Theorising the Crises of the European Union

Nathalie Brack, Seda Gürkan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000318814
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Historia europea

This book examines the relevance of integration theories for studying and analsing the crisis situations faced by the EU since 2009.

Ten years on from the start of the 'age of crisis', it critically analyses the impact of the multiple crises' context on the EU polity and questions the utility of integration theories for grasping the peculiarities of the particular crisis under study. Bringing together prominent scholars in EU studies, the volume constitutes an essential reference book on integration theories. Its contribution is twofold. First, it provides a comparative overview of classical integration theories for studying and analysing current crisis situations the EU faces. Second, the book connects theories to current debates through an in-depth discussion of recent crises that hit European integration since 2009, with a particular focus on the financial crisis, Brexit, refugee crisis, illiberal tendencies in some member states, and the Coronavirus pandemic.

This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of European integration, European Union politics, political theory, and, more broadly, to European studies.

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INTRODUCTION

European integration (theories) in crisis?

Nathalie Brack and Seda Gürkan

1. Introduction

The European project has always been a contested one and may even be considered to be a polity in a quasi-permanent crisis. Indeed, European integration has faced, almost from the start, various crises: from De Gaulle’s empty chair, to the recurring tensions over the budget and Margaret Thatcher’s opposition to a political Union, to the constitutional crisis. Today, the EU again faces multiple challenges. It is still struggling with the economic and social consequences of the 2008 financial crisis, and economic governance remains a controversial issue. The migration crisis provoked various conflicts between the Member states and the Commission. The European Union’s (EU’s) scope of intervention and its legitimacy is increasingly called into question, and Brexit has triggered new existential debates on the purposes and forms of European integration. In some countries, the values underpinning the integration process, and more generally liberal democracy, are increasingly threatened. And following the results of the 2019 European elections, acknowledging the problems related to the functioning of supranational institutions and the citizens’ distancing from the European project, the European Parliament, supporting the Commission President’s proposal, called on Member states to launch a Conference on the Future of Europe by 2020. Finally, in the first semester of 2020, the outbreak of Coronavirus (COVID-19) not only posed serious challenges to the public health sectors of Member states but also uncertainties related to the pandemic might trigger deeper socio-economic impact in the EU in the medium term. This succession of crises, each different but all shaking the European project, is a unique opportunity to think about what crises are and what they mean for the European integration.

As noted by van Middelaar (2016: 436), a crisis is a moment of truth, from which we can learn much about the EU–, its nature, its resilience, and its reactions. Whereas it seems there is a consensus in academic literature to characterize the recent past as a ‘decade of crisis’ (Schimmelfennig 2018) or the ‘age of crisis’ (Dinan et al. 2017), there are still many debates on the origins, drivers, and consequences of these crises. The field of EU integration theories has been reinvigorated, and new approaches have emerged to take stock of the latest developments. While for long, scholars have concentrated on specific features of the EU and its governance, there is a shift back to grand theories and understanding the transformation of the entire political system as a result of these crises.

Against this background, this edited volume aims at examining some essential questions about the relevance of integration theories in helping scholars to analyse, understand, or explain pertinent aspects of the current turmoil affecting the EU. How do European integration theories help us understand and explain current crises or the responses of the EU/Member states to these challenges? What are the strengths and shortcomings of these theoretical perspectives in studying crisis contexts? Which theoretical lenses help us better understand the EU in a crisis situation? In other words, can classical theories of European integration, which mostly try to explain the process of integration, work in reverse and/or explain this new context?

The ambition of this introduction is to re-examine a few fundamentals of the recent theoretical debates on the EU ‘polycrisis’ (Juncker 2016). More specifically, we will first discuss the peculiarity of this ‘decade of crisis’ through a comparison with previous crises European integration has faced. By doing so, we will offer a definition of the crisis and summarize the main features of the various crises of European integration. A second section will briefly survey the main European integration theories and their take on the crisis. The last section will then give an overview of the edited volume and the main arguments presented in the different parts.

2. Crisis of European integration: exceptional times or permanent state?

Since 2008, the EU has been facing a succession of crises: the Eurozone crisis, the Ukrainian crisis, the migration crisis, Brexit, the emergence of illiberal tendencies, and COVID-19 disease pandemic. But crises are nothing new in the trajectory of European integration. Moments of crisis are even central to the founding story of the European project and are often assumed to be instrumental in driving the project forward. While some argue that crises are a ‘natural way of development for the EU’ (Àgh 2014: 5), others go so far as to say that it has become the ‘new normal (Haughton 2016: 15). If we choose the latter understanding, can we then consider that the concept of crisis has been overworked? Do we tend to use and abuse the term to describe challenging moments for European integration? These questions that lie at the heart of this volume are closely related to the conceptualization of the crisis.

