Month: October 2015

Is the Eurocrisis here to stay? Wolfgang Streeck and Lea Elsässer highlight one of the main structural impediments to an economically and fiscally healthy Eurozone, the pronounced economic disparities between the Eurozone’s centre and its periphery. Read their recent article “Monetary disunion: the domestic politics of euroland” published in the Journal of European Public Policy to learn how the Eurozone’s entrenched internal heterogeneity may turn its future politics into an “ugly tug-of-war over entitlements and obligations to international financial solidarity”.

While citizens’ identification with the EU tends to be quite shallow in normal times, prospects for identifying with the EU in times of crisis are expectedly thin. Alina Polyakova and Neil Fligstein show that citizens from the EU member states hit hardest by Europe’s recession tend to disfavour European solutions and instead turn to their national governments to protect them from austerity advocated by supranational authorities. Read their recent article “Is European integration causing Europe to become more nationalist? Evidence from the 2007–9 financial crisis” published in the Journal of European Public Policy to explore how Europe’s financial and economic crisis has shaped EU citizens’ (dis-)affection for European integration and their national identities.

What shapes they dynamics and trajectories of EU integration? While the question is as old as the European integration project, new answers are abound: ‘New intergovernmentalists’ re-discover the dominance of governments at the expense of supranational actors; the principle of ‘ever closer union’ has had to give way to differentiated integration; and mass publics put constraints on what kind of European policies elites can negotiate in Brussels and at home. Philipp Genschel and Markus Jachtenfuchs argue that these developments reflect a common cause: the integration of core state powers, by which they mean “the increasing involvement of EU institutions in key functions of sovereign government including money and fiscal affairs, defence and foreign policy, migration, citizenship and internal security.” Read their recent article “More integration, less federation: the European integration of core state powers” to understand how the integration of core state powers has not consolidated a nascent European federation, but instead fuelled the EU’s fragmentation.

Months of bruising negotiations among EU leaders to avert economic and financial collapse in Greece may have prevented ‘Grexit’ (for now), but they have not eliminated the possibility of ‘Graccident’. Snap elections in September restored a parliamentary majority led by SYRIZA and allowed Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras to silence dissidents within his own party. Yet, any attempt to implement the reforms and meet the creditors’ demands still hinges on the capacity of a weak Greek administration and the Prime Minister’s resolve to overcome domestic resistance. Read George Tsebelis’ analytic narrative “Lessons from the Greek crisis” published in the Journal of European Public Policy to gain an inside view into the political dynamics of Greece’s third bailout negotiations and learn about the conclusions European policy-makers can draw therefrom.