The Institutional Consequences of the EU's Handling of the Crisis

Abstract

The purpose of this panel is to bring together academics who are working on the impact of the EU’s handling of the ongoing crisis on the EU’s own institutions and processes in response to section 5’s call for panels that – inter alia – address the issue of inter-institutional relations in the European Union. It is not only the origins of the crisis per se that have been the focus of both attention and debate. The same applies to the institutional consequences of the way in which the EU has responded to the crisis, i.e. the impact of this response on the European Union’s own institutions and processes. In simple terms, two sets of arguments have been presented in the ongoing debate (which this panel is meant to further), despite the diversity of the theoretical frameworks that have been used by the relevant authors. On the one hand, some authors have argued that the EU’s supranational institutions - or at least some of them - have benefited from the changes brought about at the European level in response to the crisis (for example, see Bauer and Becker 2014). On the other hand, others have argued that it is the intergovernmental element that has been enhanced (Bickerton, Hodson & Puetter, 2014; Chang 2013; White 2015). The proposed panel brings together authors on either side of this debate in an effort to foster debate between them and thus help advance the theoretical and empirical understanding of EU institutions and policy-making processes, in line with this section’s objectives.