This article examines how political party leaders in six European Union (EU) member states activate EU-related frames in their Twitter communication between 2007 and 2022. Building on framing theory and politicisation theory, it asks which frames are most prominent, how their salience varies over time and which party-political and contextual factors account for the use of frames on social media. The analysis relies on an original dataset of 181,615 tweets (14,528 EU-related) from party leaders in Czechia, Estonia, Germany, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia. EU-related tweets are identified through a combination of automated and manual procedures and coded using manual quantitative content analysis for five master-frames: economic, identity-cultural, sovereignty, democracy-legitimacy and security. The descriptive results show that nearly 85% of EU-related tweets activate none of the five coded frames, and that when frame activation occurs, it is dominated by economic and security perspectives. In contrast, sovereignty, democracy and cultural frames are much less salient in this arena. Explanatory two-way fixed-effects models reveal that Euroscepticism and radical-right party status are the strongest predictors of sovereignty and democracy framing, whilst economic and security frames are more widely used across the spectrum, with non-linear effects of left-right and Green, Alternative, and Libertarian-Traditional, Authoritarian, and Nationalist placements and selective amplification during the migration crisis and Brexit. Overall, the study shows that explicit EU frame activation on Twitter is sparse, selective and crisis-sensitive and suggests that politicisation through framing in this arena often takes an episodic form rather than appearing as continuous competition amongst multiple frames.
Recent initiatives, such as Global Gateway, highlight the increasingly political nature of the European Commission. This, in turn, creates policy opportunities and challenges related to both how the European Commission works on the global stage and how its different services interact with each other and work internally. Thus, initiatives such as Global Gateway increase the need for policy integration across policy domains, in this case related to connectivity. This article looks at how policy integration becomes a policy ambition that is confronted with increased internal politicisation. By studying four empirical expectations in relation to how Global Gateway tests the European Commission's integrative capacity, the article unpacks the ways in which the European Commission's integrative capacity has become fundamental to ensure its effectiveness in external policies. The capacity to integrate different policies to allow different sectors and policy communities to develop joint work, including strengthened cross-directorate-general co-ordination, can enable the Commission to present itself as a credible external actor with a unified external strategy. However, this goal is questioned by resource competition, intra-institutional politicisation and the need for external flexibility.
Abstract Understanding how organised interests' stated positions correspond to EU legislation requires moving beyond end‐point measures of preference attainment towards a process‐oriented account of how policy‐position alignment evolves across institutional stages. This study conceptualises semantic alignment as the extent to which an actor's three‐dimensional policy‐position profile corresponds to successive EU institutional texts. This study draws on a corpus of approximately 4800 consultation submissions across three major legislative dossiers: the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, the Artificial Intelligence Act and the Critical Raw Materials Act. We use a multilingual agentic large language model framework to retrieve relevant passages, extract positions on regulatory stringency, governance centralisation, crisis urgency and compute stage‐specific alignment with the European Commission, the Council of the EU and the European Parliament. Given that the analysis is observational and text based, the resulting scores capture semantic alignment and preference attainment rather than causal influence. Four findings emerge. First, semantic alignment is more strongly associated with final preference attainment than textual similarity. Second, preference attainment varies across stages: civil society submissions show their highest alignment at the agenda‐setting stage, whilst business actors display comparatively flatter alignment profiles across institutions. Third, non‐English submissions achieve significantly lower alignment, revealing systematic linguistic inequality in EU consultation processes. Fourth, crisis framing is more strongly associated with alignment in high‐uncertainty contexts than in stable policy environments. Together, these findings offer a process‐oriented, computationally scalable and cross‐linguistically sensitive account of how organised‐interest positions correspond to European integration outcomes.
Abstract Scholarship on the Europeanisation of border conflicts explains how closer integration can transform them. This article addresses the reverse case. It examines how the European Union (EU) and the United Kingdom have managed the de‐Europeanisation of three border conflicts – Northern Ireland, Gibraltar and the UK Sovereign Base Areas in Cyprus – through the Withdrawal Agreement Protocols and the Agreement on Gibraltar. Three legal techniques recur: sovereignty disclaimers that quarantine the underlying territorial disputes; the extraterritorial application of EU law to keep contested borders functionally invisible; and bespoke governance mechanisms for institutional oversight and dispute resolution. Each is calibrated to the intensity of the underlying sovereignty dispute and the depth of integration required to prevent border hardening. The article enriches the literature on differentiated disintegration with an account of its territorial and conflict‐related dimensions and recasts the neo‐functional peace as a method of conflict management capable of operating in either direction.
