SISP Conference 2022

The aim of this paper deals with the relations between Ukrainian political parties and their counterparts at the European Union level. Party politics at the European Union (EU) level is characterized by the presence of two main party actors: they are the Political Groups in the European Parliament (EPPGs) and the European Political Parties (EuPPs). The EU party system is influenced by the relations that occur between these two actors, on the one hand, and the national parties of the national parties of the EU Member States (MS), on the other (Katz, Mair 1993; Bardi 2005). However, lacking the EPPGs and EUPPs of direct contact with European voters, they rely on national parties for this aspect. Obviously, the UE faces can vice versa furnish to national parties with some assets they would hardly obtain elsewhere. In fact, EPPGs and EUPPs have direct contacts with the EU institutions, they are able to coordinate the multinational electoral campaigns and the EP parliamentarians and, in some cases, they can also provide top-down political legitimacy to national parties. The latter function is particularly useful for newly born national parties or parties with little legitimacy within their own national political system. Furthermore, the EU party actors help also to legitimize parties coming from new member states or from EU candidate countries (Cianciara 2016). The literature has studied many cases of affiliation (and disaffiliation) of national parties to their EU counterparts (von dem Berge, Poguntke 2012; Wientzek 2019; Gherghina, von dem Berge 2018; Chryssogelos 2017; Mikucka-Wójtowicz 2016). The Ukrainian national parties are not exception from this perspective: for this reason, they are targeted by EU political parties and, vice versa, they also compete each other in order to approach the EU counter parts, with the aim at increasing their international and national legitimization. The 2022 war between Russia and Ukraine has improved the Ukrainian interest to obtain the support by the Western international organizations, such the Nato and the EU, but has also reinforced the scope of strengthening the transnational relations between sectors of the Ukrainian civil society and of the Western European one. In this context, new relations between Ukrainian political parties and the EU have been proposed or even established. Amongst the several cases, the most known is the recent accession of President Volodymir Zelensky’s party, Servor the People, to the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats in Europe (ALDE). This paper aims to provide an interpretative framework of the relationships between Ukrainian parties and the EU parties, starting from the reconstruction of the events that characterized the affiliation of the various Ukrainian parties to their European referents. Valuable sources of this will be official records of the EU-level and of national parties, newspapers and the secondary literature. Consequently, I will investigate why and how some EPPGs and the EuPPs (mainly those belonging to the Liberal and the Christian-Democrat families) have been more successful in strengthening their links with the Ukrainian parties, while others (mainly of the Social-democrat, Left and Green families) have been less efficient in creating these transnational relations.

Democracy is struggling with current rapid changes and its worldwide backslide is a consensual conclusion reached by academics and international organisations. For the first time in two decades, autocracies outnumber democratic regimes and the majority of world population now lives under non-democratic ruling systems. Challenges arise from diverse domains: populism, digital technologies, disinformation, economic crisis, migrations, pandemics, terrorism, gender equality, minorities, inclusiveness, new (sometimes incipient) forms of multi-level governance and many others put pressure on the democratic system. Within the scope of this wave, the European Union has recently watched, also for the first time, one of its member-states backsliding into an autocratic regime, very seriously affecting the EU’s persuasive role as a norm diffuser of certain values, including democracy and Human Rights. Therefore, how have EU member states performed in terms of democratic quality and what may be the causes behind that trend? In order to find some evidences to answer these questions, the present research will aggregate data of different international indices of democratic quality over the last 10 years for all the 27 member-states of the EU and to compare their evolution with the worldwide trend; secondly, to conduct a systematic literature revision of the causes of democratic erosion across the EU. Thus, methodologically, a mixed-method approach follows, including a quantitative analysis of the above-mentioned indices, as well as an interpretative, qualitative strategy with the systematic literature revision. By the end of the research, the main purpose is to understand the overall performance of EU member states in terms of democratic quality and their inclusion in the overall trend of democratic erosion, as well as systematise the academic efforts to find possible explanations for this phenomenon.

The current transition phase of the world political order is an opportunity to re-examine the topicality of the EU's role, partly self-attributed, as a global player. The paper examines this topic on the basis of IR theories of world power and order change. The invasion of Ukraine called on EU institutions and governments to make a kind of check up on their own engagement in world politics. Like almost all countries of the world at the time of the transition of order, European countries are called upon to position themselves on the stage where coalitions of states confront each other both on the way out of disorder and on the choice of the future world order. Verifying, and changing if appropriate, one's position on the world order means discussing priority collective problems, institutions and policies desired to deal with such problems, and grouping with states that share the imagined future order. This paper examines EU documents highlighting the U-turn effect the war in Ukraine has on EU countries' foreign policy. However, sharing the response to Russia continues to be a tortuous, difficult, and not fully achieved process. Differing views persist on the EU's position on coalition policy and the next world order.

The situation at the EU's borders with Belarus and Ukraine is but the last of a series of events showing the ever growing relevance of migration for the EU. Migration is the context in which more than anywhere else the EU’s core values have been put under strain by securitization and criminalization practices. A lot of ink has been spent to underline how the EU’s efforts to control immigration have enabled severe violations of human rights at its borders and beyond. The aim of this paper is to place this debate in the broader context of a normative reflection on the crisis of the liberal order. Blurring the divide between political theory and international relations, the paper identifies three different understandings of what a legitimate liberal policy of migration would be and explores which of these understanding is the most coherent with the EU’s historical developments and self-identification. It proceeds then analyzing the embedded legitimizing claims behind the the EU migration system of governance, compares the coherence of such claims with the EU’s self-identification, and eventually derives implications in terms of the EU’s stance in the liberal world order (and its crisis).

