CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2017
| Author | Isherwood Mote, John Arthur |
|---|---|
| Title | European Institutions at the Forge of Crises: A Motion Picture on Prudential State Formation |
| Summary | This historical institutionalist (HI) approach to regional integration theorises what role relationships between Europe’s market and state actors and institutions have in the timing of the European Union’s (EU) establishment. This approach differs from intergovernmentalist and rational choice theories that understand this process as successive iterations of self-interested fully rational nation-state representatives playing the same unembedded games of power together ad infinitum. I propose rather that this understanding has become outdated because (i) there are certain spatiotemporal (or historical) contexts that limit national representatives’ abilities to prevent EU agent institutions from reproducing norms and rules that run counter to national interests, and (ii) when national actors reprise intergovernmental arrangements as a premise for governance, they undermine the ‘coherency’ that is crucial to the reproduction of EU institutions that have gained state-like functions in promoting and securing public goods. Because self-interested actors are at least minimally rational or prudent, they do possess the necessary problem-solving capabilities to recohere incoherent institutional processes. However, because complex information environments tend to accentuate the contextual limitations to actors’ rational capabilities, actors’ problem-solving capabilities in-turn have delayed effectiveness in the process of institutional recoherence. I later apply this HI model to recent critical junctures in the EU: the Eurozone crisis from 2010 and the Schengen crisis from 2015. I find that institutional incoherencies are based on discredited commitments to EU institutions in (firstly) economy and (latterly) home affairs. I propose that comprehensible cost-benefit measures demonstrate enhanced regulatory strategies at the EU level have the potential to yield optimal solutions to these commitment-based incoherencies. This paper thus asserts that contemporary evidence of intergovernmental arrangements in the EU represent snapshot delays and not limits to European state formation. |
| Supervisor | Pelinka, Anton |
| Department | Political Science MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2017/isherwood-mote_john.pdf |
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