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From the euro to the Schengen crises: European integration theories, politicization, and identity politics
Abstract
This contribution argues that the three dominant approaches to European integration cannot fully explain why the two most recent crises of the European Union (EU) resulted in very different outcomes. Liberal intergovernmentalism and neofunctionalism can account for why the euro crisis resulted in more integration, but fail to explain why the EU has been stuck in a stalemate in the Schengen crisis. With regard to postfunctionalism, it is the other way around. To solve the puzzle, we have to consider that depoliticization through supranational delegation during the euro crisis has ultimately led to more, not less politicization. Moreover, both crises were about identity politics. Political controversies over the euro crisis have centred predominantly on questions of order, i.e., what constitutes Europe as a community and how much solidarity members of the community owe to each other under which conditions. The mass influx of migrants and refugees changed identity politics, since Eurosceptic populist parties framed the Schengen crisis in terms of borders, advocating for an exclusionary ‘fortress Europe.’ In contrary of a more inclusionary discourse, the dominance of exclusionary positions in the politicization of EU affairs has impaired an upgrading of the common European interest in the Schengen crisis.
... Since the Schengen crisis is not included 387 in the politicisation indexes of Kriesi and Grande (2016) and Rauh and Zürn (2016), the crises cannot be compared numerically. And yet, the scale of politicisation appears broadly similar across both crises -an interpretation shared by a range of scholars (Börzel and Risse 2018;Genschel and Jachtenfuchs 2018;Schimmelfennig 2018). The scale of politicisation therefore cannot account for the variations in integration outcomes across the Euro and Schengen crises. ...
... Protestors in southern member states accused Germany of neo-Nazism and German tabloids mobilised against 'lazy Greeks' and 'crooks' (Polyakova and Fligstein 2016). Yet, the available data largely rebuts the intuition that the Euro crisis was (more than previous integration steps) framed in exclusively nationalist terms (Börzel and Risse 2018). Kriesi and Grande's comprehensive dataset shows that the Euro crisis was 'overwhelmingly framed in economic (50.7%) or political efficiency (21.2%) terms' (2016: 271). ...
... Debates about economic policies oftentimes relate to wider identity arguments about the nature of the envisaged polity (see Matthijs and McNamara 2015). The argument here, therefore, is about relative importance: by and large, the available data arguably suggest that the debates were still primarily about economic policies, even if they were secondarily informed by identity concerns (Börzel and Risse 2018;Hobolt and Wratil 2015). This focus on problem-solving certainly did not prevent massive conflicts among member states, but clashes were mostly about EU policies, not the EU as a polity. ...
... Crises are an essential part of European integration, thus a popular topic for researchers in European integration (Biermann et al. 2019;Börzel -Risse 2018;Gocaj -Meunier 2013;Ingham 2022, Krotz -Schramm 2022, Lefkofridi -Schmitter 2014Nicoli 2020, Niemann -Ioannou 2015Schimmelfennig 2014;Schimmelfennig 2018a;Schimmelfennig 2020;Riddervold -Trondal -Newsome 2021). Crises that naturally provoke a response from the concerned actors stand as suitable cases to test and compare the explanatory skills of European integration theories. ...
... For example, Börzel and Risse (2018) tested the explanatory power of intergovernmentalism, neofunctionalism and postfunctionalism to explain why the Eurozone crisis and the Schengen crisis had different outcomes. Whereas the Eurozone crisis led to further integration, the Schengen crisis ended up in a stalemate. ...
... When it comes to the Eurozone crisis, identity played a role as well. Börzel and Risse (2018) argue that a debate about identity -over the level of solidarity required to keep the Eurozone together -was taking place. They claim that prominent approaches to the study of European integration should consider concepts of identity and politicisation to enhance their ability to explain crises. ...
The review essay presents European crisis literature, which tests the theories of European integration. It argues that the existing research on European crises and subsequent reactions by the European Union is fragmented, non-systematic and works with a too-implicit definition of ‘crisis’. The reviewed literature comments on turbulent developments in the European Union rather than providing comprehensive empirical research. The article demonstrates existing gaps and suggests a conceptualisation of the research topic. It also promotes a systematic research framework enabling a proper analysis of the European crises and the European Union’s reactions. Such a framework is based on a clear definition of the relevant actors and crisis situations and the identification of an empirical basis for analysis. The author argues that a systematic approach could enhance researchers’ ability to understand reactions to turbulence in European integration better and even predict the European Union’s responses to future events.
... Yet, it does not examine their impact on differentiation specifically (e.g. Biermann et al., 2019;Börzel and Risse, 2018;Genschel and Jachtenfuchs, 2018;Jones et al., 2016;Schimmelfennig, 2018). By contrast, research on DI has theorized and studied its drivers, conditions and effects without particular attention to the effects of a crisis (Adler-Nissen, 2014;Jensen and Slapin, 2012;Kölliker, 2006;Schimmelfennig and Winzen, 2020). ...
... Moreover, the two crises vary in their integration outcomes. Whereas the Euro crisis resulted in a significant increase in EU-level competences and resources, the migration crisis has failed to produce a major reform of the Common European Asylum System in its aftermath (Börzel and Risse, 2018;Schimmelfennig, 2018;Scipioni, 2018). This variation allows us to test the relationship between crisis-induced integration and differentiation. ...
... Finally, we apply these theoretical perspectives to our empirical cases. Comparative analyses of the Euro and the migration crises suggest significant differences in explaining why the former triggered a major leap in Eurozone integration, whereas the latter failed to produce far-reaching reform of the EU's asylum and border policies (Biermann et al., 2019;Börzel and Risse, 2018;Schimmelfennig, 2018). These analyses underpin the expectation that the Euro crisis increased the scope of differentiation between Euro-ins and outs, and that the migration crisis did not have a relevant differentiation effect. ...
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.
... The Treaty on the European Union established the preconditions for creating an 'ever closer union', strengthening the cooperation between the MSs in many areas, introducing the European citizenship that allowed citizens to move and reside freely across MSs, and laying the foundations for the single currency. Since then, EU affairs have become increasingly politicised, with peaks matching major integration steps (Börzel & Risse, 2018), and the revelation of the inter-governmental elite bargain to public scrutiny marked the passage from 'permissive consensus' to 'constraining dissensus' (Hooghe & Marks, 2009). ...
... Indeed, this attitudinal stance well synthesises positions on European integration and immigration, the two macro-phenomena that have restructured individual preferences and party competition in Western European countries. The EU enlargement, and the subsequent Eurozone and Schengen crises, have strongly contributed to increasing the salience and polarisation of both European integration and immigration and making the connection between these two issues manifest (Börzel & Risse, 2018;Hooghe & Marks, 2018). In the last decade, scholars increasingly devoted attention to welfare chauvinism: the blending of attitudes in support of a wide welfare state, but with social benefits and services restricted to the in-group, natives rather than immigrants (see Careja & Harris, 2021 for a review). ...
... On one side the higher migration levels may have harmed welfare attitudes, by restricting the deservingness criteria used by citizens. This development brought a change to identity politics, with Eurosceptic populist parties framing the crisis in terms of borders and exclusionary practices, advocating for a 'fortress Europe' (Börzel & Risse, 2018). As a consequence, the integration of migrants and the handling of refugees dominated electoral campaigns across Europe, whether in the case of the Brexit referendum in the UK (Goodwin & Milazzo, 2017) or in elections in Austria, France, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands. ...
Have attitudes towards welfare deservingness changed over time across the EU? This article investigates aggregate and individual- level preferences towards welfare exclusionary policies, by evaluating antecedents of welfare deservingness in different contexts: in 1992, before the signing of the Maastricht Treaty, and in 2016, in the aftermath of the great recession, of the Eurozone and Schengen crises, and the Brexit referendum. Based on Eurobarometer and the ‘Reconciling Economic and Social Europe’ (REScEU) survey data collected in five EU countries, the article shows that unconditional transnational solidarity was weaker in 2016 compared to 1992. Contrary to expectations, cross-border welfare rights were already politicised in most countries prior to the Maastricht Treaty. Findings suggest that EU identity could have become the main criterion to define who deserves to have access to social security benefits, and in this sense, it is proposed that deservingness may have become ‘Europeanised’.
... This is particularly important for this research as Knill and Lehmkuhl (2002) and Börzel and Risse (2003) believe that this impact can produce a reaction from parties (with this top-down impact able to influence areas of party competition, organisation change, and partiesʼ political manifestos) depending on whether they fit or misfit with national regulations. Misfit, defined as the incompatibility of EU regulations with their national counterparts, has received widespread attention from Europeanisation scholars, including Börzel (1999), Börzel and Risse (2018), and Cowles and Risse (2001). These scholars have outlined how this incompatibility between national and European regulations allows the EU and its politicians to pressure states and their actors to introduce the requested domestic policy changes. ...
... This is especially evident in light of the recent financial crisis which challenged various mainstream parties across Europe and helped the emergence of new political parties which rejected the economic policies of the European Union which included the promotion of a series of austerity measures and its influence on member states (Polyakova & Fligstein, 2016;Hobolt & Tilley, 2016). These new emerging parties would receive an additional boost with the Syrian migration crisis which allowed these parties to expand their influence within their electorate (Börzel & Risse, 2018). ...
This chapter deals with the literature on Europeanisation. It provides a detailed investigation on the influence of the European Union on political parties. This chapter engages with various scholars of Europeanisation including Radaelli, Bulmer and Ladrech to explain how the European Union can influence states and entities such as political parties. The chapter is divided into two providing a detailed an insight into the characteristics of Europeanisation as well as an analysis on how the European Union can influence party politics. The chapter concludes that Europeanisation is not simply the ability of the European Union to influence party politics, but also, the way the European Union is used by these parties in order to gain political advantage.
... This is particularly important for this research as Knill & Lehmkuhl (2002), and Börzel & Risse (2003) believe that this impact can produce a reaction from parties (with this top-down impact able to influence areas of party competition, organisation change, and partiesʼ political manifestos) depending on whether they fit or misfit with national regulations. Misfit, defined as the incompatibility of EU regulations with their national counterparts, has received widespread attention from Europeanisation scholars, including Börzel (1999), Börzel and Risse (2018), and Cowles, Risse & Caporaso (2001). These scholars have outlined how this incompatibility between national and European regulations allows the EU and its politicians to pressure states and their actors to introduce the requested domestic policy changes. ...
... This is especially evident in light of the recent financial crisis which challenged various mainstream parties across Europe and helped the emergence of new political parties which rejected the economic policies of the European Union which included the promotion of a series of austerity measures and its influence on member states (Polyakova & Fligstein, 2016;Hobolt & Tilley, 2016). These new emerging parties would receive an additional boost with the Syrian migration crisis which allowed these parties to expand their influence within their electorate (Börzel & Risse, 2018). ...
This chapter provides an insight into the political system in Malta which is based on a near-perfect two-party system with the Nationalist Party and Labour Party competing for power. It delves into Malta’s electoral system which is based on the Single Transferable Vote. This is necessary in order to understand the Maltese political system, as well as the influence of the European Union on party politics, their approach towards the European Union and the way the European Union is used in political campaigns. The chapter argues that the Maltese political system is heavily dependent on clientelism, political patronage, and personal charisma. The chapter explores these characteristics and provides a detailed account of the establishment of the various civil society groups and the way they are now able to challenge the status quo of the main political parties.
