‘It takes three to tango’: new inter-institutional dynamics in managing major crisis reform

Smeets, Sandrino; Beach, Derek

doi:10.1080/13501763.2021.1958904

Cited by 18 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…This resulted in political leaders hammering out solutions amongst themselves, outside of the Community framework, like the EFSF and EU Turkey deal. In June 2018, the Heads again tried, but failed, to reshape EU migration policy, drafting proposals and forging compromises, resulting in a plethora of measures, ranging from controlled centres to disembarkation platforms (Smeets & Beach, 2021). In the RRF case, the opposite happened.…”

Section: Conclusion and Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

New institutional leadership goes viral EU crisis reforms and the coming about of the covid recovery fund

Smeets¹,

Beach

2022

European J Political Res

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This article reconstructs the coming about of the 750 billion EU Covid Recovery fund. We provide an embedded process-tracing analysis of the dynamics from mid-March 2020, when the idea of 'Coronabonds' was parachuted onto the Heads' Agenda, up until the 'historic' deal on the MFF and Recovery Fund of 21 July. Where most media accounts and scholarly assessments focus on the high-level dealmaking between political leaders, we trace the proceedings inside the EU's institutional machinery, which produced the solutions and laid out the groundwork for a deal. The reconstruction assesses the role and influence of the EU institutions -the European Commission in particular -in producing this major step. We show that the process was characterized by a handicapped European Council, which hampered the ability of member states to oversee and control developments. The conclusions discuss the implications of our findings for our understanding of (institutional) leadership and policy-making during crisis. is nevertheless a 'quantum leap' in European integration, both financially and institutionally. 1 In an EU that it supposedly characterized by reluctant member states coming up with 'too little, too late' type of solutions (Börzel, 2016;Jones et al, 2016;Mody, 2018), how do we explain such a major step?The deal was also remarkable in terms of the remarkably short negotiation process. The idea had its first appearance under the label of 'Corona bonds', which landed on the table of the Heads at their 2 nd video-tele-conference of 17 March 2020. However, the idea was dismissed almost immediately by the Northern member states, including Germany, and by Commission President von der Leyen (Politico, 2020a(Politico, , 2020b. The stage appeared to be set for a lengthy process of intergovernmental bargaining resulting in a lowest common denominator type of solution. Nevertheless, only four months later, on 21 July 2020, the EU member states agreed to what was in essence a similar solution: a massive financial support package, to be financed through an unprecedented sharing of financial debts and obligations. Moreover, while there had been intense negotiation about the overall size of the package, the division between grants and loans, the conditions (if any) that should be attached to financial assistance, the principle as such of the EU entering the financial markets and issuing debt on behalf of the member states sailed through with remarkable ease. As will become clear from our reconstruction, the speed and scope of the developments from March to July also took many insiders by surprise. The Covid crisis had somehow provided the momentum for agreeing on a 1.82 trillion euro financial package that, all things considered, had less to do with addressing the immediate consequences of the Covid crisis, and was more about building what the Commission likes to refer to as, the 'Next Generation European Union' (NGEU). This article goes beyond the headlines to explore the forces at work behind the scenes that produced this unprecedented...

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Section: Conclusion and Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

New institutional leadership goes viral EU crisis reforms and the coming about of the covid recovery fund

Smeets¹,

Beach

2022

European J Political Res

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“…In this article, we use the NIL framework as an example. The NIL framework was based on a series of empirical analyses of EUCO crisis management, during the eurozone crisis, migration crisis, and Brexit and Covid-19 crisis (Smeets & Beach, 2022, 2023. NIL intends to capture the dynamics within the inter-institutional triangle of EUCO (PEC and cabinet), Commission (president, cabinets, services), and Council (Secretariat) and delineate the roles that the three institutions are supposed to play within the EUCO system.…”

Section: A Methodological Contribution To the Theoretical Debatementioning

confidence: 99%

“…One of the most notable consequences of this constant or polycrisis was the rise of the EUCO. The European leaders came to play a prominent role in shaping and steering EU policy responses to, but also beyond, the immediate crises (Smeets & Beach, 2022;Van Middelaar, 2019). This led to a recalibrationaccording to some a "re-intergovernmentalisation"of EU decision-making (Bickerton et al, 2015;Puetter, 2014).…”

