Introduction

Since 2008, the European Union has been engulfed in several exogenous and endogenous crises: the sovereign debt/ Eurozone crisis (2008–2018), the migration and refugee crises (2015-ongoing), Brexit (2016–2021), the Covid-19 pandemic (2020–2023), the rule of law and climate crises (ongoing) and the security, humanitarian and inflationary crises deriving from the geopolitical unrest across the globe (more recently, in Afghanistan, Ukraine, Israel, the Red Sea). While distinct, these crises are feeding into each other and are testing the capacity and resilience of EU and domestic institutions, bringing forward common policy questions. Many observers have underlined the permanent character of this state of crisis—Zuleeg et al. (2021) have gone as far as calling this ‘the age of permacrisis’—while others have emphasised their compound and cumulative nature, defining the current as the era of polycrisis (Juncker 2016; Zeitlin et al. 2019). Here, we adopt the term permacrisis since it allows us to better understand the pressure that EU institutions and member states face in their quest to find ways to cope with this new policymaking environment. It is not only that they are confronted with many crises but that these crises are continuous or at least challenges are perceived as continuous crises.

The transboundary nature of these crises has made the EU ‘increasingly important in crisis management’ (Quaglia and Verdun 2023: 606). As such, crisis affect the way EU institutions approach policy design and negotiations with member states, since dealing with crises becomes part of their normal mode of policymaking (Ladi and Wolff 2021). Consequently, this changes the mechanisms and direction of the European Union’s integration process, raising questions over policy effectiveness (e.g. Kreuder-Sonnen and White 2021; Schmidt 2021) and democratic legitimacy (Boin and Rhinard 2022; Zeitlin et al. 2019).

We argue that permacrisis is fundamentally changing the relationship between the EU and its member states. This series of crises—and especially the Covid-19 pandemic and the war on Ukraine—have contributed to a renewed awareness of the importance of the State, at whichever applicable level of the governance scale, as a key provider of public goods and reform agent (Stiglitz 2021; Mazzucato and Quaggiotto 2020; Hay 2023). In this context, both the supranational and the domestic level are of paramount importance for crisis response, while a right balance between them is necessary to achieve maximum efficiency and to avoid conflict.

In this article, we start by acknowledging that the recent crises, and especially the Covid-19 pandemic, have inaugurated a trend towards a new mode of ‘coordinative Europeanization’ in EU decision-making (Ladi and Wolff 2021). Developing the original definitions of coordinative Europeanization by Ladi and Wolff (2021) and Wolff and Ladi (2020), we define coordinative Europeanization as a process where increased and often informal coordination between member states and EU institutions takes place during a crisis’ early stages in view of quickly devising policy solutions that work for everyone, thereby enhancing decision-making speed, reform ownership and policy compliance. This is happening because the permanent state of emergency is revealing new aspects of the interdependence between member states and EU institutions, creating an increased demand for policy learning and cooperation.

In the context of permacrisis, the EU has become more proactive in the provision and coordination of policy responses and has expanded its influence over policy areas which until recently had remained a prerogative of member states such as foreign and security policy, asylum and public health (e.g. Brooks et al. 2023, van Schaik et al. 2020, Juncos et. al. 2024, Wolff and Zardo, 2024). What we are now observing is that coordinative Europeanization, while it emerged in the context of emergency politics, appears to be spilling over onto pre-existing, non-emergency policies too, complementing other forms of Europeanization such as coercive Europeanization (Coman, 2022; Polverari, 2024). A question is thus whether it is becoming institutionalised as a modus operandi that goes beyond emergency politics.

