This book elucidates the link between the politics of a now seemingly permanent crisis in Europe and the politicisation of European integration. Looking at the epistemic dimension of crises, it suggests that the way in which a crisis is framed and contested determines its potential impact on the level of politicisation of European integration. Europe is more challenged and contested today than it has even been, facing crisis of an almost existential kind. Yet, political crises are manufactured and narrated, so Europe has the possibility to intervene and ‘bring about her recovery’, instead of letting these crises prove terminal. This book explores the political process in and through which certain events come to be framed as constitutive of a moment that requires a decisive intervention. It shows that crises require a double framing: a situation needs to be identified as one of crisis in the first place and, subsequently, the nature and character of the crisis need to be specified. By examining a wide range of policy areas, the book demonstrates that framing of crises, i.e., identifying one situation both as a crisis and a crisis of a particular kind, contributes to the politicisation (or depoliticisation) of the process of European integration. The chapters in this book were originally published as special issue of Journal of European Integration.

An analysis of the repeated existential crises affecting the resilience of the European Union in the twenty-first century.

Politicising Europe presents the most comprehensive contribution to empirical research on politicisation to date. The study is innovative in both conceptual and empirical terms. Conceptually, the contributors develop and apply a new index and typology of politicisation. Empirically, the volume presents a huge amount of original data, tracing politicisation in a comparative perspective over more than forty years. Focusing on six European countries (Austria, France, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK) from the 1970s to the current euro crisis, the book examines conflicts over Europe in election campaigns, street protests, and public debates on every major step in the integration process. It shows that European integration has indeed become politicised. However, the patterns and developments differ markedly across countries and arenas, and many of the key hypotheses on the driving forces of change need to be revisited in view of new findings.

The European Union beyond the Polycrisis? explores the political dynamics of multiple crises faced by the EU, both at European level and within the member states. In so doing, it provides a state-of-the-art overview of current research on the relationship between politicization and European integration. The book proposes that the EU’s multi-dimensional crisis can be seen as a multi-level ‘politics trap’, from which the Union is struggling to escape. The individual contributions analyze the mechanisms of this trap, its relationship to the multiple crises currently faced by the EU, and the strategies pursued by a plurality of actors (the Commission, the European Parliament, national governments) to cope with its constraints. Overall, the book suggests that comprehensive, ‘grand’ bargains are for the moment out of reach, although national and supranational actors can find ways of ‘relaxing’ the politics trap and in so doing perhaps lay the foundations for more ambitious future solutions. This book, dedicated to the exploration of the political dynamics of multiple, simultaneous crises, offers an empirical and theoretical assessment of the existing political constraints on European integration. Analysing domestic and European political reactions to the EU’s polycrisis and assessing how EU institutions, national governments and broader publics have responded to a new era of politicization, The European Union beyond the Polycrisis? will be of great interest to scholars of European politics and the EU, as well as professionals working in EU institutions, national administrations and European advocacy groups. The chapters were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of European Public Policy.

A study of party competition in Europe since 2008 aids understanding of the recent, often dramatic, changes taking place in European politics.

This handbook comprehensively explores the European Union’s institutional and policy responses to crises across policy domains and institutions – including the Euro crisis, Brexit, the Ukraine crisis, the refugee crisis, as well as the global health crisis resulting from COVID-19. It contributes to our understanding of how crisis affects institutional change and continuity, decision-making behavior and processes, and public policy-making. It offers a systematic discussion of how the existing repertoire of theories understand crisis and how well they capture times of unrest and events of disintegration. More generally, the handbook looks at how public organizations cope with crises, and thus probes how sustainable and resilient public organizations are in times of crisis and unrest.

Why are migration policies sometimes heavily contested and high on the political agenda? And why do they, at other moments and in other countries, hardly lead to much public debate? The entrance and settlement of migrants in Western Europe has prompted various political reactions. In some countries anti-immigration parties have gained substantial public support while in others migration policies have been hardly controversial. The Politicisation of Migration examines the differences between seven Western European countries by developing a conceptual framework to empirically explain patterns of politicisation and de-politicisation. The analyses show that over the past decade immigration has been increasingly defined in socio-cultural terms and that it has been receiving less political attention since the economic crisis started in 2007. This book also looks at the role of mainstream parties and political actors in the process of politicisation, and demonstrates how the role of ‘challengers’ is more limited than often assumed. Contributing to literatures on migration, party politics and agenda-setting, the book will be of interest to students and scholars in the fields of politics and migration studies.