AVRUPA ENTEGRASYONU

Eurozone crisis: Eurozone crisis or as mostly referred to as the 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.

Opt-outs: They are a way of ensuring that when a given country does not wish to join the others in a particular field of EU policy, it can opt-out, thus avoiding an overall stalemate. In order to prevent the Danish ratification crisis to turn into a threatening crisis for the EU as a whole, the Edinburgh Summit of December 1992 granted opt-outs to Denmark in core state powers along with the certain exceptions in European citizenship. Examples of opt-outs were extended in time to other member states including the UK, Ireland, Sweden, and Poland.

Politicization refers to the increasing contestation of the scope, level, or character of regional integration, mass publics have come to pay more attention to political decision-making within EU framework and at the same time seem more critical of the policies. This increasing contentiousness has been called the ‘politicization of European integration’. To be more precise, politicization refers to “… an increase in polarization of opinions, interests or values and the extent to which they are publicly advanced towards policy formulation within the EU”

Before overviewing how the EU has become increasingly politicized since the recent crises, the key features of the crisis-driven politicization are given as follows:
• Politicization has not remained solely at the national level; it has become multi-leveled; at the bottom or national politics in the member states; bottom-up effects for all EU actors and effects for EU governance and its inter-institutional dynamics at the top.
• Politicization has become more nation and region-specific or differentiated;
• Yet, “national politics” is still the crucial arena for the politicization of the EU.
• The substantive content of politicization was broadened to cover the EU’s governing authority, its governing activities and key dilemmas of governance-democratic accountability and democratic legitimacy.
• Politicization has had differential effects and consequences for the Euro crisis and for the Schengen crisis.

At the national level, politicization can be used to describe four interrelated phenomena:
• the increasing political salience of the EU in national public spheres;
• the growing cross-cutting cleavages in the electorate that find expression in public debates;
• the mainstream party politics that has had difficulty coping with the electoral divides, as evidenced in election losses and weak public discourse; and
• the rise of populist challenger parties and governments that benefit from the electoral divides and give voice to public discontent.

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

Whereas the Euro crisis has produced more integration, the Schengen crisis has not, and the Brexit referendum has initiated a process of disintegration. There has been more
political disintegration than some of the historically ‘optimistic’ theories (neo-functionalist and liberal intergovernmental) would have anticipated, but less than more recently-developed and more ‘pessimistic’ theories, notably post-functionalism, would have expected.

The recent European crises have not only have made the EU a more publicly contested issue for several political actors at the domestic level but also, have fiercely sparked the debate concerning the hegemonic leadership role of Germany in the process of European integration. Germany has played a central role in all crises, but with varying degrees of success. During the Eurozone crisis, Germany seemed to have enhanced its role in managing and undertaking the burdens of the EU politics of crisis-management. Arguably, the fact that other countries of the Eurozone have not acted decisively and responsibly might be regarded as instrumental for bringing Germany to the forefront in assisting Greece with loan facility albeit with conditionality and for promoting new economic governance reforms.

The EU crisis responses have led to changes within EU institutional actors. The supranational actors have been broadened to include de novo bodies created by member states after the Euro crisis and outside the EU framework alongside traditional supranational institutions. While EU intergovernmental bodies can be viewed as the most powerful decision-makers- either at a meeting in the European Council formation or in the Eurogroup and Euro Summits- they have become more differentiated as can be seen in the bipartite meetings led by France and Germany. The pattern of differentiation of intergovernmental institutions has drawn scholarly attention to internal power constellation and to the importance of leadership in hard times. Arguably, the European Council’s active role in the crisis management was a consequence of the very nature of the crisis which required political leadership and national legitimation of the policy instruments to tackle the crisis. In fact, throughout the crisis, European citizens had increasingly been identifying the Heads of State and Government as their legitimate representatives, giving them a collective responsibility for the management of the Eurozone crisis.

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 zero-sum game where the strengthening powers of the one inevitably lead to the weakening of those of the other. The second tension is between a functionalist EU or the Union as a problem-solving entity and a federal EU or the Union as a political union. From the outset, the member states had “determined to lay the foundations of an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe”. 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. 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.

They raise sovereignty tensions and redistributive disputes be they old or new.

In Greece in 2009

A) since the foundational period

D)

B)

C)

The EU did not adopt Eurobonds in respect to the Eurozone crisis.

B)

D) Schengen area covers 26 countries without border controls among them.

A) Weakened prospect of enlargement beyond the Balkans