European integration (theory) in times of crisis. A comparison of the euro and Schengen crises

ABSTRACT

The European Union has gone through major crises of its two flagship integration projects of the 1990s: the euro and Schengen. Both crises had structurally similar causes and beginnings: exogenous shocks exposed the functional shortcomings of both integration projects and produced sharp distributional conflict among governments, as well as an unprecedented politicization of European integration in member state societies. Yet they have resulted in significantly different outcomes: whereas the euro crisis has brought about a major deepening of integration, the Schengen crisis has not. I put forward a neofunctionalist explanation of these different outcomes, which emphasizes variation in transnational interdependence and supranational capacity across the two policy areas.

KEYWORDS:

• Crisis
• euro
• European Union
• integration theory
• neofunctionalism
• Schengen

Acknowledgments

For comments on previous versions of the article, I thank audiences at an ACCESS EUROPE seminar at VU Amsterdam, the 2017 annual conference of the Swiss Political Science Association in St. Gallen, the 2017 EUSA Convention in Miami, and the Euro-CEFG workshop at the University of Rotterdam. Special thanks to Klaus Armingeon, Ben Crum, Madeleine Hosli, Matthias Mattijs, Abraham Newman, Thomas Spijkerboer, Jonathan Zeitlin and two anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Frank Schimmelfennig is professor of European politics at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, Center for Comparative and International Studies.

Notes

1 See http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Asylum_statistics (accessed 13 January 2018).

2 ‘Border controls extended without justification’, 13 April 2017, https://euobserver.com/justice/137592 (accessed 13 January 2018).

3 https://ec.europa.eu/home-affairs/sites/homeaffairs/files/what-we-do/policies/european-agenda-migration/press-material/docs/state_of_play_-_relocation_en.pdf (accessed 8 October 2017).

4 http://faculty.london.edu/mjacobides/assets/documents/Euro_Breakup_UBS_2011.pdf (accessed 13 January 2018).

5 https://www.bertelsmann-stiftung.de/fileadmin/files/BSt/Presse/imported/downloads/xcms_bst_dms_36656__2.pdf (accessed 13 January 2018).

6 See http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/03/01/schengen-collapse-is-bigger-economic-threat-to-europe-than-brexi/; https://www.bertelsmann-stiftung.de/fileadmin/files/BSt/Publikationen/GrauePublikationen/NW_Departure_from_Schengen.pdf (accessed 13 January 2018).