European political parties and media have often scapegoated the European Union (EU) as responsible for unpopular or unsuccessful decision-making. As a heated and heavily politicized issue that was widely portrayed as a "crisis", irregular migration is no exception. Soaring human mobility flows across the Mediterranean have severely affected support for the EU, often blamed as unable to enforce its external borders and ensuring solidarity by redistributing refugees across member states. The structure and magnitude of these narratives, however, have never been examined in depth. By providing a systematic content analysis of Italian, Spanish, and Maltese newspapers covering over 8 million words and the eight years timespan between 2013 and 2020, our paper fills this gap. Specifically, we identify the key frames, roles, and policy narratives underlying the portrayal of specific European actors, including Frontex, the European Commission, Germany, France, and the countries and leaders of the Visegrad group. We show that, overall, lack of EU solidarity is the prevalent frame in Italian, Maltese and Spanish newspapers alike, followed by the alleged inefficiency of European actors and by the humanitarian implications of dysfunctional border management. Accordingly, the EU and its key actors and figures are regularly portrayed as either villains, who deliberately refrain from solving the migration "crisis", or wimps who are too weak and divided to take effective action. These narratives appear remarkably consistent across countries, over time, and newspapers with different ideological orientation.

The involvement of third countries in the management of migratory flows to the European Union (EU) has attracted an impressive body of literature. Yet, while most scholars investigate the process of externalization as mainly related to migration governance, in fact the so-called ‘external dimension’ (ED) of migration policies has increasingly featured as a crucial aspect that affects asylum, the EU governance of international protection and its capacity to comply with the inherent international regime. As new cooperation agreements are introduced with countries of origin and transit, or as existing cooperation tools do evolve, asylum-seekers’ mobility and their capacity to enter Europe and make protection claim is inevitably affected. Especially when externalization practices take the form of extraterritorial migration control, people on the move’s possibility to apply for international protection is greatly challenged. In this sense, a key question emerges: does the external dimension of EU migration policies have an impact on the number of asylum applications to the EU? Or, to put it differently, is the external dimension relevant in explaining the variation in the number of asylum applications over time? The goal of this article is to address these questions. Theoretically, it builds upon the literature on externalization and how this gets entangled with asylum and international protection. To analyse the impact of the external dimension of migration governance on asylum-seeking, we rely on an original dataset of all international agreements signed between the EU and third countries between 2000 and 2020 that include migration among their objects, and on official statistics on asylum applications in the EU.

Migration governance of the EU and the development of its external dimension have been relevant for decades, but increasingly so in recent years, after the EU experience and response to the so-called migration crisis of 2015. The process of externalisation of this specific policy is apparent in the institutionalised use of partnerships with third states. In addition, research shows that policy responses to the European migration crisis have been increasingly characterized by deals and bargains. In this regard, the EU-Turkey Statement has been cited as one primary example of this transformation in refugee policies, where protection bargaining has become the norm. Controversy over the EU-Turkey Statement centres on its adhesion to international law and respect of human rights, with a number of scholars claiming that the deal violates international law. Given that the EU has often been conceptualised as a normative power, it is puzzling that this international actor, which often puts human rights concerns at the forefront, could conclude a deal that arguably precisely violates these norms and puts EU normative power at risk. As a result, the key to the puzzle presented in this paper lies in the mismatch between EU rhetoric and EU action. Through this paper, I identify and explain the gap between what the EU preaches and what it practices in the specific case of EU external migration governance in the context of the 2015 migration crisis through the lenses of the political theory of organized hypocrisy. The theory, which focuses on mechanisms within international organizations, has only recently been tested on a case at the European level. This paper aims at giving further evidence that its insights can be efficiently applied to the EU as an international organization. This piece of research could be a starting point for further study of migration policy gaps linked to the external dimensions of migration policy.

