The Coercive Ceiling: Multilevel Governance and the Limits of Scale in a Crisis-Driven EU

Governance in the EU has exemplified multilevel governance (MLG) in the past decades, with policy authority and implementation distributed across local, regional, national, and supranational levels according to logics of scale and efficiency. However, a recent move towards nationalization challenges the ubiquity of MLG. In this paper, I propose scope conditions of multilevel governance that suggest that the highest levels of MLG are constrained to eras of peace. Drawing on Charles Tilly’s state-building literature, I develop a distinction between ’capital-intensive’ and ’coercive-intensive’ policies and demonstrate that while MLG functions well under ’capital-intensive’ policies, those that have dominated the EU agenda since the 1990s, authority renationalizes in times of defense threats. I further test if this renationalization has spillover effects using EU Cohesion Policy budget data following the invasion of Ukraine. The empirical analysis finds limited evidence of renationalization within Cohesion Policy in the immediate post-invasion period, suggesting a high degree of institutional stickiness. By contrast, Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) funding is distributed more centrally, with a greater share allocated to national-level actors. Taken together, these findings provide tentative support for the argument that coercion-informed governance logics are more likely to emerge in newly created instruments than to rapidly reshape entrenched multilevel structures. This project builds on European integration literature to refine the domain-specific scopeconditions of multilevel governance in the EU, highlighting broader conditions under which authority is dispersed or nationalized.