'Never Let a Serious Crisis go to Waste...': How Member State Governments and EU Institutions Use Crises to Deepen European Integration

This paper investigates European integration in response to crises. In particular, it asks why the EU so often responds to crises with ‘more Europe’, and analyses how member state governments and EU institutions deliberately use different crisis situations since Maastricht to deepen European integration in line with their pre-existing policy preferences. Theoretically, the paper takes up the vivid debate on European integration in response to the recent Euro Crisis, but broadens the perspective to arrive at a less case-specific, more general account of the causal link between crises and integration. To this end, the paper develops a liberal intergovernmentalist model of integration in response to crises, which is inspired by some elements of the multiple streams framework. Empirically, the paper investigates one economic and three non-economic crises, which affected different EU policy fields: 1) the BSE Crisis of the late 1990s, 2) the security crisis following the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington on 11 September 2001, 3) the Euro Crisis from 2010 onwards, and 4) the current refugee crisis since 2014. The analysis, which uses process tracing methods and draws on qualitative (governmental documents, newspaper articles), but also quantitative data (newspaper frequency analyses, Eurobarometer data), reveals that asymmetric interdependencies between EU member states and varying degrees of governmental bargaining power explain why EU members generally prefer deeper European integration in response to crises, but final policy decisions usually mirror the pre-existing policy ideas or proposals of Germany, France, or the United Kingdom. Yet, in the context of urgency and uncertainty, EU institutions also have the chance to shape integration by swiftly tabling policy proposals. The paper contributes to our understanding of the mechanisms of European integration, especially in times of crisis.