Despite notable exceptions (Schmitt 2010; Dolný and Baboš 2015), it is commonly assumed among scholars that the traditional stance displayed by both voters and politicians with respect to European integration progressively gave way to the emergence of a progressive attitude’s misalignment between the two from the 1900s onwards (Real-Dato 2017). Within this new socio-political context, several studies relying on different methodologies and data (Mattila and Raunio 2006, 2012; Costello et al. 2012; McEvoy 2012; Sanders and Toka 2013) showed how this ‘sleeping giant’ (Van der Eijk and Franklin 2004) eventually gave rise to the notorious mass-elite ‘gap’ on European integration. Thus, despite the hindrances concerning the possibility to reach a systematic understanding that were pointed out by Pareschi et al. (2022), the literature at-large managed to prove how the political elites tend to present a pro-EU bias, which in turn contrasts with the rather contentious attitudes of the public opinion when it comes to the EU and European integration. Given these premises, the present study aims to offer two main contributions with respect to the present topic. Firstly, it seeks to address the aforementioned deep-rooted assumptions of the literature by conducting a longitudinal mass-elite congruence analysis on European integration at the supranational level spanning from the first direct European elections to the late 2010s. The primary objective of this endeavour rests on the opportunity not only to confirm or refute the presence of this ‘gap’, but also to observe its evolution over time. As can be noted in Pareschi et al. (2022), many authors focusing on mass-elite congruence at the supranational level mostly relied on single surveys (Belchior 2010; Costello et al. 2012; Dolný and Baboš 2015) or events (Belchior 2013), while longitudinal studies are relatively fewer in number (i.e. Real-Dato 2017). In this sense, this study aims to offer a more wide-reaching investigation that might be able to observe the attitudinal shift of voters and politicians from the golden era of the ‘permissive consensus’ (Inglehart 1970) to the ongoing phase of ‘constraining dissensus’ (Hooghe and Marks 2009). Secondly, my research intends to investigate mass-elite congruence by examining pro-European and Eurosceptic voters and politicians, thus seeking to verify whether or not the aforementioned mass-elite ‘gap’ is present when separating the two opposing views on European integration. This is of paramount importance especially in light of the progressive mainstreaming of Euroscepticism, a phenomenon that began with the ratification of the TEU and reached its apex in the aftermath of the Great Recession (Brack and Startin 2015). In order to fulfil this goal, the paper relies on elite and voter data from 1979, 1994, 2009 and 2016 through the usage of both the EES and EUENGAGE datasets, on the one hand, and the methodology on ideological congruence from Golder and Stramski (2010), on the other. Initially, the study will descriptively analyse the results of the data through mass-elite congruence via a many-to one analysis; then, a series of regressions will be conducted in order to confirm the trends shown in the descriptive section. Through these undertakings, the present study expects to both confirm the presence of this ‘gap’ and establish how it changed over time. When it comes to the pro/anti-EU dimension, finally, the research expects pro-European public opinion to be less integrationist than pro-EU politicians, while Eurosceptic voters should tend to be more integrationist when compared to their politicians. Belchior, A. M. (2010). ‘Ideological Congruence among European Political Parties’, The Journal of Legislative Studies, 16:1, 121–42. Belchior, A. M. (2013). Explaining left–right party congruence across European party systems: a test of micro-, meso-, and macro-level models. Comparative Political Studies, 46(3), 352-386. Brack, N., Startin, N. (2015). Introduction: Euroscepticism, from the margins to the mainstream. International Political Science Review, 36, 239-249. Costello R, Thomassen J and Rosema M (2012) European parliament elections and political representation: policy congruence between voters and parties. West European Politics 35, 1226–1248. Dolný B and Baboš P (2015) Voter–Representative Congruence in Europe: A loss of institutional influence?. West European Politics 38, 1274–1304. Golder, Matt, and Jacek Stramski (2010). ‘Ideological Congruence and Electoral Institutions’, American Journal of Political Science, 54:1, 90–106. Hooghe L., Marks, G. (2009). A Postfunctionalist Theory of European Integration: From Permissive Consensus to Constraining Dissensus. British Journal of Political Science, 39 (1), 1-23. Inglehart, R. (1970) ‘Cognitive Mobilization and European Identity’. Comparative Politics, Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 45–70. Mattila M and Raunio T (2006) Cautious voters – supportive parties: opinion congruence between voters and parties on the EU dimension. European Union Politics 7, 427–449. Mattila M and Raunio T (2012) Drifting further apart: national parties and their electorates on the EU dimension. West European Politics 35, 589–606. McEvoy C (2012) Unequal representation in the EU: a multi-level analysis of voter-party congruence in EP elections. Representation 48,83–99. Pareschi, A., Giglioli, M. F. N., & Baldini, G. (2022). Caught between sovereignty and solidarity? A multidimensional revisitation of EU mass–elite congruence. Italian Political Science Review/Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica, 1-21. Real-Dato, J. 2017. Citizens-Representatives Congruence Concerning The European Union: Evolution During the Eurozone Crisis. Corvinus Journal of Sociology and Social Policy 8 (3S): 85–112. Sanders D and Toka G (2013) Is anyone listening? Mass and elite opinion cueing in the EU. Electoral Studies 32,13–25. Schmitt H (2010) Better Than It Used to Be? New Evidence on the Congruence of Voters and Their National MPs Regarding the Issue of European Integration. Paper prepared for the APSA Annual Meeting, Washington, DC, September. Van der Eijk, Cees, Mark N. Franklin and Wouter van der Brug (1999) ‘Policy Preferences and Party Choice’, in Hermann Schmitt and Jacques Thomassen (eds) Political Representation and Legitimacy in the European Union, pp. 161–85. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

This paper analyzes the impact of the EU party-voter distance on party support. To this goal, we focus on the party-voter dyad and we analyze patterns of EU issue voting in the European elections. We make use of a combination of data from CHES and EES to construct the distance measures. We show that voters are mobilized on the EU, with EU party positions operating as a driving factor of the voting preferences of the electorate, with a differentiated impact on the pro-European and the Eurosceptic parties. Finally, we demonstrate that, in the EU countries, the EU conflict consistently contributed to determining the voting preferences of citizens and to aggregating election results.

The article sheds light on the political consequences of two new well-entrenched labour market divides for the process of European integration and the political feasibility of ‘social’ Europe. In detail, literature agrees that the shift to post-industrial economy, the labour market flexibilization, the possibility to outsource production in developing economies, automation and technological change made two segments of the labour force particularly vulnerable: the so-called ‘outsiders’ (precarious workers and unemployed individuals) and the ‘globalization/modernization losers’ (workers exposed to outsourcing and/or technological change). However, there is no consensus on how these labour market risks, further exacerbated by the pandemic and the related economic crisis, contribute to structuring new lines of conflict and political demands at the EU level. Exploiting the first wave of the SOLID original mass survey on 16 European countries, the article fills this gap by investigating the relationship between respondents' exposure to these labour market risks and their attitudes towards the process of European integration by distinguishing between its economic dimension (i.e. EU integration as a potential threat to jobs and social security) and its cultural one (i.e. EU integration as a potential threat to the collective identity and lifestyle of the native population). This distinction allows verifying whether marginalization and economic distress endured in the labour market overflow the economic dimension pushing vulnerable workers towards sovereigntist stances also on the cultural dimension of the EU integration process. Lastly, the article zooms on the policy areas these two segments of vulnerable workers would like the EU to take a leading role in a near future to win their trust. In so doing, the article overcomes the polarized interpretation of Euroscepticism as a mere threat to the EU integration process, emphasizing its potential pars construens for the project of a more ‘social’ Europe.

