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.
