The European Union Beyond the Polycrisis?: Integration and Politicization in an Age of Shifting Cleavages by Jonathan Zeitlin & Francesco Nicoli

Author:Jonathan Zeitlin & Francesco Nicoli [Zeitlin, Jonathan & Nicoli, Francesco]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781032085449
Google: zJZmzgEACAAJ
Goodreads: 57868432
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-06-30T09:03:38+00:00

Crisis and reconfiguration of sovereignty

To explain these changes, we build on recent scholarship that views sovereignty as an evolving nexus of practices that are constitutive of statehood at a given historical moment. New sovereignty practices can thus emerge from incremental adjustment and reflexive deliberation, which means that sovereignty is much more fluid than is often implied. In this vein, Schmidt (2014) has analyzed sovereignty as an ‘entrenched habit’ that can change in response to real-world challenges. Thus the new military and geopolitical context after 1945 set the stage for the unprecedented practice of establishing military bases in other sovereign countries, as policymakers ‘define workable courses of action, set more specific aims, and so come to terms with new situations’ (Schmidt 2014: 824). This is quite relevant to the EU. In addition to changed external circumstances, the process of European integration itself acts as a powerful stimulus for member states to alter their sovereignty practices. Extensive areas of ‘pooled’ or ‘delegated’ sovereignty accrue at the EU level, but this itself lends fluidity to member states’ sovereignty practices. Sovereignty is never really a stable equilibrium. When national politicians perceive undue encroachments of the EU on national sovereignty, they are quick to assert what Werner and De Wilde (2001) call ‘sovereignty claims’. European integration is therefore suffused with what Adler-Nissen and Gammeltoft-Hansen (2008: 15) call ‘sovereignty games’, in which ‘states engage in new practices and modify their understandings of their own sovereignty’. These sovereignty claims and games carry political weight because the member states are still recognized as sovereign within and beyond the EU.

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