Between 2015 and 2017, the European Union (EU) was confronted with a major crisis in its history, the so-called “European refugee crisis.” Since the multifaceted crisis has provoked many different ...responses, it is also likely to have influenced individuals’ assessments of immigrants and European integration. Using data from three waves of the European Social Survey (ESS) — the wave before the crisis in 2012, the wave at the beginning of the crisis in 2014, and the wave right after the (perceived) height of the crisis in 2016 — we test the degree to which the European refugee crisis increased Europeans’ anti-immigrant sentiment and Euroscepticism, as well as the influence of Europeans’ anti-immigrant attitudes on their level of Euroscepticism. As suggested by prior research, our results indicate that there is indeed a consistent and solid relationship between more critical attitudes toward immigrants and increased Euroscepticism. Surprisingly, however, we find that the crisis increased neither anti-immigrant sentiments nor critical attitudes toward the EU and did not reinforce the link between rejection of immigrants and rejection of the EU. These findings imply that even under a strong external shock, fundamental political attitudes remain constant.
This contribution analyses the relevance of neofunctionalist theory and the various spillover mechanisms for explaining the management of the crisis and the drive towards a more complete Economic and ...Monetary Union (EMU). The management of the crisis resulted in integrative outcomes owing to significant functional dissonances that arose from the incomplete EMU architecture created at Maastricht. These functional rationales were reinforced by integrative pressures exercised by supranational institutions, transnational organized interests and markets. The contribution concludes that, despite shortcomings, neofunctionalism provides important insights for understanding the integrative steps taken during the crisis.
Explaining outcomes of decision-making at the European level has occupied scholars since the late 1950s, yet analysts continue to disagree on the most important factors in the process. In this book, ...which was originally published in 2006, Arne Niemann examines the interplay of the supranational, governmental and non-governmental actors involved in EU integration, along with the influence of domestic, supranational and international structures. The book restates and develops neofunctionalism as an approach for explaining decisions in the European Union and assesses the usefulness of the revised neofunctionalist framework on three case studies: the emergence and development of the PHARE programme, the reform of the Common Commercial Policy, and the communitarisation of visa, asylum and immigration policy. Niemann argues that this classic theory can be modified in such a way as to draw on a wider theoretical repertoire and that many micro-level concepts can sensibly be accommodated within his larger neofunctionalist framework.
This is the introduction to a special collection of contributions that analyse the financial and economic crisis through various theoretical lenses. Accordingly, it does four things. First, it ...describes the EU's institutional response to the crisis in order to provide a reference point for the contributions. Second, it summarizes the contributions. Third, it compares them in order to develop a theoretical dialogue. Finally, it answers the fundamental question at the heart of the crisis and this special collection: why did Economic and Monetary Union become deeper and more integrated when many feared for its survival?
The past 25 years have seen an unprecedented Europeanisation of the structures and governance in football across the continent. A European (and global) transfer market for players and managers has ...become the norm and a pan-European league system has been established that regularly exposes supporters to transnational competitions and players from all over Europe. At the same time, manifold typologies of football fans have been established, distinguishing groups of fans based on, for example, fan intensity, fan behaviour or their attitudes towards different actors in the field. The attitudes towards Europe and the self-identification of these fans within Europeanised football have not played a role in any of these typologies so far. This paper steps into that void and develops a typology of football fans in (Western) Europe that takes their attitudes towards Europeanisation as a point of departure. Based on data from an online survey among fans of first league clubs in England, France, Austria and Germany, two dimensions are identified as key categories: the intensity of fandom, and fans’ attitudes towards Europeanisation – which here manifests as a divide between the national/local belonging versus appreciating diversity and transnational spaces/developments or more succinctly, a divide between cosmopolitanism and communitarianism. Our analysis uncovers the existence of four types of fans: occasional cosmopolitans, occasional communitarians, frequent cosmopolitans and frequent communitarians.