While this new coordinative mode of Europeanization has emerged in parallel to intergovernmental and supranational tendencies ignited by crises, it is not our primary intention to assess whether it leads to more or less European integration. Extant research is already evidencing that different crises have led to different outcomes in terms of member states’ propensity to identify new common interests, pool resources at the EU level or delegate additional powers to the EU (Börzel 2023). Jones et al. (2021, 2016) have gone as far as to claim that European integration is happening by ‘failing forward’, while others emphasise that the approval of the Next Generation EU (NGEU) actually represented a “leap forward’ in policy terms”, thanks to the introduction of a novel and unprecedented governance model (Fabbrini 2022: 9). The latter developments represent an opportunity for democratic strengthening through enhanced citizens oversight and more ‘genuine public accountability’ (Nicolaïdis 2023, 40). Others, still, have argued that the outcome of the permacrisis will inevitably be more differentiation, with the latter becoming a ‘permanent and systemic’ feature of the EU, rather than an exceptional, temporary response (Trondal et al. 2022). Our contention is that although the literature has already discussed the implications of crises on European integration a European public policy agenda aiming to map the changes caused by crisis in multiple policy areas and how they relate to each other, has not been tackled yet. This is what we aim to do in this special issue. What are the constituent features of coordinative Europeanization? In which policy areas is coordinative Europeanization taking place? What factors have led to its emergence and diffusion? Is coordinative Europeanization always linked to crisis? What kind of policy and governance solutions emerge out of it? What can be observed about the changing relationship between member states and EU institutions in this context?

In this article we first define the new mode of coordinative Europeanization and outline its key features, contrasting coordinative Europeanization with other, often coexisting, modes of Europeanization. In the second section, we argue that the recent crises have altered the EU member states relationship in pursuit of fast policy responses and go more in depth on the reasons behind this changing relationship as well as how it might evolve. We then discuss the challenges caused by coordinative Europeanization and how they relate to pre-existing de-Europeanization tendencies. In both sections we draw empirical examples from the articles of this special issue. We close the article with an analysis of the significance of the findings of this special issue and we propose new research avenues.

Features of coordinative Europeanization

Crises are not new to the EU, and compromise and change during crises have been thoroughly analysed in the literature (D’Erman and Verdun 2018; Dinan, Nugent, and Paterson 2017, Carstensen and Schmidt 2018). Current literature has tended to shift from the traditional dichotomy between intergovernmentalism and supranationalism, to more nuanced understandings which better grasp the varied and comprehensive range of governance arrangements and policy solutions that different crises have led EU institutions and member states to adopt. Matthjis (2020), for example, underlines how current scholarly work on the EU’s responses to crises since 2008 has tended to show an “EU more ‘intergovernmental’ in nature but with a more robust implementation role for the EU’s supranational institutions” (2019, 1129). Anghel and Jones (2023), and Ferrara and Kriesi (2022) underline how responses have varied depending on the nature of the crises, while Cabane and Lodge (2024) discuss the differentiated implementation of EU crisis response. Brooks et al. (2023) emphasise how crisis-induced policy change can rest on institutional entrepreneurship by the Commission, which can precede and not be connected to the crisis itself. The pandemic crisis, in particular, has been viewed as a sui generis crisis which, due to its scale and all-encompassing scope, allowed EU institutions and national governments to pursue a ‘cooperative positive-sum game’, overcoming any possible conflict between supranational and intergovernmental institutions (Quaglia and Verdun 2023: 601; Kassim 2023).

We agree that ‘the type of crisis generates different policy making processes’ (Anghel and Jones 2023, 767; see also Coman, 2022; Juncos et al. 2024) and that the EU policy responses are linked to the crisis’ type (Roos and Schade 2023). Although this is an interesting research path, we explore a different angle to demonstrate that the continuous challenges that the EU has faced have led to the emergence of ‘coordinative Europeanization’ as a new modus operandi between the EU and its member states. The analysis of crisis has been a fruitful area of investigation in Europeanization studies and definitions of different types of Europeanization abound (for a review, see Exadaktylos and Graziano 2023). In this section, we tease out the specific features of such novel type of crisis-induced Europeanisation, with the aim of contributing clarity on a concept that has gained traction in scholarly research. In doing so we make reference to other types of Europeanization, yet without systematically addressing commonalities and differences, given the vast scale and diversity of Europeanization research.

