European Integration and the War in Ukraine: Just Another Crisis?
2023; Wiley; Volume: 61; Issue: S1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/jcms.13550
ISSN1468-5965
Autores Tópico(s)Economic Issues in Ukraine
ResumoAfter the sovereign debt, migration, Brexit and pandemic crises (to name but a few), the European Union (EU) again faces a crisis of – as yet – unknown proportions. Putin's war of aggression against Ukraine violates every principle of the European security order that emerged with the end of the Cold War. It also contests the liberal model for organizing societies the EU and its member states have been built around. Amidst these profound challenges the German Chancellor Olav Scholz referred to as 'Zeitenwende', politicians and pundits alike call for the deepening of European integration to defend the EU as a liberal integration project. Institutional reforms are deemed indispensable to prepare the EU for the accession of the Western Balkans and Ukraine and build the EU's strategic autonomy in weathering current and future challenges, geopolitical and otherwise. The sovereign debt, mass migration, rule-of-law backsliding and the Covid-19 pandemic have revealed the EU's weakness as a regulatory polity in coping with non-military transboundary crises. Military security pressures might do what the previous crises failed to do – finally push the member states to build up the EU's fiscal and coercive power turning it into United States of Europe. Even if the treaty reforms necessary for remedial capacity-building were on the cards in the foreseeable future, EU research does not necessarily support the expectation that conferring more power to the EU produces more power of the EU. The problem of the EU's wanting actorness does not lie so much in the weakness of its fiscal and coercive power nor in its decision-making rules and procedures. It is the member states – in the East and the West – prioritizing their national self-interests over realizing shared goals. The Ukraine crisis is a case in point. Despite the persistence of intergovernmental institutions in foreign and security policy, the member states have been remarkably united in supporting Ukraine against Russia's war of aggression. As in previous crises, the EU has been coping with its first military security crisis by using its regulatory power to facilitate the joint exercise of fiscal and coercive power by the member states. Yet, the outcome of this crisis differs. It has not resulted in a strengthening of the EU's regulatory powers as we have seen it in the Euro crisis. Unlike in the Covid-19 crisis, the member states have not been willing to give the EU more fiscal power to finance the financial assistance for Ukraine either. At the same time, intergovernmental co-operation has not been deadlocked by member states' refusal of solidarity that has derailed joint decision-making in the Schengen crisis. In our previous work on the EU's multiple crises, Thomas Risse and I argued that changes in the EU's identity politics account for the differing outcomes of the Euro and the Schengen crises (Börzel and Risse 2018). In this article, I explore the extent to which the political mobilization of particular identity constructions related to questions of order rather than borders in framing the Ukraine crisis can help explain why member states have upgraded their common interest in supporting Ukraine without granting the EU additional power. The article starts by conceptualizing supranational institutions and member state solidarity as two separate dimensions of deepening European integration. It then develops an argument that links deepening European integration to identity politics. To empirically illustrate the argument, I analyze the outcome of the EU's Ukraine crisis and compare it to previous crises. The comparison reveals that the member states have been willing to upgrade their common interests without pooling or delegating additional powers though. This outcome differs from the Euro, the Schengen and the Covid-19 crises, in which member state solidarity went hand in hand with a strengthening of supranational institutions – with the exception of the Schengen crisis, which resulted in neither. Mainstream theories of European integration may explain the absence of institutional reform in the Ukraine crisis by insufficient functional pressure to outweigh the high sovereignty costs involved in granting the EU coercive power. It is less obvious, however, how they would account for the willingness of member state governments to unite in their support for Ukraine in the absence of such pressure. The second part of the article therefore discusses whether the explanation for this peculiar outcome can be found in the identity politics involved in Putin's war against Ukraine. Unlike Schengen and similar to Euro and Covid-19, the upgrading of the common interest even by right-wing populist governments has been facilitated by the war being framed in terms of order (who are we) rather than border (who