Debunking differentiated integration in the European Union

Despite the much-anticipated operation of the single European currency, the financial crisis in the Eurozone insinuated Euroscepticism, which was further aggravated by the explosive inflow of migrants and refugees. The constitutional specification of intergovernmental relations differed across and among member states, and an extra tier of governance at the European Union level also proliferated the explosive feature of ‘bordering.’ In principle, the intermediate-tier government often has constitutional responsibility for local governments in localizing policy accommodation of social integration. Yet while mapping the meanings of identity across multiple tiers of government and governance, this multiplicity in many member states did not deter prioritizing national over supranational integration. Some separatist or populist parties even managed to take advantage of resources and venues at the European level. In this paper, I first lay out the European Union as “a system of differentiated integration (Leuffen et al. 2013).” In the following section, I explicate how federative states manifest rather a unique relationship between governments and the people across multiple layers of governments. I purport to construct a theoretical framework that accounts for a variation in federative states by elucidating the conditions in which separation and integration among constituent units may not be mutually exclusive of each other. In doing so, I propose to delineate the underexplored mechanism of differentiated integration. Specifically, I intend to explore why differentiated integration unfolds only to undo the years of progress accumulated in the European Union and how the variation across policy and among participating--or even non-participating-- constituent member states may necessarily bungle into differentiated disintegration. If a specific policy has a greater horizontal differentiation—or territorial extension— than others, what does such variation portend for the member states at various stages? How does the variegated horizontal differentiation within a specific policy realm menacingly contribute to differentiated disintegration, which further diffuses to other policy realms? Why does the sense of confidence runs short of containing the misperception of insecurity in perilous times? Who is to blame when such thin solidarity spirals down to a disastrous outcome? This paper is a rudimentary endeavor to account for “Europe Entrapped” (Offe 2016) by juxtaposing the concept of federalization with that of differentiated integration. In a concluding remark, I contemplate on the inter-Korean model as per the European Union as “a system of differentiated integration.”