European Integratıon (ENG) — Ünite 7 Soru-Cevap

The process of European integration has always proceeded and will continue so, by both incremental change and critical junctures of crisis.

Eurozone crisis: Eurozone crisis or as mostly referred as sovereign debt crisis that broke out in Greece in 2009 is fundamentally due to weak and unstable integration of peripheral countries in the Eurozone.

Crises imply major turning points in times of instability that would give way to partial disintegration (a reduction in the existing integration level, scope and membership of integration) instead of bringing about integration outcomes.

In order to prevent the Danish ratification crisis to turn into a threatening crisis for the EU as a whole, the Edinburgh Summit of December 1992 granted opt-outs to Denmark in core state powers along with the certain exceptions in European citizenship. Examples of opt-outs were extended in time to other member states including the UK, Ireland, Sweden and Poland.

When the Treaty of Lisbon entered into force in December 2009, the EU finally appeared to have consolidated institutionally after a series of incremental treaty revisions.

Crises have had constraining impact on the domestic politics of the EU member countries.

Together with functional spillover and externalization, politicization is one of the key intervening variable—determining whether, when, and how functional pressures lead to regional integration.

Politicization refers to the increasing contestation of the scope, level, or character of regional integration, mass publics have come to pay more attention to political decision-making within EU framework and at the same time seem more critical of the policies.

Politicization of European integration does not seem to have been a post-Maastricht phenomenon as some have maintained (de Wilde and Zürn 2012; Hooghe and Marks, 2009). Instead, it intensified at critical moments and during key political events at the European level (such as Treaty changes or European summits) and the national level (such as national referendums on European issues) (Hutter and Kriesi, 2019, 997). Nonetheless, European integration has become increasingly controversial since the early 1990s and at a time of intensifying integration to new fields of core states powers and the EMU and Schengen in particular. It is in this newly transformative context that postfunctionalism has emerged as the new research agenda to shift the terms of debate on European politics while challenging the grand theories of integration: (new) intergovernmentalism and neofunctionalism.

Before overviewing how the EU has become increasingly politicized since the recent crises, the key features of the crisis-driven politicization are given as follows:

• Politicization has not remained solely at the national level; it has become multi-levelled; at the bottom or national politics in the member states; bottom-up effects for all EU actors and effects for EU governance and its inter-institutional dynamics at the top.

• Politicization has become more nation and region specific or differentiated;

• Yet, “national politics” is still the crucial arena for the politicization of the EU.

• The substantive content of politicization was broadened to cover the EU’s governing authority, its governing activities and key dilemmas of governance-democratic accountability and democratic legitimacy (Schmidt, 2019, 1018).

• Politicization has had differential effects and consequences for the Euro crisis and for the Schengen crisis.

At the national level, politicization can be used to describe four interrelated phenomena:

• the increasing political salience of the EU in national public spheres;

• the growing cross-cutting cleavages in the electorate that find expression in public debates;

• the mainstream party politics that has had difficulty coping with the electoral divides, as evidenced in election losses and weak public discourse; and

• the rise of populist challenger parties and governments that benefit from the electoral divides and give voice to public discontent (Schmidt, 2019, 1021).

Politicization has influenced the overall EU institutional dynamics too (Schmidt, 2019, 1024). There has been much debate about the role of the EU institutions in managing the euro crisis and the reform process. The predominance of executive politics during the crisis has intensified political struggles between the majoritarian bodies – both the Council and the EP and non-majoritarian institutions such as the Commission and the ECB. The Eurozone crisis has had consequences for the inter-institutional balance between the Council and the Commission. It is at this level that scholarly debates have intensified between the new intergovernmentalist scholars and scholars who take a supranationalist approach.

The Six-Pack and the Two-Pack: The legislative measures introduced with the Six-Pack and the Two-Pack develop and strengthen the Stability and Growth Pack, which is the framework for coordination of the fiscal policies of the member states within a broader context of economic governance.

The new intergovernmentalists generally argue that politicization has not constrained much consensus-seeking deliberation or deliberative intergovernmentalism in EU economic governance (Puetter, 2016). More specifically, the EU responses to the crisis suggest the centrality of the European Council in the new European governance with the Commission’s agenda setting power being decreased. For instance, the Six-Pack and the Two- Pack have added a new activism of the member states acting through the European Council in legislative matters whereas the Commission saw its role as policy entrepreneur being damaged by the role of the European Council acting as an agenda- setter (Valle-Flor, 2018, 2).

Banking Union: It ensures that the EU banks are stronger and better supervised. The pillars of the Banking Union are Single Supervisory Mechanism, Single Resolution Mechanism, European Deposit Insurance Scheme and Sovereign Bond-Backed Securities.

The Six-Pack “legislative” phase highlights the way in which supranational institutions, like the EP have gained greater involvement in economic governance through the introduction of “Economic Dialogue” (Valle-Flor, 2018, 13). Indeed, the relevance of the Six-Pack for the new supranationalism arises from the fact that it was the first time that the EP had the opportunity to legislate on economic policy coordination since Lisbon (Valle-Flor, 2018, 3). In addition, the introduction of reverse majority voting in the preventive arm of the SGP which is extended to all the key steps of the Excessive Debt Procedure under the Fiscal Compact confirms premises of the new supranationalism (Valle-Flor, 2018, 12).

Schengen area: It covers 26 countries without border controls among them. These countries are Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland.

The last tension relates to the EU and its wider international environment. The blurring of the distinction between external security and internal security on the one hand, and between hard power and soft power on the other, underlines how important the unstable and disorderly neighbourhood has become to Europe. The EU has witnessed the return of both geo-politics and geo-economics to the East with Putin’s incursion into Ukraine. Europe’s normative power came face to face with Russian hard power (Laffan, 2016, 916). To the South, it faces a series of failing or failed states that in turn are acting as a powerful push factor for the increased movement of people across the Mediterranean. Instability to the south manifested itself in a refugee and migration crisis and threatened the unity and sustainability of the Schengen system, a core European regime. The increase in refugees seeking European protection in turn heightened internal security concerns and gave rise to an illiberal challenge and a rule of law crisis in some EU member countries, such as Hungary and Poland.