State-building’, ‘polity maintenance’ and EU crises. Exploring the ‘nature of the beast’ - once again

How ‘weak’ is the EU as a policy and political system? Is it a ‘state-building’ failure? Do crises strengthen or further enfeeble it? And how can we tell? Scholars have been inspired by the EU’s attempts to deal with recent crises to innovate in our understanding of the EU. To take just two, Keleman and McNamara’s recent ‘state-building’ approach argues that the EU is condemned to chronic polity ‘weakness’ and crisis-management failure because it has never encountered the security challenges that state-formation historically requires. By contrast, Ferrera, Miro and Ronchi’s ‘polity-maintenance’ argument is more optimistic, claiming that alongside policy innovations, the strategic use of ‘communicative discourse’ by political leaders during the Covid-19 crisis revealed unappreciated powers to ‘bound’, ‘bind’ and ‘bond’ the EU polity. But despite their differences, both share a common dissatisfaction with conventional approaches to understanding the EU as a political system. Using these two studies, alongside others, this paper considers what EU crisis management and its analysis over the last two decades really tells us about the ‘nature of the beast’ and how best to understand the impact of successive crises on the EU and its political development.