The National Coordination of European Policy After Lisbon and an Era of Crisis

This paper sets out the justification and conceptual framework for revisiting national EU coordination. After a discussion of why national EU coordination matters both domestically and as an integral part of EU governance, it makes the case for national EU coordination as an organizing concept, offering insights that are distinct from other approaches to member state-EU relations in the literature. Following a short literature review in which it highlights the outdatedness and lack of systematic analysis in existing scholarly, the paper sets out the project ambitions – empirical, conceptual, and theoretical – in the light of the reforms introduced by the Lisbon Treaty, new structures and processes at the EU level created in response to crisis, and domestic factors. Arguing for a new conception of ‘national EU coordination’ as a dependent variable, the paper outlines hypotheses about the ambitions, structure, and organisation of national EU coordination, and theoretical expectations about levels and types of change anticipated in the wake of the three sets of developments mentioned.