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Building a Union through Crises: The EU, Crisis-induced Policy Learning and the European Integration Process, 2008-2022 (working title)

Crises have affected the European integration process from its beginning. Since the late 2000s, the EU has faced an abundance of external and internal crises, from the Sovereign Debt Crisis to Russia’s current war on Ukraine and the subsequent energy crisis. Some crises have forged greater European solidarity, like the Covid-19 pandemic, where common solutions led to a temporary increase in fiscal capacity at the EU level. In contrast, others, such as the Migration Crisis, threatened the European project, and was a contributing factor to Britain’s decision to leave the EU in 2016. To understand how these crises affect the EU, it is essential to understand how the Union deals with and, crucially, learns from crises.

In my PhD project I seek to investigate the relationship between crises, policy learning and European integration, to understand if different ways of managing crisis result in various forms of learning, and in turn, if this produces different types of policy changes and effects on European integration. To do this, I rely on data from elite interviews as well as document analysis, mainly official policy documents, in order to analyse learning processes in the EU, how, and if they resulted in policy changes. The central policy areas under investigation are economic and financial policy, justice and home affairs, and health policy, all of which are policy areas where the EU has experienced complex crises in the past two decades.