Trends in European political (dis)integration. An analysis of postfunctionalist and other explanations

ABSTRACT

The divergent outcomes in respect of political integration of the several crises that the EU has confronted during the last decade present a challenge for most ‘grand theories’ of European integration. There has been more political disintegration than some of the historically most influential, ‘optimistic’ theories would have anticipated, but less than more recently-developed and more ‘pessimistic’ theories, notably postfunctionalism, would have expected. Compared with these contrasting theories, a hegemonic-stability-theoretical approach to the EU’s crises provides a more convincing explanation of recent patterns of political integration and disintegration.

KEYWORDS:

• Crisis
• hegemonic stability theory
• liberal intergovernmentalism
• neo-functionalism
• political disintegration
• postfunctionalism

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the participants in the conference, ‘ Grand Theories of European Integration in the Twenty-First Century’, staged at the European University Institute (EUI), Florence on 31 May and 1 June, 2018, three anonymous reviewers, and above all the co-editors of this special issue, Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks, for their helpful comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on the contributor

Douglas Webber is Professor of Political Science at INSEAD, Fontainebleau, France and Singapore. Contact: [email protected].

Notes

1 This section draws extensively on Webber (2019).