Crises, Adaptation, and Resilience—Exploring Crises Responses of Regional Organizations from the Perspective of EU Studies and Comparative Regionalism

Anders, Lisa H.; Braun, Daniela; Libman, Alexander Article — Published Version Crises, Adaptation, and Resilience—Exploring Crises Responses of Regional Organizations from the Perspective of EU Studies and Comparative Regionalism Politische Vierteljahresschrift Provided in Cooperation with: Springer Nature Suggested Citation: Anders, Lisa H.; Braun, Daniela; Libman, Alexander (2025) : Crises, Adaptation, and Resilience—Exploring Crises Responses of Regional Organizations from the Perspective of EU Studies and Comparative Regionalism, Politische Vierteljahresschrift, ISSN 1862-2860, Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, Wiesbaden, Vol. 66, Iss. 3, pp. 507-524, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11615-025-00617-7 This Version is available at: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/330726 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. 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If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.de RESEARCH ARTICLE https://doi.org/10.1007/s11615-025-00617-7 Politische Vierteljahresschrift (2025) 66:507–524 Crises, Adaptation, and Resilience—Exploring Crises Responses of Regional Organizations from the Perspective of EU Studies and Comparative Regionalism Lisa H. Anders · Daniela Braun · Alexander Libman Received: 24 June 2024 / Revised: 25 April 2025 / Accepted: 5 May 2025 / Published online: 23 June 2025 © The Author(s) 2025, corrected publication 2025 Abstract How do different types of regional organizations react to current challenges and crises? This special issue of the Politische Vierteljahresschrift explores this question by bringing together contributions from European Union studies and comparative regionalism. This introduction discusses the concepts of crisis, adaptation,andresilience as well as the value of the dialogue between the two subdisciplines, outlines the aims of the special issue, systematizes the main findings of the contributions, and reflects on their implications for future research. Keywords European Union · EU studies · Comparative regionalism · Regional organizations · Crises Lisa H. Anders Department of European & International Studies, King’s College London, UK E-Mail: [email protected] Daniela Braun Gesellschaftswissenschaftliche Europaforschung, Universität des Saarlandes, Saarbrücken, Germany E-Mail: d.[email protected] Alexander Libman Osteuropa-Institut, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany E-Mail: [email protected] K 508 L. H. Anders et al. Krisen, Anpassung und Resilienz – Untersuchung der Krisenreaktionen regionaler Organisationen aus der Perspektive von EU-Studien und vergleichendem Regionalismus Zusammenfassung Wie reagieren regionale Organisationen auf aktuelle Herausforderungen und Krisen? Das vorliegende Sonderheft der Politischen Vierteljahresschrift widmet sich dieser Frage und vereint hierzu Beiträge aus den Bereichen EUForschung und vergleichende Regionalismusforschung. Diese Einleitung erläutert die Konzepte Krise,Anpassung und Resilienz, diskutiert den Nutzen des Dialogs zwischen den beiden Teildisziplinen, benennt die Ziele des Sonderheftes, systematisiert die zentralen Befunde der Beiträge und diskutiert Anregungen für die weitere Forschung. Schlüsselwörter Europäische Union · EU-Forschung · Vergleichende Regionalismusforschung · Regionalorganisationen · Krisen 1 Introduction and Aims of the Special Issue Regional organizations (ROs) are an integral component of the liberal international order (LIO). Their importance grew after the end of the Cold War, when regionalism was seen as part of the world’s transition to the “postnational” liberal order (Börzel and Zürn 2021). The European Union (EU), as the most advanced case of regionalism, became a global actor and a source of emulation for ROs worldwide (Lenz 2013). In other parts of the world, the number of ROs increased, as did their ambitions and interconnectedness. Over the last several decades, regionalism has increasingly been perceived not as an alternative to global multilateralism but rather as an essential part of it, partially compensating for deficits in global governance (Pomfret 2021). Currently, it has become commonplace to portray the LIO as facing multiple crises (Ikenberry 2018; Peoples 2024). This is driven by both the internal contradictions of the LIO and the challenges it faces due to unexpected shocks and actions of illiberal actors, such as large authoritarian countries (Lake et al. 2021; Börzel et al. 2024). Sometimes these crises facing the LIO are presented as part of the overall “polycrisis” the world is experiencing, i.e., an amalgamation of overlapping crises affecting each other (Tooze 2021; Henig and Knight 2023). These developments also influence ROs, and