belongs to us). The identity discourse about what community the EU wants to be fostered solidarity amongst the member states in coping with the Covid-19 pandemic, and in the same way, it is generating solidarity with Ukraine in defending its independent nationhood against Russia, including the granting of accession prospects. EU membership, of course, also relates to issues of borders and belonging; questions of order and border intersect, particularly since EU accession is conditional upon the commitment to and compliance with the EU liberal principles for organizing politics and society. Being a European neighbor, Ukraine qualifies for EU membership. Geographic and cultural proximity also accounts for the willingness of Poland to receive millions of Ukrainians. The article concludes by discussing why the identity discourse enabling a far-reaching upgrading of the common interest on security and defense issues has not resulted in a strengthening of supranational institutions. There are different ways to conceptualize and measure the deepening of European integration. EU scholars tend to focus on the institutional dimension. Regional integration involves the 'delegation and pooling' of national sovereignty rights (Hooghe and Marks 2015). 'Delegation' ('level', or 'breadth' of integration) refers to the number of policy sectors in which states are willing to share or transfer national competencies to the European level; 'pooling' ('scope', or 'depth') denotes the power and autonomy of regional authorities in exercising these competencies (Börzel 2005; Hooghe and Marks 2015; Lindberg and Scheingold 1970). The breadth of EU competencies is quite comprehensive. There are very few areas in which the EU is unable to take action. The issue is how much control member states still hold over EU policy-making. This varies considerably across and within policy areas,1 depending on the 'governance mix'. The power of individual member states, and hence the need for upgrading the common interest, increases from intergovernmental co-ordination, which requires unanimity (e.g., security and defense), over joint decision-making by majority voting (e.g., asylum and migration) to supranational delegation (e.g., monetary policy) where member states are not involved (cf. Börzel 2010). Early on, Ernst Haas identified what he considered 'a particular interesting indicator for judging progress along the path of integration' (Haas 1961, p. 367): conflict resolution by 'upgrading of the common interest' rather than on the basis of the 'lowest common denominator' or 'splitting the difference'. Haas saw the mode of conflict resolution and the powers of supranational institutions as two dimensions of political integration, which were causally linked: '[P]arties succeeded in redefining their conflict so as to work out a solution at a higher level, which almost invariably implies the expansion of the mandate or task (…)' (Haas 1961, p. 368). The causal mechanisms that links the two is that 'the up-grading of the parties' common interests relies heavily on the services of an institutionalized mediator (…) with an autonomous range of powers' (Haas 1961). The idea that supranational institutions foster the upgrading of the common interest amongst member states is reflected in the demands of EU scholars and policy-makers alike for extending majority rule on issues of security and defense to strengthen the EU's capacity to act as one, internally and at the global level. Yet, the Schengen crisis has demonstrated how asymmetrical effects on the member states, on the one hand, and the increasing electoral support for populist parties, on the other, can result in a constraining dissensus on centralized political action (Börzel and Risse 2018; Hooghe and Marks 2009). EU competencies and majority voting have not been sufficient to make member states upgrade the common interest in coming to terms with mass migration into the EU. Outvoted member states have resorted to 'opposition through the backdoor' (Falkner et al. 2004) by refusing to comply with EU decisions, for example, to relocate Syrian refugees (Börzel 2021, pp. 164–169). At the same time, the war in Ukraine demonstrates that the EU is perfectly able to act as one, even under unanimity. The EU has never been so united on foreign and security policy issues. This is not to say that supranational institutions have no role in fostering conflict resolution by upgrading the common interest. Member states have strengthened the powers of supranational institutions to depoliticize controversial decisions allowing them to upgrade the common interest, resulting in a deepening of integration (Börzel 2016). Conversely, the strengthening of supranational institutions requires an upgrading of the common interest by the member states. They have to give up national sovereignty to realize common goals through supranational institutions. There seems to be, however, factors that interfere with, and compensate for, the policy effectiveness of joint decision-making and