Towards a Segmented European Political Order

The European Union's Post-crises Conundrum

Jozef Bátora, John Erik Fossum

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138495333
• eBook ISBN: 9781351024327
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book makes a distinctive contribution to the crucial debate on the European Union (EU)'s present and future development.

It systematically examines how the range of crises and challenges over the last decade have transformed the EU and relates those findings to the discussion of an increasingly differentiated EU. It argues that the post-crises EU shows clear signs of becoming a segmented political order with in-built biases and constraints. The book spells out the key features of such an order in ideational and structural terms and shows how it more concretely manifests itself in the EU's institutional and constitutional make-up and in how member states constrain and condition EU action. Different states impose different types of constraints, as is underlined through paying explicit attention to the Visegrád countries.

This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of EU politics/studies, European integration and politics, East European politics and foreign policy.

1
Introduction

Jozef Bátora and John Erik Fossum

I Introduction

A widely held governance assumption is that a unified structure yields both ­unified and coherent policies, whereas a differentiated and fragmented political system yields diverse and incoherent policies. Diverse, in this connection, refers to a political system that is composed of a (wide) range of different legal and political arrangements, organisational models, policy styles and policy instruments. The growing body of literature on European Union (EU) differentiation argues that the EU has become more diverse, as part of a transition from time-bound or temporary to more permanent differences in EU integration (along functional, territorial and structural lines).¹ In arguing this, analysts do not make clear distinctions between different types of diversity, which therefore also include ideas, ideologies and values.

From this perspective, the EU post-crises leaves us with something of a puzzle: it is clear that the EU has become more differentiated, and yet the policies that the EU instituted to deal with the Eurozone crisis were not only coherent, they were also quite ideological. Since there is consensus that the EU post-crises has become more structurally (in terms of rules, norms and institutions) differentiated, we could say that increased openness to structural and legal diversity actually combined with a form of cognitive and ideological closure.

How can this be? Is it a temporary feature associated with the EU’s handling of the crises? It is well known that circumstances of crisis give scope for power concentration and centralisation, which would then account for closure. When the crisis is over, the expectation is that there is a return to normalcy. This, however, was hardly the case in the EU, given that today the main elements of the puzzle remain in place.

The question is whether differentiated integration provides us with suitable conceptual and analytical tools for capturing adequately what is presently unfolding. One response in the EU literature has been for analysts to argue that we need to shift our focus from differentiated integration to differentiation. Differentiation is a more general term that is not tied to any particular direction of development; it encompasses both differentiated integration and differentiated disintegration.² Prior to the crises, the general assumption was that, whereas Member States would integrate at different speeds (differentiated integration), they would all more or less end up at the same destination. Post-crises, it has become apparent that the EU is less capable of pulling together towards an “ever closer union”; its future development is far more open-ended than before. There is therefore a greater acceptance that Member States may not end up at the same place, but could rather come to occupy different statuses (permanently): some may be full members (participate in all forms of integration); some may stay out of the Eurozone; some will not be included in Schengen, etc. There appears to be a shift from a multi-speed Europe to a multi-status or structurally differentiated EU. The EU debate post-crises also encompasses the possibility of EU disintegration (be it unified or differentiated).³

Differentiation is not only a more encompassing term than differentiated integration; differentiation also operates at a higher level of generality. Differentiation reminds us that all modern political systems are differentiated (along functional and territorial lines). In this connection, the important point to underline is that the multi-level entity that makes up the EU is distinctly differentiated. The specific patterns of differentiation that we find in the EU diverge from those which we find in all other political systems. There are two main reasons for this: the distinct configuration that has emerged at EU level, coupled with very extensive diversity across the EU’s Member States.

Thus, when we talk about differentiation in the multi-level EU context, we cannot solely focus on the EU level, but must also pay explicit attention to the fact that the EU’s Member States are highly diverse. Institutionally speaking, the internal structures of the EU Member States and the manner in which they organise their functions along territorial lines differ along a wide range of dimensions.⁴

The scope and magnitude of Europe’s structural-institutional, cultural, social, economic, ethnic and linguistic diversity is profoundly shaping and conditioning the integration process. Increased EU integration entails increased EU involvement and engagement with Europe’s diversity. The more the diverse states are tied together, the more their diversity (both internal and across states) will be drawn into the EU integration process. In response, states will be seeking (and obtaining) opt-outs or opt-ins, exemptions, derogations, etc. Further, certain governing and managing ideas, policy styles, organisational principles and institutional arrangements will be “lifted” or “uploaded” or “grafted onto” the EU level. These can vary considerably from one policy-field to the next. In this context, it is readily apparent that increased integration will increase structural openness, in the sense that the multi-level EU structure may contain a wider repertoire of ideas, instruments and institutional arrangements.

The obvious assumption from increased differentiation is that the EU will become more unwieldy and more difficult to steer and govern as a consequence of this. Member States have different socio-economic systems and governing philosophies. That implies that the greater the number and range of member state inputs, the more difficult will it be for the EU to reconcile these. Increased differentiation, then, would entail increased contestation over which socio-economic model to prioritise, at what level(s) governing should be concentrated, how governing should proceed (including the nature and range of the policy instruments) and upon what governing should concentrate. We would thus expect that EU policy-making would be difficult to control and align with the central goals and priorities in an EU that would be highly sensitised to local concerns and rationalities.

