Authors:
Christian Freudlsperger & Markus Jachtenfuchs
Journal of European Integration
First Published online: Feb 2021.
Abstract and Figures
The EU has integrated core state powers in a largely unsustainable manner. Why is this? In this introduction to a special issue on Germany, we take an in-depth look at national preference-formation. We trace the impact of state elites, as emphasised by functionalist theories, and mass publics and political parties, as stressed by postfunctionalism. We find that across policy fields and with striking continuity over time, Germany acts as a normal member state. The country prefers the regulation of national capacities over the creation of European capacities, and (increasingly) the intergovernmental rather than supranational control of those capacities. Only in existential crises, Germany supports European capacity-building under intergovernmental control. This leads to unstable integration but is not an indicator of hegemonic dominance. Crucial from both a practical and theoretical perspective, there exists no major gap between state elites and political parties or public opinion on German preferences.
ARTICLE
A member state like any other? Germany and the European
integration of core state powers
Christian Freudlsperger and Markus Jachtenfuchs
Jacques Delors Centre, Hertie School, Berlin
ABSTRACT
The EU has integrated core state powers in a largely unsustainable
manner. Why is this? In this introduction to a special issue on
Germany, we take an in-depth look at national preference-
formation. We trace the impact of state elites, as emphasised by
functionalist theories, and mass publics and political parties, as
stressed by postfunctionalism. We nd that across policy elds
and with striking continuity over time, Germany acts as a normal
member state. The country prefers the regulation of national capa-
cities over the creation of European capacities, and (increasingly)
the intergovernmental rather than supranational control of those
capacities. Only in existential crises, Germany supports European
capacity-building under intergovernmental control. This leads to
unstable integration but is not an indicator of hegemonic domi-
nance. Crucial from both a practical and theoretical perspective,
there exists no major gap between state elites and political parties
or public opinion on German preferences.
KEYWORDS
Core state powers; Germany;
neofunctionalism; liberal
intergovernmentalism;
postfunctionalism
1. Introduction
German preferences and actions towards the European Union have long puzzled scholars
and political observers. One group regards Germany as the hegemon and true ruler of the
EU, imposing its institutional preferences, economic model and foreign policy positions
on the other member states and the European Commission. Another group sees Germany
as a compulsive pro-European which denes its interests in European terms and stands
ever ready to support a common European solution, if needed with billions of
Deutschmarks or Euros.
The disagreement over the normative underpinnings and substantive direction of
German policy towards the EU is linked to theoretical debates about the drivers of
European integration. For functional theories such as neofunctionalism or liberal inter-
governmentalism, the EU is an institution for solving collective action problems and
increasing domestic gains (Schimmelfennig 2014; Moravcsik 2018). In this perspective,
rationally egoistic governments scale up governance functions to the EU because it pays
o with their voters, by creating more jobs, catching more criminals and a better protec-
tion against security threats. For postfunctionalism, the logic of community conicts with
the logic of interest (Hooghe and Marks 2009). Voters also care for community, particularly
CONTACT Christian Freudlsperger freudlsperger@delorscentre.eu Friedrichstraße 194, 10117 Berlin
JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN INTEGRATION
2021, VOL. 43, NO. 2, 117–135
© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/
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cited.
if supranational governance involves redistribution and sacrice, and challenger parties
give voice to these concerns and exert pressure on mainstream parties. In this perspective,
rationally egoistic governments try to assure their re-election by relinquishing potential
gains from the scaling up of governance functions to the EU if audience costs are too high.
Governments thus have to choose which of the two logics they should follow. Their
choice may depend on the policy eld, issue salience, the strength of sovereigntist
challenger parties, or patterns of asymmetric interdependence, to name but a few.
When the issue is technical, low salience, no challenger party in sight but only huge
gains from a common European solution, the choice for scaling up is easy. When the issue
is close to the core of sovereignty, of high salience, mobilized by strong challenger parties
and involves high risks or costs, the choice is much more dicult.
