The European Reinsurance of the Nation-State

Which kind of polity is the EU and which purpose does it serve? The post-Maastricht consensus was that the EU was a regulatory polity (Majone 1996) that engaged primarily in negative market-making (Scharpf 1999). This model was widely criticized for prying open the political and economic boundaries of the nation-state while offering inadequate supranational compensation for the concomitant loss of national control (Bartolini 2005). Recent contributions on core state power integration and external bordering have challenged this view. Since the polycrisis, the EU has moved hesitantly beyond the regulatory template via a gradual build-up of supranational capacity (Genschel and Jachtenfuchs 2021). In addition, the EU has sought to overcome its tendency toward “dilutive integration” (Schimmelfennig 2021) by acquiring instruments to control its external boundaries. What these literatures have not yet explicated, however, is the impact of these trends on the EU's systemic development. Against this backdrop, this paper claims that European integration has increasingly followed a logic of supranational reinsurance. Drawing on legal and economic scholarship on reinsurance in the private sector, it argues that core state power integration and external bordering neither weaken nor replace but rather seek to reinsure the nation-state. EU member states continuously bear primary responsibility for insuring their citizens against risks. At the same time, the EU has acquired means and capacities to step in as reinsurer in case national insurance proves insufficient. This is particularly the case for situations of severe crisis and disaster. The paper illustrates this reinsurance logic on the examples of the recent Frontex reform and the introduction of the SURE scheme during the Corona pandemic. It concludes by reflecting on the effectiveness of the approach and the conditions under which reinsured nation-states can take on additional risks and produce more public goods than under a scenario of exclusively national insurance.