Periodic Reporting for period 3 - SOLID (Policy Crisis and Crisis Politics. Sovereignty, Solidarity and Identity in the EU post 2008.)
Reporting period: 2022-09-01 to 2023-12-31
Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project
During the post 2008 decennium horribile, the EU has been faced with unprecedented shocks (the Euro area crisis, the Great Recession and its dramatic social consequences, the refugee crisis, Brexit) which have coalesced in a disruptive dynamic of unprecedented scope and depth. Conflicts over sovereignty, solidarity and identity sparked a deep political crisis, shaking the very foundations of the EU. Yet despite all this, the ultimate collapse of the Union has been averted. In dramatic moments EU leaders agreed on significant institutional advances or at least some backstops. How can one explain this peculiar mix of crisis and resilience?
This basic question has not only academic but also practical relevance for society. In fact, the crises of the last decade have generated the pressing need of identifying and accounting for the vulnerabilities of the EU polity, as well as its implicit and explicit capacity to withstand functional and political challenges. SOLID’s empirical data will greatly enrich the knowledge base currently available on European political developments. As the project includes policy analysis, it will offer useful insights for European politicians and policy makers who will confront future crises, providing them with novel usable data and interpretative insights for identifying alternatives and options. Through its dissemination activities, SOLID will also contribute to inform and sensitize a broad range of societal publics.
In terms of research, the project aims at uncovering the key dynamics behind both crisis and resilience. In order to capture such dynamics, we disentangle the political dimension of the crisis from more policy- and crisis-specific challenges. On the one hand, we analyse how sequences of policy crises disrupt routine policy-making, jeopardize or bias responses, unleash turbulent forms of crisis politics, and put political legitimacy, even the durability of the polity, at risk. On the other hand, we also posit that severe crisis situation may activate novel modes of conflict management, latent forms of solidarity and collectively agreed policies for enhancing functional performance. Moreover, deep political crises give EU leaders incentives for polity maintenance, i.e actions and policies aimed at safeguarding the durability of the EU as such, by containing forms of dis-integrative conflicts. We scrutinize democratically ambiguous strategies of keeping the political community together “whatever it takes”. Covering developments since 2008, SOLID ultimately aims at assessing the overall soundness of the EU’s foundations.
This basic question has not only academic but also practical relevance for society. In fact, the crises of the last decade have generated the pressing need of identifying and accounting for the vulnerabilities of the EU polity, as well as its implicit and explicit capacity to withstand functional and political challenges. SOLID’s empirical data will greatly enrich the knowledge base currently available on European political developments. As the project includes policy analysis, it will offer useful insights for European politicians and policy makers who will confront future crises, providing them with novel usable data and interpretative insights for identifying alternatives and options. Through its dissemination activities, SOLID will also contribute to inform and sensitize a broad range of societal publics.
In terms of research, the project aims at uncovering the key dynamics behind both crisis and resilience. In order to capture such dynamics, we disentangle the political dimension of the crisis from more policy- and crisis-specific challenges. On the one hand, we analyse how sequences of policy crises disrupt routine policy-making, jeopardize or bias responses, unleash turbulent forms of crisis politics, and put political legitimacy, even the durability of the polity, at risk. On the other hand, we also posit that severe crisis situation may activate novel modes of conflict management, latent forms of solidarity and collectively agreed policies for enhancing functional performance. Moreover, deep political crises give EU leaders incentives for polity maintenance, i.e actions and policies aimed at safeguarding the durability of the EU as such, by containing forms of dis-integrative conflicts. We scrutinize democratically ambiguous strategies of keeping the political community together “whatever it takes”. Covering developments since 2008, SOLID ultimately aims at assessing the overall soundness of the EU’s foundations.
Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far
Elaboration of theory
Our substantive work focused on elaborating our theoretical framework. It was published as Ferrera, Kriesi and Schelkle (2023) in the Journal of European Public Policy.
SOLID ultimately aims at assessing the overall soundness of the EU’s foundations. Our perspective in the tradition of Stein Rokkan explores the viability of the EU as a new, in many ways experimental, form of a compound polity, characterised by fluid borders, dispersed authority, thin forms of loyalty and social bonds. This makes the EU polity crisis-prone. The absence of a clear telos invites us to pay particular attention to the maintenance of the EU – a task which often requires delicate balancing acts for creating and exercising authority at the EU level without destabilising domestic political structures. Our framework specified the meaning of a deep political crisis as polity politicisation, a situation in which policy contestation escalates into a polarised dispute around the foundations of the community. A coalition-centred approach guides our empirical analysis of how existing, if hidden, institutional and policy resources are mobilised and new ones created.
