The EU's soft balancing governance model: origins, characteristics and prospects for the future

Abstract A series of crises has challenged the European Union in the 2010s and 2020s, but has at the same time illustrated the resilience of the EU governance model. This model is characterized by soft balancing and is conditioned upon a division of labour, with NATO—and ultimately the United States—taking care of hard security and military balancing. The EU's success has relied on its not becoming a geopolitical actor, and it provides security mainly through processes of soft balancing, rather than policy outcomes. This article reconceptualizes soft balancing as a tool for understanding the EU's governance model, arguing that it is characterized by embedded and inclusive institutional soft balancing: member states use institutional mechanisms for pursuing power and interests by binding other actors through norms, rules and procedures inside the institutions. At the same time, member states' understandings of what constitutes power and interests, and how they are best pursued, are embedded in expectations created by the informal practices and formal rules of the institutions. Applying this model in the context of the history of EU integration since the early Cold War era, this article traces the development of the EU governance model, identifies and unpacks its characteristics, and discusses the lessons to be learned in terms of its future prospects.