... Seeking to explain the radical divergence between the outcomes of the Eurozone crisis and the Schengen crisis, Börzel and Risse (2018) underscored the way each crisis was framed by various countries and political forces. According to their reconstruction, the theoretical apparatus elaborated by postfunctionalism beginning with exerted by national publics came closer than other grand theories to providing a full-fledged explanation. ...
... Yet, no systematic endeavour has ever examined whether and to what extent the EU is actually interpreted in similar ways at the two levels. This is astounding, both because the diverse outcomes of recent European crises have strongly problematised the framing of the EU (Börzel and Risse 2018), and because related considerations arise in real-world debates at each and every critical juncture. In the run-up to the Brexit referendum, for instance, the Guardian had asked for contributions from its foreign readership: ...
This article makes the case for conceptualisation of attitudes towards the EU as interpretative ‘frames’, to be employed as analytical tools for comparison within and between European countries. At present, this move is all the more necessary. In fact, multiple asymmetrical crises and the entrenchment of ‘differentiated integration’ have compounded the contested, open-ended nature of European integration; in parallel, EU studies have increasingly acknowledged the context dependence, heterogeneity and ambivalence of such attitudes, moving beyond the presumption of stable support or opposition. The article leverages a variety of extant works and the empirical outcomes of a deductive-cum-inductive research endeavour to craft a comprehensive inventory of 16 interpretative frames. Then, it highlights a fundamental application, discussing practices that enable the construction of a frame-based approach to mass-elite congruence on European integration. Further suggested developments entail the study of Euroscepticism, national ‘issue cultures’ and ‘issue fields’, and mass-level attitudes towards the EU.
... Before this crisis, the option of introducing IBCs had been used very sparingly by the member states. The 2015 situation is therefore often characterized as a 'crisis of the Schengen regime' (Schimmelfennig, 2018) or simply as the 'Schengen crisis' (Börzel & Risse, 2018), in which the principle of free movement was challenged. That the policy responses of member states in crisis turned towards national re-bordering raised the question of whether we are witnessing European disintegration (e.g. ...
... That the policy responses of member states in crisis turned towards national re-bordering raised the question of whether we are witnessing European disintegration (e.g. Biermann et al., 2019;Börzel & Risse, 2018;Scipioni, 2018;Taggart & Szczerbiak, 2018). In March 2020, the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic resulted in further use of temporary internal border controls, which further limited freedom of movement in the Schengen area. ...
Following the refugee crisis in 2015 and the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, the use of internal border controls within the EU expanded considerably. This change seems to be at odds with the freedom of movement within the Schengen Area, a cornerstone of European integration. Previous research has been inconclusive as to whether this re-bordering signals a move towards renationalisation and disintegration or if it should be understood as a reconfiguration of European cooperation. This article takes a long-term perspective on the use of internal border controls and compares, through content analysis, the prevalence of renationalisation and European integration themes in member states’ notifications of internal border controls from 2006 to 2020. While controls have become more extensive in duration and scope over time, the results show that, contrary to expectations, increased focus on national security was not accompanied by less commitment to European integration in these notifications. Thus, rather than a sign of disintegration, it is argued that internal border controls can be understood as a reconfiguration of the European border regime towards cooperative but defensive integration.
... The deepening of integration brought structural differences in member state interests to the fore. European citizens also became more aware of how much 'Europe hits home' (Börzel and Risse 2018) and challenger parties seized on the topic. As a result, the EU has become increasingly politicized. ...
... The focus of this left-wing welfare populism is on social inclusiveness and solidarity within national communities (Colantone and Stanig 2019). Fundamental criticism of the EU from the left has been fuelled by the EU's response to the Eurozone crisis imposing austerity programmes and strict conditionality on the debtor countries (Börzel and Risse 2018;Hobolt 2015;Streeck and Elsässer 2016). Rather than advocating a return to the nation state, left Eurosceptics demand a break with the neoliberal monetarist policies and undemocratic institutions of the EU and call for a strengthening of the regulatory and redistributive powers of the EU to promote European solidarity and social justice in and amongst the member states (Varoufakis 2015). ...
This article provides a comprehensive analysis of Eurosceptic contestation within the legislative arena of the European Parliament (EP) from 2009 to 2019. Under what conditions do Eurosceptics vote differently from their Europhile peers? The literatures on European integration, party competition and policy types lead us to expect variation in Eurosceptic contestation across policy areas. Drawing on roll‐call votes in the EP, we introduce two new measures of such contestation: Eurosceptic dissent, that is, the extent to which Eurosceptics diverge from the Europhile plurality, and integration polarization, that is, the extent to which Eurosceptics and Europhiles oppose each other as cohesive camps. Our two indicators show that Eurosceptic contestation is particularly pronounced when the EP votes on cultural, distributive and constituent issues. When voting on redistributive policies, in contrast, dissent and polarization are curbed by national and ideological diversity.
... The postfunctionalist perspective has recently been adopted in the study of migration and mobility in the EU (Schimmelfennig, 2018(Schimmelfennig, , 2021, yet its appropriateness is debatable. It has already been argued that postfunctionalism has its limits (Börzel & Risse, 2018;Schimmelfennig, 2014Schimmelfennig, , 2018Schmitter, 2009). However, from the perspective of European integration theories and security studies, a manifestation of the postfunctionalist perspective framing the dynamics of politicization of and "constraining dissensus" in the field of EU internal security governance should be seen as a valuable framework for the explanation of exceptions from the rules governing mobility within the Schengen area. ...
... Regarding internal rebordering in the EU, one can argue that postfunctionalism undervalues the territorial level of European governance in which networks and connectivities between national actors and supranational entities tend to avoid politicization. This concurs with Börzel and Risse (2018), who noted that postfunctionalism tends to underestimate the resilience of the EU. Rebordering may be interpreted as a mechanism designed to ensure resilience during crises or emergencies which are fundamentally depoliticized and are coped with for the sake of restoring full-fledged cooperation and integration across the EU. ...
The EU has been under severe strain as a free-travel area. The migration crisis of the mid-2010s and the current Covid-19 pandemic have exerted a negative impact on the freedom of movement in the EU and the undisturbed crossing of internal borders within the Schengen area. Direct effects and long-term consequences of the prolonged crisis have shown that the dynamics of integration, which are determined by spillover effects of transnational processes, are counterposed by a politicization of domestically-embedded issues of security governance. This assumption underpins the postfunctionalist approach to European integration proposed originally by Hooghe and Marks. The tendency towards longstanding derogations from the Schengen regime, termed “internal rebordering,” should be juxtaposed with efforts of the European Commission towards a full restoration of the Schengen area without controls at internal borders. The argument developed in this article holds that internal rebordering has been embedded in the logic of the EU as an area of freedom, security, and justice comprising the Schengen area as its territorial manifestation. The rebordering processes in the EU and in the Schengen area have questioned the principle of “constraining dissensus” underlaying the postfunctionalist approach.
... The EU-led management of the crisis brought about voter reactions on the EU integration dimension (De Vries and Hobolt 2016;Hobolt and Tilley 2016). Similarly, the refugee crisisresulting from the Syrian and Libyan civil warsmagnified the deficiencies of the existing EU treaties, highlighting the controversy over a European co-ordination of migration policies (Börzel and Risse 2018). Moreover, the British referendum in June 2016 on EU membership (Brexit) brought about a mass-endorsed process of EU (dis-)integration to public attention across the continent (Walter 2021), probably prompting electoral spill overs in other EU Member States (Delis et al. 2020). ...
Many works have analysed EU issue voting, showing that European integration affects electoral
preferences. This article posits that EU issues have increasingly influenced party preferences,
boosting their effects and, in particular, on Europhile parties. Several punctuation points – authority transfer towards the EU, party politicisation efforts and a multiple set of crises – have occurred,
with EU issues cumulating effects on voting preferences. Europhile parties may have strategically
responded on this issue dimension, seizing on more favourable public orientations and, thus,
prompting an electoral mobilisation of their constituents. By exploring the EU issue voting
patterns in 25 Western and Central-Eastern European countries between 2014 and 2019, the article
presents two core findings, corroborating its expectations. It demonstrates that EU issues have increasingly affected electoral preferences, as well as enhancing their effects amongst the Europhile
party voters.
... First, the onset of the Eurozone crisis has been seen as an important moment for EU politicisation at the domestic level (De Vries, 2018;Hoeglinger, 2016;Hooghe & Marks, 2018;Hutter & Kriesi, 2019;Ruiz-Rufino & Alonso, 2017;Schäfer & Gross, 2020), and it has given rise to a large debate on the consequences of "Europe" for electoral behaviour Lobo & Lewis-Beck, 2012, Lobo & Pannico, 2020. Second, the nature of the EU has evolved from a regulatory to a distributional power (Börzel & Risse, 2018). Whereas previously it could be argued that the pursuit of electoral legitimacy by the EU was unnecessary, since it consisted of a regulatory power, the monetary union and the Eurozone crisis have made clear that the decisions taken at the EU level actually have important distributional consequences, not only between member-states, but also within countries (Börzel, 2016). ...
While the EU’s importance has grown for decision-making, both in politics and policies, following a decade of crises, its accountability mechanisms at the EU level have remained largely untouched. Most of the studies which research the way the EU is being legitimised focus on the European Parliament elections. In this book, we argue that to understand how EU accountability works, it is necessary to focus instead on national elections and the national political environment. While this channel of accountability has been long established, it still remains, to this day, poorly understood. Beyond establishing its importance, with a multi-methods approach and in comparative perspective, the book explores the national contexts which foster or discourage the expression of EU preferences at the national ballot box. Through a detailed analysis of longitudinal trends in EU politicisation in media and parliamentary debates from 2002 to 2019, as well as their impact on EU issue voting in national elections held between 2019 and 2021 in six European countries, the book establishes rigorously the paths of European accountability at the national level, its propitious contexts, and whether the paths are similar from Greece to Germany. The findings have implications for both national and European Union democracy, underlining the importance that national institutions have in enabling citizens to hold the EU accountable.
... Hix, 2008), the trend reversed in the last legislative terms, with the gradual consolidation of the grand coalition between the left and the right. Indeed, trans-partisan consensus has persisted in the last decade (Novak et al., 2021), despite the important crises that the EU faces (Brack & Gürkan, 2021;Schimmelfennig, 2018) and the growing politicisation of the EU issues (Hooghe & Marks, 2009;Börzel & Risse, 2018). ...
Consensus is a key feature of the European Union. In the European Parliament, most legislation is adopted by a grand coalition between the left and the right. While this trans-partisan cooperation has always been informal, the epp and s&d groups agreed on a formal political coalition in 2014. For the first time in the ep ’s history, this grand coalition was based on a policy programme negotiated by the two groups’ leadership. Based on roll-call vote data, this paper aims to understand the impact of this deal on actual coalition-building in the ep plenary. We find that the 2014 coalition deal provided a framework that incentivises legislative actors to increase their levels of cooperation on the issues on which they usually cooperate the least.