The turning point for coordinative Europeanization was the Covid-19 crisis when a united response from the side of the EU became central not only for tackling the crisis but also for the EU’s own existence. This mode of Europeanization is normally linked to a crisis or an emergency that increases the feeling of interdependence between EU institutions and national actors, while also increasing awareness vis-à-vis the need for speedy cooperation. Similarly to earlier definitions of Europeanization which emphasised the circular nature of Europeanization (see Radaelli 2003), coordinative Europeanization leads to changes both at the EU and domestic levels. It is not claimed that coordinative Europeanization replaces the normal processes of EU policy making that take much longer and involve many more actors than emergency decisions. However, it is important to acknowledge that some emergency decisions such as the creation of the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) (Ladi et al. (2024), the EU vaccination strategy and the EU’s policy towards Russia (Juncos, et. al. 2024) may be significant and have long-lasting effects. In this sense, coordinative Europeanisation might occasionally reverse the joint decision trap, as crises reveal, in stark terms, the costs of inaction and/or of not acting jointly, decisively and ambitiously to address the crisis. This realisation pushes member states to work together to seek ambitious policy solutions that go beyond the least common denominator in view of identifying effective policy responses. In this sense, what makes coordinative Europeanization distinctive is that, although the EU always works coordinatively and by achieving compromises, in this case it does it faster, more decisively and ambitiously, even going beyond the Treaties or against long-established policy paradigms.

At the EU level, in periods during which coordinative Europeanization becomes the prominent mode, the European Commission tends to acquire a more central role, by playing a fundamental role in pushing forward ambitious policy solutions and overseeing their implementation. These solutions may have already existed in the form of proposals as a result of previous crises or of long-term policy development and negotiations, or may have been already piloted, not necessarily successfully, in already existing EU policies (Polverari, 2024). However, they are now promoted as necessary and even ‘unavoidable’ or ‘good enough’ in light of the new emergency (Wolff and Zardo 2024). As already underlined in Ladi and Wolff (2021), a further key feature is that the Commission aims to check early on the fast implementation potential since the decision is made in light of an emergency and thus quick and effective implementation is crucial.

This new mode is not expected to change the mechanisms of Europeanization which will still range from ‘hard’, such as institutional compliance via regulations and directives, to ‘soft’ such as changing domestic opportunity structures and framing domestic beliefs and expectations (Knill 2001). The key difference is that coordination with the Capitals becomes of paramount importance earlier on and the mechanisms are designed in view of ensuring effective and efficient implementation. This was the case during Covid-19 with informal often online meetings with the Capitals taking place throughout the crisis and during the first weeks of the war against Ukraine (Juncos, et al. 2024). A similar approach was also adopted during the Brexit withdrawal negotiations when the Commission created the Task Force 50 to guarantee unity among member states (Schuette 2021). This swifter decision-making process is facilitated by existing crisis management mechanisms developed over the past 12 years of ‘crisis’ (Rhinard 2019).

At the national level, coordinative Europeanization means that domestic actors should in principle find it easier to implement the EU decisions since their viability and potential for quick implementation would have been checked in advance. The domestic mediating factors that have been outlined in the literature are key for understanding why some member states find it easier to implement EU decisions than others (Schmidt, 2002). They include the economic vulnerability of member states, their political, institutional and administrative capacities, the domestic actors’ policy preferences and the predominant discourse about the EU. However, in light of crises and of favourable EU decisions that are seen as better than the ones the domestic actors could have achieved on their own, these mediating factors may be weaker for a period and, thus, allow for initial implementation and some immediate results. It is likely that central government actors that are closer to the decision-making process would experience the easiness of implementation more than regional or local actors, who might have been excluded from these condensed fast-paced decision-making processes (Valenza et al. 2021; Piattoni and Polverari, 2022; Zeitlin et al. 2023). Clearly, the endurance of policies and decisions taken during such periods along with their impact, needs to be assessed in the long-term.