In the post-Maastricht period, the latter type of choices has increased strongly because
the EU has moved from market integration into core state powers. In this special issue, we
try to assess the inuence of functionalist and postfunctionalist factors in explaining
German preferences on core state power integration. Consequently, the contributions
to the special issue analyse
●an extended time period: from Maastricht to the present
●dierent core state power areas: asylum, policing, scal capacity, scal regulation,
defence procurement, security policy
●periods and policy elds with diering levels of interdependence and salience
●dierent types of actors: state elites, political parties, public opinion
The guiding question of this special issue is to which degree and under which conditions
state elites (reacting to functional pressures) and political parties and/or public opinion
(reacting to postfunctional concerns of community and sovereignty) shape German
preferences on the integration of core state powers. In answering this question, we
provide a fresh and systematic look at the old topic of Germany’s role in the EU. We
also make a contribution to the theoretical debate by introducing and analysing state
elites as the carriers of functional interests in core state powers, where business interests
are largely absent, and by comparing the respective inuence of functional and post-
functional inuences on government preferences.
In the following, we discuss case selection and method, in particular the focus on
Germany (section 2), our framework for analysing our dependent variable, namely pre-
ferences on the integration of core state powers (section 3), our independent variables
and hypotheses (section 4), and provide a comprehensive comparative discussion of the
ndings of our contributions (section 5).
We conclude that Germany is neither willing and able to become a European hege-
mon, nor is it an unconditional supporter of the EU. Instead, it acts as a member state like
any other. When faced with strong sectoral externalities, German governments instru-
mentally compare the costs of the status quo with the price for change, and seek to
minimise the costs and risks incurred from the integration of core state powers. Across
core state power areas, German governments thus express a consistent preference for
regulation over costly supranational capacity-building. Only in cases in which the creation
of some supranational capacities appears unavoidable, primarily in full-blown crisis situa-
tions, Germany supports the build-up of state-like capacities on the supranational level,
118 C. FREUDLSPERGER AND M. JACHTENFUCHS
while insisting on intergovernmental control and/or their temporal nature to reduce costs
and risks (Fabbrini and Puetter 2016). Regarding the inuence of functional or postfunc-
tional factors explaining preferences, we nd few instances where functional interests
represented by state elites and identity concerns represented by political parties and
public opinion actually clash, even though we looked at several broad policy elds over
thirty years. Only in security policy, we have a constellation where elites are broadly in
favour of more integration whereas mass publics oppose it (successfully). In the other
elds, functional and postfunctional forces by and large point into the same direction.
Overall, therefore, there is no systematic conict between elites willing to integrate and
mass publics opposing integration in post-Maastricht Germany.
2. Case selection and method: why Germany?
The literature on Germany’s role in the EU exhibits a strong tendency to regard the
country as a special case, explaining German government preferences by idiosyncratic
factors. Throughout European integration history, this scholarly understanding of
a German Sonderweg on Europe came in dierent forms. One classic strand saw German
governments as displaying a particularly strong ‘European vocation’ (Paterson 2010),
rooted in the country’s dicult history. Europe, in this sense, served as a vanishing
point for a country grappling with its own past. In the immediate aftermath of reunica-
tion, the German aection for Europe is frequently argued to have reached its apogee. At
the time, Helmut Kohl emphasised habitually that deepened EU integration and reunica-
tion were ‘two sides of the same coin’ and that the Euro was crucial in rendering European
integration ‘irreversible’ (Bancho 1997). In our view, the explanatory power of such
understandings of Germany’s role in Europe is dubitable even for the pre-Maastricht
era, contradicted for instance by German attempts to restrict the size of the EC budget
throughout the 1980s (see Howarth and Schild 2021). They certainly no longer hold now.
Indeed, many scholars observed a process of disenchantment and ‘normalisation’ (Hyde-
Price and Jeery 2001) that followed the post-reunication honeymoon period.
