Coordinative Europeanisation and Russia’s war of aggression: how crises shape Europeanisation dynamics in EU foreign policy

The European Union’s response to Russia’s war of aggression has run contrary to expectations of EU foreign policy inaction and incoherence as well as increasing trends of de-Europeanisation and renationalization. In particular, the response to the war has revealed a qualitative shift in processes of Europeanisation, with changes to cross-loading, uploading, and downloading dynamics. With the aim of investigating these changes further, the present paper relies on the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine as a case study to explore how crises shape Europeanisation dynamics in EU foreign and security policy. Relying on primary and secondary sources as well as interviews with EU and national officials, we show how the coordinative Europeanisation we have witnessed since the start of the war can be attributed not only to the characteristics of the crisis itself, but also to cumulative learning and progressive institutional transformations stemming from previous crises. In so doing, the paper contributes to the literature on Europeanisation of foreign policy as well as to studies focusing on the effect of crises on the process of European integration.