Research design
We study four types of crises: the Euro area (LSE), refugee (EUI) and social crises (UNIMI) plus the membership (Brexit) and Covid -19 crises (jointly studied by the three teams). Since February 2022 we have also added the Ukraine crisis to our study, as a shadow case for specific questions raised by the other crises. A working group composed of members of all three teams has conducted three waves of a panel survey focusing on this crisis. Where possible, we defined episodes of policy-making processes marked by key decisions. The number of episodes studied varies by crisis. We study the decision-making at the EU, transnational and member state level. For the study of decision-making processes, we apply various methods. For the social crises, we mainly rely on traditional methods of process tracing, comparative policy and discourse analysis. For the other four crises, we developed an original method - Policy Process Analysis (PPA, see below). In addition, we are collecting and generating new data on both the supply- and demand-side of policy-making. We have also collected a wealth of survey data. So far two surveys focused on the first wave of the Covid-19 crisis and a general survey covering all the crises in 16 countries that included a number of experiments to establish causal mechanisms. A second general survey is planned for 2024.
Our substantive work focused on elaborating our theoretical framework. It was published as Ferrera, Kriesi and Schelkle (2023) in the Journal of European Public Policy.
SOLID ultimately aims at assessing the overall soundness of the EU’s foundations. Our perspective in the tradition of Stein Rokkan explores the viability of the EU as a new, in many ways experimental, form of a compound polity, characterised by fluid borders, dispersed authority, thin forms of loyalty and social bonds. This makes the EU polity crisis-prone. The absence of a clear telos invites us to pay particular attention to the maintenance of the EU – a task which often requires delicate balancing acts for creating and exercising authority at the EU level without destabilising domestic political structures. Our framework specified the meaning of a deep political crisis as polity politicisation, a situation in which policy contestation escalates into a polarised dispute around the foundations of the community. A coalition-centred approach guides our empirical analysis of how existing, if hidden, institutional and policy resources are mobilised and new ones created.
Research design
We study four types of crises: the Euro area (LSE), refugee (EUI) and social crises (UNIMI) plus the membership (Brexit) and Covid -19 crises (jointly studied by the three teams). Since February 2022 we have also added the Ukraine crisis to our study, as a shadow case for specific questions raised by the other crises. A working group composed of members of all three teams has conducted three waves of a panel survey focusing on this crisis. Where possible, we defined episodes of policy-making processes marked by key decisions. The number of episodes studied varies by crisis. We study the decision-making at the EU, transnational and member state level. For the study of decision-making processes, we apply various methods. For the social crises, we mainly rely on traditional methods of process tracing, comparative policy and discourse analysis. For the other four crises, we developed an original method - Policy Process Analysis (PPA, see below). In addition, we are collecting and generating new data on both the supply- and demand-side of policy-making. We have also collected a wealth of survey data. So far two surveys focused on the first wave of the Covid-19 crisis and a general survey covering all the crises in 16 countries that included a number of experiments to establish causal mechanisms. A second general survey is planned for 2024.
Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)
Going beyond the tradition of Stein Rokkan, the theory paper has proposed a re-conceptualisation of the EU as a compound polity, not merely an incomplete nation-state. It is characterised by fluid boundaries, divided authority and “thin” loyalty, largely based on legal entitlements. In our polity perspective, the absence of a fully-fledged constitution and a clear telos exposes the EU polity to the risk of disruption. Thus EU leaders face the challenge of constantly experimenting with new combinations between boundaries, authority and sharing arrangements in order to safeguard the functionality and durability of the compound polity. These combinations can turn weaknesses into hidden strengths. For instance the right of withdrawal and the dispersed authority structure of the Union could have turned Brexit into a fully-fledged membership crisis, through domino effects. Instead, the institutional resources contained in the Lisbon Treaty and the set-up of the Task Force provided bargaining advantages which kept the Union polity together, at the cost of the unity of the UK. The SOLID perspective is distinct from other grand theories of European integration.
We have also engaged critically with a recent literature on emergency politics, which claims that crisis management in the EU suspends all decision-making routines and overrides national democratic processes. Our research on the Covid-19 pandemic and its politics has highlighted considerable margins of action left to national governments for anticipating the economic fallout from the pandemic and discussing the ways in which recovery could be supported across the union. In fact, we argue that a clearly defined role for the EU Commission in coordinating action on the pandemic can buy governments’ time to deliberate on the response to an anticipated economic crisis (Truchlewski, Ganderson and Schelkle 2022; Ganderson, Schelkle and Truchlewski 2023).
