TEC will be canceling all public events and seminars until at least April 15th due to ongoing developments associated with COVID-19.

 

How do we explain that the European Union gained so much authority, especially in economic areas? Most explanations of the EU usually start off by misdescribing how much authority it exerts over its member-states. Classic IR theorists in realist or liberal traditions describe the EU as a strong international regime, allowing them to explain it simply as a response to especially-strong regional versions of the exogenously-given conditions that ostensibly favor international cooperation elsewhere. Even more endogenously-inclined theorists who explain the EU as an ideational or institutionally path-dependent project tend to describe it as a quasi-federation that still falls well short of a “United States of Europe.” But if the EU certainly lacks some important powers of federal states, in some core areas it has surpassed them. Employing a comparison of the EU to three Anglo-Saxon federations (United States, Canada, Australia), we show that today’s EU actively exercises authority over states’ market openness and fiscal discipline that these federations have never claimed. This re-description of the EU outcome displays just how far Europe has departed from the expectations of classic IR theories, and highlights the kind of strongly endogenous ideational and institutional explanation it requires. Co-author: Craig Parsons, University of Oregon.

 

Matthias Matthijs is associate professor of international political economy. His research focuses on the politics of economic crises, the role of economic ideas in economic policymaking, the politics of inequality, and the democratic limits of regional integration. He was one of the inaugural recipients in 2015 of a Johns Hopkins Catalyst Award, in recognition of his work as a promising early-career investigator. He teaches courses in international relations, comparative politics, and international economics, and was twice awarded the Max M. Fisher Prize for Excellence in Teaching, in 2011 and 2015.

Since the summer of 2019, he is also a Senior Fellow for Europe at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). He also currently serves as the Chair of the Executive Committee of the European Union Studies Association (EUSA).

Matthijs is the editor (with Mark Blyth) of the book The Future of the Euro published by Oxford University Press in 2015, and author of Ideas and Economic Crises in Britain from Attlee to Blair (1945-2005), published by Routledge in 2011. The latter is based on his doctoral dissertation, which received the Samuel H. Beer Prize for Best Dissertation in British Politics by a North American scholar, awarded by the British Politics Group of the American Political Science Association (APSA) in 2010.

In 2018, he won the Best Paper Award from APSA’s European Politics and Society section for “When Is It Rational to Learn the Wrong Lessons?” (co-authored with Mark Blyth). Among various other research and writing projects, he is currently working on a book-length manuscript that delves into the collapse of national elite consensus around European integration.

Dr. Matthijs received his BSc in applied economics with magna cum laude from the University of Antwerp in Belgium, and his MA and PhD in international relations from Johns Hopkins University.

 

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The EU and its member states are currently facing a number of extraordinary internal and external challenges. The rise of populist parties that are skeptical of the European integration process and undermine the rule of law in the member states represents one of the main challenges. These parties are set to increase their support at the European Parliament elections on May 23-26. Belgium, the country that hosts the main EU institutions and whose existence is constantly questioned as well, holds federal and regional elections at the same time. We analyze the current state of politics in the EU and Belgium, and discuss the prospects for the upcoming elections and their implications.

Christophe Crombez is Senior Research Scholar at The Europe Center at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, and Professor of Political Economy at the Faculty of Economics and Business at KU Leuven in Belgium. Christophe Crombez specializes in European Union politics. His research focuses on the functioning of the EU institutions and their impact on policies, EU institutional reform, party politics, and parliamentary government.

To listen to the audio recording of this talk, please visit our multimedia page.

 

The European Union (EU) is facing one of the rockiest periods in its existence. Not often in its history has it looked so economically fragile, so unsecure about how to protect its borders, so divided over how to tackle the crisis of legitimacy facing its institutions, and so under assault of Eurosceptic parties. The unprecedented levels of integration in recent decades have led to increased public contestation, yet at the same the EU is more reliant on public support for its continued legitimacy than ever before. Eurosceptic parties are expected to increase their vote share in the upcoming European Parliamentary elections, and the outcome of the Brexit vote provides glimpse of what could happen when Euroscepticism hardens.

In this talk, I discuss the role of public opinion in the European integration process. Based on my 2018 book Euroscepticism and the Future of European Integration, I outline a novel theory of public opinion that stresses the deep interconnectedness between people’s views about European and national politics. It suggests that public opinion cannot simply be characterized as either Eurosceptic or not, but rather consists of different types. This is important because these types coincide with fundamentally different views about the way the EU should be reformed and which policy priorities should be pursued. These types also have very different consequences for behaviour in elections and referenda. Euroscepticism is such a diverse phenomenon because the Eurozone crisis has exacerbated the structural imbalances within the EU. As the economic and political fates of member states diverged, people’s experiences with and evaluations of the EU and national political systems also grew further apart. The heterogeneity in public preferences has implications for the European project, as it makes a one-size-fits-all approach to addressing Euroscepticism unlikely to be successful.

 

 

Catherine E. De Vries is a Westendijk Chair and Professor of Political Behaviour in Europe at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, where she also acts as the Director of the VU Interdisciplinary Center for European Studies. In addition, she is an Associate Member of Nuffield College, University of Oxford and an affiliated Professor of Political Science at the University of Essex. Finally, she serves a scientific advisor the eupinions project of the Bertelsmann Foundation and as a board member of the European Institute at the London School of Economics and Hertie School of Governance in Berlin.

 

Co-sponsored by the Hoover Institution