The European Union Beyond the Polycrisis?

Integration and politicization in an age of shifting cleavages

Jonathan Zeitlin, Francesco Nicoli, Jonathan Zeitlin, Francesco Nicoli

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000764130
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Governmental Accounting
• Index: Business

The European Union beyond the Polycrisis? explores the political dynamics of multiple crises faced by the EU, both at European level and within the member states. In so doing, it provides astate-of-the-art overview of current research on the relationship between politicization and European integration.

The book proposes that the EU's multi-dimensional crisis can be seen as a multi-level 'politics trap', from which the Union is struggling to escape. The individual contributions analyze the mechanisms of this trap, its relationship to the multiple crises currently faced by the EU, and the strategies pursued by a plurality of actors (the Commission, the European Parliament, national governments) to cope with its constraints. Overall, the book suggests that comprehensive, 'grand' bargains are for the moment out of reach, although national and supranational actors can find ways of 'relaxing' the politics trap and in so doing perhaps lay the foundations for more ambitious future solutions. This book, dedicated to the exploration of the political dynamics of multiple, simultaneous crises, offers an empirical and theoretical assessment of the existing political constraints on European integration.

Analysing domestic and European political reactions to the EU's polycrisis and assessing how EU institutions, national governments and broader publics have responded to a new era of politicization, The European Union beyond the Polycrisis? will be of great interest to scholars of European politics and the EU, as well as professionals working in EU institutions, national administrations and European advocacy groups. The chapters were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of European Public Policy.

Introduction: the European Union beyond the polycrisis? Integration and politicization in an age of shifting cleavages

Jonathan Zeitlin, Francesco Nicoli and Brigid Laffan

ABSTRACT

Over the past decade, the EU has faced multiple crises. In the introduction to this collection, we argue that this ‘polycrisis’ is fracturing the European political system across multiple, simultaneous rifts, thereby creating a ‘polycleavage’. As a consequence, the EU is caught in a ‘politics trap’. Similar to other decision traps, this multi-level politics trap is dysfunctional, but difficult to escape altogether. The contributions to this collection analyze the mechanisms of the politics trap, its relationship to the European polycrisis, and the strategies pursued by a plurality of actors (the Commission, the European Parliament, national governments) to cope with its constraints. In light of this analysis, we argue that comprehensive, ‘grand’ bargains are for the moment out of reach, but national and supranational actors can find ways of ‘relaxing’ the politics trap and in so doing perhaps lay the foundations for more ambitious future solutions.

Introduction

For more than 10 years, from the launch of the euro to the global financial crisis, the process of deepening European integration advanced incrementally, while the EU widened its membership and extended its borders. The Eurocrisis, however, signaled the beginning of a prolonged period of distress for the EU: several simultaneous crises are now affecting multiple policy domains and fracturing the cohesion of the Union’s member states across new and changing cleavages. The still incompletely resolved Eurocrisis continues to affect southern member states disproportionately, widening the center-periphery gap. Similarly, the refugee and migration crisis has opened a rift between the front-line countries on the South-Eastern borders and the core countries of the North-West on the one hand, and Central and Eastern European member states, unwilling to share the burden of the crisis on the other. The EU likewise faces a host of other challenges, from Brexit and democratic backsliding to geopolitical and security threats, which have not yet blown up into full-scale crises, but may do so at any time, threatening to create new cross-cutting faultlines among member states.

In the face of this ‘polycrisis’,¹ the Union’s institutions and governance have evolved significantly. Yet despite the remarkable array of new institutions, governance processes, and policies introduced to counter these inter-connected challenges, a patchwork approach has prevailed and no comprehensive solution is in sight. The old functionalist adage that ‘integration advances through crises’ appears to be simultaneously confirmed and rejected: while institutional integration points in the direction predicted by neofunctionalists, the dynamics of political fragmentation have accelerated, as postfunctionalists would expect.

Two views of politicization

The EU’s polycrisis in turn has had a major impact on the ongoing politicization of European integration. We use here the standard definition of politicization advanced by de Wilde et al. (2016). Politicization occurs when issues become salient, when actors polarize in their views of these issues, and when they are able to mobilize public opinion accordingly. Politicization defined in this way has no single implication for European integration. Rather, two competing views on its effects coexist. Some analysts see politicization as an unavoidable stage in the integration process, leading to the transformation of domestic and European political systems. Others, by contrast, see politicization as a fundamental constraint on the capacity of EU institutions to deliver effective solutions to urgent problems, undermining the output-driven legitimacy of the integration project.

