AVRUPA ENTEGRASYONU

Eurozone crisis or as mostly referred as sovereign debt crisis that broke out in Greece in 2009 is fundamentally due to weak and unstable integration of peripheral countries in the Eurozone. It was triggered by the speculative mortgage lending by the US financial institutions in 2007.

The influx of refugees in 2015 created a further major challenge at the EU’s external borders and for the internal ‘Schengen’ free movement regime.

When the Treaty of Lisbon entered into force in December 2009, the EU finally appeared to have consolidated institutionally after a series of incremental treaty revisions.

Whereas debtor countries – inter alia Greece, Italy and Spain – welcome risksharing,
i.e. redistribution, but wish to avoid conditionality, creditor countries like Germany, Austria, Finland and the Netherlands prefer riskreduction over risk-sharing by establishing formal enforcement mechanisms to ensure compliance.

This growing political tension, in turn, has generated a rise of populist challenger parties both in the national and European electoral arena. Key examples include, the UK Independence Party (UKIP) in Britain, Geert Wilders’s Freedom Party in the Netherlands, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany.

The legislative measures introduced with the Six-Pack and the Two-Pack develop and
strengthen the Stability and Growth Pack, which is the framework for coordination of the fiscal policies of the member states within a broader context of economic governance.

Adopting a conservative, nationalist and xenophobic discourse, the AfD has filled a
representation gap on cultural integration issues in the German party system, attracted the growing number of citizens who were dissatisfied with the migration policy of the coalition government, hence combining anti-migration and anti-establishment sentiment.

Whereas the Euro crisis has produced more integration, the Schengen crisis has not, and the Brexit referendum has initiated a process of disintegration.

The first tension is between the EU collectivity and its member states. It is worth stressing that the nature of the relationship between the whole and the constituent parts has never been a zerosum game where the strengthening powers of the
one inevitably leads to weakening of those of the other. As a unique form of joint exercise of pooled national sovereignties, the EU has not transcended the European states but transformed them from nation-states to member states. European integration should be studied as a process of state transformation. All member states would ideally want a Union in which they manage their higher levels of interdependence but also they retain maximum autonomy.

The last tension relates to the EU and its wider international environment. The blurring of the distinction between external security and internal security on the one hand, and between hard power and soft power on the other, underlines how important the unstable and disorderly neighbourhood has become to Europe.

Eurozone crisis or as mostly referred as sovereign debt crisis that broke out in Greece in 2009 is fundamentally due to weak and unstable integration of peripheral countries in the Eurozone.

Brexit is an example of how practices of differentiated integration might feed up perceptions of marginalization from the core policy areas and fears of having no voice in shaping of future reforms.

Treaty ratification crises have allowed the newly formed EU to operate in a context of European politics characterized by contestation of EU issues in domestic arenas paralleled by a gradual decline in public enthusiasm and support for the European integration project.

Spain is a debtor country.

“National politics” is still the crucial arena for the politicization of the EU.

Stability and Growth Pact (SGP): It is a set of rules designed to ensure that countries in the EU implement sound public finances and coordinate their fiscal policies with the aim of achieving the well-functioning of the Economic and Monetary Union.

Schengen area: It covers 26 countries without border controls among them. These countries are Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland.

The fourth tension is between an ‘ever closer union’ and the various forms of ‘differentiated integration. The UK’s membership of the EU and the challenge of Brexit deserves special attention here. Combined with a party-driven Euroscepticism as the persistent feature of the British domestic politics since the time of Maastricht, differentiated integration of the UK into the EU has not helped but marginalized it from the rest of the Union in the post-Lisbon period.

Politicization has not remained solely at the national level; it has become multi-levelled with effects on EU actors and EU inter-institutional dynamics.

Germany played a differentiated leadership role in the crisis context, acting as a reluctant hegemon during the Eurozone crisis.