Schmidt Publishes Paper on EU Governance
Vivien Schmidt, Professor of International Relations and Political Science at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies and Director of the Center for the Study of Europe, an affiliated Center of the Pardee School, published a recent journal article arguing it is best to think about the future of European Union governance as a “soft core” of member-states clustered in overlapping policy communities.
Schmidt penned the article, entitled “The New EU Governance: New Intergovernmentalism, New Supranationalism, and New Parliamentarism,” for the May 2016 issue of Istituto Affari Internazionali.
From the text of the article’s abstract:
Contemporary analysts differ over which EU actors are the main drivers of European integration and how they pursue it. “New intergovernmentalists” focused on political leaders’ deliberations in the Council clash with “new supranationalists” centred on technical actors’ policy design and enforcement in the Commission and other EU bodies, while both ignore “new parliamentarists” concerned with the European Parliament.
This essay argues that only by considering the actions and interactions of all three main actors together can we fully understand the “new” EU governance and its problems. It uses in illustration the EU’s crises of money, borders and security. The essay also suggests that it is best to think about the future of EU governance not in terms of any hard core but rather as a “soft core” of member-states clustered in overlapping policy communities. It additionally proposes ways of reinforcing EU-level capacity for policy coordination with national-level decentralisation to address problems of democracy and legitimacy.
Prof. Schmidt is Jean Monnet Professor of European Integration at Boston University. Her research focuses on European political economy, institutions, democracy, and political theory. She has published ten books, over 100 scholarly journal articles or chapters in books, and numerous policy briefs and comments, most recently on the Eurozone crisis. Her current work focuses on democratic legitimacy in Europe, with a special focus on the challenges resulting from the Eurozone crisis, and on methodological theory, in particular on the importance of ideas and discourse in political analysis (discursive institutionalism). You can learn more about her here.