FOR 5770:  Reconfiguring Europe: Between competence and control

• Subject Area: Social and Behavioural Sciences
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 532657320

After a decade of EU crises and crisis-induced change, it is time to reassess the reconfiguration of the EU in a broader perspective. This is the goal of the Research Unit. It argues that the EU is torn between building the competence to solve transnational policy problems and realize economies of scale and creating controls of these competencies. This leads to a dilemma: uncontrolled competencies are dangerous, overcontrolled competencies are useless. The Research Unit starts from the assumption that the reconfiguration of the EU is shaped to a major degree by how it deals with this dilemma. It aims to understand which tradeoffs exist between competence and control and how they develop across sectors and governance tasks over time (description), to explain the emergence, development and change of these tradeoffs (explanation) and to assess what these tradeoffs mean for the reconfiguration of the EU as a whole (consequences). It does so in three ways. First, instead of using a one-dimensional measure of more or less integration, it uses a two-dimensional conceptualization consisting of different combinations of competence and control. These combinations are issue-specific and change over time. Whether or not they add up to a dominant mode or to a variety of patterns is subject to empirical analysis and theoretical explanation. This two-dimensional concept allows to distinguish between more integration in terms of more competence and in terms of more control. Second, it combines political science and law in order to improve our understanding of European integration. Political science theories of integration and legal theories of European constitutionalism address similar issues but from complementary points of view and remain largely apart. Competence-control theory provides a common vocabulary and framework for integrating legal and political science perspectives in the analysis of the reconfiguration of the EU. This allows for the creation of a larger interdisciplinary group for the analysis of European integration which has the potential for strongly resonating in the international debate on the EU. Third, it conceives of integration as a process of polity formation and reconfiguration. This allows us to contribute to recent conceptualizations from a system-building perspective without committing to grand empirical and normative visions about the EU becoming a (federal) state or the desirability thereof. It rather asks how the EU creates and maintains itself as a polity. The group brings together the broad knowledge of issue areas, institutional settings, instruments, theories, and debates required for analyzing the reconfiguration the EU with the help of an interdisciplinary competence-control perspective.

• DFG Programme: Research Units

Projects

• Competence, control, and joint procurement in the EU (Applicant Genschel, Philipp )
• Competence, control, and the reconfiguration of the EU’s finances (Applicant Jachtenfuchs, Markus )
• Coordination Funds (Applicant Jachtenfuchs, Markus )
• Courts as Cross-Level Guardians of Values – Re-Balancing Competences Through Judicial Control in the EU (Applicant Wendel, Mattias )
• Courts as Governors in the Internal Market? – the interaction between judicial control and competence (Applicant Schmidt, Susanne K. )
• Judicial conflict and the reconfiguration of control in the EU constitutional order (Applicant Bobic, Ph.D., Ana )
• Populism and the Constitutional Re-Configuration of the European Union (Applicant Dawson, Mark )
• Reconfiguring EU through Spending (ReSpend) (Applicant Hartlapp, Miriam )

• Spokesperson: Professor Dr. Markus Jachtenfuchs