Even if there were some uncertainty and hesitation at various stages of the EU’s crises responses, the overall picture of the EU’s response to the Eurozone crisis does not fit with these expectations. What we should expect from increased differentiation cannot easily be squared with the form of cognitive and policy-based closure that marks the EU’s handling of the crises. As several of the contributors to this book underline, the EU appears to have locked itself into a certain approach to handling crises that forecloses the search for other options, and it has been pursuing this for a long time. There was a clear underlying thrust to the EU’s response to the externally generated financial crisis, a stubborn insistence on deficit reduction and the need for all actors to comply with the provisions in the stability treaty. Rather than an open contestation over which socio-economic model to embrace, the EU’s response exhibits a dogged determination to hold on to an economic-crisis handling approach that, in many respects, has proven to be counter-productive (Blyth, 2015). This argument has been frequently brought up in relation to the EU’s role in the Greek rescue packages. It has also been applied to the Eurozone as a whole, which many claim is not a zone of convergence but a zero-sum game in which some countries’ gains (notably Germany’s) are other countries’ losses (notably, the debtor nations) (Offe, 2016; Tranøy and Schwarz, Chapter 3 in this volume).

Indeed, the story of the EU post-crises is one of a paradoxical mixture of openness and closure, a type of mixture that sits uneasily with what we associate with differentiation. We need a different terminology that helps us to make sense of the factors that produced this mixture, one which must make explicit reference to the role of ideas and ideologies, the role of (professional) knowledge and cognition and the role of structural and institutional factors. Accordingly, the account must combine attention to ideas, actors and structures, and how they combine and interact must provide us with vital clues to what transpired, and to the type of political entity that emerged out of the poly-crises.

II What is this book about?

The basic question that this book addresses is: How to understand and type-cast the EU which has emerged from the crises? The thesis that we seek to substantiate is that the EU – post-crises – is in the process of becoming a segmented political order.⁵ A segmented political order is not a state; it lacks the magnitude and scope of territorial control across a broad range of functional spheres that we associate with the modern state. Furthermore, functionally and institutionally speaking, a segmented political order is much more imbalanced than a state.

An important research challenge is to spell out in further detail what the distinctive features of a segmented political order are. In this introductory chapter, we provide a rough outline of the core features of such an order, which the successive chapters of the book both develop and illuminate in considerable detail. A segmented political order can have supranational traits, but since segments can vary in centralisation and density, such a system can combine supranational and intergovernmental structural traits. The defining feature is that each segment – with a segment tied to a specific policy-field – is imbued with a specific repertoire of ideas, types of expertise and ideological pre-dispositions that uphold the given segment’s cognitive closure.

The main purpose of the book is to explain what such a segmented political order would look like, and to discuss to what extent the EU qualifies as such. Furthermore, we will provide some possible explanations as to why this has been taking place. This is, at most, a partial account, in which the main focus is on recent developments, not their deeper historical roots. Particular attention is paid to the EU’s crises-driven mutations. In the concluding chapter, we sum up the key findings and discuss the implications in relation to two other possible EU developmental trajectories. The point is that a proper diagnosis of the EU is, at present, necessary in order to say something meaningful about the likelihood of other developmental trajectories.

The book adds to existing scholarship in several respects. First, the book provides a novel, empirically grounded take on the EU as a political order. We seek to substantiate the claim that, in order to understand and typecast the EU that has emerged from the poly-crises, we need to develop the notion of the EU as a segmented political order. Second, the book brings our thinking about differentiation forward, in that it not only incorporates the role of ideas, expertise and ideology, but also considers how ideas and ideologies are structurally conditioned and, at the same time, condition structures and institutional arrangements. A key contribution of the book is to understand how the dynamic interaction of ideas and ideologies, on the one hand, and structural-institutional factors, on the other, shape the very nature and operations of a complex political system such as the EU. Third, the book takes explicit account of Europe’s diversity and the different conceptions of Europe that exist by focusing on developments not only at EU level, but also within the Member States. This includes paying explicit attention to those states that are critical of, actively contest and refuse to implement EU measures. To this end, the book includes a number of contributions on the Visegrád countries.

II.1 Crises and structural mutations

The book’s point of departure – and what motivates our claim to the effect that the EU is developing into a segmented political order – pertains to the manner in which the EU has been transformed through the many crises which it has faced and the manner in which it has responded to them. We ascribe to these developments an EU structural mutation (Menéndez 2013). This is associated with the entrenchment of certain ideas, policy styles and institutional arrangements that are best understood from the perspective of segments and segmentation....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsement
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Preface and acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The institutional make-up of Europe’s segmented political order
• 3 Illusions of convergence: the persistent simplification of a wicked crisis
• 4 Epistemic worries about economic expertise
• 5 What kind of crisis and how to deal with it?: the segmented border logic in the European migration crisis
• 6 Toxic ordoliberalism on the EU’s periphery: Slovakia, the Euro and the migrant crisis
• 7 European solidarity in times of crisis : towards differentiated integration
• 8 Interstitial organisations and segmented integration in EU governance
• 9 Undermining the standards of liberal democracy within the European Union: the Polish case and the limits of post-enlargement democratic conditionality
• 10 Newspaper portrayal of the EU in crises in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary: The Union’s imagined linearity
• 11 European crises and foreign policy attitudes in Europe
• 12 Integration through differentiation and segmentation: the case of one Member State from 1950 to Brexit (and beyond)
• 13 Conclusion: a segmented political order and future options
• Index