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We analyse the rhetoric and reality of EU digital sovereignty by looking at content control. The control of online content is central to sovereignty because it relates to fundamental freedoms and democratic competition. Our main data source is the unique International Organizations in Global Internet Governance (IO-GIG) dataset which contains internet policy output documents across international institutions and issue areas between 1995 and 2021. By assessing policy output, we show structural trends in content control output in volume, bindingness, and orientation. By analysing policy discourse, we show the evolution of frames on content control over time. We find evidence for a comprehensive but still ongoing trend towards digital sovereignty in policy output and a shift from prioritising free access to the public order in discourse.
Constitutional differentiation is often assumed to match perfectly with reality. We argue, however, that this is often not the case in core state powers. Constitutional differentiation often does not lead to the exclusion of the non-integrated member states (“outs”) from the policies of the integrated member states (“ins”) but to their reintegration by different means. We present a cost-benefit-model which argues that both “outs” and “ins” often have strong functional and political incentives to seek reintegration after an earlier decision for differentiation because the costs of exclusion are too high. We use a novel dataset of reintegration opportunities to map trends and patterns of reintegration across policy fields, reintegration instruments and member states in core state powers. We conclude by arguing that reintegration is a frequent but fragile phenomenon through which “ins” and “outs” cope with the costs of exclusion.
We challenge Kruck and Weiss’ argument about the regulatory security state on two counts. First, we contest the notion that the regulatory state is a viable alternative to the positive security state. While regulation and epistemic authority are increasingly important means of security provision, they remain critically dependent power resources and political authority that only the positive state provides. The regulatory security state is premised on the positive state and unviable without it. Second, the rise of the regulatory security state over the past three decades reflects highly specific historical conditions rather than a general trend. These conditions include unusually low geopolitical tensions in Europe and the strong regulatory bias of EU integration. Concepts matter: The wider the notion of security, the more relevant the regulatory security state becomes. It is an important reality but the war in Ukraine reminds us of the enduring centrality of the positive state.
The EU has integrated core state powers in a largely unsustainable manner. Why is this? In this introduction to a special issue on Germany, we take an in-depth look at national preference-formation. We trace the impact of state elites, as emphasised by functionalist theories, and mass publics and political parties, as stressed by postfunctionalism. We find that across policy fields and with striking continuity over time, Germany acts as a normal member state. The country prefers the regulation of national capacities over the creation of European capacities, and (increasingly) the intergovernmental rather than supranational control of those capacities. Only in existential crises, Germany supports European capacity-building under intergovernmental control. This leads to unstable integration but is not an indicator of hegemonic dominance. Crucial from both a practical and theoretical perspective, there exists no major gap between state elites and political parties or public opinion on German preferences.
What are the policy consequences of constitutional differentiation in core state powers? We argue that the most important consequence is not necessarily the exclusion of the constitutional outs from the policies of the ins, but their reintegration by different means. The outs often have strong functional and political incentives to re-join the policies they opted out from, and the ins have good reasons to help them back in. We develop a theoretical framework that derives the incentives for reintegration from the costs of a policy exclusion. We use a novel dataset of reintegration opportunities to map trends and patterns of reintegration across policy fields and member states. We analyze selected cases of reintegration to probe the plausibility of our theoretical argument.
The European Union's history exhibits numerous episodes in which Member States have sought to re-enforce their national autonomy in the face of deepening integration. Efforts to re-gain autonomy, however, are often accompanied by legitimate concerns that autonomy will lead to dis-integration or will have wider destructive consequences. The EU thus faces a dilemma. Calls for autonomy cannot all be dismissed as mere populist rhetoric or national egoism but instead represent a legitimate questioning of the degree of uniformity that EU law and politics presently carry. At the same time, the fear that greater autonomy may carry dis-integrative effects is also legitimate -uniformity is not an accidental by-product of the EU's construction but intrinsically related to its policy goals. Giving too much room for autonomy might create an opportunity structure for the loss of collective goods, deficits in problem-solving, and perhaps even to self-destruction.
The EU requires autonomy, but in doing so, it must also avoid collapse. Can it achieve it, and if so, how? Autonomy without Collapse is devoted to exploring innovative answers to this question. It draws together scholars in law and political science interested in exploring how to overcome the central dilemma of preserving sustainable yet real autonomy in the future European Union.
Did the Covid-19 crisis prompt a turn in German EU policy? Investigating the long-term development of German preferences on the European integration of core state powers, we find striking continuity. German governments persistently seek to minimise their costs from and maximise their control over integration. Consequently, they back supranational capacity-building primarily as a last resort in existential systemic crises. The Corona recovery fund, which is temporary and placed under intergovernmental control, is in line with this general long-term preference and does little to alleviate the structural flaws of the Euro area.
Postfunctionalism posits a tradeoff between the functional scale of governance and the territorial scope of community: functional scale is large and transnational for efficiency reasons; community is small-scale and (sub-)national for reasons of social trust and collective identification. COVID-19 has turned this tradeoff upside down: it has shrunk functional scale to the (sub-)national level in the name of security, while lifting expectations of community to the grand transnational scale in the name of solidarity. This reversal of scales has resulted in a rapid rebordering of the Single Market and the Schengen area on the one hand, and a significant debordering of fiscal risk and burden sharing on the other. We reconstruct the evolution of this double-movement from January to August 2020, contrast it to historical trends in the scale-community tradeoff of European integration, and discuss implications for postfunctionalist theory.
This paper studies two areas of Core State Powers (CSP), i.e. the EU budget and Justice and Home Affairs. The two cases have the aim to reconstruct how Differentiated Integration (DI) has developed over time in these two specific domains. While the aim is the same for both cases, the way the cases are structured is substantially different. This is due to various reasons. First, the politics of the EU budget go back to the early days of the EU, while JHA is a post-Maastricht feature. This implies that the budget case study concentrates on a much longer time span. Second, DI in the budget interests several member states, while in JHA it is a phenomenon circumscribed to fewer members. Finally, the politics of the budget are decided through intergovernmental negotiations, while JHA is a rather supranationalised policy that relies a lot on secondary legislation and EU executive bodies such as EU agencies.