Shifts in the EU’s internal governance capacity: From economic to political conditionality

The European Union’s (EU) last decade and a half has been marred by several crises, such as the financial, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the rule of law crisis. Many EU scholars have demonstrated that the responses to these crises have led to more integration (see e.g. Rhinard et al. 2023) and to an overall strengthening of the EU’s governance capacity. In particular, the EU has increasingly resorted to economic conditionality as an internal governance mechanism towards member states to incentivize domestic reforms (Vita 2017; Jacoby/Hopkin 2019). This paper adds to the debate by focusing on a different kind of conditionality that has recently emerged. As we argue, there is a shift from purely economic to a new type of political conditionality towards its member states. Through this political conditionality, the EU seeks to influence the institutional structures of its member states more directly than ever before. As we show, it does so either through explicit political conditionality (Regulation 2020/2092 on the protection of the EU budget) or through implicit political conditionality via economic and technical governance instruments (Common Provisions Regulation). By extending its pre-accession strategy of political conditionality to member states, the EU has embarked on a path that breaks with its traditional commitment not to interfere with the institutional set-up of its members. Moreover, while its constitutional foundations have remained unchanged, the introduction of these conditionalities represents a qualitative change in the EU’s relation with its member states by enhancing its internal governance capacity towards these. To illustrate this argument, we develop a classification of different types of conditionalities and then use it to empirically assess and compare the deployment of four conditionality regimes: the European Semester, the Recovery and Resilience Fund, the Rule of Law Conditionality Regulation and the Common Provisions Regulation.