More recent accounts of Germany’s role in Europe deviate drastically from this classic
view. Two strands stand out. First, under the impression of the Euro crisis, various scholars
(Nedergaard and Snaith 2015; Matthijs 2016; Schäfer 2016) have sought to explain
German government preferences by reference to ordoliberal convictions. The deep-
seated German desire for Ordnungspolitik, in this perspective, led the Eurozone into crisis
(Young 2014). While there is merit to this explanation, the ordoliberalism thesis does not
explain why other Eurozone countries without an ordoliberal tradition hold similar pre-
ferences. It also cannot explain why German governments ultimately caved in at each
decisive turn in the ‘chicken game’ (Schimmelfennig 2015) that was the Eurozone crisis, be
it on the ESM or the third Greek bailout program. In our view, such behaviour is much
more in line with a rationalist strategy of cost-minimization than a doctrinal attachment to
ordoliberalism. A second strand enjoying increasing prominence focuses on Germany’s
domineering role in the EU. Characterisations of Germany as ‘semi-Gulliver’ (Bulmer and
Paterson 1989) or as ‘embedded hegemon’ (Crawford 2007) have long been a mainstay of
IR-inspired thinking on Germany’s role in the EU. In more recent years, conceptualisations
of Germany as the EU’s power-maximising ‘hegemonic stabiliser’ have gained currency
(Donnelly 2018; Webber 2019). In our view, Germany is indeed a pivotal member state
JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN INTEGRATION 119
which has arguably become Europe’s economic and political powerhouse. As the
Schengen crisis demonstrated, however, Germany fails to upload its policy preferences
in case it cannot act alongside a powerful coalition of member states (see Ripoll Servent
and Zaun 2021). In contrast to the hypothetical hegemon described in these scholarly
accounts, Germany is unable to unilaterally impose its preferences on the rest of the EU.
This special issue puts systemic factors at the centre of its explanatory approach.
Instead of resorting to idiosyncratic factors to understand German preferences on
European integration, we contend that the root cause for changing German preferences
on Europe lies in the transformation of European integration itself, with core state power
integration increasingly becoming the dominant site of EU institution-building. As
a consequence of this systemic approach, we use Germany as a test case for the
explanatory leverage of general theories of European integration. Our aim is to analyse
in which cases and under which conditions functional pressures for managing interde-
pendence, which is the explanatory focus of rational functionalist theories (Moravcsik
2018) and concerns for identity and community, which lie at the core of postfunctionalism
(Hooghe, Lenz, and Marks 2019), play a role in the formation of German preferences.
Correspondingly, we trace the impact that state elites, on one hand, and mass publics and
political parties, on the other, have on German preference-formation. Obviously, focuss-
ing on a single case risks making Germany a special case instead of treating it as one case
in a class of many. In order to minimize these risks, we include a comparative section in
this introduction, and the bulk of the individual contributions to this special issue also
address the German position in comparison to other member states. In addition, eyeing
long time horizons (if possible since the Maastricht Treaty) allows us to track whether
German preferences have actually changed over 30 years. It also avoids overestimating
short-term outliers or premature ndings of, for instance, a German hegemony in Europe.
3. Institutional design in core state powers: regulation and capacity
German government preferences on the European integration of core state powers are
the dependent variable of the contributions to this special issue. Preferences describe ‘an
ordering among underlying substantive outcomes that may result from international
political interaction, [. . .] [i.e.] a set of fundamental interests dened across “states of the
world.”’ (Moravcsik 1997, 519; cf. Frieden 1999, 42) Core state powers, in turn, are the
action resources essential for upholding the core functions of sovereign government
(Kuhn and Nicoli 2020, 7–9), that is, to constitute a territorial, positive state (in contrast to
a solely regulatory state, Majone 1997) in the Weberian sense. At the very minimum, these
comprise the control over the means of coercion (police, military, borders) and the raising
and spending of public revenue (monetary, tax and scal), both realised by an eective
bureaucratic apparatus. Core state powers can be integrated on the European level by
means of either regulation or capacity-building (Genschel and Jachtenfuchs 2014).
Regulation refers to the setting of authoritative rules for the exercise of a state’s action
resources. Once majority-voting applies in a given eld, we assume regulation to be
exercised by the EU-level, either supranationally via the traditional Community method or
intergovernmentally by the member states alone. Capacity, in turn, refers to the creation
and maintenance of standing action resources. These resources can be situated either on
the national or on the supranational level. Governmental preferences on institutional
120 C. FREUDLSPERGER AND M. JACHTENFUCHS
design in core state power integration can take on four distinct combinations of regula-
tion and capacity-building (see Table 1).
