The Routledge Handbook of Differentiation in the European Union

Benjamin Leruth, Stefan Gänzle, Jarle Trondal, Benjamin Leruth, Stefan Gänzle, Jarle Trondal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032183824
• eBook ISBN: 9780429624148
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Routledge Handbook of Differentiation in the European Union offers an essential collection of groundbreaking chapters reflecting on the causes and consequences of this complex phenomenon.

With contributions from key experts in this subfield of European Studies, it will become a key volume used for those interested in learning the nuts and bolts of differentiation as a mechanism of (dis)integration in the European Union, especially in the light of Brexit. Organised around five key themes, it offers an authoritative "encyclopaedia" of differentiation and addresses questions such as:

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• How can one define differentiation in the European Union in the light of the most recent events?

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• Does differentiation create more challenges or opportunities for the European Union?

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• Is Europe moving away from an "ever closer Union" and heading towards an "ever more differentiated Union", especially as leading political figures across Europe favour the use of differentiation to reconcile divergences between member states?

This handbook is essential reading and an authoritative reference for scholars, students, researchers and practitioners involved in, and actively concerned about, research in the study of European integration. As European differentiation is multifaceted and involves a wide range of actors and policies, it will be of further interest to those working on countries and/or in policy areas where differentiation is an increasingly relevant feature.

The Introduction and chapters 13, 21, 30, and 35 of this book is available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

1IntroductionDifferentiation in the European Union as a field of study

Benjamin Leruth, Stefan Gänzle and Jarle Trondal

DOI: 10.4324/9780429054136-1

Introduction

On 24 June 2016, the European Union (EU) woke up facing a situation which was as much unprecedented as unexpected. For the first time in the history of European integration, citizens of a member state had cast a vote in favour of leaving the Union. The outcome of the popular referendum held in the United Kingdom (UK) sent shockwaves across the continent and the world. At that time the EU found itself centre stage of a series of challenges, including the Eurozone crisis, which had followed the global financial and economic crisis of 2007–2008, the Ukrainian crisis of 2013–2014 and so-called refugee crisis of 2015. These crises have subsequently been complemented by the Covid-19 pandemic challenging the EU since early 2020. Thus, the EU is likely to remain prone of what has accurately been coined a ‘polycrisis’ (Zeitlin 2016); in addition, throughout the 2010s, the EU has become increasingly exposed to high levels of public and party-based Euroscepticism in many of its member states (see, e.g., Leruth et al. 2018). Rather than breaking down, previous studies suggest that the EU has become resilient to crises owing to its ability to adapt and absorb, and if necessary, muddling-through (Riddervold et al. 2021).

The Brexit vote resulted in a lengthy and cumbersome withdrawal process that came to a close with the so-called transition period elapsing on 31 December 2020. Therefore, Brexit, in itself, is best understood as a process rather than a single event that is transforming the EU. In retrospect, Brexit was not fully unexpectable either; at least not for those who had been questioning to what extent ‘Britain was European’ (Ash 2001) for a while. Ever since its successful bid for an exclusive reduction of its share to the Community budget – the famous ‘British rebate’ – in the mid-1980s the UK nurtured a reputation of being an ‘awkward partner’ (George 1998) in Europe. The state’s attitude was in line with some of its long-standing foreign policy traditions which set the UK somewhat ‘apart’ – underpinning its mutually reinforcing insular and ‘splendid’ isolation: British exceptionalism and differentiation from continental Europe – ‘where the weather comes from’ as allegedly put by Winston Churchill – have, in the aftermath of the Treaty of Maastricht, been underwritten by opt-outs covering policy areas as economic and monetary union (EMU) as well as justice and home affairs. Second, the EU and its member states themselves had come a long way in recognizing that the core idea of its political order ultimately revolved around the reconciliation of two – at first sight – dichotomous principles, namely ‘unity in diversity’. This principle paralleled one of the EU’s strongest original objectives which consisted in the realization of ‘ever closer union’. Controversial questions surrounding member states’ rights to withdraw from the EU were legally settled through the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty in 2009 through what is now Article 50 of the Treaty on EU. Article 50 describes the procedural steps a member state is obliged to take in order to lawfully withdraw from EU membership (European Parliamentary Research Service 2016). Yet, only a few observers at that time would have guessed that this article was to become a point of reference in less than a decade already.