... Hutter and Kriesi argued that the affair of European integration became more politicized during the Euro crisis, especially in the South where countries hardest hit by the Euro crisis are located [3]. Borzel and Risse emphasized on the nature and progression of politicization on the outcome of the Euro crisis to explain the same effect [4]. Degner developed a liberal intergovernmentalist link between crises and European integration and argued that the Euro crisis deepened European integration [5]. ...
... Others regarded the member states gathered in the Council of the EU as firmly in the driving seat: 'new intergovernmentalism,' (Bickerton et al., 2015;Hodson & Puetter, 2019). Other scholars qualified their assessment, depending on the type of crisis (Börzel & Risse, 2018;Genschel & Jachtenfuchs, 2018;Schimmelfennig, 2018;Seabrooke & Tsingou, 2019), or the stage of evolution of the crisis (Schmidt, 2019). Similarly, while some scholars criticized the lack of cooperation among EU institutions (Collignon, 2012) and used actor-centred approaches focusing on the role of elites and technocrats (Schulz, 2019), others highlighted instances of 'collaborative leadership' (Nielsen & Smeets, 2017;Smeets & Beach, 2020). ...
The COVID-19 pandemic posed unprecedented challenges to the European Union (EU) and its member states. In the EU, health policy competence has been and remains largely with member states. However, faced with a major external crisis, which more or less affected all member states at the same time, the EU developed a framework within which the member states (and their subnational units) could respond together to the crisis. This introductory article to the Special Issue ‘The COVID-19 Pandemic and the European Union,’ briefly examines how EU institutions, policies and politics were affected by the crisis. Contrary to earlier crises, the EU responded speedily and effectively this time around. The EU has become increasingly important in crisis management, in part due to the nature of transboundary crises. The EU proved itself to be a good crisis manager on some dimensions, but certainly not on all. The crisis created momentum for collective action and for fast decision-making, even though the legitimacy of some these actions has been subject to limited public scrutiny.
... Research on the European Union, the most supranational IO in the world, has shown that politicization can be a game changer in the dynamics of international cooperation in a democratic setting (Hooghe & Marks, 2009). In the face of overwhelming functional pressures in the wake of the financial crisis or the migration crisis, it has proven very hard indeed for the European Union to respond by deepening delegation (Börzel & Risse, 2018;Hooghe & Marks, 2019;Schimmelfennig, 2018;Scipioni, 2018). This is not an exclusively European phenomenon. ...
Unlabelled:
Why do some international organizations (IO) accrete delegated authority over time while in others delegation is static or declines? We hypothesize that the dynamics of delegation are shaped by an IO's founding contract. IOs rooted in an open-ended contract have the capacity to discover cooperation over time: as new problems arise these IOs can adopt new policies or strengthen collaboration in existing areas. This, in turn, triggers a demand for delegation. However, this logic is mediated by the political regime of the IO. In predominantly democratic IOs, delegation is constrained by politicization which intensifies as an IO's policy portfolio broadens. These claims are tested using an updated version of the Measure of International Authority dataset covering 41 regional IOs between 1950 and 2019. Controlling for alternative explanations and addressing potential endogeneity across a range of model specifications, we find robust support for our argument.
Supplementary information:
The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11558-022-09482-0.
... But he continued to argue in later years that as major policy debates play themselves out 'above the nation state', a degree of institutionalized, supranational polity-building was taking place (Haas, 2004). EU researchers have long been on the lookout for a European political space that allows authoritative decision-making but also the airing and reconciliation of key societal questions ('cleavage' issues, old and new; see Hutter & Kriesi, 2019) and opportunities to build something resembling a shared identity (Börzel & Risse, 2018). The emergence of a space for the debate over and emergence of shared values is therefore seen as a key measure of European integration. ...
A seemingly continuous stream of crises in Europe has turned scholarly agendas towards assessment of the EU's management of crises. Those assessments vary widely, depending on the analytical focus and criteria used. This paper introduces three assessment criteria drawn from crisis research that pertain to the detection of a crisis, the mobilization of necessary resources, and the nature of the public debate about critical choices made in times of crisis. We relate these crisis management insights to long-standing debates in European integration theory to help link traditional crisis management assessments with EU-focused theorizing. The article offers a framework for assessment of the EU's performance as a crisis manager. We illustrate the utility of the framework with a brief application to the EU's response to Covid-19. We assess the EU's performance in positive terms: the Union acted quickly after a somewhat slow start and was very effective in mobilizing a variety of resources. At the same time, we note that major policy choices were made without a significant public debate about potential effects on the future character of the Union.
... Siyasallaşma (politicization), (harici) farklılaştırılmış entegrasyonun gerçekleşebilmesinde çok önemli bir engel olarak yorumlanmaktadır (Schimmelfennig vd., 2015). Siyasallaşan konularda ya da politika alanlarında çıkar gruplarının ve teknokratların şekillendirdiği geleneksel siyaset biçiminden kitle siyasetine bir kayış gözlemlenmektedir (Börzel ve Risse, 2018). Kapalı kapılar ardında konuşulacak ve şekillendirilecek konular, medyanın ve kamunun ilgisine açılmaktadır. ...
Küreselleşmenin etkisiyle Avrupa Birliği (AB) ve üçüncü ülkeler arasında giderek güçlenen (asimetrik) karşılıklı bağımlılık, AB’ye üye olmayan ülkelerin AB normlarını kısmen benimsemesinin ehemmiyetini arttırmıştır. Dolayısıyla, AB müktesebatının belli kısımlarının Birlik sınırlarının ötesinde uygulanması olarak tanımlanan harici farklılaştırılmış entegrasyon (external differentiated integration) konusunda gerçekleştirilen akademik çalışmalar önem kazanmıştır. Türkiye, bir yandan üyelik perspektifi oldukça zayıflamış bir aday ülke, öte yandan da birçok politika alanında AB’nin stratejik ortağı olarak, harici farklılaştırılmış entegrasyon çalışmaları açısından önemli bir örnek teşkil etmektedir. Son yıllarda AB, düzensiz göçün yönetimi amacıyla sınır yönetimi normlarının Türkiye’ye aktarımını, Türkiye ile olan diyaloğunun merkezine yerleştirmiştir. Buna bağlı olarak sınır yönetimi, Türkiye’nin AB’ye harici farklılaştırılmış entegrasyonunu kavramsal ve ampirik açılardan analiz etmek için oldukça elverişli bir politika alanı olarak öne çıkmaktadır. Çalışmada, Türkiye’nin sınır yönetimi konusunda AB ile harici farklılaştırılmış entegrasyonunun sınırları ve belirleyici faktörleri analiz edilmektedir. Çalışma, bu politika alanında kilit öneme sahip iki konuyu mercek altına almaktadır: Türkiye tarafından Entegre Sınır Yönetimi (ESY) sisteminin uygulanması ve AB Sınır ve Sahil Güvenlik Ajansı (FRONTEX) ile işlevsel iş birliğinin durumu. Makalenin kuramsal bölümünde, harici farklılaştırılmış entegrasyon ve belirleyici faktörleri, farklı politika aktarımı modelleri ve literatür haritalandırılması üzerinden kavramsallaştırılmaktadır. Ampirik bölümdeyse, ESY’nin uygulanması ve FRONTEX ile iş birliği konularında gerçekleşen farklılaştırılmış entegrasyonun kapsamı Avrupa Komisyonu Türkiye ilerleme/ülke raporları temel alınarak incelenmektedir. Entegrasyonun kapsamını ve sınırlarını etkileyen faktörler, makalenin kuramsal bölümünde gerçekleştirilen haritalandırmadan yararlanılarak ele alınmaktadır. Makalenin ana bulgusu, cazip ve güvenilir teşviklerin Türkiye’nin sınır yönetimi konusunda AB ile entegrasyonunu kolaylaştırırken, sektörel siyasallaşmanın ve öngörülen yüksek uyum maliyetlerinin harici farklılaştırılmış entegrasyonu olumsuz etkilediğidir.
... Siyasallaşma (politicization), (harici) farklılaştırılmış entegrasyonun gerçekleşebilmesinde çok önemli bir engel olarak yorumlanmaktadır (Schimmelfennig vd., 2015). Siyasallaşan konularda ya da politika alanlarında çıkar gruplarının ve teknokratların şekillendirdiği geleneksel siyaset biçiminden kitle siyasetine bir kayış gözlemlenmektedir (Börzel ve Risse, 2018). Kapalı kapılar ardında konuşulacak ve şekillendirilecek konular, medyanın ve kamunun ilgisine açılmaktadır. ...
Amaç: Bu çalışma, Türkiye’nin sınır yönetimi konusunda AB ile harici farklılaştırılmış entegrasyonunun sınırlarını ve belirleyici faktörlerini Entegre Sınır Yönetimi (ESY) sisteminin uygulanması ve AB Sınır ve Sahil Güvenlik Ajansı (FRONTEX) ile işlevsel işbirliğinin durumu kapsamında analiz etmeyi amaçlamaktadır. Yöntem: Makalenin kuramsal bölümünde, harici farklılaştırılmış entegrasyon ve belirleyici faktörleri, farklı politika aktarımı modelleri ve literatür haritalandırılması üzerinden kavramsallaştırılmaktadır. Ampirik bölümdeyse, ESY’nin uygulanması ve FRONTEX ile işbirliği konularında gerçekleşen farklılaştırılmış entegrasyonun kapsamı Avrupa Komisyonu Türkiye ilerleme/ülke raporları temel alınarak incelenmektedir. Entegrasyonun kapsamını ve sınırlarını etkileyen faktörler, makalenin kuramsal bölümünde gerçekleştirilen haritalandırmadan yararlanılarak ele alınmaktadır.Bulgular: Makalenin ana bulgusu, cazip ve güvenilir teşviklerin Türkiye’nin sınır yönetimi konusunda AB ile entegrasyonunu kolaylaştırırken, sektörel siyasallaşmanın ve öngörülen yüksek uyum maliyetlerinin harici farklılaştırılmış entegrasyonu olumsuz etkilediğidir.Özgünlük: AB-Türkiye ilişkilerinin ele alındığı yazında, harici farklılaştırılmış entegrasyon konusundaki kuramsal çalışmalar az sayıda olmakla birlikte, oldukça da yeni bir alandır. Bunun ötesinde, kuramsal tartışmaları farklı politika alanları bağlamında inceleyen sınırlı sayıda ampirik çalışma bulunmaktadır. Bu makale, AB-Türkiye ilişkilerini, göç ve sınır yönetimi gibi oldukça önemli ve güncel bir politika alanında, harici farklılaştırılmış entegrasyon tartışmaları bağlamında inceleyerek özellikle Türkçe yazına önemli ve özgün bir katkı sağlamaktadır.
... This interest affiliates with 'constructivist neoinstitutionalism' (Risse 2018), which was placed as an alternative to challenge prior theories on European integration and contemporary EU governance and put more emphasis on national level (e.g. Bulmer and Joseph 2016;Börzel and Risse 2018;Dandashly and Verdun 2018). ...
