Crises and integration in regulatory versus core state powers: a twin survey experiment on energy and military unions in the EU

The Russian invasion of Ukraine impacted Europe in multiple ways across several policy fields, uncovering how the incompleteness of processes of integration in fields like energy security and military cooperation weakened the EU’s response to the aggression. In both fields, important initial steps have been made in the aftermath of the invasion to reboot and expand integration. While impacted by the war in similar ways, energy supply and military integration are profoundly different policy areas, the latter being a clear example of core state power, while the former having traditionally been treated, at EU level, from a regulatory standpoint. Does a fundamental crisis like the Russian invasion of Ukraine affect differently public preferences for integration and joint provision of European public goods? If so, why? To answer these questions, we fielded in November 2022 two parallel randomized conjoint experiments on energy and military security in five western European countries. In this manuscript, we compare how preferences on very closely equivalent policy dimensions (financing, size, scope, procurement, governance, opt-outs), vary, depending whether they pertain energy or military integration. Furthermore, we study how individual level characteristics – such as level of relative concern between the energy/economic and security/military effects of the Russian invasion of Ukraine affect preferences across the two fields. Finally, we compare crises over time by exploiting the partial panel nature of our dataset, comparing –for a subgroup of respondents who also participated in a conjoint experiment on medicines procurement in March 2020—whether concerns over the pandemic affected preferences for healthcare integration differently than how concerns over the war have affected preferences for energy and military integration. All in all, this paper contributes to understand whether and how different crises affect differently preferences for joint provision of public goods, and help qualifying and extending the core findings of European crisis-integration theory.