Differentiated Integration through a ‘Soft-core’ Multi-clustered Europe

• In Event: Differentiation and Dominance in Europe

Abstract

Most scholars today acknowledge that the challenges facing the EU can only be addressed through differentiated integration. But what kind of differentiation remains in dispute, since any feasible model is faced with the problems related to the EU’s many crises, the difficulties of EU decision-making in light of its increasing politicization, and the dangers of domination. This paper argues that the most feasible version of differentiated integration is one in which the EU is understood as having a soft-core, as opposed to the often evoked hard-core around the Eurozone. As such, it can be envisioned as consisting of overlapping clusters of member-states participating in the EU’s many different policy communities, all administered by a single set of EU institutions, with most member-states being involved in most areas (beyond the Single Market, to which all belong by definition). Within this soft core Europe, some policy areas still require deeper integration, such as security and defense policy as well as immigration and refugee policy, while others arguably require less, namely the Eurozone. The paper will begin with the EU’s policy challenges and then its political challenges. It will then consider the EU in its current state of differentiation, and end with proposed ways for the EU to move forward productively through a greater differentiated integration that reduces the possibilities of domination, not to mention disintegration.

Author

• Vivien A. Schmidt, Boston University