This article examines national responses to the introduction of a strong policy coordination tool by the European Commission: the European Semester. The tool was introduced in 2012 in reaction to the economic crisis to prevent unsustainable policy choices within EMU. It sets annual country-specific recommendations for economic policies, which the Member States are expected to implement when drafting national budgets. We study the uptake of the policy tool in three disparate Member States: Finland, Spain and France in 2013. The article explores how national parliaments tackle the challenge imposed on national sovereignty by the powerful tool. We investigate the discursive practices and justifications evinced by national politicians on policy proposal in the parliamentary debate on annual state budget. Politicians balance between contrastive normative frameworks by operating on evasive discur-sive formulations and performative silences, which point to a deafened legitimation work and double commitment within the multilevel polity of the EU.
... EU's efforts to restrict and deflect asylum-seeking in its territory predate 2015 and is well-documented (Lavenex, 2018;Zaun, 2018) and have been attributed to its dysfunctional institutional dynamics (Lehmann, 2018), identity politics (Börzel & Risse, 2017), and power politics between refugee receiving countries and others (Zaun, 2018). EU's internal responsibility sharing resolve, not particularly strong to begin with, contributed to the challenges it is currently facing. ...
The response to the so-called refugee crisis of 2015 in the European Union was haphazard and inconsistent with the stated mission of solidarity. This article situates the EU's response and its Common European Asylum System (CEAS) as defensive integration producing the lowest common denominator policies. It argues that the rise of right-wing populism redefines solidarity in narrow and exclusionary terms, in contrast to the inclusive and global solidarity espoused by the EU. Drawing on Germany as a case study of how domestic populist pressures also rise to the European level, the article juxtaposes the demise of the EU's temporary relocation system (an attempt at internal inclusive solidarity) and the success of the EU-Turkey deal (an attempt at externalization and risk avoidance), both initiatives led by Germany. Solidarity efforts championed by Germany were quickly stymied by (Central Eastern European) member states that not only rejected efforts at temporary solutions but blocked efforts to develop permanent mechanisms and a substantive CEAS reform.
... Beyond the abandoned 'quota system' for refugee intake, current versions consist of "relocation of asylum seekers from the country of first entry to taking over responsibility for returning individuals with no right to stay, or various forms of operational support," (DG Migration and Home Affairs, 2021). This spectrum has had to be developed to reflect some member states' opposition to refugee claims' processing and acceptance, or outright refusals to introduce EU policies and legal mechanisms (Börzel & Risse, 2018). ...
This paper engages with state, citizen, and civil society responses to refugees in Budapest and Hungary more widely in order to ‘provincialise’ European migration policy and politics. We introduce grounded, eastern ‘frontline’ realities and histories to complicate European claims to universality and hierarchies of “goodness”. Through ethnographic work that documents and analyses refugee reception after the so-called 2015 refugee crisis, we shed light on the diverse forms of existing crises affecting the EU. These conflicts involve contestations over i) who is deemed European (questions that have been asked both of migrants and East Europeans), and ii) the ‘Europeanisation’ project as it has entailed new governance and funding arrangements for the development of civil society organisations. These new governance modes have attempted to re-shape city-state-EU dynamics, purposefully eliding problematic nation-state responses to refugees. These have heightened opposition to EU power-creep from conservative governments. Through an empirically rich discussion of the Hungarian context in relation to Europe, this paper speaks to the broader spectrum of grounded and politicised populist responses that have challenged the EU's governance and future.
... Theorizing democratic innovation has its roots in various branches of democratic scholarship, most notably on participatory and deliberative democracy (Fung 2006;Saward 2006). Scholars in this tradition generally presume that liberal democracy is in hot water, as growing economic inequality (Schäfer 2012), increased levels of false information circulating through social media (Bennett and Livingston 2018), a worsening quality of deliberation (Gora and Wilde 2020), and a re-emergence of identity politics (Börzel and Risse 2018), have challenged the effectiveness and legitimacy of traditional democratic institutions in governing society towards desired directions (Mounk 2018). To mitigate these challenges and revive citizens' commitment to and participation in the democratic process, governments, civil society movements and academics have initiated and tested a wide variety of democratic innovations in recent decades. ...
In order to foster a transition of the food system toward more sustainable outcomes, scholars have increasingly pointed at the need for organizing strengthened food democracy. By increasing the participation of citizens and food system actors, democratic innovations, such as food policy councils, are believed to promote the quality and legitimacy of food policymaking. However, the question of whether and how food democracy initiatives do indeed contribute to more democratic modes of governance largely remains unexplored. This study addresses this gap by performing a systematic literature review of the existing scholarship on food democracy, assessing democratic innovations for their contributions to four democratic goods: inclusiveness, popular control, considered judgment and transparency. The analysis shows that food democracy initiatives tend to be dominated by organized interests, have more influence on agenda-setting and implementation compared to decision-making, and generally aim for some form of deliberation or knowledge exchange. The precise selection mechanisms, processes and quality of deliberation, and transparency of democratic innovations remain important research gaps. The paper ends with a plea to better connect food democracy scholarship with the broader political sciences, as well as various suggestions for future research.
Supplementary information:
The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10460-022-10322-5.
... Along with other relevant studies in the field (e.g. Börzel & Risse, 2018;Grande & Kriesi, 2016;Hutter & Grande, 2014;Kriesi, 2016), this further confirms the role of politicisation as a critical antecedent for the polarisation of European integration issues in times of crisis. ...
Despite receiving much attention in the literature, existing analyses on the impact of Covid-19 on European societies and politics do not investigate the consequences for party competition over the European Union (EU) dimension. To this end, this article asks whether the pandemic affected the salience of the EU issue and the related party positions in Italy during the ‘first wave’ of the crisis. The analysis relies on an original CrowdTangle dataset comprising around 24000 posts from parties’ official Facebook pages, which are thematically coded and subsequently employed in time-series cross-section regression models. The findings show that the pandemic caused a significant increase in salience and polarisation of the EU issue in the Italian party system.
... There is widespread agreement that the crisis about the numbers was also a wider crisis of politics, institutions, and political leadership (and of solidarity) that predates 2015. With the large influx of arrivals across the Mediterranean, the EU's free movement regime, the Schengen area, also reached a crisis point (Börzel & Risse, 2018). Temporary internal border controls were reinstalled by Austria, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and France, crystallising a loss of trust in external border controls (Ceccorulli, 2019). ...
Migration and migration-related diversity are likely to remain key topics of the European policy and research agenda for the foreseeable future. This asks for a rethinking of the research agenda on migration, from a strategic perspective as well as from a research perspective. The objective of this chapter is to suggest applications that are useful in shaping the next funding opportunities for migration research, and to provide roadmaps for the optimisation of research efforts in order to avoid overlapping and, where possible, to close the gaps in the global spectrum and national initiatives on migration. Questions such as How to benefit from and get access to available knowledge and expertise? How to promote the accumulation of knowledge and expertise? and How to address gaps in knowledge? have been at the heart of the Horizon 2020 CrossMigration research project and have led to the definition of its strategic research agenda . This chapter considers the need for a future agenda on migration studies, addressing methodological issues; what funding to focus on; how funding might be organised; who should be involved in funding (and procedures); and what prospects there are for the future. We will also propose three strategies to consider how an agenda might help provide towards: (1) keeping the road safe for achieving the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals in 2030, (2) contrasting current and future pandemic/epidemic disease, and (3) establishing a fruitful dialogue with the African scientific community.
... There is widespread agreement that the crisis about the numbers was also a wider crisis of politics, institutions, and political leadership (and of solidarity) that predates 2015. With the large influx of arrivals across the Mediterranean, the EU's free movement regime, the Schengen area, also reached a crisis point (Börzel & Risse, 2018). Temporary internal border controls were reinstalled by Austria, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and France, crystallising a loss of trust in external border controls (Ceccorulli, 2019). ...
This chapter will focus on labour migration , that is the movement of persons with the aim of employment or income-bringing activities (e.g., entrepreneurship), developing the topic which was also touched upon in Chap. 10.1007/978-3-030-92377-8_3 on conceptual understanding of migration drivers. Research on labour migration has developed across various disciplines (e.g., sociology, anthropology, and geography), but most prominently in economics. It has resulted in a range of theoretical frameworks, starting with neoclassical economic theories and advancing through the New Economics of Labour Migration (NELM), dual labour market theory, and social network theory, to more recent transnational approaches or theories dedicated to particular forms of labour migration. These diverse approaches offer insights into labour migration on macro-, meso- and micro-levels. Although a dichotomy based on skills (high-skilled vs. low-skilled workers) can be seen as controversial or misleading as a division between workers representing these two types of skills is often vague or difficult to determine, the distinction does reflect recent debates on labour migration. Thus, a high−/low-skills dichotomy serves as a guide to the structure of this chapter.
... Rather than a Europeanization of policies, there has been a "renationalization'' of migration policies in many European states (e.g., Brekke & Staver, 2018). Ultimately, the failure to find common policies on migration also challenges the Schengen area of free movement (Börzel & Risse, 2018;Nikolić & Pevcin, 2022). In Finland, the tenfold increase in the number of asylum seekers was considered a challenge for the reception system in 2015 (Wahlbeck, 2022). ...
This article presents a Finnish perspective on harmonization within the Common European Asylum System (CEAS). The article analyses results from a study of the judgments and experiences of Finnish civil servants concerning the harmonization of the CEAS. The year 2015 constitutes a shift in asylum policies in many European countries, and a key question is how this shift has influenced the process of harmonization of asylum policies and practices. Senior civil servants working in the state administration of asylum and migration issues in Finland were interviewed anonymously as part of a comparative European research project (CEASEVAL). The interviews indicate that EU‐wide administrative cooperation has developed into a broad and diverse cooperation in recent years. The interviewees in Finland generally found harmonization of the asylum system to be necessary, which was connected to a need for greater predictability of the outcomes of the system. The results of the study suggest that Finnish asylum administration is developing toward harmonized practices involving transnational and supranational administrative cooperation in the field of asylum. The results support the conclusion of previous research that there is a process of horizontal Europeanization in which administrative practices develop organically within national asylum administration, independently of political disagreements at the EU level. This is relevant both to the framing of political issues and to research on Finnish migration and asylum policies, which need to take into account the ongoing European harmonization of policies and administrative practices.
By taking the main aspirations of the minilateralism as a theoretical framework, this research aims to investigate the origins and prospects of the Slavkov Triangle, which was initiated as a new regional platform between Austria, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia in 2015. The main motivation of the grouping has been to enhance the cooperation of these States in various areas ranging from energy security, transport infrastructure, youth employment, cross-border relations, to the social dimension of European integration. The regional platform was regarded as problematic for and as an alternative to the Visegrad cooperation since it would imply the isolation of Hungary and Poland. As forming a response to these inquiries, this article aims to find out whether the Slavkov Triangle presents a new sustainable alternative central European format. In this respect, the focal point of the research is to answer whether Slavkov Triangle fits theoretically to the traditional ‘minilateral’ grouping definition within the European Union (EU). To reveal whether the members of the Triangle have adopted a concrete joint position in EU decision-making, this paper examines the voting patterns of the members of the Triangle by conducting a quantitative analysis of the voting record of the members of the Triangle in the Council of the EU. The empirical analysis will show the degree to which these countries vote together as a minilateral group. The time frame is designated as two-time spans. The first-time span focuses on between 2010 and 2015 while the second time span covers voting records from 2015 i.e., the beginning of the initiative till 2022 November i.e., the very recent date of the voting data publicly available. That would help grasp the comparative case basis of voting records of these member states before and after the Triangle. In this way, the current study empirically contributes to the burgeoning scholarly literature on regional groupings within the EU.
