When does crisis reshuffle the cards of EU governance? A comparative case study of the Euro and EU migration crisis

Scholarly agreement exists that the crises affecting the EU over the past two decades have had a far-reaching impact on how the EU works. Observing that existing studies generally tend to treat crises as a singular one-size-fits-all concept, this article adds a new layer of analysis by probing when and how different types of crises structurally impact EU governance. It does so by way of a comparative case study between the “existential” Euro crisis and “severe” EU migration crisis, which showed significant variation in the three key crisis dimensions of severity, symmetry and speed. The article consists of two parts: It first unpacks the concept of governance and applies it to the EU, linking different types of crises to governance changes in terms of political-administrative structures and processes, as well as operational capacity. Based on over thirty semi-structured interviews with practitioners and scholars, it then elaborates whether the Euro and EU migration crisis affected EU governance beyond the acute crisis and explains how these choices made were related to the type of crisis at stake. It concludes by signaling research avenues that can further test the causal link between the type of crisis and changes to EU governance in additional case studies.