supranational delegation to the European Commission and undermine the agreement on institutional reforms to realize common goals. The willingness and capacity of member states to agree on and comply with EU decisions depend on the costs they have to incur. The higher the costs, the more likely member state governments are to face domestic opposition against EU decisions, particularly if domestic actors are aware and care about them (Börzel 2021, Chapter 2). With the deepening of European integration, the EU has become increasingly politicized (Hooghe and Marks 2009; Rauh and Zürn 2016; Rauh 2016, Chapters 1 and 2). Citizens oppose or support EU policies rather than being neutral, ambivalent or indifferent (De Wilde et al. 2016; Hutter et al. 2016, pp. 7–12). Politicization is a constraining (Hooghe and Marks 2009) or even paralyzing (Scharpf 2009) factor of deepening European integration. Intensified political conflict in public media and party competition changes the quality of European integration because political élites can no longer control it. Eurosceptic attitudes of citizens in national elections and referenda on EU affairs limit the room for maneuvering by national governments and European policy-makers searching for functional solutions to Europe's pressing problems. The shift from elite-driven interest group politics to mass politics goes hand in hand with a growing salience of a new cleavage that is cultural rather than material and relates to identity and community (Hooghe and Marks 2018). The new cultural cleavage has been referred to as green, alternative, liberal versus traditional, authoritarian, nationalist, as integrationist versus demarcationist or as cosmopolitan versus communitarian (cf. De Wilde et al. 2014; Kriesi et al. 2008; Marks et al. 2002). It restructures political competition around issues such as lifestyle, cultural diversity, immigration, ecology and nationalism. Thomas Risse and I argued that the cultural cleavage maps unto the difference between those citizens holding exclusive nationalist identities versus those with inclusive Europeanized identities where Europe is added to their national identities (Börzel and Risse 2009; Risse 2010). Thus, the political mobilization of collective identities can cut both ways with regard to the deepening of European integration. Inclusive Europeanized identities generate public solidarity with other member states as well as public support for European integration whilst exclusive nationalist identities have the opposite effect (Risse 2010). The politicization of identification patterns with regard to border and community membership by (mostly right-wing) political parties prevents member states from upgrading the common interest. The opposite is the case when political controversies are framed in terms of questions of order, that is, what constitutes Europe as a community and how much solidarity members of the community owe to each other under which conditions. We empirically demonstrated our hypotheses by comparing the Euro and the Schengen crises (Börzel and Risse 2018). The Covid-19 crisis corroborates our argument that identity politics centering around issues of order are more conducive to deepening integration on both dimensions (see below). The outcome of the Ukraine crisis is more difficult to interpret as it involves an upgrading of common interest without moving towards supranational institutions. Europe was still recovering from the Covid-19 pandemic when Russia's military invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 triggered the next crisis or rather set of crises. It is not the first war fought on the European continent since the end of the Second World War. Nor are EU member states party to the war. It therefore may be debatable to what extent Ukraine war constitutes the EU's first existential military threat setting in motion new dynamics of 'European state-building' (Kelemen and Mcnamara 2022). What Putin's war certainly did was to destroy the European security order as it had emerged from the Cold War. He not only rejects its liberal foundations as they were laid down in the Paris Charter of 1990 which committed signatories to democracy, human rights and the rule of law as the fundamental values governing the future practice of their relations. The war of aggression also violates the basic principles of sovereign equality and territorial integrity enshrined in the 'Westphalian' part of the post-World War II international order that has been equally accepted by liberal and non-liberal states (Lake et al. 2021). Finally, Putin's weaponization of interdependence (Farrell and Newman 2019) regarding energy resources and food profoundly challenges the doctrine that used to inform the foreign policies of European and other Western states that international exchange and engagement promote peace and prosperity. This is why German Chancellor Olav Scholz called for a 'Zeitenwende' (historical turning point) in Germany's foreign policy, with major ramifications for the EU.2 His