This article tries to explain an apparent paradox in the Common European Asylum System (CEAS): despite political stalemate over CEAS legislative reform and lack of trust amongst MSs, administrative cooperation shows operational continuity. Drawing on the ‘Infrastructural Europeanism’ approach, we argue that a sociotechnical perspective allows detecting the material means that operationally provide continuity to administrative action, despite policy gaps. It reveals mediating agency exerted by less visible actors who are nevertheless crucial to the integration process. Through a sociotechnical lens, alleged integration failures – like in the post-2015 asylum crisis – can reveal operational cooperation not visible if only legislative outcomes are taken into account. Empirically, the article shows how the International Organization for Migration assumed a role in mediating relocations between MSs, overcoming an implementation gap in health data circulation, thanks to its data infrastructure able to prompt data production, harmonise administrative standardisation and build continuity in time.
The objective was to analyze the European Union EU as a supranational association, which, in turn, leads to problems of state sovereignty. The methodology employed consisted of general and special scientific methods. Sovereignty is an archaic political construct. There are two opposites: one focuses on the state and proclaims that sovereignty resides in a particular level of government, the parliament and the government derived from it; the other is the multilevel approach that presents sovereignty through a new prism, claiming that the concept itself is obsolete, challenging globalization and integration. The ability and right of existing states to exercise supreme authority over their territory, control access to it and defend their citizens has become more difficult to exercise. To conclude, globalization, transnational trade, culture and travel are just some of the factors that have challenged the effective capacity of the state. To adapt to these transformations, sovereignties are joined or shared with other states, as states are the main actors in an organization such as the EU because their interaction is so complex and intense that it has modified their independence.
An improved version of this conference paper has been published in Journal of Common Market Studies and is publicly available here:
DOI:10.1111/jcms.13387
SIPRI’s Environment of Peace initiative focuses on managing the risks that are created by two interwoven crises: the darkening security horizon and the immense pressures being placed on the natural world and the systems that support life on earth.
Security Risks of Environmental Crises (part 2)—shows how combinations of environmental and security phenomena are generating complex risks. Through a theoretical framework informed by the literature, Cedric de Coning, Research Professor at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI), and his team explore different pathways from environmental stress to conflict and how the darkening security horizon and environmental crises are interacting to generate different types of risk: compound, cascading, emergent, systemic and existential. The analysis is supported by numerous case studies, spanning a variety of social-ecological systems and different types of risks. Part 2 also discusses options for responding to these complex risks.
The liberal international order has recently come under increasing nationalist pressure, evidenced by a rise in nationalist demands to withdraw from international institutions. A growing literature examines the domestic economic, social, and political origins of this nationalist backlash against international institutions. However, less is known about the extent to which precedents of withdrawals of one country affect nationalist pressures for future withdrawals elsewhere. In this paper, we argue that initial withdrawal episodes provide new information about the feasibility and desirability of withdrawals to nationalist elites in other countries. Hence, we expect nationalists abroad to be either encouraged or deterred to follow a similar path – depending on the success of these precedents. We explore this argument in the context of the British withdrawal from the European Union (Brexit), which arguably marks the most significant withdrawal from an international institution to date. Based on a quantitative analyses of media reports in ten European countries, we show we show that nationalist parties in Europe increased or moderated the aggressiveness about their EU-related rhetoric as the ups and downs of the Brexit-drama unfolded. Our results suggest that precedents of nationalist withdrawals shape domestic politics well beyond the concerned countries themselves.
The purpose of this research is to determine the impact of the euro crisis on European economic integration processes and to review the measures that are being taken in order for the single currency area to come out of the crisis, to remove its causes and to establish deeper economic integration between member states EU. In addition, the paper presents an overview of theoretical positions on the euro crisis, as well as the problem of crisis interpretation. On the basis of theoretical scientific findings, a conceptual research model was identified in the paper, which determined the connection between the euro crisis and the dimensions of European economic integration. European economic integration are observed through four dimensions: Single market, 2) Level of economic homogeneity between EU member states, 3) Symmetry of policies of EU member states and the degree of correlated business cycles within the EU and 4) Compliance of member states with common institutional achievements and EU legal acquis. The euro crisis is observed through three dimensions: 1) banking crisis, 2) debt crisis and 3) growth and competitiveness crisis.
Starting from the Cleavage concept of Stein and Rokkan, the article explains the societal conflict lines in Hungary as well as their effect on the development of the party system and the structure of political disputes. It shows that immediately after the regime change, a stable, bipolar party system developed, in which five parties were continuously represented in parliament. Two traditional main conflicts still shape the political system today: the economic contrasts that arose as a result of industrialization between the urbanists and “agrarian populists” as well as the conflicts stoked by nationalization efforts between the traditionalists and the “Westernizers”. Since 2002, Fidesz has pursued the goal of replacing the liberal oligarchs and post-communists, among other things, through a new “illiberal” middle class with its “System of National Cooperation” and has been very successful since 2010 with its specific strategic orientation, while the left-liberal camp has become increasingly heterogeneous. The article also shows with which measures Fidesz-KDNP supported its influence.KeywordsHungaryParty systemCleavagesFideszJobbikRepresentationOrbán
This article examines the development of the asylum and migration policy field in Hungary. It shows that it was not until 1993 that an institutionalization of the policy field took place and that, until 2004, mainly laws and regulations were enacted to align with the Common European Asylum and Migration System. Only ten years after EU accession, the Hungarian government adopted its own migration strategy. In the course of the European refugee crisis in 2015, Hungarian asylum and migration policy became increasingly restrictive, but this only went hand in hand with a partial politicization of the policy area. Hardly any counter-programmes to the government line were developed in the country. Overall, the migration discourse consistently highlighted security aspects. The article concludes that a hierarchical migration system was set up that favours Hungarian-speaking foreigners over migrants from third countries and asylum seekers.
This article explores discursive strategies deployed in international policy-making and highlights the relevance of interrelated identifications in political persuasion. Reconsidering some of the existing theories, it states that justifications in the acts of argumentation are not only ideational but also relational. The article demonstrates this by examining a case of European law initiative Single European Sky (SES) that was considered rational, progressive and beneficial, but never proceeded to completion. The art of argumentative premises applied in the negotiations on SES are analysed in detail in an illustrative public communique by a French Minister addressing the European Commission. The article exhibits the strategic deployment of multifold institutional standards of legitimacy regulating the interface between a nation-state and the EU. The policy arguments are built upon interrelational parameters and mutual expectations that motivate their persuasiveness. In the analysis this ‘relational scaffolding’ is carved out by applying the method of membership categorisation analysis.
The strong state-centric orientation of the EU crisis discourse has produced an important blind spot that limits our understanding of the Migration Crisis. Conceptually engaging with international migration studies and the politicization/identity nexus that postfunctionalism has put on the map in EU studies, this contribution advances original empirical evidence to visibilize the ongoing intra-EUropean struggle over the meaning of the crisis and the identity relationships underlying it. As the findings show, the externalizations the dominant crisis narrative promotes on the order dimension (vis-à-vis the EU) are clearly challenged by the European Commission as a politicizing agent: Along the EUropean identity markers ‘responsibility‘ and ‘solidarity‘, it has endogenized the Migration Crisis, located difference in the Member State-collective and consistently pursued integrative steps and the development of competencies. Taking into account this ‘crisis resolution‘ counter-narrative allows to enhance our understanding of the Migration Crisis and of the permanent contestedness of European (dis)integration.
Die Europäisierung politischer Öffentlichkeit ist ein Prozess, der von politischen und medialen Infrastrukturen abhängig ist. Zwei zentrale Entwicklungen haben im Zeitverlauf zu einem graduellen Anstieg der Europäisierung nationaler Öffentlichkeiten geführt: Einerseits befördern politische und ökonomische Krisen eine Politisierung und infolgedessen eine erhöhte Sichtbarkeit europäischer Themen in nationalen Medien. Andererseits schaffen das Internet und soziale Medien neue Kommunikationsinfrastrukturen und die Möglichkeit transnationaler Vernetzung. Trotz steigender Politisierung und digitaler Vernetzungsmöglichkeiten fungiert Europäische Öffentlichkeit jedoch (noch) nicht als demokratische Arena, sondern vielmehr als ein Kommunikationsraum der gegenseitigen Beobachtung und Bezugnahme von Akteuren aus unterschiedlichen nationalen Kontexten.
The EU's power is expanding, calling for reassessments of its normative legitimacy. This article proposes a novel criterion for assessing the EU's legitimacy: symmetry in the delegation of power. We illustrate the usefulness of this criterion through an analysis of the European border regime. Existing analyses of the border regime have tended to dismiss it as weak and intergovernmental. We show, to the contrary, that it is both strong and weak. The EU wields significant power in border control but lacks power altogether in immigration policy. This asymmetry has rendered the EU incapable of discharging the moral responsibilities that arise in migration control, posing a novel legitimacy challenge. Finally, we argue that the symmetry criterion generalizes and can shed light on the EU's legitimacy beyond the area of migration.
In the wake of the Schengen Agreement, the EU has assumed the role of maintaining European security, and border integration management has been ranked among the top priorities for the EU. It is necessary to improve border integration management to advance the integration process. Despite this, border integration management in the EU has been challenging, particularly since the refugee crisis of 2015. This article analyzes the current directions and trends of relevant research on border integration management in the EU. Three main areas of research on border integration management are currently being conducted: migration policy, border control agency, and border integration problems. The study concluded that theoretical and organizational analysis need to complement border management research.
Existing research argues that a ‘democratic constraint’ blocks the path towards fiscal integration in the eurozone: Voters in creditor countries are fundamentally opposed to debt sharing, while voters in debtor countries are unwilling to leave the euro, which constrains the ability of their politicians to negotiate a more equitable distribution of the burden of adjustment. However, this literature neglects that preferences are strategically interdependent across countries and are affected by the type of information processed by individuals. Based on two linked survey experiments in Germany and Italy, conducted at a crucial moment during the COVID-19 pandemic, we show that Germans respond to information that highlights the possibility of a break-up of the euro as a result of Italexit by increasing their support for debt mutualization. In contrast, Italians are more affected by information about the costs of remaining in the euro than of exiting it and drastically reduce their support for the euro if they are told that austerity and structural reforms are required to remain in it. Our results help to explain why German politicians relaxed their hostility to joint debt and agreed to the introduction of the EU’s pandemic recovery fund in 2020.