The unpredictable character of Brexit has led scholars to rethink its implications for the future of the EU. Some studies have focused on particular policy areas, such as trade (e.g. Dhingra et al. 2016a, 2016b), environment (e.g. Burns et al. 2019), climate change (e.g. Hepburn and Teytelboym 2017), labour market (e.g. Fagan and Rubery 2018) and foreign and security policy (e.g. Duke 2019; Martill and Sus 2018). Other studies have focused more broadly on implications of Brexit on the future of European integration (e.g. Rosamond 2016; Jones 2018; Cardwell 2019). In this vein, the European Commission (EC) ignited scholarly interest through its response to Brexit: in the ‘White Paper on the Future of Europe’ in 2017, the Commission sketched out several broad scenarios for the EU’s way ahead. A total of five scenarios were presented: ‘1: Carrying on’, i.e. following the existent path of muddling through without any major changes and reforms; ‘2: Nothing but the Single Market’ excluding areas such as migration, security and defence; ‘3: Those who want more do more’ based on coalitions of the willing; ‘4: Doing less more efficiently’ with a strong focus on further market integration leaving non-market-related affairs aside, and, eventually, ‘5: Doing much more together’ across a wide range of areas (European Commission 2017: 15–25). The importance of the White Paper, as we argued elsewhere (Gänzle et al. 2019), does not lie so much in capturing each scenario per se and in isolation, but in the remarkable fact that there is a choice for scenarios at the detriment of a single grand vision as well as the nature of these scenarios. The White Paper meticulously avoids references to the term of differentiation and carefully maintains that ‘the starting point for each scenario is that the 27 Member States move forward together as a Union’ (European Commission 2017: 15) based on the unity of the single market. Differentiation is implicitly present, when calling for further cooperation where ‘a group of countries, including the euro area and possibly a few others, chooses to work much closer notably on taxation and social matters’ (European Commission 2017: 20) using, for instance, the legal mechanism of enhanced cooperation more actively. Two scenarios, in turn, call for a ‘spill-back’ in several policy areas, ‘such as regional development, public health, or parts of employment and social policy not directly related to the functioning of the single market’ (European Commission 2017: 22). These differ from state-based ‘opt-outs’ and are best conceived of as varieties of disintegration. Therefore, the scenarios ultimately flesh a wide range of differentiation encompassing both integrationist and disintegrationist processes and strategies (see Gänzle et al. 2019).

In this sense, Brexit has revived the debate over a well-known yet often misunderstood concept: differentiation as an attribute to integration. Developed in the 1970s and gaining momentum with the ratifications of the Maastricht and Amsterdam Treaties in the 1990s, scholars have increasingly paid attention to the causes and consequences of differentiated integration (see, e.g., Holzinger and Schimmelfennig 2012; Leruth et al. 2019a for literature overviews). The core objective of this Handbook is therefore to demonstrate that differentiation in the EU has become a persistent phenomenon and should therefore be considered as a systemic feature of European integration. The establishment of the Eurozone in the late 1990s as well as the subsequent ‘big bang enlargement’ of 2004 constitute the EU’s most far-reaching initiatives in terms of integration led to an increase in the use of flexibility mechanisms. By the early 2010s, less than half of EU’s 18 major policy areas still applied uniform integration (Leuffen et al. 2013). Although differentiation has been understood as the exception to the rule (as the favoured approach fostered among EU institutions to apply EU policies uniformly across member states), it is arguably a core and structural part of the European integration project.

In sum, after almost 70 years of deepening and widening processes, the core dependent variable in European integration studies has shifted from integration to differentiation – to put forth the main proposition and ambition of this volume. Despite a vast literature, scholars still struggle to come to grips with the full consequences on differentiation in the EU (Leruth et al. 2019b). By bringing together over 50 leading and early career scholars from different disciplines, this Handbook demonstrates the breadth and depth in the study of differentiation in the EU, and the diverging approaches taken to understand the phenomenon.

The introduction to this volume sets the stage for the subsequent chapters. It starts by offering a brief review of the existing literature and a deliberatively loose notion of differentiation, as scholars interpret and apply the notion in various ways. We then expand on the mechanisms that foster differentiation drawing on the supply and demand models developed by Schimmelfennig and Winzen (2020). The structure of the Handbook is then presented. As the volume covers a wide range of mechanisms of differentiated integration and disintegration, this chapter also concludes with a glossary or ‘memo’ which may help the reader to understand the differences and nuances between key concepts used throughout the volume.

Before proceeding, a common understanding of the notion of ‘integration’ is needed, as it has not often been provided in the literature. The meaning of the term ‘integration’ varies across theoretical perspectives in literature and will subsequently vary across the chapters in this volume. Overall, we choose a less attended and general definition of integration suggested by James G. March (1999: 134) who sees integration as the imagination of ‘a world consisting of a set of parts. At the least, integration is gauged by some measure of the density, intensity, and character of relations among the elements of that set’. Subsequently, he suggests three parameters for integration: consistency among the parts, interdependence among the parts and structural connectedness among the parts. On this basis, disintegration would imply a lower degree of density and intensity of the consistency, interdependence and structural connectedness among these parts.

From studying ‘integration’ to ‘differentiated integration’ to ‘differentiation’ – a cursory review of literature¹

Differentiation, as discussed earlier, is not a new phenomenon in European integration. What is relatively new, however, is that it has become more conventional to include both integration and disintegration as possible variants of differentiation (Schimmelfennig 2018; Gänzle et al. 2019; Leruth et al. 2019a). Moreover, differentiation can take various forms which are often intertwined (see, e.g., Stubb 1996; Dyson and Sepos 2010). This Handbook thus suggests that differentiation constitutes a ‘normal’ state of affairs because of the Union’s institutional architecture and character as a c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsement
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface and acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Differentiation in the European Union as a field of study
• Part 1 Conceptualizing differentiation
• Part 2 Institutionally based differentiation
• Part 3 Policy-based differentiation
• Part 4 Territorial differentiation
• Part 5 Brexit: Introduction
• Epilogue: Polycrisis and resilience in the European Union: Covid-19 and avenues for future studies
• Index