Europe's Union in Crisis

Tested and Contested

Brigid Laffan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351706834
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The European Union faces a set of inter-related crises that it struggles to contain and address. By exploring how the EU responds to crises and conflict, this volume addresses both its resilience and vulnerability. The EU faces significant challenges: European integration is increasingly politicised; democratic politics within member states are increasingly volatile; challenger parties threaten the status quo; and party systems are shifting throughout Europe. These crises test both the EU and individual states, especially those that had to exchange interdependence in the Union for dependence on the Troika. Despite the tension of hard times, this volume points to patterns of continuity and change as the single market, somewhat side-lined and forgotten in the heat of crises, retains its role as the hard core of the Union and the EU's most significant achievement.

This book was originally published as a special issue of West European Politics.

Europe’s union in crisis: tested and contested

Brigid Laffan

ABSTRACT
This special issue explores how Europe’s Union is tested though crises but also faces explicit contestation in troubled times. Crises are ‘open moments’ that impact on rulers and ruled, testing existing paradigms, policies, politics, institutional roles and rules. The papers in this special issue test the resilience of the Union in crisis conditions, the post-functionalist interpretation of contemporary integration, the legacy of the crisis for politics and institutions in Europe and the impact of the crisis on key bilateral relations. Four thematic issues are addressed: the resilience of the EU, multilevel politics, patterns of continuity and change and the relationship between the whole (EU) and the member states.

Europe’s Union faces a set of inter-related crises that it struggles to contain and address. This special issue seeks to explore how the Union is tested through crises but also faces greater contestation. The dual emphasis on testing and contesting allows us to focus on how the EU addresses crises but also faces explicit contestation in troubled times. Since 2008 the Union and its member states have confronted two major exogenous shocks. These shocks in turn led to internal turbulence within the Union. The first exogenous shock was the global impact of the collapse of Lehman Brothers which triggered a deep financial and economic downturn, the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The Great Recession had a severe impact on the European Union as the global financial crisis morphed into a deep crisis of the eurozone in autumn 2009. The credibility and sustainability of the eurozone was tested. Market pressure, in addition to political, economic and social pressures, gave rise to deep cleavages between creditors and debtors, the strong and the vulnerable. The EU did not face a single eurozone crisis but instead a confluence of overlapping and interrelated political, institutional and governance crises for the eurozone as a whole and its member states. The EU’s legal system, institutions and governance capacity were tested, perhaps like never before. At the same time, the Union’s policies, instruments, the commitment of the member states to a shared endeavour and even the underlying rationale of integration became ever more contested as democratic politics in Europe bore the strain of recession and the asymmetric manner in which the crisis affected the member states.

The second exogenous shock came from Europe’s neighbourhood. Having essentially been created to pacify inter-state relations in Europe and negate geopolitics, the Union was confronted with the re-emergence of an assertive Russia when Putin annexed Crimea and began a proxy war in Eastern Ukraine. This shattered the Union’s neighbourhood policy, a policy that was built on market access, a diffusion of governance norms and soft conditionality. Europe’s normative power came face to face with Russian hard power. As optimism concerning the Arab Spring abated, Europe was confronted to its south with a multiplicity of states that were either failing, ravaged by civil war or characterised by heightened political uncertainty. Instability to the south manifested itself in a humanitarian crisis and extensive movement of people across the Mediterranean that left the member states on its northern shores struggling to cope with the influx of people. By summer 2015, the refugee and migration crisis threatened the sustainability of the Schengen system, a core European regime. The emergence of ISIS and the number of Europeans willing to fight as jihadists for the group heightened security concerns and concerns about the integration of migrants in Europe. The return of some battle-hardened jihadists to Europe exposed deep vulnerabilities in Europe’s internal security as it was confronted with terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels. The combination of external transboundary shocks and their impact on Europe gave rise to deep instability in two of the Union’s core regimes and began to threaten the EU’s sense of itself. How Europe deals with the forces unleashed by these multiple crises will shape the future of the Union and the continent. The timing, combination and consequences of the two external shocks placed extraordinary pressure on the EU and its governing capacity. Given that the Union does not exist in a sealed container immune from developments on its borders, the special issue is attentive to the growing pressure on the Union from outside, although the primary focus is on the multifaceted eurozone crisis.