In recent years, populist radical right parties that openly contest the EU’s liberal consensus have acquired a reputation for restricting the space for civil society. Developing a novel conceptual framework of obstruction, this article examines how actors from the far right and the political mainstream obstruct humanitarian NGOs. We argue that while far right actors do so in a distinctly politicized way, mainstream EU actors and governments seek to obstruct rival NGOs in a depoliticized way, so as to act in line with the EU’s norms and values. Empirically, we test our argument of different styles of obstruction for the case of EU border management in the Central Mediterranean, where NGOs have played an important role in the domain of search and rescue (SAR). Our analysis shows that initially dominated by hardliners, most notably the Italian populist right-wing Conte I government, the obstruction of SAR NGOs politicized EU-NGO relations. Under the more mainstream Conte II government, in turn, obstruction continued but relied on a more depoliticized approach. In addition, EU institutions as well as other mainstream governments in relevant flag states such as Germany or the Netherlands also resorted to similar obstruction strategies.
Since the increase of refugee arrivals in 2015, the longstanding trend of using islands to confine asylum seekers at the EU borders became a prominent aspect of asylum governance. By looking at the southeastern border of the EU, as it has been constructed around the five Greek islands that host the EU’s hotspot approach, I demonstrate the implications of the European governance of asylum on the individual right to seek asylum. In doing so, I argue that there is a newly introduced process of peripheralisation of asylum. Under the term peripheralisation I describe the multidimensional process of demotion or downgrading of a socio-spatial unit about other socio-spatial units, i.e. the Greek mainland and the northern EU member states. Although the externalisation of asylum, is key to understanding the impact of the right to asylum, peripheralisation provides the necessary conceptual tool to explain the new architecture of confinement inside the territory of the EU and on the southeastern border islands. The main contribution of the article is providing an understanding of how the right to asylum is also hampered within the EU through the peripheralisation of the islands and by the externalisation of Turkey.
While feeling rules have been found to be highly relevant in social research and international relations, little is known about their role in European policy‐making. This article explores how emotions have been understood by Commission and Council officials and by Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) across policy areas over a long time period (1999–2014). Qualitative content analysis reveals the existence of feeling rules and that the appropriateness of emotions has been contested. Many policy‐makers, placing emotions in opposition to rationality, have claimed that policy‐making should be devoid of emotions, especially in policy areas such as public health, energy, and the environment. In contrast, in policy areas such as foreign policy and home affairs, emotions are often considered to be appropriate. This article also reflects on the role of feeling rules in constraining and enabling the policy process, uncovering subtle power dynamics. Data analysed include the European Parliament (EP) database (1999–2014) and the EUSpeech database (2007–2015).
The concluding chapter summarizes the main findings of the book, particularly its argument that the fragmentation and contestation of political discourse about climate change, and differences in the political space as the framework of relevant issue dimensions are key factors for explaining the divergence of climate policy-making in the EU and US. Contextualizing these findings with current political developments and addressing future research agendas, the final part highlights two points: first, the relevance of issue linkages and processes of re-framing climate action in relation to other fields of policy-making, as observed in the launch of programs for the economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, and from shifts in the debate on climate and energy policy resulting from the war in Ukraine; and second, the current dynamic of politicization of climate governance, understood as a term for the expansion of relevant public debate in terms of its scope, visibility and contentiousness. The chapter concludes by discussing how a research agenda focused on discourse and framing can contribute to our future understanding of these two key dynamics of controversy on climate change governance.
Refugees of the now 11-year-long Syrian Civil War who fled to Jordan to escape that conflict today face a tortuously difficult dilemma: many Jordanian citizens increasingly perceive members of these groups as unwelcome interlopers who compete for limited resources and employment, rather than as innocents placed in peril by a conflict they did not create. Reflecting its population’s growing concern, the government of Jordan has proved more unyielding in its policy stance that refugees must be prevented from competing with native citizens for positions and resources, leaving those individuals in a parlous economic state, with most of them unable officially to work. As it happens, that policy does not apply to migrant farmworkers,
employment that many in Jordan do not otherwise wish to pursue.
Accordingly, the Kingdom has been relatively open to allowing fleeing Syrians to work in such roles in agriculture. This fact was important to our study as we wished to interact with deeply vulnerable refugees, and a our chosen population, migrant farmworkers, certainly met that criterion.
There are perhaps few terms that are used so frequently in the study of migration yet have as little definitional clarity as ‘governance’. This is perhaps not surprising, for, as the political scientist Claus Offe (2009) has observed, governance might best be understood as an ‘empty signifier’. What he meant by this was that governance acquires meaning through the ideas, processes, and practices that become associated with it rather than through a prior independent meaning that it possesses. For example, if migration governance is described as ‘multilevel’, as it often is, then this tells us that it occurs in lots of different places across ‘levels’ (local, national, international), whilst the actual meaning of governance remains unclear. This is a useful observation to take forward for the analysis that follows.
Avrupa Birliği (AB) siyasi sahnesi, kimlik inşasının siyasi partiler için siyasi bir meşrutiyet kazanma aracı haline geldiği söylemsel bir alan sunmaktadır. Avrupa yanlısı partiler, Avrupa kimliğinin grup içi anlatılarını kullanırken Avrupa şüpheci partiler, siyasi gerçekliği yeniden şekillendirmek için gruplar arası farklılaşma anlatılarını kullanarak “biz” ve “onlar” arasındaki grup ayrımını sorunsallaştırır. Literatür çoğunlukla, söylemsel sosyo-politik dışlama yoluyla grup içi ulus kimliği inşa eden Avrupa şüpheci popülist söylem ve sağcı retoriğe odaklanır. Bu makale, farklı bir duruş benimseyerek 2019 Avrupa Parlamentosu seçim kampanyaları süresince Avrupa yanlısı siyasi partilerin başvurduğu söylemsel stratejileri söylem-tarihsel yaklaşım yöntemiyle ele almayı amaçlamaktadır. Çalkantılı Avrupa siyaset sahnesindeki Avrupa yanlısı söylemi araştırmak bu partilerin grup içi kimlik bölünmesine ilişkin duruşunu ortaya koymakta kritik bir öneme sahiptir.
Politicising Europe presents the most comprehensive contribution to empirical research on politicisation to date. The study is innovative in both conceptual and empirical terms. Conceptually, the contributors develop and apply a new index and typology of politicisation. Empirically, the volume presents a huge amount of original data, tracing politicisation in a comparative perspective over more than forty years. Focusing on six European countries (Austria, France, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK) from the 1970s to the current euro crisis, the book examines conflicts over Europe in election campaigns, street protests, and public debates on every major step in the integration process. It shows that European integration has indeed become politicised. However, the patterns and developments differ markedly across countries and arenas, and many of the key hypotheses on the driving forces of change need to be revisited in view of new findings.
This book challenges the common image of the European Commission as an insulated technocracy immune to political pressures.
Based on a combination of public opinion, protest and media data, it first demonstrates that European integration has become increasingly politicised since the 1990s. Against this background, the Commission is now much more concerned about the public appeal of its policies. That, however, challenges and contradicts the well-worn patterns of supranational regulation in Europe.
The book systematically compares 17 legislative drafting processes in consumer policy between 1999 and 2009. Based on first-hand insider accounts of involved officials, his analysis indicates that the Commission's policy choices indeed become more consumer friendly under higher levels of public awareness. While this improves the democratic quality of European decision-making, the book also reveals an enhanced conflict potential within the Commission and beyond which threatens to undermine the efficiency of legislative decision-making in the EU.
On the basis of a brief reconstruction of the causes and impacts of the euro crisis, this paper explores, counterfactually and hypothetically, whether the new euro regime, insisting on fiscal austerity and supply-side reforms, could have prevented the rise of the crisis or is able to deal with its disastrous economic and social impact. A comparison with the likely impact of transfer-based Keynesian reflation suggests that, in both cases, economic success is uncertain, while both approaches are likely to produce severely negative side-effects. In light of such dismal policy choices, attempts to politicize European election campaigns are more likely to provoke unmanageable policy conflict than to overcome the input-oriented, democratic deficit of European economic governance.
With the lingering Euro crisis, personalized competition for the Commission presidency, and a surge of Eurosceptic parties, the 2014 European Parliament elections took place against an unknown level of European Union politicization. How does this changing context affect the supply side of party competition on European issues in EP election campaigns? This article compares the 2014 and 2009 EP elections in two EU founding members with high electoral support for radical left and radical right Euroscepticism—France and the Netherlands. We study publically visible patterns of partisan mobilization in the written news media with semi-automated content analyses. The data indicate that visible party mobilization on EU issues was on average not significantly higher in 2014. While particularly mainstream and especially incumbent parties publically mobilize on European issues during both campaigns, the radical right’s mobilization efforts have become more visible during the 2014 elections. Examining the temporal dynamics within electoral campaigns, we show that the Eurosceptic fringes exhibit significant contagion effects on the mainstream parties, but that the extent of this contagion was surprisingly lower in the 2014 campaign. As a result, the increasing EU politicization between the 2009 and 2014 electoral contests has not resulted in an enhanced and more interactive supply of partisan debate about Europe.
Political science analyses of the governance of the euro crisis largely build on conventional theories of European integration to account for the extent to which institutional developments either reflect supranationalism, intergovernmentalism, or historical path-dependencies. This analytical focus captures the usual integration dynamics and institutional design outcomes, but overlooks the constitutional dimension of how the crisis affects the EU’s legal order. In this agenda article, I draw attention to legal scholarship that highlights important deviations from the EU’s ‘legal normalcy.’ Legal studies find that a number of the emergency measures were taken on an extra-legal basis and through quasi-autocratic procedures. Normative reconstructions interpret this practice as a form of transnational state of exception which transitions into permanent traits of authoritarianism in the EU’s legal order. I argue that their findings offer a new terrain for political science research which transcends the explanatory categories of integration theory.
This article applies the governance typology used in this special issue to the evolution of euro area governance. The article begins with a description of Economic and Monetary Union's original governance structure, with third order governance (shared norms) present in varying degrees in monetary, financial and fiscal governance. While a shared consensus on the importance of an independent central bank to pursue price stability allowed for the creation of the European Central Bank, euro area governance was otherwise limited to the coordination of national policies. Since the crisis, shifting norms (third order governance) allowed for the creation of new bodies (e.g. the European Stability Mechanism and the Single Supervisory Mechanism) and the expansion of the powers of existing institutions (particularly the ECB). In areas where no normative changes occurred (fiscal and economic policy coordination), second order governance has been marked by incremental changes to existing institutions. The degree to which economic governance has become more hierarchical depends both on the strength of third order governance norms and the preferences of large states like Germany either to retain their own sovereignty or create additional rules that bind member states.
The European Union's (EU) political and economic integration project has grown dramatically since its inception in 1952. While the ultimate goal of the EU is unclear, one of its aspirations has been to attempt to create European citizens. The idea is that over time, citizens would look towards Europe as their main national identity. While the political and economic integration projects are quite far along, the national identity project has lagged far behind. The number of people who have primarily a European identity is quite small and has not increased much in the past 20 years. There is a far larger number of citizens for whom their national identity is paramount, but a European identity also exists. Since 2005, this group has grown smaller and the number of citizens with only a national identity has grown larger. This article argues that the EU integration project has pushed citizens to value their national identities more and to look to their national governments to protect them. We examine the evidence for this in the context of the 2007–9 financial crisis. We show that in countries most seriously hit by the crisis, national identities have increased dramatically and citizens with some European identity have decreased.
