentralization. Yet at a meeting of Indonesian political, military, religious, and intellectual leaders that I attended after the fall of Suharto, most of the participants (especially those from the military) rejected federalism out of hand because of secessionist conflicts at the end of Dutch colonial rule. Indonesia should at least consider what I call a federacy to deal with special jurisdictions like Aceh or Irian Jaya. A federacy is the only variation between unitary states and federal states. It is a political system in which an otherwise unitary state develops a federal relationship with a territorially, ethnically, or culturally distinct community while all the other parts of the state remain under unitary rule. Denmark has such a relationship with Greenland, and Finland with the Aaland Islands.
In seeking to understand why some countries are reluctant to adopt federal systems, it is helpful to examine what political science has had to say about federalism. Unfortunately, some of the most influential works in political science today offer incomplete or insufficiently broad definitions...
Studying the administrative infrastructure of the EU is an intriguing affair. Comitology committees, in particular, are significant indicators for analysing and assessing the evolution of the EU's administrative system. Relevant integration-related theories, however, offer several diverging analyses and assessments of their function and significance. Some of the existing empirical data denote considerable growth in administrative participation and a significant differentiation of procedures and forms, indicating a considerable Europeanization of national administrations. Insights into the behavioural patterns within committees indicate an interactive style in which the fundamental constitutional issues and the exact legal form are controversial, but where daily routine is characterized by business-like workings based on technocratic expertise and camaraderie, and geared to consensus among civil servants from several levels. Comparing realist, federalist, neo-functionalist and functionalist approaches, as well as erosion and governance views, the evolution of comitology committees can best be described as an indicator of a multi-level fusion process in action, leading to a yet undefined new stage in the evolution of West European states.
The year 2009 saw a series of events celebrating the first decade of Europe's monetary union. Within a year, however, the eurozone descended into the most serious crisis in its short history. The question posed in this article is whether scholarly analysis of European monetary integration was deficient in ways that led observers to miss impending problems. The answer given here is that the standard analysis was broadly on the mark, although it missed the need for effective oversight of banking and financial systems at the level of the monetary union and underemphasized political economy considerations.
This article challenges the common assumption that the European Union (EU) has little power over taxation. Based on a comprehensive analysis of EU tax legislation and European Court of Justice (ECJ) tax jurisprudence from 1958 to 2007, the article shows that the EU exerts considerable regulatory control over the Member States' taxing power and imposes tighter constraints on Member State taxes than the American federal government imposes on American state taxation. These findings contradict the standard account of the EU as a regulatory polity that specialises in apolitical issues of market creation and leaves control of highly politicised core functions of government (defence, taxation, social security, education, etc.) to the Member States; despite strong treaty safeguards, national tax autonomy is undermined by EU regulation.
The seventh edition of 'Economics of Monetary Union' provides a concise analysis of the theories and policies relating to monetary union. De Grauwe analyses the costs and benefits associated with having one currency as well as the practical workings and current issues involved with the Euro.
In the first part of the book the author considers the implications of joining a monetary union through discussion based on an economic cost-benefit analysis. The second part of the book looks at the reality of monetary unions by analysing Europe's experiences, such as how the European Central Bank was designed to conduct a single monetary policy.
The seventh edition has been revised to include more discussion of monetary unions outside Europe and, to reflect this fast-moving area, updated coverage of new member states in transition and an updated discussion of the stability pact.
Online Resource Centre
An online resource centre, featuring supplements for lecturers including PowerPoint slides and an instructor manual, has been updated for this edition.
The European Union is composed of its fifteen member governments, yet these governments have chosen repeatedly to delegate executive, judicial and legislative powers and substantial discretion to supranational institutions such as the Commission, the Court of Justice, and the European Parliament. In The Engines of European Integration, the first full-length study of delegation in the European Union and international politics, Mark Pollack draws on principal-agent analyses of delegation, agency and agenda setting to analyze and explain the delegation of powers by governmental principals to supranational agents, and the role played by those agents in the process of European integration. In the first part of the book, Pollack analyses the historical and functional patterns of delegation to the Commission, the Court of Justice, and the Parliament, suggesting that delegation to the first two is motivated by a desire to reduce the transaction costs of EU policymaking, as predicted by principal-agent models, while delegation of powers to the Parliament fits poorly with such models, and primarily reflects a concern by member governments to enhance the democratic legitimacy of the Union. The second part of the book focuses on the role of supranational agents in both the liberalization and the re-regulation of the European market, and suggests that the Commission, Court, and Parliament have indeed played a causally important role alongside member governments as "the engines of integration," but that their ability to do so has varied historically and across issue-areas as a function of the discretion delegated to them by the member governments.
Wayne Sandholtz and Alec Stone Sweet examine the evolution of Neofunctionalism, as it was modified in the 1990s, and discuss the theory's contributions to the study of European integration.
This article offers a basic explanation of the process and outcome of negotiat- ing the Treaty of Amsterdam. We pose three questions: What explains the national preferences of the major governments? Given those substantive national preferences, what explains bargaining outcomes among them? Given those substantive bargains, what explains the choice of international institu- tions to implement them? We argue in favour of an explanation based on three elements. Issue-specific interdependence explains national preferences. Inter- state bargaining based on asymmetrical interdependence explains the out- comes of substantive negotiation. The need for credible commitments explains institutional choices to pool and delegate sovereignty. Other oft-cited factors - European ideology, supranational entrepreneurship, technocratic consider- ations, or the random flux and non-rational processes of 'garbage can' decision-making - play secondary roles. Remaining areas of ambiguity are flagged for future research.
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