There is no claim that only one mode of Europeanization exists at a time. The first wave of Europeanization studies in the 2000s focussed on the uploading of best practices by member states at the EU level and their downloading to the rest of the member states (Börzel, 2002). A good example of this mode is the open method of coordination (OMC). Although it is not so much discussed nowadays in the literature it still exists but is different to what is described here as coordinative Europeanization. The OMC is mainly encountered in EU policymaking during ‘normal’ times or for unurgent issues and not during crises. Other tools of soft Europeanization such as incentives, standards and moral suasion still exist even in parallel with crisis management (Coman, 2022; Polverari, 2024).

During the Eurozone crisis the discussion turned to coercive Europeanization to shed light to instances of EU led policy change as a result of conditionality attached to the Memoranda of Understanding of the bailout agreements between member states and the Troika (Leontitsis and Ladi, 2018). Coercive Europeanization still exists, and the ‘rule of law’ conditionality attached to all EU funding, including the RRF, is a recent manifestation of this since it attempts to secure compliance via the freezing of financial payments until the necessary policy adjustments take place at the national level (see Coman, in this issue). However, the implementation of the conditionality attached to the Economic Adjustment Programmes showed that coercion was not enough and that national governments matter (Moury et.al, 2021). As such, the lessons learned from the Eurozone crisis affected the design of the RRF (Ladi and Tsarouhas, 2020, Angelou 2024). This time round the Commission and the member states cooperated for the design of the National Recovery and Resilience Programmes (NRRPs) and national ownership was seen as being of paramount importance (Ladi et al., 2024; Angelou, 2024, Bokhorst and Corti 2023).

Coordinative Europeanization is also compatible with the idea of differentiated integration as a way to respond to crises. Leruth (2023) argues that differentiated integration should not be seen as good or bad for the European Union since ‘muddling through’ crises can allow for a certain degree of differentiation to occur between member states for a short period of time. And indeed, a result of coordinative Europeanization could be further differentiation, which might potentially become ‘permanent and systemic’ in some areas, as predicted by Trondal et al. (2022). Nevertheless, what we observe in the tackling of crises such as Covid-19 or the Russian aggression of Ukraine is an effort for an initially united response since differentiation would weaken the response in both cases.

How is coordinative Europeanization operationalised in methodological terms and what are we expecting to observe when it is taking place? First and foremost, there should be evidence of increased coordination between member states and between EU institutions and member states for the design of policy solutions vis-à-vis an urgent matter. These key decisions will often be taken in extraordinary European Council meetings, but the preparation will occur at the lower level with the participation of member states’ officials in discussions with the European Commission. These preparatory discussions are often informal and even online, such as the “Commission-Capital networks” that were launched during the Covid-19 crisis in order to bring fast results (Russack and Fenner, 2020). The discussions for the adoption of the NGEU and for the re-opening of the Schengen Area after its de facto closure in the early days of the Covid-19 crisis are good examples of such coordination as well (Ladi and Wolff, 2021). Moreover, we would expect member states to seek solutions that provide an effective unified response to the crisis’ most severe repercussions. Corollary to this, we would expect member states to negotiate until they identify such solutions.

Secondly, as policies adopted under this mode are crisis-contingent, we would expect them to have an end date, as is the case with Next Generation EU, the RePower EU plan or the more recent gas reduction regulation. Nevertheless, they are quite radical if compared with decisions made during less turbulent times (European Council 26/7/22). Whether these decisions will become more permanent cannot be observed at this stage but it is an important question for the future. For example, initial evidence on health policy (Brooks et al., 2023) is showing that the emergency decisions taken during the crisis have opened a new space allowing for the expansion of the EU’s already existing, even if secondary, competences in an area which member states had previously been reluctant to europeanise (even though not to the extent that had been sought by the Commission, see Brooks et al., 2020). In similar vein, it can be expected that the EU’s response to Russia’s aggression against Ukraine will affect the EU-Russia relationship in the long-term (Juncos et al., 2024).

