Introduction : escaping the politics trap? EU integration pathways beyond the polycrisis

Abstract

Since 2016, the EU has widely been considered to be in a state of ‘polycrisis’,where simultaneous, mutually reinforcing challenges threaten the Union’scohesion and legitimacy. Such polycrises may fracture Europe’s politicalspace, creating cross-cutting ‘polycleavages’ that polarise member states andtheir citizens asymmetrically, thereby constraining the EU’s capacity to forgeeffective compromises on key policy issues. In so doing, they exacerbate therisk of the EU’s falling into a multi-level ‘politics trap’, where negativepoliticisation of European issues inhibits national leaders from agreeingambitious solutions in intergovernmental negotiations, while the ensuingdeadlock in turn saps the Union’s output-based legitimacy and fuels aEurosceptic ‘constraining dissensus’. In this introductory article, we developan analytical framework elaborating the concepts of polycrises,polycleavages, and politics traps, which we then use to present and interpretthe main findings of the contributions to this collection, focused on theCovid-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The most importanttakeaway from the contributions to this collection is that – consistent withour framework – the EU has clearly proved more resilient to the potentialnegative consequences of politicisation than many commentators hadexpected at the beginning of this long polycrisis decade.