Rebuilding the ship at sea: crisis politics and EU polity formation since 2008

The European Union has been in crisis on an ongoing basis since 2008. A wealth of scholarship has charted the contours of the crisis period, often emphasising the EU’s institutional weaknesses and tendency towards sub-optimal or incomplete solutions. Yet the EU has also proven capable of resilience, marshalling both policy and political resources to ‘rebuild the ship at sea’. To understand the cumulative consequences of the post-2008 period for the EU we must understand it as a compound polity, bringing together analyses of both fragility and resilience into a coherent account. The EU polity is characterised by flexible bounding, dispersed binding authority, and second-order bonding, features that can explain its vulnerability to crisis. Yet the same three features can also become sources of adaptability and staying power. This collection presents evidence that Europe’s polity resilience is an established tendency, not just a series of lucky escapes. Crisis politics remains highly contingent, and we cannot assume the EU will always be ‘forged in crisis’ in the sense of progress towards becoming another kind of ideal-type polity. Rather, EU resilience stems from its ability, in a crisis, to hone its apparent weaknesses and turn them into political strengths of collective polity maintenance.