calls for a deepening of the EU (more majority voting in the Council) have been echoed by some European leaders (e.g., Spain)3 and rejected by others (e.g., Poland).4 Meanwhile, the EU has shown an astonishing ability to take action against the massive violations of international law committed by Putin's Russia.5 The EU member states have agreed – unanimously – on no fewer than 11 sanctions packages, on supplying military equipment and training to the Ukrainian armed forces and on providing almost €75 billion in financial, humanitarian, emergency, budget and military support. The member states have also welcomed around six million refugees and have given temporary protection to more than four million.6 Finally, the EU heads of state and government promised 'to contribute, together with partners, to future security commitments to Ukraine, which will help Ukraine defend itself in the long term, deter acts of aggression and resist destabilisation efforts'.7 This is the first time that EU member states have made such a security commitment to a third country. The unity of the 27 member states' external action vis-à-vis Russia is all the more remarkable amidst the dependence of many of them on energy from Russia and the close relations some of them used to socialize with Putin's regime. Hungary's Prime Minister Victor Orbán barked at some of the joint actions but ultimately came around (Genschel 2022, p. 1893). If security and defense already constitute a least likely case for member states upgrading the common interest, so does EU enlargement. For 20 years, different member states had blocked any plans for widening the EU (e.g., the Netherlands and France) or insisted on accession conditions for current candidates related to their myopic national interests (e.g., Greece and Bulgaria). The EU's 'enlargement fatigue' (Rehn 2007) ended in June 2022, when the member states unanimously agreed to grant Ukraine, Moldova and possibly Georgia candidate status. The member states have agreed on a comprehensive set of joint actions, with 'very little infighting (…) and clear evidence of burden-sharing' (Anghel and Jones 2023, p. 775). At the same time, they have refrained from giving the EU more fiscal and coercive power or changing the decision-making rules and procedures on security and defense issues. The member states made a commitment in March 2022 towards building EU sovereignty in the fields of defense, economy and energy.8 However, rather than centralizing core state powers at the EU level, they have jointly mobilized their national armed forces, fiscal resources and administrative capacities, supported and regulated by EU institutions (Genschel 2022). The French proposal to use the fiscal instruments of mutualizing debt introduced to finance the EU measures to help member states recover from the socio-economic consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic was rejected (Genschel 2022, p. 1896), most notably by the German government,9 whose Chancellor Scholz had helped negotiate the EU Recovery Instrument hailing it as the EU's 'Hamiltonian moment' when he was still Minister of Finance (cited in Freudlsperger and Schimmelfennig 2022, p. 1881). Instead, the Commission had to repurpose the €300 billion in loans not used in NextGenerationEU for its REPower Europe program (Anghel and Jones 2023, p. 776). Nor have the member states taken any action to build centralized military capabilities to honor their security commitment to Ukraine without having to rely on the United States. Despite calls for more majority voting on security and defense matters, which would allow the EU to circumvent the veto of non-aligned member states (Austria, Ireland, Malta and Cyprus) as a major obstacle to its strategic autonomy, the intergovernmental institutions of the Common Security and Defense Policy have remained unchanged. In sum, the EU's handling of the Ukraine crisis has involved a remarkable degree of upgrading of the common interest – without, however, resulting in any institutional deepening of European integration as we have seen it in the Euro and the Covid-19 crisis. To prevent the breakdown of the euro zone, the Euro countries established a whole set of new supranational institutions (for a more detailed analysis, see Börzel 2016). The Fiscal Compact, the European Stability Mechanism, the Banking Union, the Macro-Economic Imbalance Mechanism and the European Semester constitute a far-reaching institutional deepening of European integration. So do the reforms introduced in response to the Covid-19 pandemic (cf. Brooks et al. 2023, pp. 728–735; Kassim and Tholoniat 2021, pp. 617–627). The member states accepted the proposal of the Commission for a European Health Union increasing the role of the EU in the field of health security. They also strengthened the powers of the European Medicines Agency and the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control and established the Health Emergency, Preparedness and Response Authority. EU funding for dealing with health and