The Crisis of the European Union

Abstract

The chapter scrutinizes the most recent evolutions of EU’s modes of governance since the entry into force of the Maastricht Treaty. The focus of her study lies on the examination of the resilience of EU’s modes of governance in the light of new conceptualizations in EU studies: the new intergovernmentalism and the new supranationalism. While the first sections looks at the intergovernmental method, the second section deals with the community method and the last one with the open method of coordination (OMC) and the European Semester, which is the instrument designed at the onset of the Eurozone crisis for the coordination of macro-economic policies. The contribution shows that EU policy-making witnessed several transformations since the 1990s and that the intensity of change has been fuelled by the Eurozone crisis, which put the decision-making process under considerable strain. In 2010, when it was unclear how to respond appropriately to the problems of the Eurozone both in terms of process and in terms of solutions, Coman argues, EU institutional actors reacted rapidly to reassure the markets and to save the euro. The decisions taken from 2010 to 2012 altered prevailing modes of governance as the crisis forced the EU to adjust the decision-making process. At the onset of the Eurozone crisis the intergovernmental methods prevailed; as soon as the crisis entered in its “slow-burning phase,” supranational institutions and actors regained power and visibility in the decision-making process. The overarching aim of Coman’s contribution is to capture incremental changes in the power relations between the European Commission, the European Parliament, the Council and the European Council and to show how they have remodelled pre-existing modes of governance. The chapter illustrates the “adaptability and resilience” of the EU policy-making in face of new challenges (cf. Pollack, Wallace and Young 2010: 482; Schmidt and Thatcher 2013), that is the ability of EU institutions to adapt to incremental change and sudden disruptions. In doing so, it scrutinizes institutional empowerment in EU decision-making both de iure and de facto. On the one hand, EU institutional actors are granted new attributions in the formulation, decision-making and implementation of EU public policies and, on the other, they perform new functions through their dynamic interactions.