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9 - The Perils of Choice: Structure and Agency in EU Crisis Management
- By Douglas Webber
Edited by Richard Ned Lebow, King's College London, Ludvig Norman, Stockholms Universitet
Book:

Robustness and Fragility of Political Orders

Published online:

25 November 2022

Print publication:

24 November 2022, pp 229-269
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Summary

This chapter explores how the EU (European Union) managed the multiple crises that it confronted during the decade from 2010 to 2020, the extent to which these crises provoked its disintegration or closer integration and – primarily – how far the EU’s crisis management policies were structurally determined or shaped by agency. It argues that the decisions made by the EU in the Eurozone and coronavirus crises – decisions that forged closer political integration – were largely structurally determined, whereas those that culminated in political disintegration either involved a combination of structural and agency-related causes, as with the refugee crisis, or, as with the Brexit crisis, were the result of a sequence of decisions that were taken by political actors who possessed agency and that therefore could well have been different.