Politicization in the EU: between national politics and EU political dynamics

ABSTRACT

The EU has become increasingly politicized not only at the bottom, due to polarized debates, divided electorates, declining mainstream parties, and rising Euroskeptic populism; or from the bottom up, as national politics permeates member-state leaders’ positions in the Council. It has also emerged purely at the top, in the increasingly politically charged dynamics of interaction within and among EU actors. Such politicization involves struggles for power and influence that are ideational as much as institutional and coercive. Current theorists of EU integration, because of their tendency to focus on only one or another EU actor have overlooked the EU’s politicized dynamics, even though their accounts, taken together, provide ample evidence of it. The article shows that the EU has gone from what was once metaphorically described with the catchphrase of ‘politics without policy’ at the national level to ‘politics against policy’ in more contentious areas, whereas at the EU level it has moved from ‘policy without politics’ to ‘politics with policy’. The paper illustrates with the cases of the Council and the Commission in the Eurozone crisis.

KEYWORDS:

• Politicization
• European Union
• Council
• Commission
• populism
• Eurozone crisis

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the co-editors of the special issue and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments, as well as the participants at the Amsterdam workshop.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Vivien A. Schmidt is Jean Monnet Professor of European Integration and Professor of International Relations and Political Science in the Pardee School at Boston University.