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The European Union's history exhibits numerous episodes in which Member States have sought to re-enforce their national autonomy in the face of deepening integration. Efforts to re-gain autonomy, however, are often accompanied by legitimate concerns that autonomy will lead to dis-integration or will have wider destructive consequences. The EU thus faces a dilemma. Calls for autonomy cannot all be dismissed as mere populist rhetoric or national egoism but instead represent a legitimate questioning of the degree of uniformity that EU law and politics presently carry. At the same time, the fear that greater autonomy may carry dis-integrative effects is also legitimate -uniformity is not an accidental by-product of the EU's construction but intrinsically related to its policy goals. Giving too much room for autonomy might create an opportunity structure for the loss of collective goods, deficits in problem-solving, and perhaps even to self-destruction. The EU requires autonomy, but in doing so, it must also avoid collapse. Can it achieve it, and if so, how? Autonomy without Collapse is devoted to exploring innovative answers to this question. It draws together scholars in law and political science interested in exploring how to overcome the central dilemma of preserving sustainable yet real autonomy in the future European Union.

Most EU-scholars conceive of the EU as a multilevel polity with strong powers to regulate economic policy externalities among the member states but little power to intervene in, let alone assume, core functions of sovereign government ('core state powers') such as foreign and defense policy, public finance, public administration, and the maintenance of law and order. This book challenges this view. Based on a systematic comparison of integration processes in military security, fiscal policy, and public administration, it finds steady progress in the integration of core state powers although with substantial sectoral variation. But the EU is not heading towards state-building. In contrast to the historical experience of national federations, the European integration of core state powers proceeds mostly by regulating national capacities, not by creating European ones, and leads to territorial fragmentation rather than increased cohesiveness.

Most EU-scholars conceive of the EU as a multilevel polity with strong powers to regulate economic policy externalities among the member states but little power to intervene in, let alone assume, core functions of sovereign government ('core state powers') such as foreign and defense policy, public finance, public administration, and the maintenance of law and order. This book challenges this view. Based on a systematic comparison of integration processes in military security, fiscal policy, and public administration, it finds steady progress in the integration of core state powers although with substantial sectoral variation. But the EU is not heading towards state-building. In contrast to the historical experience of national federations, the European integration of core state powers proceeds mostly by regulating national capacities, not by creating European ones, and leads to territorial fragmentation rather than increased cohesiveness.

Discussing what we may learn from thinking about the EU in federal terms represents a two-fold challenge. It is on the one hand a matter of establishing ‘how federal’ the EU is (the EU’s federal challenge). On the other, the EU has federal features but is not a state, thus raising the question of whether federal theory and practice may have to be adapted to take proper account of the EU (the EU’s challenge to federalism). The contributions to this collection supplement and extend existing scholarship through focusing on two important lines of inquiry. The first focuses on the relationship between federalism and democracy, with particular emphasis on how federal systems respond to and deal with citizens’ interests and concerns, within and outside the political system. Representation is explored both in the process of federalization, and as a feature of established systems. The second line of inquiry places the emphasis on the relationship among the governments of federal systems. The focus is on intergovernmental relations, and the particular merits that emanate from studying these from a federal perspective. This book was originally published as a special issue of Journal of European Public Policy.

This volume argues that the crisis of the European Union is not merely a fiscal crisis but reveals and amplifies deeper flaws in the structure of the EU itself. It is a multidimensional crisis of the economic, legal and political cornerstones of European integration and marks the end of the technocratic mode of integration which has been dominant since the 1950s. The EU has a weak political and administrative centre, relies excessively on governance by law, is challenged by increasing heterogeneity and displays increasingly interlocked levels of government. During the crisis, it has become more and more asymmetrical and has intervened massively in domestic economic and legal systems. A team of economists, lawyers, philosophers and political scientists analyse these deeper dimensions of the European crisis from a broader theoretical perspective with a view towards contributing to a better understanding and shaping the trajectory of the EU.

This volume argues that the crisis of the European Union is not merely a fiscal crisis but reveals and amplifies deeper flaws in the structure of the EU itself. It is a multidimensional crisis of the economic, legal and political cornerstones of European integration and marks the end of the technocratic mode of integration which has been dominant since the 1950s. The EU has a weak political and administrative centre, relies excessively on governance by law, is challenged by increasing heterogeneity and displays increasingly interlocked levels of government. During the crisis, it has become more and more asymmetrical and has intervened massively in domestic economic and legal systems. A team of economists, lawyers, philosophers and political scientists analyse these deeper dimensions of the European crisis from a broader theoretical perspective with a view towards contributing to a better understanding and shaping the trajectory of the EU.

Discussing what we may learn from thinking about the EU in federal terms represents a two-fold challenge. It is on the one hand a matter of establishing ‘how federal’ the EU is (the EU’s federal challenge). On the other, the EU has federal features but is not a state, thus raising the question of whether federal theory and practice may have to be adapted to take proper account of the EU (the EU’s challenge to federalism). The contributions to this collection supplement and extend existing scholarship through focusing on two important lines of inquiry. The first focuses on the relationship between federalism and democracy, with particular emphasis on how federal systems respond to and deal with citizens’ interests and concerns, within and outside the political system. Representation is explored both in the process of federalization, and as a feature of established systems. The second line of inquiry places the emphasis on the relationship among the governments of federal systems. The focus is on intergovernmental relations, and the particular merits that emanate from studying these from a federal perspective. This book was originally published as a special issue of Journal of European Public Policy.