Crisis and Integration : Explaining Regional Integration in Europe in Response to Transboundary Crises 1993-2015

Abstract

Regional polities, especially the European Union (EU), are ever more often confronted with severe economic, health, and security crises. Yet, the regional integration literature so far does not provide sufficiently systematic insights into the causal relationship between transboundary crises and regional integration. The present dissertation aims to close this research gap by tackling the research question: Do crises cause regional integration, and if yes, why and how? In its theoretical part, the study develops a four-part liberal intergovernmentalist ‘baseline model’ of the crisis-integration link, which is complemented with insights into crisis decision-making from the multiple streams framework. This model focuses on sudden shifts in public attention, activities of domestic policy entrepreneurs, governmental cost-benefit calculations, and intergovernmental bargaining. Alternative expectations are drawn from supranationalism and constructivism. Following the diverse case selection logic, the study tests all theoretical expectations in three in-depth case studies of crises that affected the EU between 1993 and 2015, namely the BSE Crisis, the Post-9/11 Crisis, and the Euro Crisis. The empirical processtracing analyses generally corroborate the expectations of the liberal intergovernmentalist baseline model. First, an unfolding economic, health, or security crisis unveils previously ignored legal-institutional deficiencies in the affected policy area and causes high public attention for the threat at the heart of the crisis. Fixing these deficiencies therefore becomes highly salient for member state governments. Second, well-organized domestic interest groups or political elites use the resulting ‘window of opportunity’ to approach their governments with proposals for policy change. These proposals vary according to the cross-national distribution of integration costs and benefits. Third, governments calculate the material and ratification costs of the proposals and select the least costly ones for the interstate negotiations with their fellow partners. Finally, governments engage in hard intergovernmental bargaining on legislative changes in the regional polity’s primary and/or secondary law. In view of the high material and ratification costs of no agreement and with regard to the difficulties to ii effectively resolve transboundary problems through national actions, governments usually adopt policy change that actually deepens vertical integration. Apart from these findings in support of the baseline model, the case studies also unveil important divergences from liberal intergovernmentalist expectations. First, supranational actors may exert significant influence on interstate negotiations in policy areas that are already marked by a high degree of integration at the crisis outset. This lends support to the supranationalist theory of regional integration. Second, in line with constructivist expectations, ideational concerns and deep-rooted policy paradigms may influence governmental preference formation if an extremely severe crisis like the Euro Crisis shakes the core of a regional polity. Finally, the primary and secondary law changes that are adopted in crisis times do not necessarily represent sustainable policy equilibriums for the longer term. Instead, member states agree on insufficient lowest common denominator solutions, or fail to implement the adopted reforms when the crisis pressure decreases. This paves the way for new crises in the affected policy areas, so that regional integration is continuously ‘failing forward’. With these findings, the present study contributes to the current debate on crises and integration in the regional integration literature. Beyond that, it also adds to the literatures on EU public policy and crisis management more generally.