Was Jean Monnet Wrong? A Comparative Analysis of Crises and IssuePolarisation Dynamics in the EU, 2009–2024

Conventional wisdom holds that crises create opportunities for European integration and solidarity. Yet mounting evidence suggests the opposite: crises may be systematically polarising the European Union. This paper examines how different crisis types—economic, rule-of-law, migration, and climate—generate distinct patterns of political polarisation across EU member states. Drawing on European Election Studies data (2009–2024), we construct measures of ideological and issue polarisation across the different European Parliament elections. Using multilevel models, we test whether economic crises intensify left-right economic polarisation; migration shocks amplify cultural divides and radical-right mobilisation; rule-of-law conflicts deepen cleavages over institutional trust and EU membership; and climate politics activate postmaterialist versus materialist value divisions. Our findings reveal that crises do not uniformly strengthen European integration but instead reconfigure political divisions in crisis-specific ways, reshaping both party competition and voter alignments. By providing the first systematic cross-crisis comparison of EU polarization dynamics, this study challenges integration theory's optimistic assumptions and demonstrates how contemporary challenges fragment rather than unify the European political space.