Populist right-wing politics is moving centre-stage, with some parties reaching the very top of the electoral ladder: but do we know why, and why now?
In this book Ruth Wodak traces the trajectories of such parties from the margins of the political landscape to its centre, to understand and explain how they are transforming from fringe voices to persuasive political actors who set the agenda and frame media debates. Laying bare the normalization of nationalistic, xenophobic, racist and antisemitic rhetoric, she builds a new framework for this ‘politics of fear’ that is entrenching new social divides of nation, gender and body.
The result reveals the micro-politics of right-wing populism: how discourses, genres, images and texts are performed and manipulated in both formal and also everyday contexts with profound consequences. This book is a must-read for scholars and students of linguistics, media and politics wishing to understand these dynamics that are re-shaping our political space.
We map the pattern and extent of the European integration of core state powers (coercive force, public finance and public administration) and analyse causes and consequences. We highlight two findings: First, in contrast to historical examples of federal state-building, where the nationalization of core state powers precipitated the institutional, territorial and political consolidation of the emerging state, the European integration of core state powers is associated with the institutional, territorial and political fragmentation of the European Union. Second, in
contrast to European market integration, state e´lites and mass publics, not organized business interests, are the prime drivers of integration.
Has the executive role of the European Commission changed since the euro area crisis? Intergovernmentalists point to the increased role of the member states and the Council at the expense of the Commission and other supranational institutions. This article examines how the Commission has responded to the expansion of fiscal and economic rules such as the regulations that strengthen the EU's statistical competence and the Six-Pack and Two-Pack. Based on interviews conducted with key staff, we find that these rules have created significant co-ordination, information and analytical demands on the Commission. The latter has enhanced its horizontal and vertical co-ordination efforts, prioritized staff for the Directorate-Generals conducting surveillance activities, added DGs to these efforts, and reorganized their organizational structures to promote a deeper understanding of the member states’ fiscal and economic policies. Using a principal-agent, approach this article explains how the Commission has increased its role in European integration process.
This is the introduction to a special collection of contributions that analyse the financial and economic crisis through various theoretical lenses. Accordingly, it does four things. First, it describes the EU's institutional response to the crisis in order to provide a reference point for the contributions. Second, it summarizes the contributions. Third, it compares them in order to develop a theoretical dialogue. Finally, it answers the fundamental question at the heart of the crisis and this special collection: why did Economic and Monetary Union become deeper and more integrated when many feared for its survival?
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.
Liberal intergovernmentalism explains the politics to cope with the euro area crisis by the constellation of national preferences and bargaining power and by institutional choices designed to commit euro area countries credibly to the currency union. National preferences resulted from high negative interdependence in the euro area and the fiscal position of its member states: a common preference for the preservation of the euro was accompanied by divergent preferences regarding the distribution of adjustment costs. These mixed motives constituted a ‘chicken game’ situation characterized by hard intergovernmental bargaining and brinkmanship. Whereas negotiations produced a co-operative solution averting the breakdown of the euro area and strengthening the credibility of member state commitments, asymmetrical interdependence resulted in a burden-sharing and institutional design that reflected German preferences predominantly.
Further integration in the European Union (EU) increasingly depends on public legitimacy. The global financial crisis and the subsequent euro area crisis have amplified both the salience and the redistributive consequences of decisions taken in Brussels, raising the question of how this has influenced public support for European integration. In this contribution, we examine how public opinion has responded to the crisis, focusing on support for monetary integration. Interestingly, our results show that support for the euro has remained high within the euro area; however, attitudes are increasingly driven by utilitarian considerations, whereas identity concerns have become less important. While the crisis has been seen to deepen divisions within Europe, our findings suggest that it has also encouraged citizens in the euro area to form opinions on the euro on the basis of a cost–benefit analysis of European economic governance, rather than relying primarily on national attachments.
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.
This article analyses preferences for European economic governance in the European sovereign debt crisis. We assess citizens' opinions on increased intergovernmental co-operation and supranational governance in the economic sphere. We argue that current efforts to tackle the euro crisis do not benefit the typical ‘winners of European integration’. Moreover, European economic governance constitutes an even greater perceived threat to national identity, especially in the member states that fare well economically. Hypotheses are tested using multilevel analysis of Eurobarometer survey wave EB 75.3 (2011).
In this contribution, we focus on the role of euro-scepticism on radical right-wing voting in national elections in 18 European countries between 2002 and 2008. We do so with multilevel modelling taking advantage of high-quality cross-national European data. First, we focus on social cleavages related to voting, e.g. social class and religiosity. Second, we examine the effects of several contextual characteristics, of which some are classical and others new. Third, we take diverse socio-political attitudes into account. We test whether euro-scepticism affects voting for the radical right, over and beyond other determinants that have previously been proposed to determine radical right-wing voting. We find evidence that euro-scepticism indeed contributes to the explanation of voting for the radical right beyond perceived ethnic threat and political distrust. At the same time euro-scepticism is much less relevant than perceived ethnic threat in explaining why particular social categories, i.e. lower educated people, manual workers, unemployed people and non-churchgoers are more likely to vote for the radical right.
The Lisbon Treaty has institutionalized a dual constitution, supranational in the single market’s policies and intergovernmental in (among others) economic and financial policies. The extremely complex system of economic governance set up for answering the euro crisis has been defined and implemented on the basis of the intergovernmental constitution of the EU. The euro crisis has thus represented a test for the validity of the intergovernmental constitution of the Lisbon Treaty. Although the measures adopted in the period 2010-2012, consisting of legislative decisions and new intergovernmental treaties, are of an unprecedented magnitude, they were nevertheless unable to promote effective and legitimate solutions for dealing with the financial crisis. In the context of an existential challenge, the intergovernmental approach faced a structural difficulty in solving basic dilemmas of collective action.
This is an authoritative, one-volume, and independent treatment of the history, functioning, and nature of the European integration. Written by leading scholars, it covers the major institutions, policies, and events in the history of integration, whilst also providing a guide to the major theoretical approaches that have been used to study it over time. By bringing together such a distinguished cast covering such a wide array of themes, the publication is intended as a one-stop shop for all those interested in the European Union and its predecessors. The volume, which is intended to shape the discipline of EU studies, represents a timely guide to an institution that is much discussed but often only imperfectly understood.
Politicising Europe presents the most comprehensive contribution to empirical research on politicisation to date. The study is innovative in both conceptual and empirical terms. Conceptually, the contributors develop and apply a new index and typology of politicisation. Empirically, the volume presents a huge amount of original data, tracing politicisation in a comparative perspective over more than forty years. Focusing on six European countries (Austria, France, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK) from the 1970s to the current euro crisis, the book examines conflicts over Europe in election campaigns, street protests, and public debates on every major step in the integration process. It shows that European integration has indeed become politicised. However, the patterns and developments differ markedly across countries and arenas, and many of the key hypotheses on the driving forces of change need to be revisited in view of new findings.
In A Community of Europeans?, a thoughtful observer of the ongoing project of European integration evaluates the state of the art about European identity and European public spheres. Thomas Risse argues that integration has had profound and long-term effects on the citizens of EU countries, most of whom now have at least a secondary "European identity" to complement their national identities. Risse also claims that we can see the gradual emergence of transnational European communities of communication. Exploring the outlines of this European identity and of the communicative spaces, Risse sheds light on some pressing questions: What do "Europe" and "the EU" mean in the various public debates? How do European identities and transnational public spheres affect policymaking in the EU? And how do they matter in discussions about enlargement, particularly Turkish accession to the EU? What will be the consequences of the growing contestation and politicization of European affairs for European democracy? This focus on identity allows Risse to address the "democratic deficit" of the EU, the disparity between the level of decision making over increasingly relevant issues for peoples' lives (at the EU) and the level where politics plays itself out-in the member states. He argues that the EU's democratic deficit can only be tackled through politicization and that "debating Europe" might prove the only way to defend modern and cosmopolitan Europe against the increasingly forceful voices of Euroskepticism.
Politicising Europe presents the most comprehensive contribution to empirical research on politicisation to date. The study is innovative in both conceptual and empirical terms. Conceptually, the contributors develop and apply a new index and typology of politicisation. Empirically, the volume presents a huge amount of original data, tracing politicisation in a comparative perspective over more than forty years. Focusing on six European countries (Austria, France, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK) from the 1970s to the current euro crisis, the book examines conflicts over Europe in election campaigns, street protests, and public debates on every major step in the integration process. It shows that European integration has indeed become politicised. However, the patterns and developments differ markedly across countries and arenas, and many of the key hypotheses on the driving forces of change need to be revisited in view of new findings.
This volume argues that the crisis of the European Union is not merely a fiscal crisis but reveals and amplifies deeper flaws in the structure of the EU itself. It is a multidimensional crisis of the economic, legal and political cornerstones of European integration and marks the end of the technocratic mode of integration which has been dominant since the 1950s. The EU has a weak political and administrative centre, relies excessively on governance by law, is challenged by increasing heterogeneity and displays increasingly interlocked levels of government. During the crisis, it has become more and more asymmetrical and has intervened massively in domestic economic and legal systems. A team of economists, lawyers, philosophers and political scientists analyze these deeper dimensions of the European crisis from a broader theoretical perspective with a view towards contributing to a better understanding and shaping the trajectory of the EU.
'Imagined Communities' examines the creation & function of the 'imagined communities' of nationality & the way these communities were in part created by the growth of the nation-state, the interaction between capitalism & printing & the birth of vernacular languages in early modern Europe.
While much of the literature on the Euro crisis has highlighted the intergovernmental features of the European Union response, it appears that in strategic areas, such as macroeconomic policy or banking regulation, supranational institutions have seen their discretionary powers significantly enhanced and that they have played an instrumental role in bringing about such a change. This is all the more remarkable considering the decline in support for integration among governments and the public. This article explains this paradox by the dramatic character of the crisis and the deep mistrust that existed between European states at the time. It also suggests that the process could be hard to reconcile with attempts at ‘politicizing’ EU public policy.
The 2014 European Parliament elections were held against the backdrop of the worst economic crisis in post-war Europe. The elections saw an unprecedented surge in support for Eurosceptic parties. This raises the question of whether the crisis, and the EU's response to it, can explain the rise of Eurosceptic parties. Our analysis of the 2014 European Election Study demonstrates that the degree to which individuals were adversely affected by the crisis and their discontent with the EU's handling of the crisis are major factors in explaining defection from mainstream pro-European to Eurosceptic parties in these elections. This suggests that far from being second-order national elections concerned only with domestic politics, European issues had a significant impact on vote choices.
