While the European Union (EU) professes a commitment to liberal democracy, in recent years it has allowed some member governments to backslide toward competitive authoritarianism. The EU has become ...trapped in an 'authoritarian equilibrium' underpinned by three factors. First, the EU's half-baked system of party politics and its ingrained reluctance to interfere in the domestic politics of its member states help shield national autocrats from EU intervention. Second, funding and investment from the EU helps sustain these regimes. Third, the free movement of persons in the EU facilitates the exit of dissatisfied citizens, which depletes the opposition and generates remittances, thereby helping these regimes endure. While more fully developed democratic federations have the capacity to eventually steer autocratic member states back toward democracy, the EU appears to be stuck in an autocracy trap.
This article argues for a radical recasting of the European Union democratic deficit debate. Critics have long argued that the EU suffers from a democratic deficit and that growing EU power ...undermines national democracy. But recent backsliding on democracy and the rule of law in Hungary and Poland reminds us that grave democratic deficits can also exist at the national level in member states and that the EU may have a role in addressing them. This article will place the EU’s struggles with democratic deficits in its member states in comparative perspective, drawing on the experience of other democracies that have struggled with pockets of subnational authoritarianism. Comparative analysis suggests that considerations driven by partisan politics may allow local pockets of autocracy to persist within otherwise democratic political unions.
The European Union (EU) project of combining a single market with a common currency was incomplete from its inception. This article shows that the incompleteness of the governance architecture of ...Europe’s Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) was both a cause of the euro crisis and a characteristic pattern of the policy responses to the crisis. We develop a “failing forward” argument to explain the dynamics of European integration using recent experience in the eurozone as an illustration: Intergovernmental bargaining leads to incompleteness because it forces states with diverse preferences to settle on lowest common denominator solutions. Incompleteness then unleashes forces that lead to crisis. Member states respond by again agreeing to lowest common denominator solutions, which address the crisis and lead to deeper integration. To date, this sequential cycle of piecemeal reform, followed by policy failure, followed by further reform, has managed to sustain both the European project and the common currency. However, this approach entails clear risks. Economically, the policy failures engendered by this incremental approach to the construction of EMU have been catastrophic for the citizens of many crisis-plagued member states. Politically, the perception that the EU is constantly in crisis and in need of reforms to salvage the union is undermining popular support for European integration.
The causal logic behind many arguments in historical institutionalism emphasizes the enduring impact of choices made during critical junctures in history. These choices close off alternative options ...and lead to the establishment of institutions that generate self-reinforcing path-dependent processes. Despite the theoretical and practical importance of critical junctures, however, analyses of path dependence often devote little attention to them. The article reconstructs the concept of critical junctures, delimits its range of application, and provides methodological guidance for its use in historical institutional analyses. Contingency is the key characteristic of critical junctures, and counterfactual reasoning and narrative methods are necessary to analyze contingent factors and their impact. Finally, the authors address specific issues relevant to both cross-sectional and longitudinal comparisons of critical junctures.
This Special Issue of the Journal of European Public Policy has two objectives. First, we clarify some ambiguities in the original formulation of the failing forward framework. Second, we analyze ...scope conditions under which we are likely to see failing forward. To achieve these objectives, we bring together articles that engage with the failing forward framework. Some contributions seek to refine the concepts and arguments, others challenge them outright. These pieces assess the applicability of the framework to a range of policy areas, from trade negotiations, competition policy and banking union through citizenship and the rule of law to pandemic response and defense and security policy, thus helping to identify the domains and conditions in which failing forward is likely to occur, and those in which it is not.
This article explores the potential efficacy and limitations of judicial mechanisms as tools to combat democratic backsliding in European Union (EU) member states. The article argues that more can be ...done to maximize the effectiveness of existing judicial tools, such as infringement proceedings brought to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) by the Commission and private enforcement litigation in national courts. At the same time, we highlight risks inherent in many proposals for novel judicial tools to defend national democracy. We conclude that despite their importance, judicial safeguards alone - whether existing ones or novel proposals - will not suffice to stop democratic backsliding by a determined national government: if the Union is to rein in such attacks on its core values, heads of government and other EU leaders will have to intervene politically as well.
When environmental issues emerged on the international agenda in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the United States was of one of the strongest and most consistent supporters of international ...environmental treaties and agreements. The member states of the European Union subsequently ratified all the international treaties created in this period, but U.S. leadership was crucial and European states were laggards in many cases. Since the 1990s, the political dynamics of international environmental policy have shifted, with the European Union emerging as a global environmental leader and the United States repeatedly opposing multilateral environmental agreements. The authors argue that a “regulatory politics” model that synthesizes the effects of domestic politics and international regulatory competition provides the most powerful explanation of why the United States and European Union have “traded places” with respect to their support for international environmental agreements.
This article dismantles the myth that the EU's failure to respond adequately to the rise of autocratic member governments has been due to its lack of adequate tools. The EU has used this excuse ...repeatedly to justify engaging in what Laurent Pech calls a new instrument creation cycle - reacting to attacks on democracy and the rule of law not by deploying existing tools but by wasting time creating new ones. The repetition of this cycle has resulted in the creation of a Rule of Law Rube Goldberg machine - a redundant assemblage of mostly useless instruments ostensibly designed to help the EU address backsliding. The pointlessness of many of these tools is underscored when we look closely at the few simple but potentially powerful, MacGyver-like tools that the EU has had at its disposal all along, but which EU leaders have failed to use robustly to defend democracy.
The European Union’s institutional development is highly imbalanced. It has established robust legal authority and institutions, but it remains weak or impotent in terms of its centralization of ...fiscal, administrative, and coercive capacity. We argue that situating the EU in terms of the history of state-building allows us to better understand the outcomes of EU governance. Historically, political projects centralizing power have been most complete when both market and security pressures are present to generate state formation. With the EU, market forces have had a far greater influence than immediate military threats. We offer a preliminary demonstration of the promise of this approach by applying it to two empirical examples, the euro and the Schengen area. Our analysis suggests that the EU does not need to be a Weberian state, nor be destined to become one, for the state-building perspective to shed new light on its processes of political development.
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