‘Fast-Forward’ Europeanization: Welfare State Reform in Light of the Eurozone Crisis

Abstract

The Eurozone crisis and the indecision of the EU leaders to move towards a concrete and long-lasting solution have raised once more the discussion about the future of the European project. Will the EU manage to come out of the crisis stronger, or will the Eurozone collapse and with it the EU will be directed to an intergovernmental phase? Although it is difficult to predict the answer to this question, what can be said is that the way we study and analyse the EU has already been affected. In the last 15 years, the focus of the analysis has shifted to Europeanization and to the way the EU has been changing the polity, policy and politics of the member states (e.g. Ladrech, 2010; Featherstone and Radaelli, 2003). Policy convergence, divergence and inertia (or, in other terms, policy transformation, adjustment and continuity) have been observed in a variety of cases, and a lot of emphasis has been placed on the domestic mediating factors as explanatory factors for the outcome of Europeanization (see Graziano, 2011; Ladi, 2011). In this chapter, we argue that in order to better understand Europeanization and the way it affects member states, we need to focus more on the changing face of Europeanization itself. The current economic crisis reveals that when member states have not been converging, in presence of increasing, multiple EU-led policy constraints, Europeanization becomes more persistent. This is what we call ‘fast-forward’ Europeanization.