Finally, with respect to the role of EU institutions, and in particular of the Commission, we would expect them to operate as effective arbiters and honest-brokers between member states. In practical terms, we would expect the Commission to initiate early consultations with and between member states, also identifying and establishing informal channels to facilitate such interactions (Ladi et al., 2024). Moreover, we would expect them to bring forward effective and commonly accepted solutions in the form of discussion papers and policy documents that would operate as the starting point of the negotiations. The efficiency and initial acceptability of these proposals are key features in this respect. All of these features are shown in Table 1 below.

Table 1 Features of coordinative Europeanization.
Full size table

A changing relationship between the EU and its member states

The centrality of member states is one of the fundamental pillars of the EU, and at the heart of the existence of the Union itself. The Lisbon Treaty, after the failure of adopting a Constitution for the EU, went a step further by declaring that: “The Union shall respect the equality of Member States before the Treaties as well as their national identities, inherent in their fundamental structures, political and constitutional, inclusive of regional and local self-government. It shall respect their essential State functions, including ensuring the territorial integrity of the State, maintaining law and order and safeguarding national security. In particular, national security remains the sole responsibility of each Member State.” (Lisbon Treaty, article 3a). Article 3a is a strong statement not only about the importance of national identities as it has often been discussed in the literature, but also for the centrality of state structures and functions of all levels as well as of the member states’ responsibility for their national security (Cloots 2015). Clearly a lot has changed since 2008 when the era of permacrisis made its appearance. The challenges for the State are only going to increase as the climate crisis deepens and war and conflict are still raging in the EU’s neighbourhood. What the recent crises have evidenced is the need for the member states to cooperate within the EU to be able to respond.

In other words, permacrisis has boosted the feeling of interdependence between EU member states and the appetite for coordinated solutions. The Covid-19 crisis and the war on Ukraine have meant that policy makers looked at the EU for solutions, realising that no national government alone could provide a meaningful answer to transboundary and exogenous crises of such scale (Ladi and Wolff 2021). Ultimately, even countries with a very critical stance towards the EU such as Hungary had to compromise in order to be included in the RRF. This country’s position in relation to the war on Ukraine is more ambivalent but has not yet blocked common decisions (Juncos et al., 2024; Börzel, 2023).

The realisation of interdependence was followed by a second realisation, by EU and domestic policymakers alike, about the importance of national infrastructure and institutional and administrative capacity at the national and local level (e.g. hospitals, transport, energy supply, production of essential goods and services). This meant that EU and domestic actors understood that EU regulations alone and the previous austerity doctrine would not provide solutions and that investment in national infrastructure and capacity, as well as coordination, would be necessary. This has been the case during the Covid-19 crisis with the need for effective national health infrastructure and staffing becoming evident. Moreover, since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, the military capability of member states and their national infrastructure vis-à-vis refugees flows, became central features of the EU’s response. However, the costs that member states are called to cover as a response to crises and emergencies and the costs they will be called to cover in the near future as a response to natural disasters are of an unprecedented nature and will only rise. As Hay (2023) argues, this new reality should change the way we conceive the welfare state. He goes further to suggest that public debt is bound to become unsustainable and thus an international political economy solution should be agreed, where debt default due to fiscal irresponsibility is treated differently to the rise of debt in response to financing the recovery cost after natural disasters. We would add that the EU member states will be forced to pursue economies of scales whenever possible, just like they did during the latest crises (with the RRF and the common purchase of vaccines, thus supporting the national efforts which would have likely been insufficient by themselves).