During the past decade, the European Union (EU) witnessed a growing tension between the social and economic dimensions of integration as a consequence of the Eurozone and the refugee crises. The increasing politicization of EU issues in national political arenas that led to the rise of Eurosceptic parties mostly revolved around EU solidarity. Against this background, this article investigates the congruence between voters and incumbent members of national parliaments on the highly contentious aspects of EU solidarity. First, the article maps the extent to which national political elites share similar views with their voters and compares elite- and voters-level EU solidarity polarization. Secondly, we assess which factors contribute to explaining MPs-voters congruence at the party level. Employing original data from elite and mass surveys conducted in six EU countries by the REScEU project, we find that both voters and MPs express a high level of support for policies strengthening European solidarity in the Eurozone periphery. Instead, voters of core member states share more positive preferences than their national representatives. Furthermore, this gap is higher between radical-right Eurosceptic MPs and their voters than between voters and MPs of other parties.

The Covid-19 crisis put under stress the EU member states’ capacity to tackle the shortcomings created by the pandemic and called into question the EU’s capacity to act autonomously and timely in order to deploy a coordinated and effective response. Differently from the past crises, the EU has launched a new instrument of cross-national solidarity, the Next Generation EU, to cope with the severe socio-economic consequences of the pandemic. An instrument that on one hand aimed to solve (part of) the socio-economic effects of the pandemic but that on the other hand could also trigger paramount changes in terms of EU authority and capacity to autonomously rise and redistribute resources, paving the way to the realization of the so-called “transfer Union”. Previous studies have framed this strategy, supported by the EU institutions and the most important member states’ leaders, as a choice of polity maintenance, that is the attempt to safeguard the integrity and the effectiveness of the supranational political system. What instead has been overlooked are the stances expressed by the so-called Eurosceptic, allegedly Eurosceptic and all those political actors that express different nuances of criticism against the EU and the Commission. Considering the innovative nature of this instrument and the opening of a new phase in which solidarity seems to have substituted austerity, it is natural to expect the expression of different kinds of reactions to this innovation and, consequently, different trajectories of politicization in this phase of EU politics. An exceptional crisis followed by an innovative response represents a powerful catalyser for further politicization. Is it possible to trace the presence of a critical but “systemic” opposition alongside an “anti-systemic” opposition? Moreover, in case of the presence of different patterns of opposition, is it possible to trace the different ideational dimensions of this contestation and, consequently, the different goals? Considering the peculiar nature of this crisis, we can reasonably state that what distinguishes the different models of contestation is the different evaluation of two dimensions that have a prominent role in every political system - even in a supranational one -: legitimacy and solidarity. By studying a sample of parliamentary speeches through qualitative discourse analysis, the paper aims to track which type of contestation, if any, has occurred during European Parliament debates concerning the Next Generation EU and the approbation of the new EU Multiannual Financial Framework. In a nutshell, the research will try to determine if within the EP have emerged different patterns of contestation about the EU reaction against the pandemic and the shift of the EU towards a “transfer union”, that is patterns of opposition that evaluate differently the idea that the EU can gain new powers and competencies, improve member states coordination and, finally, that this crisis could represent the critical juncture by which institutionalize intra EU solidarity and boost EU institutions legitimacy. The analysis of parliamentary speeches can be extremely helpful to disentangle the ideational peculiarities that have been built around the legitimacy and the solidarity dimensions and, consequently, isolate different models of political contestation within the EP. The selected discourses will be those of the MEPs who belong to parties that are not considered mainstream and/or are not part of the legislative majority that supports the commission. This choice allows us to effectively have a broader view about party positions within the EP and detect the (eventual) structuration of different stances that involve both the EU response to Covid-19 and the implications of the EU integration trajectory. This study will contribute to understanding the pattern of EU politicisation triggered by the pandemic, underlining the drivers and models of different ideational oppositions within the EP.

The European Union is considered the archetype of depoliticisation processes due to its institutional architecture and the multilevel governance model, which over the years has proved weak enough to be sacrificed, in the years of the Eurozone crisis, to the advantage of governance economic. In the last years, the literature has focused on the concept of depoliticisation and, starting from the early 2000s, it helped to bring the concept into the public debate affecting the institutions. Since the Eurozone crisis onwards, the European Union has been through moments of depoliticisation and politicisation: the inadequate economic governance, the inability to respond to the citizens requests, in terms of measures supporting both well-being and welfare of society, such as the absence of a European political leadership are structural elements that, still today, contribute to framing the European Union in the depoliticisation processes. However, the arrival of Mario Draghi at the European Central Bank (ECB) set in motion a moment of politicisation of the European Union, helping to promote its positive perception to the eyes of citizens and to promote the development of the European integration process. In this research, the analysis of Mario Draghi's political language allows us to accredit the reflections and the theories about the existence of processes – or we can say moments - of depoliticisation and politicisation in the European Union. In a climate of uncertainty and the mistrust of the crisis years, Mario Draghi presents himself as the one and only political leader compared to the other institutional characters involved, being able to integrate himself in the EU dialogue and to promote, at the same time, a new European narrative.

This paper focuses on how the multiple global crises affecting the EU during the last decade has implemented EU integration through policy-making. Within this scenario, where progresses and fails of integration occur without new treaties, the politicization of global issues become crucial to understand EU policy formation and the transformations of EU integration as a whole. How do different politicization dynamics affect integration in policy making? Has cleavage structure a role within these processes? Are policy types influent in integration though policy making? Our research aims to address these questions by focusing on the role of public support for EU integration though policy-making. We purpose a theoretical framework on the dynamics linking the general public to political elites within the integration process, during politicizations phases. We then analyze support for policy making to strength EU integration, both at the elite and the general public level in the three main crises of the last decade: namely the Euro crisis, the refugee reception crisis and the SARS-COV2 pandemic. Our preliminary results are consistent with a policy-making politicization model where also the type of policy at stake seem to play a key role in integration.

