More Crisis? More Integration. The Overall Strategy to Tackle the Eurozone and Immigration Crises

Since 2008, European governments and EU institutions have tackled the Eurozone crisis with the creation of rescue funds, a more stringent enhancement of macroeconomic, budgetary, and fiscal surveillance, and a banking union. The ongoing asylum seekers crisis has led European institutions to contemplate renegotiating the Dublin Treaty (potentially introducing permanent quotas for each member), reinforcing Frontex, and possibly creating patrol police at EU borders. Both crises seem to have paved the way for centralization: solidified regulation in the case of EMU, strengthening cohesion just at the eve in the case of immigration. The presentation intends to show how federalism can be a useful theoretical tool to conceptualize the overall integrationist strategy utilized in both cases. Looking at EMU, my main hypothesis is that the European Council through horizontal federalism (“the method”) has allowed new “rules of the game” to emerge that empowered EC/EU institutions and targeted the vertical centralization of economic and monetary affairs (“the outcome”). This then resulted in an incremental and steady federalization of EMU (“the process”). My assumption is that a similar dynamic is taking place on immigration. Challenging scholars and common views that claim a return to nationalism and the predominance of state-centric theories, I argue that the responses to these crises are reinforcing EU integration, and by so advancing political cohesion and economic regulation in the union.