The goal of this Special Issue is to improve our conceptualisation and empirical understanding of EU actorness and effectiveness in International Relations. While the European Union aspires to play a ...greater global role, its actorness and effectiveness cannot be taken for granted given the nature of the EU as a multi-level and semi-supranational polity encompassing 28 Member States with diverse foreign policy preferences. The EU is presently at an important crossroad. On the one hand, its external policy stature and capacity have been boosted by institutional innovations and by the Union’s increased involvement in the full spectrum of international issues. On the other hand, a number of factors cast doubt on the EU’s real external policy actorness and effectiveness: slow and often only modest internal reforms, an increasing politicisation of formally ‘low politics’ issues, the prolonged sovereign debt crisis in the Eurozone, and a less favourable external environment, with the US shifting its focus to the Asia-Pacific region and emerging powers creating a more polycentric world order. In view of these changes and subsequent developments in the scholarly literature, our aim is to re-evaluate earlier conceptions of EU actorness. Central to this re-evaluation will be a shift in focus from notions of actorness to effectiveness. This introductory article will unpack and further elaborate the issues raised in this abstract by delineating the EU as an international actor in the empirical context, by reviewing the existing conceptual literature, defining and conceptualizing key notions and by providing an overview of the contributions to this Special Issue.
In 2020/2021, the EU and its member states had to tackle the largest shock of the twenty-first century yet, the COVID-19 pandemic. COVID-19 led to an unprecedented health and economic crisis. In this ...article, we analyse public opinion on redistributive EU measures based on an original survey in Austria, Germany and Italy and ask whether EU citizens support a common aid package, common debt and redistribution to those countries that are economically most in need. Testing the influence of three explanatory concepts – self-interest, justice attitudes and general support of European integration – we find that all three explanatory concepts have predictive power. However, we find stronger effects on support for EU-level redistribution for citizens’ instrumental calculations concerning whether their country benefits from EU aid, and on general support for EU integration, than for justice attitudes.
In 2015/16, Europe faced the largest inflow of refugees since World War II. This inflow highlighted systemic deficiencies in EU asylum co‐operation which provoked a state of crisis. Together with the ...Eurozone crisis, this crisis has the potential to seriously damage the overall project of EU integration. The goal of this Special Issue is to provide a first systematic assessment of the crisis, applying and further developing key theoretical approaches to the sequence of events. In empirical terms, we advance original empirical evidence in order to deepen our understanding of the crisis and how it has been managed. In theoretical terms, we seek to (re)assess the usefulness and limitations of some important theoretical perspectives to European integration at a critical juncture of the EU's history. After presenting the sequence of events and assessing the EU's crisis response, the introduction will summarize our main findings and present avenues for further research.
This article analyses the extent of European Union (EU) actorness and effectiveness at the 15th United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of the Parties (COP) meeting ...in Copenhagen in December 2009. Although the EU has been characterised as a leader in international climate policy-making for some time, the COP 15 meeting in Copenhagen has overall brought about disappointing outcomes for the Union. This casts doubts on EU actorness and effectiveness in this field. We take the article by Jupille and Caporaso as a conceptual point of departure and then specify a more parsimonious actorness framework that consists of coherence and autonomy. Effectiveness is conceptualised as the result of actorness conditioned by the ‘opportunity structure’, that is, the external context that enables or constrains EU actions. We hold that EU actorness was only moderate, especially given somewhat limited coherence. In terms of the opportunity structure, we argue that the strong involvement of other important actors with rather different positions adversely impacted on EU effectiveness, along with a high degree of politicisation that constrained the European Union’s ability to negotiate effectively.
This article analyses the EU’s Common Commercial Policy (CCP) at the level of Treaty revision and particularly focuses on the last Treaty negotiations that led to the Treaty of Lisbon. The analysis ...is based on a revised neofunctionalist framework that the author developed in previous work. It draws on the following concepts: (i) functional spillover; (ii) cultivated spillover; (iii) social spillover; and (iv) countervailing forces. Insights into the dynamics and countervailing forces driving Treaty revisions considerably deepen our understanding of the Common Commercial Policy, as EU external trade policy-making is substantially affected by the parameters set by the Treaty. The analysis indicates that the revised neofunctionalist framework can broadly account for the changes of the Common Commercial Policy during the last Treaty revision. It is further suggested that integration in the area of trade policy cannot be explained exclusively by rational choice dynamics, such as utility maximizing actors with fixed preferences, but that socialization through deliberation also needs to be taken into account.
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