The frequency and intensity of crises has led to more inter-crisis learning too. In the last few years, it has often been the case that the same EU and national policy makers are tackling crises that occur one after the other in a very short time span (see Ladi and Tsarouhas 2020, Angelou, 2024). For instance, contrary to its response during the Eurozone crisis, the Commission recognised that in tackling the Covid-19 pandemic, investments and reforms needed to count on the support and ownership of the target recipients. After all, this was the moste viable way to ensure their viability and avert unintended negative political backlash (Ladi and Tsarouhas 2020; Matthijs 2020). This awareness, argues Angelou 2024, led the Commission to seek, early on, close cooperation and coordination with the member states and to even temporarily revert long-established policy paradigms, like the constraints on national finances of the stability and growth pact or of state aid rules (Boin and Rhinard 2022).

Challenges to coordinative Europeanization

There are certainly challenges to coordinative Europeanization. We identify two types of such challenges: first, crises do not only create unity and coordination, but they can also create disagreement. As Zeitlin et al. (2019) argue, cleavages between member states exist and can be reinforced by crises and even lead to disintegration and/or de-Europeanization. Second, the fast pace of coordinative Europeanization can cause unintended dysfunctionalities at the EU, national, regional and local level.

Coordination in times of crises does not render the EU immune to the possibility of disintegration and/or de-Europeanization. These terms have been used to describe a possible counter-Europeanization in order to explain the evolving relationship with accession countries such as Turkey, and with EU member states, like Hungary and Poland, that have reverted some key legislation related to the rule of law (i.e. Bodur and Arkhan, 2022; Coman, 2024; Ertugal 2021; Copeland 2016; Yilmaz, 2015 and Agh, 2015). De-Europeanization—or Europeanization “in reverse gear” to use Radaelli and Salter’s terminology (2019)—has been initially observed in the repealing of legislation adopted in order to join the EU, including in violation of (and change, even) of the Constitutions adopted after 1989, thereby eroding some of the conditions that had been met in order to gain accession to the EU (Coman, R. 2022). More recently, and particularly after Brexit, a more nuanced appreciation of de-Europeanization has been proposed which comprises intermediate forms of distancing from EU driven rules, norms, practices and ideals, along a continuum that includes dis-engagement linked to contingent needs and political preferences or pre-existing policy legacies (Wolff and Piquet, 2022). Under this framework, dis-engagement might be followed by future re-engagement, in a view of de-Europeanization that is conceived as a reversable, fluid and open process (Exadaktylos and Usherwood 2021). Evidently, more coordinative Europeanization does not mean that de-Europeanization is not still on the cards. Quite to the contrary. More ambitious EU policies may render it even more difficult for some member states to follow-up on decisions especially after the crisis’ initial repercussions have been managed and a supranational response is no longer seen as necessary. As such, coordinative Europeanization might well lead and co-exist with different extents of de-Europeanization. The EU response to the Hungarian and Polish erosions to the rule of law illustrated by Coman (in this issue) is a case in point.

Regarding the possible dysfunctionalities linked to the pace of coordinative Europeanization, recent experience of implementation of the NRRPs is showing that national governments and subnational authorities with key delivery responsibilities do not always have sufficient administrative capacity to implement the ambitious decisions taken in light of a crisis in addition to already existing policies (Polverari, 2024). With regards to the RRF, in particular, concerns have been raised about the absorption and implementation capacity of some main recipient countries, and also about the suitability of the verification mechanisms related to the assessment of the achievement of milestones and targets (Polverari and Piattoni 2022; European Court of Auditors 2022, 2023). The successful implementation of policies devised under coordinative Europeanization cannot to be taken for granted, and a legitimacy backlash could derive from unsuccessful implementation hence further exacerbating the aforementioned de-Europeanisation tendencies (Schmidt 2021). While, coordinative Europeanization is considered in itself to have enabled domestic policymakers to legitimise domestic policy reforms by leveraging on the ‘vincolo esterno’ (Zeitlin et al. 2023, Bressanelli and Natali, 2024), the implementation of reforms and investments agreed under a coordinative Europeanization framework remains dependent on the ‘member states willingness to play by the rules’ (Coman, in this issue) and on their administrative capacity (Polverari and Piattoni, 2022). Finally, the adoption of new tools and policies as a response to crisis in one field (e.g. the RRF) can lead to policy discrepancies in relation to traditional EU policies (e.g. cohesion policy) and possibly paradoxical outcomes, leading one policy to displace another (Polverari, 2024). This calls for an examination of the consequences of these discrepancies with regards to the achievement of the EU’s long-term policy priorities.

