Scholars surveying the evolution of supranational priorities have heatedly debated the advent of a 'social turn' in EU economic governance. Yet the question of when EU normative shifts are put into practice has received less systematic attention. To address this gap, this article shifts the focus from polity socialisation - the growing sensitivity of EU governance to social concerns - to policy socialisation - the uptake of these orientations in national reform. Methodologically, it uses a mixed-method design combining longitudinal and comparative evidence to examine how EU prescriptions were shaped and mobilised in interaction with member states. A quantitative analysis of 344 labour-market recommendations (2011-2020) shows a recent peak in 'market-correcting' prescriptions. Case studies of Spain, Italy, France, and Germany, however, reveal considerable variation in uptake. In conclusion, we discuss how observed gaps between this socialisation 'in words' and its translation 'into deeds' may affect the lasting power of the EU's social turn.
The Ukraine war and uncertainty about the US security commitment have forced Europe to address its defence readiness. In response, the EU has launched its most ambitious effort yet to consolidate its defence industrial base and enhance collective readiness: the European Defence Industrial Strategy (EDIS) and European Defence Industry Programme (EDIP). However, member states have responded differently to these initiatives, resulting in intense intergovernmental bargaining over the content, governance and financing of the new policy. This article examines the formation and development of EDIS and EDIP through the lens of neoclassical realism, a theory of foreign policy that explains how unit-level intervening variables affect how states respond to similar international systemic pressures. The article thus captures the full arc of supranational institutional response and national recalibration, tracing how the EU has reimagined its defence role and how national capitals have reacted to this new strategic and institutional reality.
While EU scholarship has largely focused on elite narratives and values in political actors' discourse, the relationship between citizens' EU support, political values and conflict remains underexplored. Drawing on 21 focus groups conducted in Belgium, France, Italy, and Portugal, this article examines how citizens mobilize political values when discussing European integration. It shows that values feed both diffuse and specific EU support, challenging purely utilitarian accounts by demonstrating that citizens' evaluations are not only based on cost-benefit considerations but also on normative expectations. The analysis further identifies three clusters of values that structure political conflict over the European project and examines how these tensions are articulated and negotiated. In doing so, the article extends research on EU politicization and post-functionalist theory by bridging macro-level and micro-level dynamics of politicization.
This article analyzes how the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) reshapes housing governance in the EU, using Portugal's unprecedented housing allocation as a critical case revealing structural Europeanisation dynamics. Despite housing's national competence, RRF's centralized performance-based model exerts profound influence through milestone compliance over domestic governance arrangements. The research utilizes a multifaceted approach, incorporating document analysis, semi-structured interviews, and an online survey, to comprehensively assess developments across six dimensions of governance. The RRF conditionalities result in alterations to Local Housing Strategies, transitioning from strategic planning (logic of appropriateness) to procedural gatekeepers (logic of consequences). While these dynamics are rooted in the Portuguese case, they reflect structural features of the RRF's governance logic, demonstrating the limitations of Europeanization through funding alone, in the absence of administrative robustness and inclusive governance.
The availability of foreign workers is often beneficial for employers due to local skill shortages or migrants' flexibility. The 2004 enlargement of the European Union offered businesses a large pool of workers from Central and Eastern Europe. However, during accession negotiations, European employers' organisations did not advocate for opening labour markets to new EU citizens. This article, based on archival documents and interviews, investigates employers' strategies related to the enlargement. It demonstrates that they did not have a uniform perception of their interests, with small businesses wary of enlargement and large companies prioritising investment and market opportunities. Consequently, the umbrella UNICE favoured delaying the free movement of workers, while the ERT, representing multinationals, did not promote it, fearing protracted debates. This demonstrates how employers' positions can vary depending not only on economic calculations but also on the institutional environment, with labour-related interests being weighed against other, sometimes more fundamental ones.