What is a crisis?

A crisis can be considered to be an unexpected, abrupt shock, which compels political actors to take a new set of decisions with a sense of urgency. These events are specific points in time, a turning point in the history of European integration, characterized by unexpected, uncommon events demanding a political action. This political response is indispensable as the cost of non-action during this hottest phase of the crisis is high. But there is a second facet to the crisis, which starts once political decisions are taken as a response to the crisis. Drawing on previous distinctions between ‘fast-’ and ‘slow-burning crises’ (t’ Hart and Boin 2001; Seabrooke and Tsingou 2019; Coman 2018), we define ‘crisis’ as an extraordinary, abnormal point in time, which alters subsequent decision-making procedures, and routine, ordinary, normal functioning of the polity.¹ In other words, we conceptualize a crisis not only as a point in time or ‘an event of intense danger that requires an extraordinary response’ (Hooghe and Marks 2019: 1118), but also as a process since this abnormal point in time or the (non-)response impinges subsequent modes of governance or ‘ways of doing’ in the EU. In other words, a crisis is a situation which cannot be resolved with existing rules or tools and which will lead to a change in the dynamics of integration or the shape of the system of governance in the EU. This crisis situation might in turn lead to disintegration (or horizontal political disintegration in Webber’s words (2019) such as Brexit) or to further vertical political integration (Webber 2019) through the expansion of the formal competences of supranational institutions. Therefore, while the hottest phase of the crisis, where extraordinary procedures are required in t₁, has negative connotations, this phase might lead (in t₂) either to negative (disintegration or stagnation) or positive (further integration) outcomes or to the preservation of the status quo. In a nutshell, crises can lead to different outcomes ranging from major breakthroughs in the integration process (as suggested by the old functionalist adage) to a stagnation of the integration process or to a (political or sectoral) disintegration (with variations in scope and degrees (see Vollaard 2018; Webber 2019)).

Another feature of our definition is that it is general enough to encompass different empirical realities (ranging from Brexit to the Schengen crisis), while capturing changes between the EU and state level on the one hand, and between the EU and society level on the other hand. Last, this overarching definition builds on distinctive definitions put forward by each individual approach in this book. As discussed in Table 1.1, each chapter contributes to the definition of the crisis from its theoretical angle and applies it to single specific crisis or to several.

TABLE 1.1 Definitions of crisis from different conceptual/theoretical angles

Chapter	Author	Concept/ Theory/ Approach	Crises	Definition of the crisis (or sister concepts)
1 Introduction	Brack and Gürkan	Overview of the main European integration theories	Overview of crises in a historical perspective	Crisis: a situation which cannot he resolved with existing rules or tools and which will lead to a change in the dynamics of integration or the shape of the system of governance in the EU.
2	Lord	Legitimacy	Legitimacy crisis	Legitimacy crises occur where a political order is unable to satisfy all necessary conditions for the justification of its powers simultaneously.
3	Brack, Coman, and Crespy	Sovereignty	Economic crisis, migration crisis, rule of law crisis	Conflicting claims to sovereignty: these claims occur across four dimensions (national, supranational, parliamentary, and popular).
4	Hutter and Schäfer	Cleavage politics and European integration	Eurozone crisis, migration crisis	A critical moment of politicization: crisis situations (like the financial, Eurozone, and migration crisis) may lead to publicly visible contestation about the right course of action (as indicated by higher levels of politicization), and this, in turn, may intensify (or alter) the long-term restructuring of domestic conflict. In this scenario, crises are potential triggers for conflict and cleavage restructuring.
5	Hodson	New Intergovernmentalism	Economic/financial and migration crises	Political disequilibrium: it arises because of the disconnect between the pro-integration consensus among policymakers and some sections of European society over the direction of the EU.
6	Lefkofridi and Schmitter	Neo-functionalism	Economic/financial crisis, Brexit, migration crisis	Crisis: a situation which cannot be resolved without a significant change in the rules of the game. Crisis is an integral part of the integration process.
7	Rauh	Neo-functionalism, liberal intergovernmentalism, post-functionalism	An overview of recent crises, including economic/financial crisis, migration crisis, and Brexit	Public politicization: high public attention to EU affairs, polarizing opinions in the citizenry, and active mobilization of European issues in domestic political competition
8	Saurugger	Liberal intergovernmentalism, neo-functionalism, classical constructivism, sociological approaches	Economic/financial crisis	Crisis: a phase of disorder in the seemingly ‘normal’ development of a system, which induces a sense of urgency
9	Manners	Critical Social Theory (CST)	Neoliberal economic, demographic social, climatic ecological, proxy conflict, and ethno-nationalist political crises of the twenty-first century	Planetary organic crisis as the broader context encompassing European communion
10	Gürkan and Tomini	(De-)Europeanization	Autocracy crisis	De-Europeanization: declining commitment to the EU’s founding values, in particular to democracy and the rule of law; and their contestation in some Member states and in the EU’s neighbourhood
11	Wunderlich and Gänzle	New regionalism	Disintegration in a comparative perspective and economic/ financial crisis	Critical juncture: a period of political and institutional challenge during which an agency is decisive in setting an institution on a new developmental pathway
12	Leruth	Differentiated integration	Maastricht Treaty referendum; the Swedish opt-out of the Eurozone, Greece, and Iceland after the economic/financial crises; Brexit	Integrational stagnation or differentiated disintegration
13 Conclusion	Brack and Gürkan	An overview of European integration theories addressed in the book	COVID-19 crisis	The crisis is defined as a point in time (endogenous or indigenous shocks) and as a process (the impact of these shocks on the integration process).