All of this raises questions about the lasting nature of coordinative Europeanization. As suggested above, crises provide windows for Europeanization during which domestic governments and elites converge in recognising that the cost of maintaining the status quo in the wake of emergency would be higher than the gains of a joint and coordinated response, while the political opposition is not able to provide workable alternatives. Yet the lasting effect of coordinative Europeanisation might be contingent upon the crisis’ duration. The prolongment of a crisis might render the crisis less pressing in the public eye and its repercussion normalised, undermining the need for coordinative Europeanization altogether and allowing misaligned domestic preferences to re-emerge.

Furthermore, de-Europeanization—or, more simply, the dis-engagement from EU rules, norms, practices and ideas—might be linked to a number of factors connected to the loss of urgency on a specific issue. These factors might include the low embeddedness of the policy change in the domestic system, the high degree of politicisation and governmental contestation of the EU domestically, and the legacy of previous experiences with similar Europeanization processes (like the response to the community strategic guidelines or EU cohesion policy conditionalities). All the above might hamper the lasting impact of coordinative Europeanization, they might selectively halt the implementation of agreed policy responses or contribute to reversing the outcomes of coordinative Europeanization altogether at some point throughout the implementation process, whether deliberately or due to lack of capacity.

Conclusions

While, the Eurozone crisis showed the European Union’s effectiveness in ‘imposing decisions on member states and societies’ (Graziano and Hartlapp, 2016: 2), the crises that followed i.e. the Covid-19 pandemic, paved the way to the emergence of a new role for the EU, one of brokerage and coordination. In this article and in the whole special issue we set out to further develop the emerging idea of coordinative Europeanization (Ladi and Wolff, 2021; Corti and Vesan, 2023). While, early scholarly work focussed on the emergence of this new mode of Europeanization through the interaction between the EU and its member states to swiftly launch policies during emergencies (Ladi and Wolff, 2021), our aim is to bring the discussion forward, teasing out the specific features and novelty of this mode of Europeanization. We focused on the key characteristics of coordinative Europeanization and we spelled out how the relationship between the EU and its member states has changed via the multiple crises of the last few years and the deeper realisation of interdependence among member states. We then sought to investigate two types of challenges to coordinative Europeanization: de-Europeanization and unintended dysfunctionalities. The contributions in the special issue shed new light on these themes and allow us to draw some novel insights.

First, as coercive Europeanization is considered as a last resort response when it comes to thorny issues—such as countering the illiberal reforms in Hungary and Poland—coordinative Europeanization allowed EU institutions and member states to operate in a more concerted manner, by ‘infusing dialogue and cooperation, as well as legitimacy, transparency and acceptability’ (Coman, in this issue). The articles in this special issue confirm that the application of coordinative Europeanization extends beyond the confines of emergency policymaking strictly speaking and might actually be a viable modus operandi for dealing with future transboundary crises and long-standing politically sensible issues or wicked problems. It might also operate as a framework that enables reaching domestically unpalatable policy decisions by shifting decision-making accountability to a higher policy arena, (the ‘vincolo esterno’, Bressanelli and Natali, 2024; Ladi, et al., 2024) while sharing responsibility among a plurality of actors. This might even extend to policy fields traditionally reserved to the member states, such as foreign and security policy, asylum and public health (Wolff and Zardo 2024; Juncos et al. 2024).