Luca Cabras luca.cabras@unimi.it Ph.D. student NASP – University of Milan For years, trade negotiations have been a minor issue for European citizens. Seen as primarily technical affairs, they were characterized by low public salience and went largely unnoticed by the media. Political conflicts around trade liberalization were confined to clashes between groups representing opposing economic interests, while the broader public was only rarely involved. The absence of politicization was consistent with the notion of “permissive consensus”: pro-integration policies conducted by executives with the tacit support or disregard of the European public to benefit an alleged greater good (Lindberg & Scheingold 1970). But the permissive consensus on trade liberalization progressively eroded during the first decade of the 21st-century. The negotiations of a series of new EU preferential trade agreements (PTAs) generated a significant level of political turmoil and mobilized a wide range of non-economic actors. Unlike in the past, they were no longer a domain reservé of executive actors and parochial economic interest groups, but “went from being contested amongst a relatively small group of actors largely out of public view to being actively challenged in the public sphere” (Young 2019, p.2). This new trend is best exemplified by the cases of the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) with Canada, and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) with the United States. The politicization of both agreements has indeed been considerable. They quickly became salient to the general European public and triggered an unprecedented level of domestic contestation by broad segments of society with highly polarized positions. These episodes led many scholars to depict the EU trade policy as an increasingly politicized policy domain (Eliasson & Garcia-Duran Huet 2019; Laursen & Roederer-Rynning 2017; Young 2017). Yet, this claim does not receives unanimous support. A closer examination reveals indeed that the politicization of trade negotiations is not constant, but varies considerably both over time and across contemporaneous deals (De Bièvre & Poletti 2020; Leblond & Viju-Miljusevic 2019; Meunier & Czesana 2019). Several studies now agree that only a minority of PTAs inspired a high degree of politicization (see Young 2019). Whereas the TTIP and CETA led to strong domestic contestation and mass mobilization, negotiations with other trade partners - e.g. South Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Singapore, Australia - took place in the quasi-indifference of European citizens. This trend somewhat echoes what Hutter et. al (2016) in their study on the politicization of European integration call “punctuated politicization”, characterized by a significant variation across time, context, and country. This rise the important question: why are EU trade agreement negotiations more politicized in some cases than in others? Scholars researching this topic have primarily devoted their attention to the “black box” of politicization. In particular, they have tried to unravel the internal dynamics of this phenomenon looking at the strategies employed by political actors and interest groups to mobilize the European public opinion and increase the salience of trade negotiations (Meunier & Roederer-Rynning 2020; Bouza & Oleart 2018; Chan & Crawford 2017). These studies, which share a strong preference for agential explanations, came with a major limitation. They focus almost exclusively on instances where politicization has taken place – i.e. TTIP, CETA, and ACTA. As pointed out by Leblond and Viju-Miljusevic (2019), “it is not sufficient to analyze the contested nature of EU trade politics in particular trade agreement negotiations” (p.1841). Drawing inferences from such a limited - and skewed – set of cases has indeed the pernicious effect of exaggerating the extent and magnitude of the politicization process. Conversely, to gain a deeper understanding of this phenomenon – and to determine the causes of its variations – it is necessary to examine the factors that result in trade negotiations being politicized in some cases but not in others. In the present study, I tackle these gaps and contribute to the extant literature by directing my attention not to agents but to the structural background conditions of politicization - that is, those conditions that create opportunities for the politicization of trade negotiations in the first place. Drawing on the works of De Bièvre and Poletti (2020) and Meunier and Czesana (2019), I acknowledge that hardly a single factor suffices in and of itself to produce politicization (De Bièvre and Poletti 2020; Meunier and Czesana 2019). On the contrary, I expect them to unfold their explanatory power in full when in conjunction with others. Against this background, I put forward a number of plausible explanations (or causal mechanisms) and test them on a medium N-case sample through a Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA). This methodological approach is especially apt for addressing the causal complexity of my research question, as it allows to determine the combination(s) of conditions that lead(s) to the outcome and test whether the considered explanatory factors represent necessary and/or sufficient conditions for the politicization of EU trade agreement negotiations. References Bouza, L. and Oleart, A. (2018) “From the 2005 constitution’s ‘permissive consensus’ To TTIP’s ‘empowering dissensus’: the EU as a playing field for Spanish civil society”, Journal of Contemporary European Research 14(2): 87–104 Chan, A.T. and Crawford, B.K. (2017) “The puzzle of public opposition to TTIP in Germany”, Business and Politics 19(4): 683–708. De Bièvre, D. and Poletti, A. (2020) "Towards Explaining Varying Degrees of Politicization of EU Trade Agreement Negotiations," Politics and Governance, 8(1): 243-253 Eliasson, L. F., and Garcia-Duran Huet, P. (2018) “TTIP negotiations: interest groups, anti-TTIP civil society campaigns and public opinion”, Journal of Transatlantic Studies, 16(2): 101-116 Hutter, S., E. Grande and H. Kriesi (2016) Politicising Europe: Integration and Mass Politics, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge. Laursen, F. and Roederer-Rynning, C. (2017) “Introduction: the new EU FTAs as contentious market regulation”, Journal of European Integration, 39(7): 763-779. Leblond, P. and Viju-Miljusevic, C. (2019) “EU trade policy in the twenty-first century: change, continuity and challenges”, Journal of European Public Policy, 26(12): 1836-1846 Lindberg, L.N. and Scheingold, S.A. (1970) Europe’s Would-Be Polity: Patterns of Change in the European Community, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Meunier, S. and Roederer-Rynning, C. (2020) “Missing in action? France and the politicization of trade and investment agreements”, Politics and Governance, 8(1): 312–324. Meunier, S. & Czesana, R. (2019) “From back rooms to the street? A research agenda for explaining variation in the public salience of trade policy-making in Europe”, Journal of European Public Policy, 26(12): 1847-1865 Siles-Brügge, G. (2011) “Resisting Protectionism after the Crisis: Strategic Economic Discourse and the EU-Korea Free Trade Agreement”, New Political Economy, 16 (5): 627-653. Young, A. R. (2019) “Two wrongs make a right? The politicization of trade policy and European trade strategy”, Journal of European Public Policy, 26(12): 1883-1899 Young, A. R. (2017) “European trade policy in interesting times”, Journal of European Integration, 39(7): 909-923.

