The European Union's response to the COVID-19 pandemic revealed changes and continuity in the structure and the functioning of the European project. In lieu of a conclusion to the Special Issue, this article discusses what those lessons tell us about how Europe responds to the following crisis. We compare European responses to the pandemic to those that followed the Russian invasion of Ukraine. We observe more differences than similarities. The same actors do not always play the central role, solidarity among Europeans is sometimes more challenging to engineer, and the requirements to make the overall project more resilient can point in different directions. Such findings show that any argument that Europe is forged through crisis is unlikely to tell us much about what Europe is or where it may be headed. In that sense, the EU is a sui generis multi-level, multi-faceted actor that can change shape in response to events.

Previous studies show that in multiparty systems the formation of minority governments can be a rational choice. To ensure survival and policy implementation, minority governments make concessions to non-cabinet parties. In this study, we empirically analyse the pay-offs given to support parties under minority governments. We argue that the content of support agreements is conditioned by support party type. Results are based on a two-stage empirical investigation: a text analysis of 10 explicit support arrangements for minority governments in Romania and a within-case comparison of two Romanian minority cabinets with different support arrangements. We employ an original data set of support agreements and elite interviews with former minority cabinet members. We empirically confirm that ethno-regional parties are mostly policy-seeking and target benefits for their specific groups. In contrast, mainstream parties make stronger claims for office distribution. The analysis challenges the widespread understanding that all support parties are mostly policy-seeking.

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The 'failing forward' synthesis of liberal intergovernmentalism and neofunctionalism puts European member states governments in charge of the process of integration (Jones et al., 2016). However, this placement does not show clearly whether the principals are reactive or proactive. That distinction between proactive and reactive is important in understanding what it means to say that integration is a movement 'forward' and what we mean by 'success'. Moving forward could mean building out the great ideals of Europe's political leaders, but it could also mean reacting to events in a way that solves problems, even if only imperfectly. The process of Eastern enlargement shows this distinction at work. We argue that enlargement is 'successful' as a reactive process and not as a proactive one. In proactive terms, the Eastern enlargement process has a consistent record of failure inasmuch as agents did not get what they wanted when they wanted it. In reactive terms, enlargement contributed to the creation of a wider and a deeper European Union.