Explaining EU integration dynamics in the wake of COVID-19: a domain of application approach

ABSTRACT

This article explores the heterogeneous and uneven EU response to the COVID-19 pandemic across policy fields and examines how integration theories can contribute to explaining the presence (or absence) of new integration steps and their varying nature. To analyse European activities in three policy fields, namely fiscal policy, centralised European vaccine procurement, and border politics, we develop a ‘Domain of Application’ approach (DOA). Instead of testing integration theories against each other, DOA allows bridging different theoretical traditions by making use of their complementary explanatory power to derive better explanations of complex empirical issues. We find that Liberal Intergovernmentalism and Neofunctionalism offer complementary explanations for several empirical puzzles, which together provide a more compelling picture of the effects of the pandemic on European integration. In addition, DOA advances our understanding of the scopes of both theories.

KEYWORDS:

• Border politics
• COVID-19
• domain of application approach
• European integration
• NextGenerationEU
• vaccine procurement

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the participants of the International Relations colloquium at the Otto-Friedrich-University of Bamberg as well as the editors and anonymous reviewers for very helpful comments and suggestions on drafts of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Manuel Becker

Manuel Becker is a postdoctoral researcher at the Otto-Friedrich-University of Bamberg.

Thomas Gehring

Thomas Gehring is Professor of International Relations at the Otto-Friedrich-University of Bamberg.