Despite CFSP developments since Maastricht, EU foreign policy has often manifested via informal groupings of member states, acting through ad hoc initiatives without formal mandates. Seeking to explain adhocism's articulation with EU foreign policy beyond EU-CFSP-centrism, this article expands the regime-based intergovernmentalist approach envisaging EU foreign policy as a regime and adhocism as a rational solution to collective action problems, to cover the framing and development of ad hoc initiatives and encapsulate the full EU foreign policy cycle. To illustrate this approach, it provides an analysis of the 'E3' initiative on the Iran nuclear crisis (2003-2022) and 'Normandy' initiative on the Russia-Ukraine conflict in Eastern Ukraine (2014-2022) based on document analysis, archival testimonies, secondary literature and 39 elite interviews, which allow to delineate adhocism's role in EU foreign policy. This article counterbalances EU-CFSP-centred assumptions of adhocism as a (recurrent) anomaly to demonstrate it is a normal EU foreign policy feature.
Recent crises have renewed interest in assessing the EU's crisis management performance. However, the current literature lacks a systematic framework, informed by EU integration theory, for assessing crisis management, resulting in contradictory conclusions. This article develops an evaluative framework to assess the EU's response to the Eurozone crisis and Covid-19 using three criteria: response time, resource mobilisation, and the generation of durable EU crisis-management capacity. Drawing on interviews with EU officials, it evaluates crisis management and considers its implications for debates on EU crisis governance, particularly the 'failing forward' perspective. Empirically, the analysis shows that the EU reacted slowly in both crises, mobilised resources more effectively during Covid-19, and generated temporary arrangements rather than durable EU crisis-management capacity. At a theoretical level, the findings support recent critiques of the 'failing forward' perspective, showing that improvements in crisis-management performance do not necessarily translate into durable EU-level capacity or deeper integration.
This article investigates how efforts to depoliticise fiscal governance in the European Union have paradoxically contributed to its enduring politicisation. In the wake of the sovereign debt crisis, European Union policymakers introduced increasingly technical fiscal rules, centred on complex indicators such as the output gap, to insulate decision-making from political contestation. Yet, as the 2019 Italian output gap controversy illustrates, these very mechanisms became focal points of political conflict. Drawing on theory-testing process tracing, the article shows how technocratic governance imported the instability of expert disagreement into European Union policymaking, generating public scientific controversies. These disputes allowed political actors to contest the rules themselves, blurring the line between technical and political decision-making. The analysis advances the literature by identifying how EU level depoliticisation strategies can generate more politicisation by embedding technical instability in policy areas supposedly considered neutral. This (de-)politicisation feedback loop shows how technocratic governance can perpetuate rather than resolve political conflict.
Why do some states name and restrict certain foreign technologies, while other states don't? This paper argues that whether to restrict relies on expected economic consequences and external threat management. Case studies demonstrate that unlike Denmark/Sweden, Norway/Finland did not specifically ban Huawei/ZTE from working on their vital infrastructure. Norway/Finland try to avoid tensions with China since they already perceive immediate threats from Russia with which both have land borders. Expected economic outcomes also shaped Norway/Finland's decisions not to antagonize China. Having suffered China's trade sanctions in 2010-16, Norway predicted that China would retaliate. Finland predicted that China would punish Nokia, once successful mobile giant that Finland now attempts to rebrand as a global telecom equipment supplier. This paper suggests that in national security strategy, how leaders perceive the targeted country is a more crucial variable compared with structural constraints (e.g. NATO, the EU, OECD, and executive-parliament relations).
Following Russia's aggression against Ukraine, efforts to revitalize the Weimar Triangle (Germany, France, and Poland) have intensified. However, little is known about the quality of its cooperation or ability to form alliances in EU decision-making. This article addresses that gap by assessing the effectiveness of WT cooperation through an analysis of voting cohesion in the Council, the EU's main legislative body, using 1,084 legislative votes from 2009 to 2020. The findings indicate that WT members demonstrate high overall cohesion, yet notable divergences arise in specific policy areas. Regression analysis further reveals key factors influencing WT cohesion: ideological proximity, socio-economic convergence, interaction intensity among representatives, and contestation from other member states. These results contribute to the literature on EU decision-making by shedding light on the coalition dynamics in the Council and demonstrating that the Weimar Triangle can act cohesively under specific conditions.
As Schengen marks its 40th anniversary in 2025, its successes and challenges are under renewed scrutiny. While borderless movement remains a key achievement, persistent internal border controls since 2015-2016 have sparked debate. Scholars refer to this situation as the 'new normal.' Although the justifications for reimpositions in official letters have been examined, national political discourses have been largely neglected. This study addresses that gap by analysing political communication in Germany, Austria, France, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway through the lens of crisis theory and the Discourse-Historical Approach. The findings reveal that each country frames the Schengen crisis differently, suggesting that there is no singular Schengen crisis. Instead, diverse national argumentation strategies shape the narrative. Moreover, these do not signal Schengen's collapse but rather its transformation into a security-oriented project.
