400018 SE Seminar für DissertantInnen: Theorie (2014S)

Policy reforms and institutional changes are often preceded by crisis episodes, which are characterized by a critical examination of existing policy instruments, concepts and, at times, even policy paradigms. While the on-going financial crisis has induced rapid and profound changes in the institutional architecture of EU member states as well as of the EU’s institutional system, the crisis itself is by no means the only engine of institutional change and policy reform in the EU. In the preceding decades, the EU has expanded the scope of its policy-making tasks in a remarkable fashion: While economic and social regulation is still the EU’s principal business, the EU increasingly encroaches into the core functions of government (defence, internal security, taxation, fiscal policy, etc.). In the first part of the seminar, we will thus challenge the assumption that EU is (still) a regulatory polity (Majone, 1996) by exploring how far the integration of ‘core state powers’ (Genschel and Jachtenfuchs, 2014) has actually progressed and how we can account for this development. In the second part of the seminar, we will explore a feature of the European integration process, which has received ample attention in recent years: the concept of differentiated integration (also known as flexible integration) captures the incongruence of the EU’s organizational and policy membership (Leuffen et al., 2013). While the Eurozone as well as the recent Fiscal Compact encompasses fewer states than the EU has members, the single market extends beyond the EU’s organizational boundaries. Schengen, in turn, encompasses EU ‘insiders’ as well as ‘outsiders. While the existing literature offers a panoply of concepts to capture policy differentiation, we want to move beyond conceptualization. In different sessions, we will empirically map policy differentiation, highlight and discuss different explanations for differentiated integration and explore its consequences. In the last section the seminar, we turn to one of the inevitable questions in the study of the EU: How can we assess the (democratic) legitimacy of European integration? What difference does the crisis make in our assessment? To address these questions, we will discuss different (normative) approaches to the EU’s (democratic) legitimacy challenge.