Second, we have seen that decisions made in the mode of coordinative Europeanization need to entail some level of flexibility since unintended dysfunctionalities are quite possible because of fast-paced decision-making. For example, some of the decisions taken in the initial versions of the NRRPs had to change once the acute phases of the crisis was over, new crises overcame previous ones, partisan domestic politics and/or nationalist and Eurosceptic narratives regained prominence (Bressanelli and Natali, 2024) The displacement of traditional policies is another case in point (Polverari, 2024). At the same time, as coordinative Europeanization has emerged as the outcome of ‘cumulative learning and progressive institutional transformations stemming from previous crises’ (Juncos, et al., 2024; Angelou, 2024), it is reasonable to expect that some of its results and tools may be institutionalised and become a more permanent feature of EU policy.

Third, the articles in this special issue confirm the renewed and central role of member states and the importance of domestic infrastructure, capacities and resources, as well as of the ownership of the policy solutions and reforms decided. Moreover, the role of states as gatekeepers (Ladrech, 2010) vis-à-vis lower levels of government and non-governmental actors has been reaffirmed (Bressanelli and Natali, 2024; Coman, 2022; Polverari, 2024). Abundant literature and grey literature have evidenced the side-lining of subnational authorities in the decision-making processes attached to the pandemic recovery package (Piattoni and Polverari, 2022; Zeitlin et al. 2023). Since these are key actors in the implementation of the RRF, exploring the effect of this marginalization on policy outcomes is paramount. A question that emerges is thus whether coordinative Europeanization can involve other policy actors beyond the EU institutions and member states despite the fact that crises would normally limit participation at the decision-making phase because of lack of time for widespread consultations. Wolff and Zardo in this issue suggest that this might be the case, but more research would be needed to establish whether this might be a more general trend, beyond asylum policy.

Future investigation is also warranted on the policy outcomes and potential spillovers of coordinative Europeanization. For example, under the NGEU and RRF, member states were left free to adopt governance, instruments and implementation solutions as they saw fit, as long as the Commission deemed them suitable to guarantee the achievement of milestones and targets and compliant with EU financial regulations and legal requirements (e.g. public procurement, state aids, do not significant harm principle). Will this lead to differentiated implementation (Princen 2022, Cabane and Lodge 2024)? And, if so, will differentiated implementation lead to better policy outcomes than previous soft or coercive approaches?

Further, coordinative Europeanization is impacting policy fields traditionally reserved to the member states. Emerging research, for example in relation to the EU’s health policy (Brooks et al. 2023 and 2022), suggest that crisis has opened a window of opportunity for EU actors to expand their reach in terms of EU-level policy initiatives and institutional responses, even in the absence of a formal upscaling of competences. Will this lead to an incremental expansion of the EU’s action in policy areas traditionally reserved to the domestic arenas? Whether and how this might happen will need to be examined further.

Lastly, and related, this special issue shows that the adoption of coordinative Europeanization in one field and the parallel traditional soft and/or coercive modes of Europeanization in others can lead to policy discrepancies and possibly paradoxical outcomes, leading one policy to displace another and to erode long-established EU principles such as that of vertical subsidiarity and interest groups’ involvement (Polverari, 2024). This calls for an examination of the consequences of coordinative Europeanisation for the evolving governance of the EU and for the achievement of the EU’s long-term policy priorities.

This special issue was conceived to open the debate on the Europeanization of EU public policies, and on the changing relationships between the EU and the member states, and among member states, in the context of permacrisis. Crucially, it focuses not only on the challenges and failures of tackling crises but also on what went well, in order to further map, evaluate and understand the conditions and consequences of ‘successful’ crisis management. The consequences are often much broader than new policy tools and practices. What we observe is a renewed relationship between the EU and its member states, and an institutionalisation of coordinative Europeanization beyond emergency politics and even beyond the confines of the competences that the Treaties assign to the EU. Crises and emergencies have certainly not ended: new questions arise inviting us to re-think theories and analytical tools in view of understanding the evolving EU governance.