In Western European democracies opposition to the European Union is commonly found at the ideological extremes. Yet, the Euroscepticism of radical left-wing and radical right-wing parties has been shown to have distinct roots and manifestations. The article investigates whether these differences are mirrored at the citizen level. Using data from the European Election Study (2009/2014) and the European Social Survey (2008/2012) in 15 West European countries, it is found that left-wing and right-wing citizens not only differ in the object of their Euroscepticism, but also in their motivations for being sceptical of the EU. Left-wing Eurosceptics are dissatisfied with the current functioning of the EU, but do not oppose further European integration per se, while right-wing Eurosceptics categorically reject European integration. Euroscepticism among left-wing citizens is motivated by economic and cultural concerns, whereas for right-wing citizens Euroscepticism is solely anchored in cultural attitudes. These results refine the common ‘horseshoe’ understanding of ideology and Euroscepticism.
This volume argues that the crisis of the European Union is not merely a fiscal crisis but reveals and amplifies deeper flaws in the structure of the EU itself. It is a multidimensional crisis of the economic, legal and political cornerstones of European integration and marks the end of the technocratic mode of integration which has been dominant since the 1950s. The EU has a weak political and administrative centre, relies excessively on governance by law, is challenged by increasing heterogeneity and displays increasingly interlocked levels of government. During the crisis, it has become more and more asymmetrical and has intervened massively in domestic economic and legal systems. A team of economists, lawyers, philosophers and political scientists analyze these deeper dimensions of the European crisis from a broader theoretical perspective with a view towards contributing to a better understanding and shaping the trajectory of the EU. Interdisciplinary approach stimulates debate between disciplines that deal with the same topic from different perspectives. Provides a broad conceptual perspective as opposed to detailed reports and short-term crisis treatments. Focus on deeper causes of the European crisis allows the reader to see the crisis in a broad theoretical perspective.
Die Entscheidungen der Europäischen Union (EU) blieben der breiten Be-völkerung lange Zeit verborgen. Die Liberalisierung europäischer Ökono-mien wurde häufig nationalen Regierungen zugeschrieben, während die Mehrheit der Bürger die EU vor allem mit einer ausufernden Bürokratie in Verbindung brachte, die auch nicht vor Bananen und Traktorsitzen Halt machte. Diese Wahrnehmung wurde nicht zuletzt durch die Eurokrise nachhaltig erschüttert. Heute kann kein Zweifel mehr daran bestehen, dass die EU zum Gegenstand der öffentlichen politischen Auseinandersetzung geworden ist. Bereits seit Anfang der 1990er Jahre lässt sich diese Gegenbewegung zur teils exekutiv, teils technokratisch dominierten Entscheidungsfindung in Brüssel beobachten. Spätestens seit dem Vertrag von Maastricht hat der europäische Einigungsprozess mehrere Phasen hoher Medienaufmerksam-keit, einer zunehmenden Polarisierung der öffentlichen Meinung und so-gar offener Proteste erlebt. Diese Politisierung supranationaler Entschei-dungsfindung fordert die hergebrachten Bewertungsmaßstäbe der EU he-raus: Statt sich nur über gesamtökonomisch effiziente Ergebnisse zu recht-fertigen, tritt die EU im öffentlichen Diskurs nun als Institution auf, die Herrschaft ausübt und damit anspruchsvolleren Kriterien politischer Legi-timation unterliegt. Gesellschaftliche Politisierung bedeutet dabei zweierlei: Sie führt zum einen zu mehr Widerstand gegen europäische Institutionen und ihre Poli-tik, sie verstärkt zum anderen aber auch das Bewusstsein über die Bedeu-tung und das Potential der politischen Prozesse jenseits des Nationalstaats.
Taking Preferences Seriously: A Liberal Theory of International Politics: Erratum - Volume 52 Issue 1 - Andrew Moravcsik
The Euro crisis has led to an unprecedented Europeanization and politicization of public spheres across the continent. In this volume, leading scholars make two claims. First, they suggest that transnational crossborder communication in Europe has been encouraged through the gradual Europeanization of national as well as issue-specific public spheres. Second, the politicization of European affairs - at the European Union (EU) level and in the domestic politics of member states - is inevitable and here to stay. Europeanized public spheres, whether elite media, mass media, or social media such as the internet, provide the arenas in which the politicization of European and EU issues takes place. European Public Spheres explores the history of these developments, the nature of politicization in the public spheres as well as its likely consequences, and the normative implications for European public life.
At first glance, the euro crisis has brought out the worst stereotypes in the public spheres that Europeans might imagine about one another. Greek street posters depicted German Chancellor Angela Merkel in a Nazi uniform with the European Union (EU) stars around the swastika. A German news magazine portrayed Aphrodite giving the finger with the title “Crooks in the Euro-Family” (note, however, that the Eurozone is still portrayed as a “family”). Europeans appear to fall back into nationalism and to advocate nationalist responses to the worst crisis the EU has ever faced. It is no wonder, then, that former Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti warned about the “psychological breakup of Europe.” Yet, his warnings represented transnational communication because he made his comments in the German magazine Der Spiegel. There is no doubt that the euro crisis has politicized European affairs and the EU, probably like no other previous event in the history of European integration. How to respond to the euro crisis is being hotly debated across borders. Austerity programs and stringent budget cuts are being proposed (and imposed on the EU’s southern tier), and others advocate (Keynesian) economic-growth strategies to avoid long-lasting recessions and growing unemployment in the Eurozone. At the same time, public-opinion polls reveal that majorities of Europeans agree that European rather than national solutions to the crisis are the best way and that European integration will increase rather than decrease as a result (European Commission 2011).
The global financial crisis that reached its peak in late 2008 has brought the importance of financial services regulation and supervision into the spotlight. This book examines the governance of financial services in the EU, asking who governs financial services in the EU, how and why, and explaining where the power lies in the policy-making process. It covers the main financial services: banking, securities, payments systems, clearing and settlement. Addressing the politics and public policy aspects of financial market integration, regulation and supervision in the European Union, this book conducts a theoretically-informed and empirically-grounded analysis of financial services governance from the establishment of Economic and Monetary Union (1999) and the launch of the Financial Services Action Plan (1999), to date. It also assesses the EU responses to the global financial crisis. Providing a reliable and unique insight into the politics of financial services regulation in the EU based on an extensive programme of interviews with policy makers and stakeholders across Europe, the book will be of great topical interest to students and scholars of European Union studies, political science and political economy.
The politicisation of European governance has become an important subject in debates about the institutional design, day-to-day decision-making and democratic legitimacy of the European Union. This special issue takes stock of this development of politicisation research, including the theoretical development as well as the rapidly expanding body of empirical evidence. It synergises the various perspectives on politicisation of European governance, building on a common understanding of politicisation as a three-dimensional process involving increasing salience, polarisation of opinion and the expansion of actors and audiences involved in EU issues. The introduction outlines the central theoretical and conceptual questions concerning the politicisation of European governance and provides a guiding framework for the contributions to this special issue. The contributions document that a differentiated Europe leads to differentiated politicisation across times, countries and settings. The differentiated patterns, particularly across countries, present profound challenges to the future trajectory of European integration and its democratic legitimacy.
Gallya Lahav's study examines the issue of immigration in the context of a Europe where the role of the nation state is in question, as the logic of the single market clashes with national policymaking. Immigration is a central issue in European politics since around a quarter of the world's migrants reside in Europe. Consequently, politicians throughout the continent are grappling with the problems this raises. Analyzing elite and public opinion, Lahav's book shows how support from both has led to the adoption of restrictive immigration policies despite the requirements of open borders.
This article demonstrates how the European integration process overburdened EU law in an attempt to overcome political deficiencies,
with negative consequences for the EU’s democratic legitimacy. The analysis is framed by the “twin crises” of twenty-first-century
EU constitutionalism: the defeat of the Constitutional Treaty in 2005 and the unfolding Eurozone debt crisis. Part of the
legacy of the first crisis was a retreat from the ideal of democratization via politicization. Now, as a result of the second
crisis, the integration project has become politicized and European policies highly salient for national voters. However,
this process has occurred largely against the will of EU leaders, who have sought technocratic solutions to what are inherently
political problems. Thus, over the past decade, the EU has moved from an unsuccessful attempt at democratization via politicization
to an unintended politicization without democratization.
The literature on authoritarianism and exclusive forms of nationalism often implies that authoritarian and exclusive-nationalist individuals will prefer radical right-wing populist parties such as Austria's FPÖ. The theoretical case for such implications appears sound as party programmes for radical right-wing populist parties invoke rhetoric that should appeal to individuals with either of these characteristics. To date, these implications have not been examined. This article examines quantitative survey data from five Western European countries with electorally viable radical right-wing populist parties to determine whether radical right-wing populist parties are preferred by authoritarians and/or exclusive-nationalists. Analyses indicate that the radical right-wing populist parties studied here are consistently preferred by exclusive-nationalist individuals, though not necessarily to all other parties, but only inconsistently preferred by authoritarian individuals. While more nuanced investigation is still needed, it is clear that, contrary to the assumptions in the authoritarianism literature, radical right-wing populist parties cannot always rely on authoritarian individuals for support.
A superordinate identity reduces bias and facilitates intergroup cooperation. This suggests that getting European Union (EU) citizens to identify with Europe will decrease outgroup hostility. Is European identity thus a superordinate identity? Using Eurobarometer data, I determine which level of identification is the most inclusive for individuals' immigration attitudes. Those who feel European hold more favorable views toward immigrants—an effect that is amplified under conditions of cross-cutting cleavages and where country length of European Union membership is greatest. In contrast, strong national identity is associated with more negative immigration attitudes; regional identity has no effect. A subsequent test confirms that the benefits of identifying with Europe extend most strongly to immigrants of European Union origin, although positive effects are observed toward non-European Union migrants as well.
The post-Maastricht period is marked by an integration paradox. While the basic constitutional features of the European Union have remained stable, EU activity has expanded to an unprecedented degree. This form of integration without supranationalism is no exception or temporary deviation from traditional forms of European integration. Rather, it is a distinct phase of European integration, what is called ‘the new intergovernmentalism’ in this article. This approach to post-Maastricht integration challenges theories that associate integration with transfers of competences from national capitals to supranational institutions and those that reduce integration to traditional socioeconomic or security-driven interests. This article explains the integration paradox in terms of transformations in Europe's political economy, changes in preference formation and the decline of the ‘permissive consensus’. It presents a set of six hypotheses that develop further the main claims of the new intergovernmentalism and that can be used as a basis for future research.
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.
This contribution aims, first, to determine whether support for the far right is based on perceptions of cultural or economic threats posed by immigrants in 11 European countries. Second, it seeks to reanalyze the question of whether class is an important explanation for support for the far right using new measures of class and, related to this, to determine the extent to which class interacts with perceived threat to explain support for far-right parties. The study reveals that perceived cultural ethnic threats are a stronger predictor of far-right preferences than are perceived economic ethnic threats. This cultural versus economic distinction is also depicted in social class differences in far-right preference. These are particularly evident between sociocultural specialists and technocrats, as anticipated by the new social class scheme. Sociocultural specialists particularly perceive fewer cultural ethnic threats compared to technocrats and consequently have a smaller likelihood to prefer the far right. On the contextual level, the authors find that higher levels of GDP in a country result in greater far-right preference, whereas higher levels of GDP do result in lower levels of ethnic threats. The effect of proportion of Muslims on far-right preference is nonsignificant. The study shows that the choice of countries in cross-national research can heavily influence the results.