The paper is a lead-in attempt at a connotative approach to the conceptual definition of the European Union’s (EU’s) so-called “existential crisis”. The recurrent framing of the latter as a “polycrisis” typically rests on compelling denotations referring to a series of difficult and dangerous junctures in specific policy areas, which combine with – and often exacerbate – a set of longer trends and transformations affecting the social and political foundations of the European integration process. That being so, the understanding of this set of critical events, together with their structural context, as a proper sequence or at least a combination constituting one polycrisis seems to hinge – apart from a remarkably tight timeframe – mainly on the cumulative endangering effects they produce on the EU’s functioning and structural coherence. The aim of the paper is to consider whether – starting from an analysis of the conceptual relations between the not-necessarily overlapping notions of “crisis” and “emergency” – a study à la Koselleck of the very changing semantics and pragmatics of the concepts of crisis in the European integration process’s social and political contexts over the last ten years or so may provide an effective connotation of the polycrisis. In observing the contingnt cultural values and practices associated with the EU, the paper tries to identify how and to what extent each of the latter’s components are actually understood as expression of decisive and radical indeterminacy – with (at least in principle) equally likely either extremely positive or negative results for the future of the Union.

Throughout the last decades, EU asylum policy has undergone continuous enhancements of competences, as well as it has faced numerous crises, resulting in one of the most dynamic policy areas of EU integration. Within scholarly debates, studies have focused on the analysis of EU asylum policy referring to theories of EU integration (neo-functionalism vs. liberal intergovernmentalism), to the institutional setting of the policy (supranational vs. intergovernmental), as well as to the transposition of the policy at the national level. Even though some scholars have engaged in bridging the fields of EU studies and public policy (as far as this specific policy area is concerned), still a big gap exists. This paper aims at filling this gap from a theoretical perspective. Due to the complexity of EU policymaking, the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) is considered to be the most suitable policy process framework in order to analyse EU asylum policy process, as well as policy change. Therefore, the present paper critically engages with the motivations supporting the former propositions, by outlining the main assumptions of the framework and their adaptability to the EU, as well as to EU asylum policy. Moreover, with the objective of accounting for the multiple crises faced by the EU – in general –, and by EU asylum policy subsystem – in particular – the paper draws on the crisis approach literature. More specifically, the paper integrates the ACF with the theorisation of creeping crisis, in order to thoroughly consider the effects that crises may have on policy change. Fulfilling such task, would not only lead to an array of assumptions specifically relating the ACF to EU policymaking, but also to a set of hypotheses to be empirically tested. Notwithstanding the fact that the hypotheses will be drawn to be empirically tested on EU asylum policy, it is supposed that they may be adapted to different EU policy areas, providing the tools for a more systematic analysis of EU policy process and policy change in times of crisis.

The outcome of the last Multi-Financial Framework (MFF) is frequently compared by many as a ´Hamiltonian Moment`, because the European Union (EU) substantially increased its borrowing and spending capacities. This paper argues that rather than diverting our view to the United States, we gain more by considering past European fiscal institutions, such as those of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC). Archival minutes from the negotiations between 1950 and 1951 show how during the discussions, Monnet successfully problematised and legitimised the High Authority’s fiscal independence and linked them to shared political, economic, and social aims. The delegates agree to create a very limited, but functioning European transfer mechanism for coal and steel workers and allow the High Authority to borrow and tax. However, they also set clear limits to the High Authority’s fiscal independence. Despite the narrowness of the financial resources available in the ECSC, a comparison between the different institutional structures show the institutional incompleteness and asymmetries of the new MFF and the backwardness of fiscal learning in the EU’s integration process overall.

The paper will assess the development of the European Union as a security actor in the context of successive crises. There will be a particular focus on the impact of the war in Ukraine and the corresponding response by EU institutions. Against the background of a prior trend of building up new capabilities and instruments in the different areas of security, the paper will assess the changes that have occurred in 2022. Looking at both the structural transformation - the changes in the geo-strategic environment in which the EU finds itself - and patterns of agency at the level of member states and EU institutions - the paper will seek to make statements about the changing nature of the EU as a security actor in the regional and global context. By way of conclusion, the paper will provide an outlook on future developments that can be expected as a consequence of the changes of 2022.

This paper examines the governance of fiscal regulation and financial assistance in the European Union (EU) during the Euro crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic. It adopts a ‘historical institutionalism’ framework to provide a theory-driven interpretation of institutional change following a large-scale exogenous shock. In terms of fiscal regulation, the paper looks at the rules governing the adoption, monitoring and enforcement of budgetary policies in EU Member States. In terms of financial assistance, it discusses the rules governing the disbursement and withdrawal of funding to the Member States in the context of crisis-management. The paper seeks to address the following questions: How did fiscal regulation and financial assistance work during the Euro crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic? Is there a change in the governance of fiscal regulation and financial assistance between the two crises? And if so, why? By relying on document analysis and semi-structured elite interviews, the paper argues that the rules-based EU ‘fiscal surveillance’ during the Euro crisis left room to ‘fiscal guidance’ in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, and that financial assistance moved from ‘unconstrained intergovernmentalism’ with the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) to ‘constrained supranationalism’ with the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF). Such a change in the governance of fiscal regulation and financial assistance owes much to an intra-crisis policy-learning process of the bargaining type.