Scholars in the first group tend to see politicization as a manifestation of a deeper transformation of the EU. As integration moves beyond pure regulatory policies and touches core state powers (such as currency, taxation, defence and border controls), decisions made by the EU institutions increasingly become objects of political conflict, both domestically and at the European level (Genschel and Jachtenfuchs 2018). This in turn creates a new fundamental cleavage in democratic political systems, leading to the restructuring of domestic and supranational party competition around the national/supranational cleavage. For instance, Zürn and de Wilde (2016) interpret such growing politicization in terms of the emergence of a new ‘cosmopolitan/communitarian’ cleavage that tends to replace (Hooghe and Marks 2018) or cut across (Kriesi 2016) the traditional left/right divide. This line of analysis is directly inspired by Lipset and Rokkan’s (1967) conceptualization of the interactions between societal cleavages and political representation. Indirectly, it also borrows from late neofunctionalists (like Schmitter 1970) the intuition that as integration moves forward into key functions of sovereignty, a transformation of both domestic political systems and supranational institutions is to be expected.

A second group of scholars sees politicization as neither inevitable nor necessarily positive. For some authors, such as Majone (2014) or Moravcsik (2018), politicization represents the failure of a system whose aim was precisely to de-politicize certain issues so to achieve better policy outcomes. Others, such as Brigid Laffan (2019) argue that European integration has always been political, in the sense defined by Michael Zürn (2019) of involving collectively binding choices ‘based on a prior process of putting the issue on the agenda, some deliberation about the right decision, and the interaction of different positions regarding the choice’. But the politicization of European integration over the past two decades in terms of increasing salience, polarization, and mobilization of domestic electorates has created what Laffan has called a multi-level ‘politics trap’ (by analogy with Scharpf’s well-known joint-decision trap), which inhibits national leaders at the EU level from reaching the compromises needed to resolve urgent policy problems (Falkner 2011; Scharpf 2006). Furthermore, politicization of European policy issues opens up space for political entrepreneurs to mobilize national publics against EU institutions and their elites. Such a ‘constraining dissensus’ (Hooghe and Marks 2009) could fuel the growth of Euroskeptic forces within the EU institutions, leading to paralysis of the European decision-making process, and eventually to disintegration of the Union itself.

From polycrisis to polycleavage

This theoretical debate confronts the new dynamics of the European polycrisis. The Euro crisis, the refugee/migration crisis, and the other simmering sub-crisis challenges facing the EU have created multiple spaces for politicization, at both domestic and European level, which have been occupied by different parties and movements in different countries and regions. Each of the crises experienced by the Union has increased dramatically the salience of the issues at stake, polarized political actors, and increased political mobilization. Thus a rift between debtor and creditor countries has emerged with regard to the management of the Eurozone and its domestic economies following the Euro crisis (Hernandez and Kriesi 2016; Matthijs and Blyth 2015). While the Euro crisis stimulated preferences for further integration, the type of integration preferred differed substantially between countries depending on their economic performance (Nicoli 2018). A divide between countries of arrival and core countries has similarly emerged as a consequence of the refugee/migration crisis (Niemann and Zaun 2018). These rifts have opened up not only between member states, but also within domestic political systems. The same structural divisions that pit creditors and debtors or front-line and more distant migration countries against one another also polarize domestic debates within each EU member state (albeit to varying degrees in different countries).

In other words, the EU faces what we call a ‘polycleavage’,² whereby multiple issues are simultaneously salient, polarize actors in different ways, and mobilize public opinion on each of the issues at stake. Furthermore, this type of politicization is inherently multi-level, occurring within as much as between member states. As a result, the European political system, rather than moving towards a normalization of left-right dynamics at EU level, as some had hoped (e.g., Hix 2008), is becoming increasingly characterized by temporary alliances of ‘strange bedfellows’ who may side with one another on certain issues (for instance, the German AfD and the Italian 5-Star Movement on border control) but will never be able to forge a compromise on others (for instance, the same two parties on bailouts and fiscal policy). Furthermore, the multi-level nature of the polycleavage implies that even when a solution is reached (often after strenuous negotiations) at European level, the compromise (by its very nature) paves the way for vigorous domestic contestation in each member state, since domestic oppositions have an intrinsic interest in mobilizing the public against their own governments.

Paradoxically, scholars in the past had seen such cross-cutting cleavages as a source of social stability, since they distribute political divisions and grievances over a larger number of actors and policies, hence preventing the formation of extremely polarized systems where the middle ground disappears under the pressure of both poles, which in turn cannot agree on anything (Goodin 1975). This latter line of argument has been used, for instance, to explain the inherent instability of the Weimar Republic or the Austrian First Republic.