Crises are ‘open moments’ that impact on rulers and ruled, testing existing paradigms, policies, institutional roles and rules. They are ‘moments of truth’, critical junctures replete with risk and characterised by a high level of contingency (Panizza and Philip 2013). According to Rosenthal et al. (2001: 6), modern crises ‘are increasingly characterized by complexity, interdependence and politicization’. They generate uncertainty, threat and discontinuity and tend to act as focal points for institutional, policy and political change that leave significant legacies (Gourevitch 1992). A crisis is rarely a distinct event but a process whereby different forces interact and intersect to create collective stress across many domains. From a constructivist perspective, ‘a crisis is not a natural event, but a social event, and therefore is always socially constructed and highly political’ (Gamble 2009: 38). The stakes are very high for political leaders when faced with crises, as they are confronted with situations that demand action in an environment of heightened uncertainty and contingency. Who owns the crisis and who is responsible for addressing it is a major question in the heat of a crisis (Boin 2009: 367). Moreover as a crisis unfolds, there is inevitably a ‘drama of accountability and blaming’ (Boin et al. 2010: 706). Institutions and their leaders are attentive not just to the framing of a crisis but to how to justify and legitimise their crises responses. A crisis offers both danger and opportunity and crises have been part of the dynamic of European integration from the outset. In fact, it could be argued that all too often and too easily any blockage or setback in integration was deemed to be a crisis. Applying the term crisis or crises is, however, truly applicable to the compound challenges that the EU faces at this juncture. Europe’s relatively young Union is facing the severest test in its short history.

Why this special issue?

On the eve of the financial crisis, the EU had become a viable regional economy, underpinned by law, and a system of multilevel governance, but neither a state nor a nation, and there were very few indications of a desire by mass publics to change this state of affairs. The Lisbon treaty finally came into operation in December 2009 just as the euro crisis was about to unfold. The treaty was the culmination of the Union’s constitutional decade and its provisions would operate in an environment very different from the first decade of the twenty-first century. In addressing the consequences of the crisis for the Union, this special issue draws a distinction between political integration, on the one hand, and institutional and functional integration on the other. Nye, writing in 1971, argued that in order to gain analytical leverage in the study of integration, it was fruitful to ‘break apart the concept of integration’ into a number of component parts (Nye 1971: 26). Institutional and functional integration encapsulates the systemic features of the Union, notably its treaty framework, institutions and policy range (the formal system) and political integration relates to political processes and the political behaviour of elites and citizens. The value added of this special issue is, primarily, its range and the manner in which the papers address different facets of integration that are usually treated separately. The politics of integration, both domestic and supranational, are rarely studied in conjunction with governance and institutions. The special issue does not begin from deductively-led hypotheses shaped by a general theory given the diversity and complexity of the crises-induced political and institutional conditions. Rather, the approach is to test the following: the resilience of the Union in crisis conditions, the post-functionalist interpretation of contemporary integration, the legacy of the crisis for Europe’s supranational institutions and the impact of the crisis on key bilateral relations. In addition, the special issue pays particular attention to the dynamic of politicisation in the context of enhanced contestation in hard times. The papers draw on a range of theoretical and analytical approaches, including traditional integration theory, comparative politics, experimental governance and institutionalism.