3. Contextualizing EU’s crises

The European project has faced several crises in its history. As noted by Webber (2019: 3), ‘almost every decade since the 1950s had witnessed a crisis that generated (as it transpired, ultimately unjustified) fears that the integration process would be durably impaired or damaged.’ Indeed, from the very beginning, the European project has gone hand in hand with crises. The ink on the Treaty of Paris establishing the ECSC was barely dry that the next project, the European Defence Community, collapsed, leading commentators at the time to believe that the supranational project was over (see Parsons 2006). Then, in the mid-1960s, the famous empty chair crisis slowed down the integration process and fundamentally changed the way the EU institutions worked for quite some time, with a decline of the Community Method and the strengthening of intergovernmental procedures. The decade that followed was marked by the budgetary crisis, with a 5-year-long struggle between the UK and the other Member states over the financial contribution of the UK to the European budget. Again, commentators at the time believed the crisis was so serious it would be the end of European integration. Moravcsik (1991) for instance described it as the ‘apogee of Europessimism’ with an atmosphere of stagnation. While the Fontainebleau agreement relaunched the integration process and demonstrated the resilience of the European project, this crisis also paved the way for a utilitarian relation to the EU which is still more or less latent today in the debates on Europe in several countries (in the UK context, of course, but also in some Central and Eastern European countries).

In the 1980s, the integration process bounced back, with the Single European Act, but then the 1990s were marked by two major crises. On the one hand, the European Monetary System crisis cast doubt on the viability and desirability of the common currency (Salvatore 1996). On the other hand, the difficult ratification of the Maastricht treaty was a critical turning point in European integration. The transformation of the Community into a Union and the transfer of what is often perceived as core state powers to the supranational level triggered opposition, at both the popular and elite levels (Brack 2018; Usherwood 2005). Indeed, this period signals the end of the so-called permissive consensus, and scholars speak of a ‘constraining dissensus’ (Down and Wilson 2008; Hooghe and Marks 2009) as a result, from...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: European integration (theories) in crisis?
• 2 Legitimacy crisis in the European Union
• 3 Sovereignty conflicts in the European Union
• 4 Cleavage politics and European integration
• 5 The new intergovernmentalism and the Euro Crisis: a painful case?
• 6 Neofunctionalism in the decade of crises
• 7 Between neo-functionalist optimism and post-functionalist pessimism: integrating politicisation into integration theory
• 8 Sociological approaches to the crisis
• 9 European communion and planetary organic crisis
• 10 The limits of the Europeanization research agenda: decoding the reverse process in and around the EU
• 11 ASEAN and the EU in times of crises: critical junctures from the perspective of comparative regionalism
• 12 Differentiation as a response to crises?
• 13 Understanding and explaining the European Union in a crisis context: concluding reflections
• Index