Revisiting National EU Coordination in an Era of Crisis and Reform

Abstract

How governments manage their interaction with the EU constitutes a key part both of national decision making and EU governance that is often overlooked. At home, governments are likely to incur political costs when they are perceived to have failed to defend domestic interests, especially in an era of ‘constraining dissensus’ (Marks and Hooghe 2008). With respect to the EU, national coordination affects the operation of EU institutions, the effectiveness of EU policy-making, the implementation, and enforcement of EU policies, and delimits the capacities of the EU as a system (Spanou 1994). Although existing scholarship offers many useful insights, it has yet to take account either of the impact on national systems of reforms introduced by the Lisbon Treaty or the new requirements imposed by new structures or processes created by the EU in response to a series of overlapping crises since 2008. This panel revisits and provides fresh conceptual and empirical perspectives on national EU coordination. Four are drawn from a new project led by Heidbreder and Kassim that investigates and assesses the impact of two sets of changes: first, the effects of Lisbon Treaty reforms that separated the European Council from the Council of the European Union, and that introduced new opportunities for national parliaments and constitutional regions, on the balance between domestic actors in dealing with EU matters; and second, the adjustments in national EU coordination made to meet the requirements imposed by the extension and expansion of the semester system in response initially to the Eurozone crisis, then the development of National Recovery and Resilience Plans in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis, and the energy strategy introduced by the EU in response to Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The fifth is based on new research conducted within a project by Sabina Lange and Johan Adrianesen.

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