Greater Unity in the EU through Crises?
European integration is at risk of becoming stuck in a ‘politics trap’. Diverging national patterns of EU politicization make joint agreements more difficult, which then fuels controversial public debates about the EU even further. But recent externally triggered crises such as Covid-19 and the war in Ukraine can break this vicious circle, at least for a short amount of time. This is the conclusion of a new big data study of mediatized debates about the EU by WZB researcher Christian Rauh and Michal Parizek (Charles University Prague).
The COVID-19 pandemic and the Ukraine crisis have positively influenced public debates about the European Union. While European integration was recently often constrained by diverging controversial public debates across the member states, the way the EU is publicly portrayed during these two major exogenous shocks indicates convergence of debates instead.
Joint decision-making becomes easier
Analyzing 753,453 articles from 228 leading online news media across all 27 EU member states between January 2018 and April 2023 with advanced text analysis methods, Christian Rauh, Head of the Bridging Project Balancing Acts: European digital policy amidst economic, normative and security competition in the international system, and Michal Parizek find three patterns in this regard: the EU was equally relevant in public reporting on both shocks in all member states, it was associated with similar topics such as health and security, and it was less frequently mentioned in the context of domestic party politics during that time.
Only short term-effects
Such debate convergence triggered by large and symmetrical exogenous shocks thus offers a window of opportunity for joint decision-making in the EU: if all national governments face similar demands in their domestic public debates, it is much easier to agree on consensual solutions than in other recent EU crises. However, the study also highlights that these effects did not last long: The patterns suggest that the alignment of public debates is short-lived and thus does not offer a permanent exit from the constraints that public politicization creates for joint decision-making in the EU.
5/8/24, kes