Regionalism Under Stress

Europe and Latin America in Comparative Perspective

Detlef Nolte, Brigitte Weiffen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138337725
• eBook ISBN: 9780429808289
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Diplomazia e trattati

Regionalism is under stress. The European Union has been challenged by the Eurozone crisis, refugee flows, terrorist attacks, Euroscepticism, and Brexit. In Latin America, regional cooperation has been stagnating.

Studying Europe and Latin America within a broader comparative perspective, this volume provides an analytical framework to assess stress factors facing regionalism. The contributors explore how economic and financial crises, security challenges, identity questions raised by immigration and refugee flows, the rise of populism, and shifting regional and global power dynamics have had an impact on regionalism; whether the EU crisis has had repercussions for regionalisms in other parts of the world; and to what extent the impact of stress factors is mediated by characteristics of the region that may provide elements of resilience.

Written by specialists from Europe and Latin America with a shared interest in the new field of comparative regionalism, this book will be an invaluable resource for students, scholars and policy specialists in regional integration, European politics, EU studies, Latin American studies, and international relations and international law more generally.

Part I

Theoretical and comparative perspectives

1 Stress factors and their impact on regionalism

Brigitte Weiffen

This chapter sets the stage for a comparative assessment of the stress factors that have an impact on regionalism in Europe, Latin America, and beyond. It presents an analytical framework with which to investigate commonalities, parallel developments, and diffusion effects among regionalisms around the world. The well-studied multidimensional crisis of the European Union (EU) serves as a point of departure. The EU has struggled to respond to an accumulation of challenges, such as the euro crisis and the tense relationship between Brussels and the countries most affected by it; repeated confrontations among members about how to handle unprecedented levels of immigration; growing electoral support for nationalist parties in many member states; the threat of domestic terrorism; the Russo-Ukraine conflict in the immediate neighborhood; and the British decision to leave the EU. The EU’s obvious limitations in coming to grips with recent crises have damaged its reputation as a role model for regional integration worldwide.

Obviously, the specific challenges and their combination are unique to the EU. The same applies to challenges facing regional organizations in Latin America or other regions of the world. Therefore, existing studies of the crisis of regionalism have usually focused on the fate of individual regions. In contrast, the aim of this chapter is to go beyond a specific regional context and come up with an analytical framework that, while inspired by real-world cases, is sufficiently general to compare the potential impact of stress factors on regionalism in different world regions.

The first part of the chapter takes stock of the stress factors facing regionalism. Based on the European experience, it distills factors that also affect other regions and operate transregionally or globally. These include economic and financial crises, conflicts and humanitarian crises, security challenges, domestic political crises, socio-cultural challenges, and regional and global power shifts. Additionally, due to the long-time status of the EU as a model, the crisis of the EU could itself be a stress factor and exert negative repercussions on regional integration and cooperation projects in other parts of the world.

The second part of this chapter outlines the potential impact of stress factors on regionalism. It draws on central assumptions and findings from integration theories regarding the effects of stress and crisis on regional (dis)integration. Analogous to the first part, it starts with the European case and summarizes burgeoning debates about the EU’s potential disintegration, and then moves on to present generalizable assumptions. I argue that stress factors do not automatically entail disintegration and fragmentation. Depending on pre-existing characteristics of the affected region, stress factors might be mitigated by elements of resilience that ensure the continuity of regionalism or may even strengthen it.

Stress factors

The EU in crisis: the end of a model?

For more than a decade, the EU has, for a variety of reasons, been trapped in a state of crisis. The 2008 US mortgage crisis and the ensuing 2008–09 global financial crisis triggered a sequence of critical developments in the EU. In late 2009, the newly elected Greek government’s announcement that the country’s budget deficit was far higher than had previously been revealed marked the onset of the Eurozone crisis. The nomenclature of the crisis is contested and has mutated over time.¹ While some see this mainly as a crisis of the Eurozone, exposing the flawed architecture of the monetary union, some characterize it as sovereign debt crisis and blame the economically weaker Eurozone members for accumulating excessive deficits in violation of the Maastricht requirements. Yet others emphasize its nature as a banking crisis, pointing to a situation of “structural symbiosis”² between states and banks, where banks are lenders of last resort for states and, at the same time, depend on massive taxpayer financed transfers in times of crisis. The tides of the Eurozone crisis ebbed and flowed over a period of several years, culminating in 2010, 2012, and 2015, at which points the survival of the Eurozone seemed questionable.

There has long been a latent discomfort with the “upward shift” of centers of decision-making in the course of European integration. In the face of the EU’s bureaucratic shape and its seeming lack of democratic accountability, individual citizens felt increasingly powerless and unable to influence the policy agenda. European citizens accepted the delegation of authority to supranational institutions as long as they trusted in their problem-solving capacity. However, once the EU failed to deliver, citizens started to question the delegation of authority to the EU level. In the context of the Eurozone crisis, the most emblematic example was Greece, which received significant international media attention for being the first and most acute case in the sovereign debt crisis. The Greek debt crisis led to repeated confrontations among domestic protesters, the Greek government, and the “Troika”—the decision group formed by the European Commission, the European Central Bank (ECB), and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in charge of supervising the implementation of austerity measures. These measures were issued as a prerequisite for financial help in the context of the “bailouts” not only of Greece, but also of Cyprus, Ireland, and Portugal.

