Reconceptualising the EU-member states relationship in the age of permanent emergency

Since 2008, the European Union has been engulfed in several crises: the sovereign debt/ Eurozone crisis (2008-2018), the migration and refugee crises (2015-ongoing), Brexit (2016-2021), the COVID-19 pandemic (2020-ongoing), the rule of law and climate crises (ongoing) and the security, humanitarian and inflationary crises deriving from the geopolitical unrest across the globe (more recently, in Afghanistan, Ukraine and Israel). While distinct, these crises are feeding into each other and are testing the capacity and resilience of EU and domestic institutions, bringing forward common policy questions. Many observers have underlined the permanent character of this state of crisis: Zuleeg et al. (2021) have gone as far as calling this ‘the age of permacrisis’. Others have emphasised the compound and cumulative nature of current crises, defining the current one as the era of poly-crisis (Zeitlin et al. 2019). These recent crises have inaugurated a trend towards a new mode of ‘coordinative Europeanization’ in EU decision-making. In this paper we first define the new mode of coordinative Europeanization and outline its key features. We argue that the recent crises have altered the EU-member states relationship in pursuit of fast policy responses and go more in depth on the reasons behind this changing relationship as well as the possible avenues it may take. We then discuss the challenges caused by coordinative Europeanization and how it relates to pre-existing de-Europeanization tendencies. We close the paper with an analysis of the significance of the findings and we propose new avenues for research.