In person icon Politicisation and the Evolution of the European Union

Abstract

The purpose of the panel is to bring together scholars who are working on various aspects of the European Union’s institutional politics to showcase new research on the broad theme of the EU’s politicisation. All of the proposed papers speak directly to the twin issues of a) politicisation and b) more broadly, evolution of the EU’s political system. Three of the proposed papers speak directly to the former by focusing on the controversial Spitzenkandidaten process – an example of the broader theme of politicisation – while the fourth engages with a major case of intra-institutional change that commenced before the advent of the Spitzenkandidaten process but has become entangled with it. The Spitzenkandidaten process was the byproduct of a reform introduced by the Lisbon Treaty in 2009 whereby the European Council proposes a new President of the European Commission taking account of the outcome of European elections. This reform has generated a burgeoning literature especially especially since the experience of 2014 which proved to be controversial. A central question on which this panel will seek to shed light is the extent to which, if at all, the introduction of the aforementioned process has managed to alter the EU’s political system in terms of interinstitutional relations and party politics (Christiansen 2016). This question is part and parcel of the broader issue of the EU’s politicisation which is a key feature of the process of European integration since the end of the permissive consensus (Hooghe and Marks 2009). Two of the papers of the proposed panel look inside two key institutions of the EU, namely the European Parliament and the European Commission and seek to examine two major developments in relation to the broader theme of the EU’s politicisation, namely the centrality of the EP’s largest party group (the European People’s Party) and the evolution of the European Commission President’s authority within the EU’s main executive. They place these developments (respectively the centrality of the EPP group in the EP and the growing presidentialisation of the European Commission) in the broader context of politicisation and the forces that seek to oppose it. Ceron, Matilde, Thomas Christiansen, and Dionyssis G. Dimitrakopoulos, eds. (2024). The Politicisation of the European Commission’s Presidency: Spitzenkandidaten and Beyond. London: Palgrave. Christiansen, Thomas (2016). ‘After the Spitzenkandidaten: fundamental change in the EU’s political system?’, West European Politics, 39:5, 992–1010. Hooghe, Liesbet, and Gary Marks (2009). ‘A postfunctionalist theory of European integration: from permissive consensus to constraining dissensus’, British Journal of Political Science, 39:1, 1–23.

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