1 Introduction: The EU under strain

Abstract

Policy-making in the European Union has been shaped – if not dominated – by a wide variety of different types of crises in recent years. Accordingly, much political activity by the EU and related actors has had a certain urgency, occurred under intense economic and societal strain, and required responses in policy areas where the EU traditionally only holds fragmented competencies. Shifting priorities, short-term policy responses, and adapted implementation schedules showcase that EU governance now most often occurs in reaction to unforeseen events, rather than following mid- to long-term planning as originally foreseen by its foundational actors and the underlying institutional set-up in calmer times. Building on a concise overview of some of the most impactful recent crises from an EU perspective, this introductory chapter provides a conceptual framework for the analysis of European crisis governance. While the chapter catalogues and categorizes a variety of different crises, it conceptualises crisis governance not as an exception to the regular functioning of the EU’s political system, but instead as a regular feature of how the EU works nowadays. In so doing, it offers a conceptual basis for the following chapters of this volume, as well as for further empirical studies on the impact of crises on EU policies and politics more generally. Following these considerations, the chapter outlines and explains the volume’s structure which considers (1) crises related to the legal and democratic foundations of the EU; (2) the EU’s role and behaviour as an international actor in a changing world; and (3) the origins and impacts of crises in various EU policy areas.

Setting the scene: Crisis as the new normal in the EU?

When EU member states signed the Treaty of Lisbon in 2007, they did not anticipate the manifold crises that would ensue over the course of the following years. Instead of the intended consolidation of a Union which had just gone through its biggest round of enlargements, the EU faced the financial and economic crises of 2007 – 2008, the European debt crisis of the early 2010s, the Arab Spring and ensuing instability in the EU’s wider neighbourhood, Russia’s annexation of Crimea and subsequently rising tensions in the EU’s Eastern neighbourhood, the Brexit referendum of 2016 and its aftermath, the so-called ‘migration crisis’ of 2015 – 17, strained transatlantic relations under US President Donald Trump, the global repercussions of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Taliban’s takeover in Afghanistan, as well as internal threats to the EU’s fundamental principles, values and legal order, and most recently Russia's re-invasion of and war in Ukraine, to name only some of the most impactful events. Beyond these, a number of more long-term and slowly evolving developments, such as the ever-increasing impact of the climate emergency, as well as the intensification of the EU’s so-called rule of law crisis have further put the EU’s system and its internal cohesion under strain.

These events and developments have pushed EU policy-making in many areas into a permanent mode of crisis management. In this context, political and institutional actors often had to prioritise one crisis over another and weigh the urgencies of (re)action against each other. They felt pressured to acknowledge rising tensions and increasing levels of politicization in more and more emotionally charged public, economic, and political debates when making decisions on short- as well as long-term policies. These tensions and the ensuing politicization often developed alongside, or were shaped by, the rise of ‘Eurosceptic’ political positions at the national level, which have increased sharply since the 1990s (Down & Wilson 2008).

Accordingly, policy-making in the EU has been shaped – if not dominated – by the above-mentioned wide variety of endogenous and exogenous crises in recent years, both in areas with well-established EU competences and in areas for which the treaties provide only fragmentary, if any, EU involvement, yet in which calls for a unified European response arose under the impression of events unforeseen by any treaty or piece of legislation. As a consequence, European integration has evolved in different ways and speeds within different policy areas, as a growing corpus of literature on EU crisis response and on differentiated integration in the EU shows (see also Chapter 4 by Leruth). In a similar vein, different actors' involvement in European policy-making and resulting power balances have changed frequently, but not necessarily in a lasting manner, or in a way that is synchronized across policy areas over the course of the last years.

It is precisely these various dynamics that this volume seeks to examine, contextualise, and conceptualise. In so doing, it aims to provide a research guide that will help develop a deeper understanding of EU policy-making under the impression of (poly)crisis both in the past and future, as current and ongoing global developments and scientific predictions give little reason to expect smoother, less crisis-informed sailing in European politics for years to come. To this end, this introductory chapter offers a conceptual toolkit for further research on EU policy-making under strain.

Most of the strain arising out of the various crises identified above not only affects the EU system in and of itself but also has repercussions at the national level below and for the international community above the EU’s political system. Nonetheless, to provide a clearer focus, this chapter and ultimately this edited volume place the EU level at the core of analysis. While there are important interactions between EU-level politics and policy and those at other levels, and such interactions are indeed considered throughout the volume, the actual relevance of EU politics and the interconnectedness of its crisis governance across different types of strain can arguably be best explored when focusing on the EU system as its own level of analysis.

The remainder of this introductory chapter is structured as follows: Building on a discussion of key terms and concepts, the central section of the chapter develops a conceptual framework for the analysis of European crisis governance, both for the following chapters of this volume and for empirical studies on the impact of crises on EU policies and politics more generally. Following these considerations, a section elaborates on how the contributions to the volume are embedded in and add to this framework, and explains their grouping in three topical parts – on the legal and democratic fundaments of the EU (1), the EU’s role and behaviour as an international actor in a changing world (2), and the impact of select crises on specific European policy areas (3) – and provides an overview of the themes and developments covered by the individual contributions.

Conceptualising crisis and European-level responses

Crises have often been framed as fundamental challenges to European integration, questioning not merely the EU's ability to thrive but to survive in the face of unexpected events and developments with far-reaching political, economic and social repercussions (for a state-of-the art discussion of the literature on EU crises see Riddervold et al. 2021b; also Davis Cross 2017). Yet, this black-and-white framing of crisis as a fundamental challenge to European integration has arguably prevented scholars from developing a more fine-grained conceptualisation of crisis phenomena and their impact on EU politics and policies.

Davis Cross (2017, 24; emphasis in the original) undertakes a fundamental step in this direction by distinguishing “crisis and existential crisis”, with the former being a state of affairs “constructed through negative and heightened characterizations of events involving conflict”, and the latter being understood (in the context of EU crises) as “marked by widespread belief that the EU's very existence and/or core characteristics are seriously under threat”. Yet, even this dichotomous distinction does not go far enough, as it does not allow us to capture other relevant properties of crises, such as their origin or how the EU’s political system has reacted to them. The EU has – by now – demonstrated a convincing level of stamina in overcoming, or at least muddling through, the multitude of crises it has faced since its creation. Resulting European crisis responses have often been identified in the recent literature as a ‘failing forward’ of European integration (see e. g. Jones et al. 2021), where a lacklustre initial crisis response leads to further crises evoking a similar response, thus moving European integration forward if on an imperfect basis.

In light of the ever-changing, but arguably never entirely abating crisis context within which EU politics take...