Good governance and differentiated integration: Graded membership in the European Union

Abstract

The study of European integration has traditionally focused on organisational growth: the deepening and widening of the European Union (EU). By contrast, this article analyses organisational differentiation, a process in which states refuse, or are being refused, full integration but find value in establishing in‐between grades of membership. It describes how the EU's system of graded membership has developed, and it explains the positioning of states in this system. The core countries of the EU set a standard of ‘good governance’. The closer European countries are to this standard, the closer their membership grade is to the core. Some countries fall short of this standard and are refused further integration by the core: their membership grade increases with better governance. Other countries refuse further integration because they outperform the standards of the core countries: their membership grade decreases as governance improves. These conjectures are corroborated in a panel analysis of European countries.

“Take back control”? The effects of supranational integration on party-system polarization

“…and ranges from 0 (no special status) to 47 if a state is integrated to the highest possible degree at a given time, where the "highest degree" of integration changes with the evolution of the organization. In other words, it is a fine-grained measure of "graded membership" and captures countries' proximity to the EU's frontier of integration (Schimmelfennig 2002(Schimmelfennig , 2016. So, for example, a core EU member-state like Germany that has always been at the forefront of the integration process always gets the highest score of 47 in the data set.…”

EU Geoeconomics: A Framework for Analyzing Bilateral Relations in the European Union

“…In the search for a new theoretical model, the debate on differentiated integration, graded membership and fragmentation (Schimmelfennig, ) has re‐emerged in EU studies. Moreover, the ‘New Intergovernmentalism’ aims at covering voluntary and informal procedures between national governments via official EU channels like the Council or newly formed bodies (Bickerton et al, , p. 705).…”

Exploring Differentiated Disintegration in a Post‐Brexit European Union

“…Between 2012 and 2017, Schimmelfennig and his colleagues published a series of in‐depth studies examining various aspects of differentiated integration, such as constitutional differentiation (Schimmelfennig and Winzen, ), the impact of EU enlargement on differentiated integration (Schimmelfennig, ; Schimmelfennig and Winzen, ), and the impact of differentiation on EU governance (Schimmelfennig, ). Further studies also focused on differentiated integration within EU legislation, which demonstrate the increasing complexity of EU law and law‐making (see Duttle et al, ; Kroll and Leuffen, ).…”