Under full member state sovereignty, EU actors’ inuence is conned to non-binding
supporting action. An example is member states’ continuous control over their contribu-
tion of troops to EU-led military missions. In cases of national control of supranational
capacities, the member states back the creation of supranational capacities while retain-
ing regulatory oversight and curtailing the involvement of supranational actors such as
the Commission or the Parliament. Among these cases rank, for instance, ‘de novo bodies’
(Bickerton, Hodson, and Puetter 2015) such as the European Stability Mechanism (ESM),
the European External Action Service (EEAS), and some EU agencies (Rittberger and
Wonka 2011). In cases of supranational or intergovernmental control of national capacities,
the member states resist the creation of supranational redistributive capacities but
delegate the exercise of regulatory oversight to the EU-level, either to supranational
actors that credibly guarantee mutual commitments or to an intergovernmental process
that they regard as better protecting their sovereignty. Whereas the initial Stability and
Growth Pact (SGP) conformed to the former variant, the later Fiscal Compact or European
Semester verged more toward the latter. Positive state-building, creating sovereign supra-
national actors that can either replace or compete with existing national capacities,
remains relatively rare. To this day, the clearest example remains the European Central
Bank (ECB).
During the last decade of crises, the EU often resorted to ‘mixed’ modes for the
integration of core state powers which neither leave national sovereignty intact nor
constitute positive state-making. While it is plausible that these modes were chosen
because they minimize conict among member states and with their voters, both the
supranational or intergovernmental control of national capacities and the national control
of supranational capacities are inherently unstable and unsustainable. The former mode
allows for the passing of authoritative rules on member states’ conduct. However, as
exemplied by the Euro and Schengen crises, it hampers the redistributive risk- and
burden-sharing necessary for upholding an equitable distribution of the costs and ben-
ets of cooperation in the face of asymmetrical shocks. The latter mode, in turn, would
allow for the sharing of key action resources of sovereign government in times of crisis.
Yet, it is ineective in doing so as it is prone to activating the ‘joint-decision trap’ which
arises in situations of compulsory joint decision-making under unanimity and produces
decision-making blockades that lead to suboptimal policy outcomes (Scharpf 2006). In
sovereignty-sensitive elds susceptible to national identity politics and mass
Table 1. Institutional design in core state power integration.
Capacity
EU level Member state level
Regulation EU level Positive state-building
Example: European Central Bank
Supranational or intergovernmental control of
national capacities
Examples: Stability and Growth Pact, Fiscal
Compact
Member state
level
National control of supranational
capacities
Example: De novo bodies
Member state sovereignty
Example: Participation in military missions
JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN INTEGRATION 121
politicization, the occurrence of this deciency is even more expectable. Obviously, one
should not extrapolate initial preferences from policy outcomes. It is well possible that
German governments would have preferred more sustainable institutional designs at
various instances. The contributions to this special issue will therefore pay particular
attention to whether and when these mixed modes were actually a German preference,
or merely the outcome of hard intergovernmental bargaining.
4. What shapes preferences on core state powers?
While there is wide scholarly agreement that understanding governmental preferences is
important for understanding the development of the EU, disagreement persists about the
factors shaping those preferences. Theories that share a functionalist understanding of
integration, such as neofunctionalism and liberal intergovernmentalism, assume asym-
metric interdependence to be the decisive factor underlying interstate bargaining on
international institution-building. Postfunctionalism, on the other hand, investigates the
eect of citizens’ concerns for identity and community on member state preferences. Both
factors are of potential relevance for core state power integration, which renders the latter
an ideal test case for both theoretical traditions. Strong and asymmetric interdependence
in elds such as monetary and scal policy or border and migration policy has long
underpinned the EU’s eorts to integrate these areas. At the same time, these elds are
generally perceived as close to the core of national sovereignty, enjoying considerable
salience in national public and political debates. Our aim is to assess the rival hypotheses
put forth by functionalist and postfunctionalist approaches on the single case of Germany.
Correspondingly, we trace the impact of, rst, state elites and, second, mass publics and
political parties.