The crises have brought to the fore the prime relevance of inter-state fault lines. The main dilemma is between sovereignty, understood as national self-determination, and solidarity, understood as institutionalised cross-national support systems. Conflicts thus lead to the politicisation of issues concerning national boundaries and communities. This creates conflicts between various groups of member states, e.g. guarantor and programme countries in the monetary union, frontline and destination states vs transit and bystander states in humanitarian migration, origin and destination states of mobile labour. EU-building dynamics will be shaped by the fluidity or durability of such inter-state conflict lines across different crises. They may also give rise to community formation, notably through new and variable coalitions. But in the refugee crisis these conflicts have prevented the implement¬ation of joint solutions preferred by a majority of member states, as we document in detail in a book-length manuscript to be published with Cambridge University Press next year (Kriesi et al., forthcoming as “Coming to terms with the European refugee crisis”). In the case of the Covid crisis, these conflicts were also intense, but could be overcome thanks to some specific characteristics of the crisis (symmetry of incidence, a policy-domain specific combination of competence distribution between the EU and its members, the unsuitability of the integration-demarcation frame for shaping political alignments). This facilitated coordinated resistance to take recourse to bailout policies, thereby forcing a critical juncture of taking another path with the NGEU reforms, and decisively changed the type of policy-solutions that resulted from crisis politics in this particular crisis (Schelkle 2021). We document this in detail in a book-length manuscript that will be submitted to Oxford University Press by the end of August 2023 (Truchlewski et al., forthcoming). The pandemic crisis activated polity maintenance incentives, especially in Germany. After initial resistence, Germany abandoned her traditional opposition to common debt and the alleged “Transfer Union” and eventually supported the NGEU agreement. In her speeches, Merkel explicitly justified this shift as a necessary step to keep the EU Together, “in the spirit of solidarity” (Ferrera, Mirò and Ronchi, 2021).
Our work has confirmed the fruitfulness of bringing together EU policy-analysis with comparative politics and political economy. We trust that such an inter-disciplinary combination will provide the adequate foundation for our ultimate aim, i.e. a theory-driven assessment of the potential for a deep crisis of the EU polity and its countervailing institutional safeguards, with a view to what this implies for the future.
While we have focused on individual crises in our work so far, we shall concentrate on the comparison between crisis and the sequencing of crisis in the remaining period of time.
We have also engaged critically with a recent literature on emergency politics, which claims that crisis management in the EU suspends all decision-making routines and overrides national democratic processes. Our research on the Covid-19 pandemic and its politics has highlighted considerable margins of action left to national governments for anticipating the economic fallout from the pandemic and discussing the ways in which recovery could be supported across the union. In fact, we argue that a clearly defined role for the EU Commission in coordinating action on the pandemic can buy governments’ time to deliberate on the response to an anticipated economic crisis (Truchlewski, Ganderson and Schelkle 2022; Ganderson, Schelkle and Truchlewski 2023).
The crises have brought to the fore the prime relevance of inter-state fault lines. The main dilemma is between sovereignty, understood as national self-determination, and solidarity, understood as institutionalised cross-national support systems. Conflicts thus lead to the politicisation of issues concerning national boundaries and communities. This creates conflicts between various groups of member states, e.g. guarantor and programme countries in the monetary union, frontline and destination states vs transit and bystander states in humanitarian migration, origin and destination states of mobile labour. EU-building dynamics will be shaped by the fluidity or durability of such inter-state conflict lines across different crises. They may also give rise to community formation, notably through new and variable coalitions. But in the refugee crisis these conflicts have prevented the implement¬ation of joint solutions preferred by a majority of member states, as we document in detail in a book-length manuscript to be published with Cambridge University Press next year (Kriesi et al., forthcoming as “Coming to terms with the European refugee crisis”). In the case of the Covid crisis, these conflicts were also intense, but could be overcome thanks to some specific characteristics of the crisis (symmetry of incidence, a policy-domain specific combination of competence distribution between the EU and its members, the unsuitability of the integration-demarcation frame for shaping political alignments). This facilitated coordinated resistance to take recourse to bailout policies, thereby forcing a critical juncture of taking another path with the NGEU reforms, and decisively changed the type of policy-solutions that resulted from crisis politics in this particular crisis (Schelkle 2021). We document this in detail in a book-length manuscript that will be submitted to Oxford University Press by the end of August 2023 (Truchlewski et al., forthcoming). The pandemic crisis activated polity maintenance incentives, especially in Germany. After initial resistence, Germany abandoned her traditional opposition to common debt and the alleged “Transfer Union” and eventually supported the NGEU agreement. In her speeches, Merkel explicitly justified this shift as a necessary step to keep the EU Together, “in the spirit of solidarity” (Ferrera, Mirò and Ronchi, 2021).
Our work has confirmed the fruitfulness of bringing together EU policy-analysis with comparative politics and political economy. We trust that such an inter-disciplinary combination will provide the adequate foundation for our ultimate aim, i.e. a theory-driven assessment of the potential for a deep crisis of the EU polity and its countervailing institutional safeguards, with a view to what this implies for the future.
While we have focused on individual crises in our work so far, we shall concentrate on the comparison between crisis and the sequencing of crisis in the remaining period of time.