Is Resilience the New Competitiveness? How the Pandemic Awakened Dormant Norm Collisions in EU Sectoral Policies

How norms and EU policy-making make comfortable bedfellows has received broad scholarly attention. Especially in policy areas shaped by both, EU institutions and member states, norms create an intersubjective, action-guiding understanding of policy-related values and challenges. They have thus been conceived of as a policy-making tool that serves the agenda-setting capacities of entrepreneurial actors such as the European Commission. At the same time, more recent norm-theoretical approaches suggest, norms and their constellation within a policy field do not remain stable over time. Instead, normative priorities are in flux, so that their meanings and interrelations are subject to constant contestation. This contestation remains dormant until a systemic change occurs that lets norms collide openly and ultimately can lead to their re-configuration and substantial policy change. The proposed contribution departs from the Covid-19 pandemic as a substantial and procedural juncture awakening dormant norm collisions in EU sectoral policies. We examine norms as policy-making tools and their disposition to collide. Given that the EU is supposed to provide support to member state action in the areas of higher education and transport policy, they are strongly linked to the broad normative agendas of increasing the competitiveness of and cohesion within the Union. At the same time, both sectors were fundamentally impacted by the Corona crisis in 2020 and the measures rolled-out to counter it. Following these observations, we consider it worthwhile to ask, to what extent the configurations of norms guiding these two EU policies have been altered. To account for the normative re-configuration of supportive EU policies in times of crises, we combine research from International Relations norm theory with approaches to EU policy analysis. In a first step, we identify respective sectoral norms and their dormant collision and situate them within European Commission strategies until the first responses to the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020. In a second step, we assess the strategic documents in reaction to the Corona crisis to identify changes in the respective constellation of norms. In result, we show a re-configuration of norms in the areas of higher education and transport, whereby we point to ‘resilience’ that appears to be established as a novel ‘catch-all’ norm within both policy sectors.