The many relationships between European integration and EU membership

Abstract

European integration is often understood to imply membership in the European Union (EU): the political, regulatory and economic forces unleashed by the process of institutionalised cooperation. But scholars studying the EU, federal and international relations know very well that European integration goes beyond the EU’s fuzzy borders. Its forces also work on those in the vicinity. Integration does not always imply cooperation but alienation and marginalisation. Such integration in adversity can also happen inside the EU: integration may lead to the evolution of distinct core-periphery patterns in several dimensions, a phenomenon that Stein Rokkan (1999) documented in 500 years of European state-formation. Therefore, this panel explores the various relationships between integration and membership. The contribution by Piroska and Epstein remind us that deeper integration, such as the building of a banking union for the euro area and a capital markets union for the Single Market, often means even for members outside the political economic core that they are made a periphery. The exit of the UK from the EU provides us with a unique opportunity to study new aspects of the relationships between integration and membership. Article 50 TFEU, only recently added to the Treaty, has given member states the right to withdraw from membership and seek other institutional forms of integration with the EU. An idiosyncratic feature of the EU’s compound polity, Ferrera et al ask how disruptive this is likely to be for future European integration. Two papers by Ganderson and Truchlewski et al explore how citizens perceive the relationship between integration and membership, a perception triggered by Brexit. The survey based papers offer some surprising findings that suggest more research needs to be done.

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