State elites
State elites ‘are for the integration of core state powers what private business is for market
integration: the group of actors most immediately aected and concerned’ (Genschel and
Jachtenfuchs 2016, 52). The category comprises all unelected professionals that derive
their status and income from the handling of national core state powers, primarily civil
servants. State elites are not political actors in the narrow sense of the word. While they
may hold ideological convictions, they primarily serve the state and the institution that
employs them. In the German case, the category comprises administrative ocials from
the departments responsible for a given core state power area, for instance the federal
ministries of foreign aairs, the economy, nance, interior, defence, and the chancellery.
The analytical focus on state elites ranks among the novelties and central departures
of core state power theory from classic functionalist approaches. The most prominent
integration theory anchored in the functionalist tradition, i.e. liberal intergovernment-
alism, argues that governments form their preferences largely in response to the
interests of domestic commercial coalitions (Moravcsik 1998). In the realm of core
state powers, however, it is well possible that economic actors hold preferences on
integration that range from diuse to virtually non-existent (for an exception see Târlea
et al. 2019, 39). From the point of view of core state power theory, state elites thus
provide the functional equivalent to liberal intergovernmentalism’s economic interest
122 C. FREUDLSPERGER AND M. JACHTENFUCHS
groups. In core state power integration, state elites are, rst, the actors most likely to hold
consistent and intense preferences on both the pooling of competencies on the EU-level
and the institutional design of integration. Second, they react to strong and asymmetric
interdependence between member states within the respective policy sectors they are
responsible for. Third, instead of following a set of ideologically derived core convictions,
state elites can be expected to hold a general preference for functional problem-solving.
In their view, the pooling of competencies is of no value per se but solely justiable if it
promises signicant economies of scale. Fourth, state elites are unlikely to promote
a comprehensive integration of core state powers since EU-level capacity-building con-
tradicts their fundamental interest in bureaucratic survival and could ultimately lead to
the much-dreaded self-abdication of the state that they depend upon. Instead, they seek
to keep the material and sovereignty costs of integration as low as possible.
In case state elites cannot thwart a certain degree of core state power integration due
to strong sectoral interdependence, they thus hold an a priori preference for regulation
over capacity-building. State elites regard this path as less costly. The supranational or
intergovernmental regulation of national capacities avoids the creation of rival capacities
and allows national elites to even extend their regulatory inuence to the EU-level,
primarily via the preparatory bodies of the Council and the encompassing system of
comitology. Whether state elites prefer the involvement of supranational institutions for
monitoring, enforcement and adjudication purposes, depends on their trust in the
supranational agents to credibly and eectively ensure mutual commitments. In that
view, the ‘Union method’ that Angela Merkel conceived during the Euro area crises can be
seen as a sign of mistrust toward the enforcement willingness and capacities of suprana-
tional institutions (cf. Schoeller and Karlsson 2021).
Only when the problem cannot be solved by either the regulation of national capacities
or a return to full member state sovereignty, we expect state elites to advocate suprana-
tional capacity-building. Generally, we expect the economies of scale from supranational
capacity-building to decrease relative to the size and wealth of a given member state. As
a large and relatively wealthy member state, Germany usually retains the capacity to act
unilaterally, its economies of scale from supranational capacity-building being relatively
smaller. German state elites should thus accept the build-up of supranational capacities
solely in cases in which both the costs of disintegration and the costs of maintaining
a regulatory status quo in a given eld are prohibitive. We expect this to be primarily the
case in full-blown crises that undermine an otherwise protable policy regime or threaten
the viability of the EU as a whole. In cases in which supranational capacity-building has
strong redistributive implications, member states that expect negative net returns from
integration will push for intergovernmental control so as to keep the costs of integration
and the risk of moral hazard as low as possible. One example was the creation of the ESM,
in which Germany pushed for an intergovernmental governance structure and insisted on
a national veto. This allows for the construction of a rst hypothesis:
(1) In the presence of strongly asymmetric interdependence, state elites will advocate the
European regulation of national core state powers.
(2) Only when the costs of regulation appear prohibitive, state elites will advocate the
creation of European capacities.
JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN INTEGRATION 123
Mass publics and political parties
From a postfunctional perspective, the party-political mobilisation of citizens’ concerns
about national identity and community is the decisive factor underpinning governmental
preference formation. Whereas citizens regarded the market-based EU of the old days
with either benevolent indierence or tacit approval, the post-Maastricht integration of
core state powers has met erce identity-based opposition (Hooghe and Marks 2009).
Voters, and especially those with exclusive national identities, have increasingly come to
see the European integration of policy areas close to the core of national sovereignty as
undermining their fundamental desire for self-rule within their political and cultural
community. Obliging them to ‘look over their shoulders when negotiating European
issues’ (Hooghe and Marks 2009, 5), citizens’ increasingly vocal opposition to the deepen-
ing of integration has curtailed governments’ room for manoeuvre and aected both their
preference formation and bargaining behaviour on the supranational level. Crucially,
postfunctionalism argues that these mass politics of European integration trump the
inuence of functional problem-solvers on national preference-formation whenever
‘both come into play’ (Hooghe and Marks 2009, 18). The analysis of core state power
integration over an extended period of time envisioned by this special issue should allow
for an assessment of this claim.
While the post-Maastricht integration of core state powers has primarily become
associated with the emergence of a constraining dissensus, it is also possible that voters
come to support integration. For one, voters could perceive the entailed constraints on
national sovereignty ‘a bitter but necessary pill to swallow’ (Kuhn and Stoeckel 2014, 638),
oset by the economic benets of integration. This tendency was observed among
citizens of ‘programme countries’ during the Euro area crisis (Kuhn and Stoeckel 2014).
Secondly, citizens could be ‘inclusive nationalis[ts]’ (Risse 2010, 41) and hold an identity-
based preference in favour of core state power integration, even in cases in which it
engenders net economic costs. Among the German general public, for instance, both
citizens’ self-image and the perceived economic consequences of integration need not be
so constraining after all. In recent Eurobarometer surveys, a clear and increasing majority
of Germans consider themselves to be European to at least some degree and deem EU
membership ‘a good thing’. Since 2012, these two survey items have consistently
recorded all-time highs, reecting a general mood among the German public that the
EU is an achievement to be preserved, even in trying times, and that Germany has been
among its foremost proteers. Third, not all areas of core state power integration are
equally sensitive to concerns for identity and sovereignty. Initial empirical evidence
suggests that voters (including those of the populist right) have strongly diverging
preferences on core state power integration depending on the issue at hand. Whereas
debt relief or refugee relocation tend to be contested indeed, many citizens support
integration in other areas such as disaster aid and defence (Bremer, Genschel, and
Jachtenfuchs 2020).
Postfunctionalism stresses that attitudes harboured by citizens merely provide a latent
potential for political mobilisation, in need of an activation by party-political entrepre-
neurs and primarily by Eurosceptic challenger parties. When forming their preferences on
core state power integration, governments thus do not respond to public opinion directly,
but particularly to the positioning of pivotal challenger parties. For the purposes of this
124 C. FREUDLSPERGER AND M. JACHTENFUCHS
special issue, this means that measuring the evolution, salience, and distance of dierent
parties’ positions on regulation and capacity-building provides a reasonably reliable
measure for the politicisation of core state powers integration, especially in the face of
scarce issue-specic and long-term data on public opinion (compare the contribution by
Freudlsperger and Weinrich 2021). Mainstream parties, as the parties that routinely
alternate between government and opposition (De Vries and Hobolt 2012), have long
held integrationist positions in most EU countries (Aspinwall 2002) and are thus most
aected by the increasing politicisation of core state power integration (De Vries 2007). In
the German case, for instance, the rise of the right-wing challenger AfD can be expected
to have had a politicizing eect on mainstream parties’, and especially the conservative
Christian-Democrats’, preferences towards the integration of core state powers (Meijers
2017). The AfD opposes the European integration of core state powers for reasons of
national sovereignty and favours stripping the EU of all competencies that reach beyond
the internal market. In a politicised environment, mainstream parties would thus look over
their shoulders, weigh the audience costs of an integration initiative, and come to support
visibly costly initiatives, especially in the form of supranational capacity-building, solely
when they can be absolutely sure of citizens’ support for integration. Our second hypoth-
esis thus argues:
(1) Mainstream parties oppose the integration of core state powers if challenger parties
succeed in politicising its material or sovereignty costs among the wider public.