Just before the financial and economic crisis unfolded, Hooghe and Marks (2009) developed a post-functionalist theory of European integration. They began from the premise that ‘Domestic and European politics have become more tightly coupled as governments have become responsive to public pressures on European integration’ (Hooghe and Marks 2009: 2). They pointed to the growing politicisation of European integration and their post-functionalist theory assigned a central role to identity politics. This combination, they suggested, led to ‘downward pressure on the level and scope of integration’ in the presence of a ‘constraining dissensus’ (Hooghe and Marks 2009: 21). The politicisation of integration was widely addressed in the integration literature during the 2000s in response to greater contestation around issues of European integration (Grande and Kriesi 2015; Stratham and Trenz 2013; De Wilde 2011; De Wilde and Zurn 2012). There was in addition a normative discussion about whether or not greater politicisation was desirable (Bartolini 2006; Hix 2006). The eurozone crisis provides an important test of the post-functionalist theory of integration and the dynamic of politicisation in crisis conditions. Five papers in this special issue address different dimensions of ‘post-functionalism’ and ‘politicisation’. Falkner’s paper on the ‘EU’s Problem-Solving Capacity and Legitimacy in a Crisis Context: A Virtuous or Vicious Circle?’ analyses across a range of policy areas how and why reforms were possible and a joint decision trap avoided notwithstanding the constraining dissensus identified by Hooghe and Marks (2009). Pelkmans’ paper on ‘Why the Single Market Remains the EU’s Core Business’ reminds us of the centrality of the single market to European integration and the enduring functional logic of market integration. Saurugger’s paper, ‘Politicisation and Integration through Law: Whither Integration Theory?’, analyses the challenges the eurozone crisis created for theoretical explanations of European integration and does so through the lens of key characteristics of the crisis, namely increasing politicisation of the domestic level and the strong call for legal regulation of and court responses to the EU’s economic governance. The Hobolt and Tilly paper, ‘Fleeing the Centre: The Rise of Challenger Parties in the Aftermath of the Euro Crisis’, addresses directly the political consequences of the crisis for party politics in the member states by focussing on the rise of challenger parties. The level of analysis moves to EU-level political dynamics in Christiansen’s paper on ‘Electoral Politics and Executive Appointment in the EU: The Impact of the Spitzenkandidaten’. This paper provides a bridge to a number of papers on the institutional consequences of the crisis.

Scholarly debate and contention about the role of individual EU-level institutions and the institutional balance is as old as the Union itself. One reading of the crisis and its consequences places an emphasis on intergovernmental decision-making, albeit in a new form (Bickerton et al. 2015; Fabbrini 2013; Puetter 2014). These scholars point to the dominance of the European Council in making the ‘big’ crisis management decisions and to the preference for extra-treaty measures and policy instruments during the course of the crisis (Bickerton et al. 2015). In other words, the Commission is the big loser. Becker et al. take issue with this core conclusion of the new intergovernmentalist literature in their paper ‘The Commission Boxed In and Constrained: Still an Engine of Integration?’ They provide an account of the Commission during the crisis that covers the interplay of factors at different levels (i.e. political and institutional environment as well as internal organisation) and argue that the crisis has acted as a catalyst for a more pronounced move towards both policy management and presidentialism. The latter was reinforced by the Spitzenkandidaten experiment analysed by Christiansen. Schmidt, in ‘Reinterpreting the Rules by Stealth in Times of Crisis: The European Central Bank and the European Commission’, addresses how two of the supranational institutions, the Commission and the ECB, governed under the pressure of the crisis. The central argument is that they did so by reinterpreting the rules without admitting to this publicly – in other words, they did so by stealth. The focus in Zeitlin’s paper, ‘EU Experimentalist Governance in Times of Crisis’, is on the fortunes of the Union’s mode of experimentalist governance in crisis conditions. Experimentalist governance was one of the main varieties of new governance modes identified by the 1990s’ ‘governance turn’ in EU studies (Héritier and Rhodes 2011; Kohler-Koch and Rittberger 2006). The two case studies in the paper, financial regulation and the European Semester, provide a robust test of the resilience of ‘experimentalist governance’ given the tendency towards centralisation and hierarchy in crisis conditions.

The European Union is a compound polity in which its member states provide the indispensable foundation. Although formally equal in the Union treaties, the Union consists of an admixture of large, medium-sized and small states. Historically, two large states – France and Germany – have been central to efforts to deepen integration and have provided the essential political capital to advance European integration. Hence their bilateral relationship lies at the core of the Union. UK membership in 1973 added a third ‘Big State’, but one characterised by an ambivalent relationship with the Union and the process of integration. Exploring how the crisis has affected bilateral and trilateral relationships across the ‘Big Three’ is essential to understanding the legacy of the crisis on the Union’s core power structures. This is addressed by Krotz and Maher in ‘Europe’s Crises and the EU’s “Big Three”’, in which they analyse the impact and significance of the Ukraine and eurozone conflicts on the EU’s big three member states.