In times of crises, communicating citizen agency can stimulate engagement, support effective governance and legitimacy. Yet, little is known about how the European Parliament - as the only directly elected EU institution and a central site for contesting democratic legitimacy in the Union - constructs citizens' roles in such moments. This article introduces a novel Actor's Agency Model that maps agency along two dimensions and applies it to more than a decade of its crisis-related press releases and X/Twitter posts (2011-2025). Our findings show that while citizen visibility has grown, this has rarely meant attributing them a capacity to act in crises. Press releases overwhelmingly cast citizens as passive, instrumentalising them to sustain institutional self-legitimation. X posts more often assign active roles, but primarily through forms that do not amount to substantive participation. Such patterns risk undermining EU legitimacy by sidelining those whose involvement is essential to democratic crisis governance.
Various authors depict the rise of geoeconomics as an unprecedented shift in European Union (EU) trade policy, highlighting the entanglement of trade and security goals in a 'geoeconomic' agenda that sidelines sustainable development. While capturing new dynamics in EU trade relations with major economies, it remains unclear whether it also applies to long-standing asymmetrical relations with the Global South. We therefore ask in what way the EU's 'geoeconomic turn' entails continuity or change for the EU's strategic trade relations with the Global South. Based on a comparative historical analysis of three landmark cases: the Lom & eacute; I Convention (1975), the Economic Partnership Agreements (2000), and Strategic Trade Agreements (2015), we argue that, despite differences, the EU has consistently leveraged trade power vis-& agrave;-vis the Global South for strategic purposes, combining trade and security considerations, while subordinating (sustainable) development objectives. The 'geoeconomic turn' is therefore not as dramatic a shift as often claimed.
At the time of the 2019 European Parliament election, the environment was one of the most important issues among citizens. As the environment represents an important EU policy issue, candidates in this election are expected to respond to public salience and discuss environmental issues during the campaign. However, they may have failed to do this, as European elections are often claimed to be dominated by national issues, implying that they might fail to establish an electoral connection between voters and representatives on EU policy issues. This paper investigates candidates' responsiveness by assessing whether they increased their focus on environmental issues in their 2019 campaign tweets compared to 2014 in line with the increase in environmental concern among citizens. Results show that candidates respond to citizens' environmental concerns, especially candidates from GAL parties. These findings indicate that European Parliament elections can serve as an arena to discuss EU policy issues.
The Conference on the Future of Europe (COFOE) has been regarded by certain Members of the European Parliament and Commission officials as the most significant exercise in 'European democracy.' But what comes next? Scholarship has largely focused on inter-institutional tensions, particularly the conflict between the Council of the EU and the European Parliament (EP) over the Conference's constituent implications, specifically the end of unanimity or the EP's right of legislative initiative. Building on research on mini-public outcomes, this article examines through interviews and documentary analysis how different institutions - the Commission, the EP, and the Committee of the Regions - have assessed the recommendations. Analytically, the study demonstrates that the institutions prioritised different sets of recommendations, resulting in differentiated forms of institutional appropriation and cherry-picking of the Conference's outputs. This provides renewed insight into how citizen deliberation can serve as a medium through which pre-existing political conflicts are reproduced.
The European Union (EU) regularly participates in informal international governmental organizations (IIGOs) to drive informal policy-making in various areas. Yet we lack systematic empirical information and theoretical grounding about this engagement. Existing work mainly focuses on states as IIGOs' primary members or on specific issue areas, and disregards the scope of the EU's IIGO engagement. Therefore, we provide an empirical mapping of 119 cases that offers a systematic overview of the historical development, key areas, participating states, and the EU institutions involved. We find that the EU's engagement is significantly higher than previously assumed, includes all EU main bodies, has a particular focus on security issues and conflict management, and aims especially at states in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Based on this, we discuss the drivers, aims, and consequences of the EU's systematic IIGO engagement to identify candidate explanations for outlining the contours of an emerging research agenda.
