Triggers for Investment Integration in the EU

One of the key themes in the current debate on the future of European integration is its relationship with crises. From the perspective of integration "from above", the renewed importance of European crisis rhetoric can be explained by the efforts of supranational bodies (in particular, the European Commission) to place the most sensitive issues in the dominant narrative in order to acquire competences where, under market conditions, there would be no prerequisites for the transfer of powers. One such area is the common policy on foreign direct investment (FDI). The paradigm of the European integration project that has emerged over the past fifteen years shows that the EU’s adaptation to crises occurs through situational management, which cannot be considered the best strategy, but has its results. In the debate on FDI competences, intergovernmental negotiations have not been successful, however, thanks to supranational entrepreneurship and the elevation of geopolitical struggle to the level of supranational politics, part of this area is now controlled at the EU level. By transforming external challenges into internal threats to European integration, the EU supranational bodies create "integration moments" to overcome disagreements between member states and the European integration project’s own crisis. In this article, we present four such crises: the global financial crisis, the crisis of global governance, the crisis of global value chains, and the aggravation of the situation around Ukraine after 2022, which were used by the EU supranational bodies as "existential threats" to the common European project and served as triggers for deepening integration in foreign direct investment.