What we have learnt?

In this concluding section we outline the conclusions that may be drawn from the articles in this special issue. We will address a number of different facets of institutional-functional integration and political integration. We begin with a discussion of the resilience of the Union when confronted with crises. This is followed by an analysis of the changing politics of integration and the links between domestic politics, transnational politics and EU-level politics. This leads in turn to a discussion of the whole and the parts and the manner in which integration logics are coupling and de-coupling. Finally we address the patterns of continuity and change that may be observed.

Resilience, but at a price

The EU faced its most severe test during the eurozone crisis and although the acute phase of the crisis has abated, the single currency zone remains an unstable hybrid between a centralised monetary union and an economic union replete with unresolved tensions. That said, the Union’s institutions and leaders proved capable of reaching agreement on far-reaching changes in the system of economic governance, the establishment of the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), the role of the European Central Bank (ECB) as defender of the currency union, the creation of a banking union and the re-establishment of the credibility of the euro vis-à-vis the financial markets. Banking union represents a step-change in integration although it remains incomplete. The rescue of the eurozone was characterised by both muddling through and muddling up. The exit of any one member state from the eurozone was avoided albeit with great difficulty. The EU institutions demonstrated a remarkable capacity to gradually put together a ‘package’ of policy instruments for coping with the crisis and ‘governancing’ the fiscal and budgetary processes of the member states. Moreover, many other areas of EU public policy adapted to the changing circumstances and pressures. Given the lack of readiness for the crisis and the deep design faults in the euro’s architecture, this suggests that the EU, a relatively young social construct, has achieved a degree of maturity and robustness through being tried and tested. Three papers in this special issue support a conclusion that points to the resilience of the Union. Falkner demonstrates that across a wide range of policy fields the Union did not descend into a ‘joint decision trap’ or stalemate but managed to reach agreement. She outlines how the crisis itself was a trigger for change particularly in situations of urgent time pressure, harsh consequences for inaction and a tipping point towards serious outcomes such as the break-up of the eurozone or financial contagion across Europe. Zeitlin’s analysis of the testing of experimental governance in two fields pointed to its durability and robustness even in relation to ‘hard cases’, financial regulation and the European Semester. The explanation offered lies in the diverse and polyarchic conditions of the EU; the Union continues to have to navigate the tensions between the ‘logic of integration’ and the ‘logic of diversity’ identified already in the 1960s by Hoffman (1966). Pelkmans brings the continuing significance of the single market sharply into focus. In a wide-ranging analysis, Pelkmans argues that the single market was and remains the hard core of the EU and that it is the foundation of the Union for the future. All three papers point to resilient problem-solving dynamics in the Union and the continuing importance of functional pressures and the functional content of policy integration. The ‘constraining consensus’ identified by Hooghe and Marks (2009) did not prove so constraining as thought and functional pressures continue to play a major role in integration.

Resilience in the eye of the storm came at a price. While the Union’s institutiona...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Europe’s union in crisis: tested and contested
• 2. Politicisation and integration through law: whither integration theory?
• 3. The EU’s problem-solving capacity and legitimacy in a crisis context: a virtuous or vicious circle?
• 4. Fleeing the centre: the rise of challenger parties in the aftermath of the euro crisis
• 5. After the Spitzenkandidaten: fundamental change in the EU’s political system?
• 6. The Commission: boxed in and constrained, but still an engine of integration
• 7. Reinterpreting the rules ‘by stealth’ in times of crisis: a discursive institutionalist analysis of the European Central Bank and the European Commission
• 8. Europe’s crises and the EU’s ‘big three’
• 9. EU experimentalist governance in times of crisis
• 10. Why the single market remains the EU’s core business
• Index