Rethinking EU governance: from ‘old’ to ‘new’ approaches to who steers integration*
Files
Accepted manuscript
Date
2018-11
Authors
Schmidt, Vivien A.
Version
Accepted manuscript
OA Version
Citation
Vivien A Schmidt. 2018. "Rethinking EU Governance: From ‘Old’ to ‘New’ Approaches to Who Steers Integration*." JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies, Volume 56, Issue 7, pp. 1544 - 1561. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcms.12783
Abstract
EU scholars have long been divided on the main drivers of European integration. The original approaches were at odds on whether EU level intergovernmental actors or supranational actors were better able to exercise coercive or institutional power to pursue their interests, with Andrew Moravcsik's liberal intergovernmentalism serving as a baseline for one side of those debates. Newer approaches are similarly divided, but see power in terms of ideational innovation and consensus‐focused deliberation. The one thing old and new approaches have in common is that they ignore the parliamentarists, new and old. What all sides to the debates have failed to recognize is the reality of a ‘new’ EU governance of more politically charged dynamics among all three main EU actors exercising different kinds of power. This has roots not only in the national level's increasing ‘politics against policy’ and its bottom up effects on the EU level. It also stems from EU institutional interactions at the top, and its ‘policy with politics’.
Description
*I wish to thank the guest editors of this Special Issue, Mark Pollack and Mareike Kleine, for their impressive stewardship of the entire project along with their extremely perceptive and careful editorial suggestions for my own article. I would also like to thank the anonymous referees for their very helpful comments and their close reading of the manuscript. The manuscript has its origins in a working paper for the Istituto Affari Internazionali, and benefited from comments by Lorenzo Vai and Pier Domenico Tortola. Its elaboration was undertaken under the auspices of the EU Commission Horizon 2020 project: ‘European Legitimacy in Governing through Hard Times’ (# 649456—ENLIGHTEN), and further benefited from comments by Ramona Coman, Amandine Crespy and Frederik Ponjaert. Thanks to them for their insightful suggestions as well as to participants in the workshops at Princeton and the EUI, including the two commentators on my article, Gerda Falkner and Lewis G. Miller, and especially, needless to say, Andrew Moravcsik himself.