(2) Mainstream parties support supranational capacity-building only if citizens regard the
material and sovereignty costs involved as justiable or even desirable.
5. German preferences on core state powers: Findings
In the following, we provide an overview and assessment of the ndings of the various
contributions to this special issue, as summarised by Table 2 below.
State elites
The ndings of the contributions in this issue lend strong support to our rst hypothesis
according to which state elites attempt a European regulation of national capacities in
cases of strong asymmetric interdependence and resort to the creation of European
capacities only if the costs of such regulation are prohibitive. ‘Prohibitive’ costs usually
meant a complete breakdown of regulation in the respective issue area. Asylum policy is
a case in point (see Zaun and Ripoll Servent 2021). Since the 1990s, Germany constantly
advocated a European regulation of national asylum systems. Although German strate-
gies changed signicantly and frequently over time, the desire to upload German regula-
tions to the EU remained constant over the last 30 years. The underlying goal was to
reduce the number of applicants and to shift adaptation costs to other member states.
Only during the ‘refugee crisis’ of 2015, when the Common European Asylum System
(CEAS) had de facto broken down and Greece as well as Italy were manifestly neither
willing nor able to uphold its rules, Germany supported a modest reinforcement of the
European Asylum Support Oce (EASO). Even then, however, Germany sought to keep
the costs of supranational capacity-building low. From the German perspective,
JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN INTEGRATION 125
a reinforced EASO was still a support oce for member states with insucient or
dysfunctional national capacities. The German Federal Oce for Migration and
Refugees was to remain the strong national capacity to deal with refugees, unlikely to
ever need EASO’s support.
German preferences regarding European asylum policy matched those of the strong
regulators of Northwestern Europe, i.e. states such as the Netherlands, the UK or Sweden.
Table 2. Overview of special issue contributions and their findings.
Core state
power area
Interdependence Preferences of state
elites
Preferences of mass
publics and
mainstream
parties
German government
positions
Asylum (Zaun &
Ripoll
Servent 2021)
High due to
common external
border
Minimising
administrative costs,
i.e., the number of
arrivals
High salience;
minimising
electoral costs, i.e.,
the number of
arrivals
High preference
intensity; burden-
shifting by uploading
the German
regulatory model;
situationally rejecting
or advocating
redistribution,
depending on
redistributive calculus
Police
cooperation
(König &
Trauner 2021)
Medium; various
Schengen borders
but strong state
capacity
Minimising the
administrative costs
of open external
borders
Low salience;
general support
Decreasing preference
intensity; Long-
standing support for
an operational EU
police force, declining
since mid-2000s
Fiscal
regulation
(Schoeller &
Karlsson 2021)
High due to
common currency
Minimising the fiscal
costs and future risks
of EMU
High salience;
minimising the
political costs of
EMU
High preference
intensity; uploading
the German
regulatory model;
supranational
regulation of national
budgets
Fiscal capacity
(Howarth &
Schild 2021)
High due to
common currency
Minimising the fiscal
costs and future risks
of EMU
High salience;
minimising the
political costs of
EMU
High preference
intensity; rejection of
‘transfer union’; Fiscal
capacity-building as
a temporary and
intergovernmental
measure of last resort
Defence
procurement
(Biermann &
Weiss 2021)
Medium; export-
oriented but not
exceedingly
competitive
defence industry
Maximising access to
nationally segmented
markets
Low salience;
general support
Low preference
intensity; long-
standing advocacy for
the build-up of
a European market,
supported by EU
armaments agency
Security policy
(Bunde 2021)
Low in territorial
defence due to
NATO; higher in
crisis management
due to instabilities
in neighbourhood
Strong socialization in
and reliance on NATO
for collective defence;
enhanced EU
coordination in crisis
management
High salience;
general support,
but clear potential
for contestation
when integration
becomes concrete
Low preference
intensity; largely
symbolic support for
enhanced EU
defence, primarily
regulatory
approaches to crisis
management
126 C. FREUDLSPERGER AND M. JACHTENFUCHS