cross-border threats was stepped up. Finally, the Commission was tasked to undertake the joint procurement of medical equipment and vaccines, to roll out an EU-wide Digital Covid Certificate, and co-ordinate the information-sharing amongst national health authorities. To mitigate the socio-economic consequences of the pandemic, the escape clause of the Stability and Growth Pact was suspended, a pandemic credit line was created in the European Stability Mechanism and a temporary Support to mitigate Unemployment Risks in an Emergency (SURE) was established offering loans to member states to finance job retention schemes. The European Investment Bank offered additional loan guarantees to small and medium size enterprises. Most importantly, the EU Recovery Instrument (Next Generation EU) and the 2021–2027 multi-annual financial framework established in 2020 provide for the largest budget the member states have ever agreed on (€1.85 trillion). To help raise the €750 billion for Next Generation EU, the member states have authorized the Commission to borrow funds on behalf of the EU on the international capital markets. For the first time, the member states engage in collective borrowing. Unlike Euro bonds, all member states will be liable. To repay the joint debts, the EU shall receive new own resources in form of a tax on non-recyclable plastic waste, a digital levy on large digital companies, a carbon border adjustment mechanism, a financial transaction tax and an extension of the EU Emission Trading Scheme to the aviation and maritime sector. Finally, member states agreed for the first time to make the disbursement of EU funds conditional on a member state's respect of the rule of law. Whilst not directly linked to the protection of the EU's fundamental values enshrined in Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union (TEU), the rule-of-law mechanism shall be activated where the financial interests of the Union are at stake. This includes cases of severe corruption, whose control requires independent courts. Taken together, the member states agreed on a forceful European response to the Covid-19 crisis, strengthening the EU's powers in public health policy, revising existing and creating new macroeconomic instruments to complement national measures to support the recovery and resilience of economies, particularly in the member states most hit by the crisis. Granting the Commission the power to borrow money and collect EU-level taxes may not constitute a 'Hamiltonian moment', but they are major steps in bringing the EU closer to a truly economic union – even though the member states could not agree to make the EU Recovery Instrument a permanent fiscal instrument of mutualizing debt and have relied on alternative ways of raising the funds to support Ukraine. The Commission freezing access to EU funds under the Rule of Law Conditionality Regulation appears to be more effective to counter rule-law-backsliding in Hungary and Poland than sanctions under Article 7, which member state governments have been unwilling to invoke (Oliver and Stefanelli 2016; Pech 2022). The outcome of the Covid-19 crisis was enabled by a substantial upgrading of the common interest that involved not only large-scale financial redistribution amongst member states but also the violation of a core EU norm of no common EU debt issuance and the breaking with the austerity policy as the condition for Northern creditors' solidarity with the Southern debtors during the Euro crisis. Solidarity in the Covid-19 crisis has been equally conditional, but this time on the respect of the rule of law (cf. De La Porte and Jensen 2021). Whilst the Ukraine crisis has not seen any of the institutional deepening of the Euro and the Covid-19 crises, it still differs from the Schengen crisis, which has been a complete failure. Initially, the inability of the EU in coming to terms with the refugee flows was not related to the unwillingness of member states to take joint action. Between the end of September 2015 and the end of April 2016, the member states agreed on a whole set of joint measures aiming at 'sharing the responsibility' (Council of the European Union 2015) for the refugees who had already entered the territory of the EU, on the one hand, and managing future refugee flows, on the other. Action was taken by drawing on the EU's legal framework for a common asylum and migration policy. Core measures included several billion euros for various funds to support member states and third countries in managing and accommodating migration flows; the adoption of a common list of safe countries of origin; the relocation of 120,000 'persons in clear need of international protection'; and the establishment of additional hot spots in Italy and Greece. Ultimately, however, the member states failed to upgrade the common interest as they refused to implement most of the agreed joint measures. They did not meet their various funding pledges, nor did they send the promised numbers of additional experts to FRONTEX or