Section: Eu(co) Crisis Management: a Snapshot Of The Debatementioning

confidence: 99%

The Institutional Ingredients of Polycrisis Management: Unpacking European Council’s Handling of the Energy Crisis

Smeets,

Beach

2023

PaG

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This article analyses how the European Council and the institutional infrastructure that supports it have been managing the early stages of the energy crisis. This was the time when the European Council, as the “control room” of EU crisis management, was unable to come up with any solutions to high energy prices. It makes a methodological and empirical contribution to the debate on how the European Council system manages (poly)crises. Methodologically, we introduce the method of embedded process tracing to study EU crisis management from within. Embedded process tracing combines mainstream causal process tracing techniques with elements from interpretivist approaches, to deal with context dependency, case heterogeneity, and empirical density. Empirically, we offer a process-management analysis of the first nine months of the energy crisis. We delineate the roles of various actors and institutions: the president of the European Council, the Council Secretariat, the Commission president, and the Commission Services. We unpack the crucial ingredients of polycrisis management: how to get and keep an issue on the agenda, how to shape and steer European-Council-level debates and conclusions, and how to ensure a proper follow-up by the Commission and the Council. Finally, we re-assess the image of the malfunctioning control room and show the causal relevance of the European Council’s early performance.

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“…Yet, some recent studies have argued that the 'new European Council-dominated crisis governance paradoxically has strengthened the role of EU institutions' ; see also e.g. discussions in Becker 2014, 2016;Niemann and Ioannou 2015;Niemann and Speyer 2018;Smeets and Beach 2022). Hence, while the European Council could be viewed as steering the overall direction of the EU, the Commission is (still) a key actor in the process leading to the EU summits, such as by drafting proposals and initiatives before the meetings Nugent 2017).…”

Section: The European Commission: Not a Unitary Actor But A Politica...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The crises also led to the internal reshaping of the EU's institutional actors and their roles and responsibilities (for theoretical and empirical discussions, see e.g. Becker 2014, 2016;Christiansen 2020;Moloney and Princen 2023;Niemann and Ioannou 2015;Nugent 2017;Smeets and Beach 2022). Thus, crises can be seen as 'an integral part of the process of European integration' (Lefkofridi and Schmitter 2015, 4; see also Andersson 2021; Nicoli 2020).…”

Section: Crisis Pressure For Integrationmentioning

confidence: 99%

The New Role of the European Commission in the EU’s Security and Defence Architecture: entrepreneurship, crisis and integration

Håkansson

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In recent years, the European Union (EU) has strengthened its foreign, security and defence policy in a remarkable way. Several new supranational security and defence initiatives have been launched and implemented, which have given the European Commission a new and central role in European security and defence policy. These swift developments are puzzling, since foreign policy and security and defence policy have long been understood as the ‘last bastions of sovereignty’ for EU member states and have thus been regarded as the least-likely cases for supranational integration. This thesis shows how the Commission has been the central driver behind these changes; it does so by conducting three focused case studies/articles to explore and explain the evolution of a new and enhanced role for the European Commission in EU security and defence cooperation during the period 2014–2023. By researching the establishment of the European Defence Fund, the EU Military Mobility project and the new policies and initiatives developed after Russia’s full-scale war of aggression against Ukraine in 2022, this dissertation analyses new competences for the European Commission within EU security and defence policy. This dissertation conceptually and analytically builds on diverse strands of integration literature, drawing on neofunctionalism, the Commission’s policy entrepreneurship and agenda setting, and crisis pressure to retrace in detail these three important empirical processes. The main contribution of this dissertation is to show how the European Commission’s initiatives and strategies have been indispensable in the strengthening of EU integration within security and defence.

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‘It takes three to tango’: new inter-institutional dynamics in managing major crisis reform

Cited by 18 publications

References 24 publications

New institutional leadership goes viral EU crisis reforms and the coming about of the covid recovery fund

New institutional leadership goes viral EU crisis reforms and the coming about of the covid recovery fund

The Institutional Ingredients of Polycrisis Management: Unpacking European Council’s Handling of the Energy Crisis

The New Role of the European Commission in the EU’s Security and Defence Architecture: entrepreneurship, crisis and integration

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