Attacks and failures: EU integration crises in comparison

This paper proposes to classify integration crises as either attacks or failures. Whereas in failures such as the euro or migration crises, the integrated policy threatens to stop working according to its agreed objectives and procedures because of poor policy design or unexpected shocks, attacks such as Brexit and the rule-of-law crisis result from political actors taking determinate action aimed at reducing the level and scope of integration. Whereas failure is an unintended result of policy malfunction, attacks are intentional acts against functioning policies. The paper starts from the assumption that attacks and failures produce different crisis processes and outcomes – and that they are best explained by different theoretical approaches: functionalism in the case of failures and postfunctionalism in the case of attacks. The paper presents these theoretical approaches to the explanation of crises and crisis responses and illustrates them in a comparative analysis of the four recent integration crises: the Eurozone crisis, the migration crisis, Brexit and the rule-of-law crisis.