This article examines the emergence of a distinct type of informal groups of EU member states in EU foreign policy. After decades of progressive Europeanisation, the Lisbon Treaty sought to further centralise member states’ foreign policies. Yet on several occasions informal groups of member states have steered EU foreign policy, often by interacting with non-EU actors in institutionalised international cooperation settings without receiving a formal mandate from EU institutions and/or other member states. Crucially, the informal groupings considered are an unprecedented phenomenon both in federal regimes and in international organisations. Drawing on the literatures on differentiated European integration and on informal governance, this article assesses the determinants and manifestations of informal groupings in EU foreign policy. To do this, it examines the EU approach to external conflicts and crises in the post-Lisbon era. In particular, it focuses on three sub-cases in Europe’s surroundings, namely Kosovo, Libya and Syria.

The introduction of the Spitzenkandidaten process has sparked a rich debate on the implications for the EU electoral process. At the same time, limited focus has been devoted to how the appointment procedure affects the Presidency from the perspective of inter-institutional relations and public legitimacy, questions that have grown in saliency overall in the post-Lisbon era and the aftermath of the Eurozone crisis. The paper develops an analytical framework for assessing the impact of leadership appointment on the effectiveness of decision-making of the European Commission. The conceptualization aims to facilitate the systematic study of how leadership selection affects four critical dimensions of EU politics: the public perception of EU leadership, the nature of executive-legislative relations during the President’s mandate and throughout the policy process, the role of party politics in EU decision-making and balance of power between intergovernmental and supranational institutions. In doing so, the paper seeks to make two contributions: first, it provides a methodology for the empirical assessment of the impact of recent changes in the process of leadership selection. Second, it provides a timely addition to the wider, theoretical debate on the parliamentarisation of EU democracy and the future trajectory of the integration process.

A major source of external pressure on the fiscal stance of governments are movements in sovereign bond premiums. These depend to a great extent on the assessment of macroeconomic outcomes and financial market conditions by international investors. Yet, fundamentals do not explain all of the investors’ sentiment. A large literature shows that the communications by central bankers – including the European Central Bank for Eurozone members – trigger tremendous, if not always predictable swings in bond yields. This paper argues that some visible actions by other European institutions, in particular, the European Commission, exert a similarly measurable effect. Our analysis, based on credit default swaps (CDSs) daily data for all EU member states between 2006 and 2020 studies the reactions of bond markets to two such actions: the opening and closing of Excessive Deficit Procedures and the yearly publication of Country-Specific Recommendations within 10 years of the existence of the European Semester.

Thirty years after the ‘party article’ in the Maastricht Treaty, which gave them ‘constitutional’ recognition, and almost twenty after Regulation 2004/2003, introducing a system of (mainly public) funding, the visibility of the Europarties in the EP elections remains weak and EU citizens still hardly know about their existence. Europarties remain fundamentally parties of parties and, despite their structural consolidation in Brussels, they have not been equipped to perform an ‘expressive function’ and act as representative agents of the EU citizens. Their national member parties are still keeping a very strong grip on the decision-making rules and the key organisational choices of their EU-level parties. Through an in-depth empirical analysis, based on official documents and original interviews with administrators of the Europarties, this paper places its in-depth focus on the new Europarty regulation – presented by the Commission in November 2020 – particularly the provisions regarding membership and funding, and the internal procedures which they adopted for selecting the Spitzenkandidaten. By analysing the organisational development of the Europarties, this paper argues that party politics in the EU takes studiously place without partisans, with the most recent reforms failing to ‘open up’ to the grassroot the Europarty organisations.