The way the Eurozone crisis was managed intensified the perception of the EU as undemocratic, elite-driven, and orientated towards the interests of business and finance.³ Crisis governance brought an increase of informal trans-governmentalism (including Germany’s informal “EU presidency”), strengthened the Commission and the ECB at the expense of the European Parliament, and intensified divisions between member states, pitting the northern European creditor countries against the southern periphery of debtor countries. Bailout programs were often implemented by technocratic caretaker governments (as in Greece or Italy); and the implementation of those programs continued despite repeated electoral victories of anti-austerity parties who did not accept the measures’ legitimacy. Thus, the reforms prescribed by the Troika effectively overrode popular mandates.

The Eurozone crisis had domestic repercussions in many member countries, not restricted to those directly affected by the crisis. The cornerstones of European integration were increasingly called into question by political elites and the wider population. In the course of the Greek crisis, German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble openly launched the proposal of a Greek exit from the Eurozone, thus suggesting the taking of a step backwards in the integration as a last resort. Furthermore, the Eurozone crisis gave rise to Eurosceptic political parties both on the right (in France, the Netherlands, and Germany, for example) and on the left (such as in Greece and Spain), which openly criticized and questioned the euro and the Europeanization process more generally.

At the same time, the EU was facing severe external and domestic security challenges. The Ukraine crisis escalated in 2014, when Russia invaded Crimea and armed conflict broke out between Russian-supported separatists and the Ukrainian army in the eastern regions of the country. The EU faced the challenge of finding a common response to a violent conflict in a partner country and to the aggressive foreign policy of Russia, its largest and most powerful neighbor state.⁴ Furthermore, in many countries of North Africa and the Middle East, the 2011 pro-democratic uprisings of the Arab Spring led to political instability, insurgencies, and armed conflict. Consequently, Europe saw unprecedented growth in the number of persons seeking to flee those conflict zones and take refuge in Europe. According to Europol, there were over one million irregular border crossings into the EU in 2015, almost five times more than there were in 2014.⁵ Most of those migrants, a significant proportion of them from Syria, were asylum-seekers in search of international protection. This steep increase in immigration added to the already high level of refugee flows from Afghanistan, Iraq, and other conflict countries, as well as economic migration from Africa due to poverty, inequality, and corrupt and authoritarian regimes in the countries of origin.⁶

The refugee and migrant crisis jeopardized the Schengen Area of passport-free travel, which became highly contested in the face of confirmed suspicions that Islamist terrorists were taking advantage of unsecured European borders. In several EU countries, individuals or groups supported or inspired by Al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, or other militant Islamist groups committed terrorist attacks. Not only has the frequency of terrorist attacks increased over time, but the transnational nature of terrorism has become obvious, as terrorists and their supporters repeatedly crossed borders, hid, and were caught in European countries other than the scene of the terrorist acts. Thus, the large number of irregular migrants from Muslim countries arriving in Europe became both a domestic and a transnational security challenge, and debates on the national and the European level began to link terrorism to immigration, leading to the securitization of migration.

Fueled initially by the Eurozone crisis and subsequently by a surge in nationalist and xenophobic resentment in the face of the “wave of refugees,” right-wing populist parties scored significant electoral successes, even in historically pro-European member states.⁷ Germany saw the emergence of the Alternative for Germany (AfD), which was founded in 2013 as a Eurosceptic party and increasingly adopted a xenophobic and anti-immigration discourse following Angela Merkel’s decision to open Germany’s borders to refugees in 2015. The 2017 general elections resulted in the AfD’s entry into the federal parliament, with 12.6 percent of the vote—the first extreme right-wing party to win seats since 1953. In 2016, the Eurosceptic Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) only narrowly failed to win the country’s presidential elections and subsequently increased its share in the parliamentary elections to 26 percent and entered into a coalition government with the conservative Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP). In France, although Marine Le Pen’s presidential bid failed, support for the Front National in the 2017 presidential and parliamentary elections was higher than ever before. Parliamentary elections in Italy in the spring of 2018 saw unprecedented success for Eurosceptic parties: together, the Five Star Movement and the League won well over 50 percent of the popular vote and formed a coalition government.

Several Eastern European countries saw the accession of national-conservative and Eurosceptic parties to power. Reforms adopted by Victor Orbán’s Fidesz government coalition in Hungary (in office since 2010) and the Law and Justice (PiS) party in Poland (in office since late 2015) undermined checks and balances by attacking and curbing judicial independence, and curtailed political rights and civil liberties by imposing restrictions on the media, non-governmental organizations, and academic freedom. In this way, they questioned the fundamental norms upon which the EU is founded: respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law, and respect for human rights, including minority rights.⁸ The difficulty of holding those countries accountable for their violations of the rule of law has itself turned into a challenge that European institutions are currently struggling with.⁹ Meanwhile, in what can be called a crisis of cohesion, separatist and secessionist movements reinforced their claims in regions of several member states, including Scotland, Catalonia, Flanders and Wallonia, and some regions of Italy. The rise of (sub-national) regionalism, separatism, and secessionism can be interpreted as yet another countertre...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: regionalism under stress
• PART I: Theoretical and comparative perspectives
• PART II: Europe
• PART III: Latin America
• PART IV: EU–Latin American Inter-regionalism
• PART V: Africa and Asia
• Index