the European Asylum Support Office (EASO). Most importantly, only a fraction of the altogether 160,000 refugees were relocated from Greece and Italy. Instead of upgrading the common interest, governments took national measures tightening border controls (Börzel 2021, pp. 164–169). Any attempts to reform the Common European Asylum System to arrive at a fair sharing of responsibility for 'registering and processing people in need of protection and who are not returning to their home countries or safe third countries they are transited through' (European Commission 2016, p. 3) have failed so far. The 'historic' agreement reached by the Council on Justice and Home Affairs in June 2023 on two asylum and migration laws10 was endorsed by a majority of 21 out of 27 member states.11 The asylum procedure regulation would allow quick assessment at the EU's external borders of unfounded or inadmissible applications. Applicants with low chances of being admitted would not be allowed to enter the EU proper. Rejected applicants would also be sent back more quickly. The strengthening of external border protection is the lowest common denominator in the reform of the Common European Asylum System. The second part of the reform would replace the Dublin rule, which makes the Mediterranean frontline states responsible for the examination of asylum applications as the member states of first entry. To arrive at a fairer and binding allocation of people applying for protection across all member states, the new asylum and migration management regulation should determine which member state was responsible for the examination of an asylum application. The member states would be given a choice of either accepting a certain number of people seeking protection each year or paying into a joint EU fund. Both, however, requires an upgrading of the common interest particularly by Central and Eastern European transit countries they are unwilling to engage in. Poland, which had voted against the two proposals along with Hungary in the Council (Bulgaria, Lithuania, Malta and Slovakia had abstained), announced to neither accept any relocations of migrants and asylum seekers nor make the required payments instead.12 With an upgrading of the common interest in supporting Ukraine but no institutional reforms of the intergovernmental Common Security and Defense Policy, the Ukraine crisis falls in-between the Euro and Covid-19 crisis with their successful deepening of European integration, on the one hand, and the Schengen crisis as a complete failure on both accounts, on the other. To what extent can identity politics account for this mixed outcome of the Ukraine crisis? Standard theories of European integration, such as liberal intergovernmentalism (LIG), neofunctionalism (NF) or postfunctionalism, provide explanations for the outcome of each of the EU's multiple crises (see, e.g., the contributions in Brack and Gürkan 2020; Hooghe and Marks 2019; Ioannou et al. 2017; Quaglia and Verdun 2023a; Tosun et al. 2016; Wiener et al. 2019). Explaining variation across the various crises poses more of a theoretical challenge, particularly with the Ukraine crisis adding a new type of outcome. Why did member state governments manage to depoliticize the Euro and the Covid-19 crisis, deepening European integration, whereas they failed to do so in the case of the Schengen crisis, despite a common interest in preserving the borderless Schengen area to avoid welfare losses incurred? Why have they been able to bridge their differences over Russia without, however, delegating more fiscal and military powers to supranational institutions or enabling more majority voting on security and defense issues? To solve the puzzle, LIG and NF both point to interdependence creating incentives for member state governments to delegate more power to the EU and determining the distribution of costs not to do so (costs of non-integration). LIG focuses on common member state preference for the preservation of the common currency (euro), the borderless Schengen area (migration, Covid) and (energy) security (Ukraine). The varying degree to which member state governments have been willing to pool and delegate sovereignty at the EU level is then explained by the asymmetrical distribution of costs and the bargaining power of big states (cf. Schimmelfennig 2021). NF emphasizes spillover mechanisms and supranational entrepreneurship in depoliticizing costs through supranational delegation (cf. Niemann 2021). LIG would argue that member state incentives to strengthen the fiscal and coercive powers of the EU in security and defense to cope with the Ukraine crisis are unequal as some are more threatened by Russia, due to their geographical proximity, than others (Genschel 2022, p. 1888). Moreover, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has provided for the necessary military capabilities to protect the EU (Kelemen and Mcnamara 2022, p. 9), and the EU can use existing funds, for examp
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