In the specific rule set and consensus-based political system of the EU, however, this polycleavage may become a source of deadlock, since a blocking minority or a veto by a single member state may be sufficient to hamper common progress on a salient contested issue, even in the midst of a crisis, especially where questions of Union competence are at stake. Such a deadlock, in turn, may quickly develop into instability, since the lack of policy action in the face of a crisis may undercut the Union’s output-based legitimacy. Hence the EU is particularly vulnerable to politicization. The specific politics trap that the Union faces today is multi-level in nature, and is characterized by multiple, simultaneous cleavages, each of which finds its roots in a specific crisis. This collection explores the processes that link crises and politicization, as well as possible exits from the politics trap (by analogy to Falkner’s [2011] analysis of exits from the joint-decision trap). Section 2 of this introduction walks the reader through the individual contributions to the collection, highlighting their analysis both of the sources of the problem and potential solutions. Section 3, finally, explores the prospects for relaxing, if not escaping, the EU’s politics trap.

Polycrisis, polycleavage and the politics trap

The mechanisms of the politics trap

In the first part of this collection, we explore the emergence of an EU politics trap. The opening contribution by Michael Zürn (2019) discusses how politicization, while affecting multiple levels of governance (at international, European and domestic levels), is discussed in literatures that often remain separate, failing to provide a comprehensive view of the phenomenon. Scholars tend to see politicization in a rather positive light when discussing it at the global and domestic levels. However, politicization is typically viewed, Zürn argues, less positively when looking at EU-level dynamics. But these politicization dynamics should not be studied in isolation, since they are interdependent across levels: authority transfers from national to European and international institutions lead to (re)politicization at national level, creating spaces for opposition and mobilization, and potentially create similar spaces for politicization at higher tiers of governance, even within non-majoritarian institutions such as international organizations or the European Commission. In this light, the European polycrisis – and associated transfers of authority to supranational, non-majoritarian institutions – can have multiple consequences. Following Zürn’s reasoning, these authority transfers can, on the one hand, lead to political realignments at national level, which typically take the form of negative politicization and contestation of supranational authority, as suggested by Hooghe and Marks (2009). On the other hand, non-majoritarian institutions may adopt a more flexible stance, becoming a ‘responsive technocracy’ that draws on political inputs from civil society campaigns to reach outcomes more congruent with citizens’ preferences (following the mechanisms analyzed by Rauh 2016). Furthermore, these dynamics have long-lasting, second-order effects insofar they feed a growing cleavage between cosmopolitans and communitarians at both national and European levels, which cuts across the established left-right class-based cleavage.

While Zürn does not enter into the details on how different crises affect different cleavages differently, the second contribution deals with precisely this topic. Swen Hutter and Hanspeter Kriesi (2019) investigate the composite nature of Europe’s polycrisis and its association with changes in politicization. Their empirical model provides new evidence regarding step changes in politicization of European integration (in terms of salience and polarization) as a result of the polycrisis across a set of European countries. As expected by Zürn, and in line with the framework put forward in this introduction, Hutter and Kriesi identify a relationship between the growing politicization of European issues and the intensification of the emerging integration/demarcation cleavage cutting across the classic left-right socio-economic cleavage. Even more interestingly, this effect varies across the three macro-regions of North-Western, South-Eastern and Central-Eastern Europe, which in turn were affected very differently by different components of the polycrisis. This regionally differentiated polycleavage makes it more difficult to find comprehensive solutions to the polycrisis through EU-level grand bargains, since the scope of the bargain is increased by the number of issues on the table, while on each of these issues politicized oppositions with very different outlooks are active in each member state.

The impact of this process of politicization, however, differs domestically and at the supranational level. In her contribution, Vivien Schmidt (2019) argues that the EU has experienced two distinct but linked processes over the past decade. Before the polycrisis, member states found themselves engaged in what she calls ‘politics without policy’ at national level, while the EU institutions conversely produced ‘policy without politics’. National electorates experienced, but did not yet react to a perceived democratic deficit. Dissatisfaction was expressed as a passive opposition, as a potential but not yet exploited politicization. First the Euro crisis, and then the migration crisis, triggered this potential into action. This awakening has led in some cases to the emergence of ‘politics against policy’, where national politicians target specific EU policies and use them to mobilize their audiences, and in others to ‘politics against polity’, whereby the very existence of the EU becomes the focus of popular dissatisfaction. Once again, the specific institutional set-up of the EU comes into play: since national leaders are vested with a double role, domestically and at European level, the shift towards ‘politics against policy’ threatens to produce deadlocks in the decision-making process, all the more so insofar as the policies preferred or opposed by national publics are at odds with one another other or respond to different positioning across multiple cleavages.

Exiting the politics trap

A number of contributions to this collection tackle the question of how the EU and its constituent institutions may be able to free themselves from this politics trap. Schmidt’s paper offers a first pathway out of the quagmire. By engaging supranational institutions in the political arena, the EU might re-establish the natural congruence of ‘policy ...