The role of ordoliberalism in the recent Euro crisis and its influence on the reforms of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) adopted in that period have been the subject of a wide academic debate for some years now. Three positions can be found in the literature. A first group of authors proposes what can be termed the ‘ordoliberalization’ thesis. During the crisis, the German government adopted a rule-based approach, oriented towards fiscal discipline and sound money, and wary of moral hazard. This clearly had to do with the long-standing German ordoliberal tradition, and since these preferences were reflected in the reforms, it is possible to speak of an ordoliberalization of the European economic governance. A second group of authors is sceptical of this thesis. The German preferences were more a matter of national interest and pragmatism, than of ideological commitment to ordoliberalism. Crucially, the reforms of the European economic governance find their roots in mainstream economics, not in this obscure and outdated German economic theory. A third group of authors takes an intermediate position, that can be defined ‘ordoliberalization by accident’. While the German government did not consciously pursue an ordoliberal agenda, the reforms of the EMU eventually did reflect an ordoliberal logic, because of the very logic of globalization and of European integration. For these authors, ordoliberalism works better as a descriptor rather than as an explanation: it hardly had any causal force on the reforms but helps clarifying their underlying logic. Based on the insights of Discursive Institutionalism on the role of ideas in politics, this paper contributes to the debate by investigating the influence of ordoliberal ideas in the reform process to assess whether and to which extent it is possible of speaking of an ordoliberalization of the European economic governance. To do so, it uses process-tracing to analyse the reform process of the EMU during the Euro crisis. In particular, the paper focuses on the reforms of the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) – the Six-pack, the Two-pack and the Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance (TSCG) – and on the establishment of the European Stability Mechanism (ESM). The paper argues the existence of a causal mechanism linking the ordoliberal ideas held by the German government to the EMU reforms. The analysis is based on a corpus of speeches by the then Chancellor (Angela Merkel) and Finance Minister (Wolfgang Schäuble), and on the documents of the Van Rompuy Task Force, one of the fora where the reforms were negotiated. The paper begins by briefly summarizing the principles of ordoliberalism. Ordoliberalism is a German variant of neoliberalism that focuses on the institutional conditions for a liberal order based on free markets. It conceives of economic policy first and foremost as Ordnungspolitik – a regulatory policy that establishes and maintains the framework conditions for a competitive market economy. The most relevant principles that underpin the Ordnungspolitik include fiscal discipline, sound money, and responsibility. In a supranational polity like the EU, the principle of (national) responsibility entails that the Member States must be held accountable for their actions (e.g., through sanctions if they breach the rules), and that the consequences of the choices of a Member State must not fall on the others: for instance, if fiscally profligate countries are hit by a debt crisis, the others should not be forced to pay for them. The paper, then, illustrates the causal mechanism. The first part of the causal mechanism reconstructs the ideas shared by the German government to establish whether they can be defined ordoliberal. In the German understanding, the crisis was caused both by the Member States and by the EMU institutional architecture. The (Southern) Member States put off the necessary but socially costly structural reforms needed to remain competitive in the global markets; rather, they sustained their uncompetitive economies through deficit spending. This led, on the one hand, to macroeconomic imbalances between competitive and uncompetitive Member States and, to the other, to the piling of unsustainable public debts, which exposed the Southern countries to the risks of sovereign debt crises. As the crisis broke out, the ECB was forced to step in through emergency monetary measures which bought time but threatened the stability of the single currency. All this was possible because the EMU institutional architecture, despite prescribing fiscal discipline, had no instruments to credibly enforce this principle by the Member States. The solution to the crisis, therefore, was to make the principle of fiscal discipline credible again by reforming the EMU regulatory framework, increasing sanctions and surveillance over the economic (and especially the fiscal) policies of the Member States, forcing the most indebted ones to reduce their debts. This regulatory approach based on the principles of national responsibility and fiscal discipline is consistent with the ordoliberal Ordnungspolitik. The main sponsor of ordoliberal ideas in the German executive was the finance minister Schäuble, who held a consistently ordoliberal position throughout the crisis and often asserted his belonging to the ordoliberal tradition. Chancellor Merkel had no direct links with the ordoliberal tradition, but her views on the crisis reflect to a large extent ordoliberal principles, although she widely used the concept of solidarity in her speeches. The second part of the causal mechanism assesses whether the ordoliberal ideas shaped the preferences of the German government. The analysis of the documents submitted by the German government to the Van Rompuy Task Force shows that the German position was consistent with an ordoliberal approach. As to the SGP reforms, the German government called for stricter rules, automatic sanctions, the introduction of the principle of balanced structural budgets in the national constitutions, a macroeconomic surveillance focused on deficit countries, and the expulsion of highly indebted countries from the Eurozone. The German government also claimed that the establishment of any permanent crisis resolution mechanism should be linked to a state resolution law that makes financial assistance conditioned to mandatory debt restructuring for highly indebted countries. The documents submitted to the Task Force, that illustrated the German preferences, were drafted by the Ministry of Finance headed by Schäuble. By comparing his position with that of his (social-democratic) predecessor, the paper argues that the (ordoliberal) ideas shared by Schäuble made a difference, and another, social-democratic finance minister might have behaved differently. The third and fourth parts of the causal mechanism show that the German government upheld its preferences in the relevant arena and that the reforms reflect these preferences to a certain extent. The European reforms were negotiated in a mainly intergovernmental arena (such as the Van Rompuy Task Force), where the German government was particularly active and, as the literature shows, acted as a leader. The paper discusses to what extent the reforms reflected the German preferences. They were the most reflected in the SGP reforms, which increased the surveillance over the fiscal policies of the Member States, reduced their political discretion, made the sanctions harsher and more automatic, and fostered the introduction of the principle of balanced structural budgets in the national constitutions, as the German government asked. As to the crisis resolution mechanism, the ESM did not include a state insolvency law, but the strict conditionality attached to financial assistance safeguarded the principles of national responsibility and of fiscal discipline. The paper argues that the German government held an ordoliberal understanding of the crisis, that these ideas contributed to shape the German preferences in the reform process, and that these preferences are reflected in the reforms, especially in the reforms of the SGP. Therefore, it is possible to claim that the EMU reforms undertaken in the years of the crisis caused an ordoliberalization of the European economic governance. The paper concludes by discussing the nature of this ordoliberalization. It agrees with the authors sceptical of the ‘ordoliberalization’ thesis that the reformed, day-to-day economic governance of the EU is based on a series of technicalities and indicators (e.g., output gap, structural balances) that derive from mainstream economics, not from ordoliberalism. Rather, ordoliberal ideas provided the German government with the ideational instruments to interpret the Euro crisis and to propose the reforms to overcome it. As these ideas have been to a certain extent embedded in the EMU reforms, they inform the European economic governance. Focusing on the role of ordoliberalism, then, gives us a perspective to deepen our understanding of the logic of the EMU, as the supporters of the ‘ordoliberalization by accident’ thesis claim. This logic reflects the ordoliberal principle of wettbewerblicher Föderalismus (competitive federalism). The role of the European institutions is to implement a federal Ordnungspolitik, a regulatory framework that establishes the rules the Member States must abide by in defining their economic policies. The federal Ordnungspolitik must enforce the principles of fiscal discipline, sound money, and national responsibility. In this sense, the relations among Member States are of a competitive nature: they should not count on supranational institutions to achieve common goals, but rather pursue their own objective independently, within the regulatory framework of the federal Ordnungspolitik.