Introduction: the European Union beyond the polycrisis? Integration and politicization in an age of shifting cleavages

ABSTRACT

Over the past decade, the EU has faced multiple crises. In the introduction to this collection, we argue that this ‘polycrisis’ is fracturing the European political system across multiple, simultaneous rifts, thereby creating a ‘polycleavage’. As a consequence, the EU is caught in a ‘politics trap’. Similar to other decision traps, this multi-level politics trap is dysfunctional, but difficult to escape altogether. The contributions to this collection analyze the mechanisms of the politics trap, its relationship to the European polycrisis, and the strategies pursued by a plurality of actors (the Commission, the European Parliament, national governments) to cope with its constraints. In light of this analysis, we argue that comprehensive, ‘grand’ bargains are for the moment out of reach, but national and supranational actors can find ways of ‘relaxing’ the politics trap and in so doing perhaps lay the foundations for more ambitious future solutions.

KEYWORDS:

• Crisis
• politicization
• cleavages
• decision trap
• integration

Acknowledgments

Jonathan Zeitlin and Francesco Nicoli gratefully acknowledge generous support of the Amsterdam Centre for Contemporary European Studies (ACCESS EUROPE) for a workshop in November 2017 at which most of the contributions in this collection were originally presented and discussed.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Jonathan Zeitlin is Distinguished Faculty Professor of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Amsterdam, and Academic Director of the Amsterdam Centre for European Studies (ACES).

Francesco Nicoli is Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Amsterdam.

Brigid Laffan is Director and Professor at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, and Director of the Global Governance Programme, European University Institute, Florence.

Notes

1 This term was coined by European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker (2016) to refer to the confluence of multiple, mutually reinforcing challenges facing the EU, from ‘the worst economic, financial and social crisis since World War II’ through ‘the security threats in our neighborhood and at home, to the refugee crisis, and to the UK referendum’, that ‘feed each other, creating a sense of doubt and uncertainty in the minds of our people.’

2 We term these issue-specific divisions created by the EU’s polycrisis ‘cleavages’, by analogy to the broader socio-political cleavages analyzed by Lipset, Rokkan and their successors, though it remains to be seen whether these will be equally deep and enduring.