it is against this background that this special issue brings together perspectives from EU studies and comparative regionalism to explore how ROs respond to crises. By analyzing responses to a range of crises across different ROs, the contributions show how these organizations adapt to crises and how resilient they are. At the same time, the special issue creates opportunities for cross-fertilization between the two subdisciplines. Crises are extraordinary moments—periods of stress that call into question “the existence and viability of the political order” (Ikenberry 2008, p. 3). They are typically defined by the combination of three elements (Rosenthal et al. 2001,p.7, Brinks and Ibert 2020;Lipscy2020): uncertainty (unpredictable outcomes), urgency K Crises, Adaptation, and Resilience—Exploring Crises Responses of Regional Organizations... 509 (the need for decision-makers to respond within a very short period of time), and threat (potentially large damage to the affected institutions and societies). While there is certainly an “objective” component to each crisis, a real set of political, economic, and social developments, in the age of public opinion polls and social media affecting and accelerating the public debate, has resulted in crisis perceptions becoming increasingly relevant. These perceptions are socially constructed, with various political entrepreneurs either advancing the framing of a particular situation as a crisis or disputing it (Geisemann and Geiger 2004). Although the crisis-framing cannot be used arbitrarily—there are measurable underlying economic, social, and political challenges, which actors observe and interpret as crises—there is still enormous variation in how similar events are perceived and in what is framed as crisis in different parts of the world (for the case of the EU studies, see Davis Cross and Ma 2015). In terms of regionalism, many observers conclude that the EU has found itself in a “long crisis decade” (Ferrera et al. 2024). Examples of phenomena typically subsumed under this concept are the euro crisis, the migration crisis, Brexit, the COVID19 pandemic, the climate crisis, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. While this list reflects the perception of particular phenomena as crises rather than the result of a systematic analysis of external shocks the EU is facing, all events mentioned above satisfy to a certain extent the three key crisis criteria outlined above. In addition to these external factors challenging the EU, the consolidation of Euroscepticism (Treib 2021; Usherwood and Startin 2013), the increasing lack of trust in EU institutions, and the ongoing rule-of-law crisis in some member states weaken the EU from within. While unfolding over a longer time period and being less urgent than the EU’s external crises, they can be described as “slow-burning crises” (see, for example, Seabrooke and Tsingou 2018). Other ROs face different challenges and crises as well, driven by both regionspecific dynamics and global challenges. Factors such as growing economic protectionism, deglobalization, and the increasing frequency of military confrontations (James 2018; Kornprobst and Paul 2021) play an important role in explaining why many ROs are perceived as facing multifaceted crises. Some ROs are split by new geopolitical lines of division, some have to adjust their mandates to deal with new challenges faced by their member states, and some have to change their decisionmaking procedures to account for the urgency and uncertainty of crises (Libman 2022). The crises ROs face differ in their degree of urgency, threat, and uncertainty, which explains why their development and effects are strikingly different; some of them are latent and slow-burning, whereas others can be seen as acute, and some transition from one category to another (on the concepts of latent and acute crises, see, e.g., Studebaker 2023).1The very fact that multiple ROs face crises today is not historically unprecedented; there have been periods in the past when regionalism both in the EU and elsewhere was also seen as facing major interconnected crises. 1The war in Ukraine, for example, which originally was seen as a short-term crisis, is currently often perceived as part of a prolonged confrontation between Russia and the EU in Eastern Europe, and thus a latent crisis. K 510 L. H. Anders et al. In the history of the EU, for example, the 1970s were a period of widespread perception of the crisis of regionalism (Jouan 2016). Still, the contemporary evolution of ROs in different parts of the world in the shadow of (perceived) crises offers us an opportunity to explore how these crises affect the dynamics of regionalism, in particular the resilience of ROs, and how the development of regionalism in previous decades affected this resilience. 2 Bridging Comparative Regionalism and EU Studies The primary aim of this special issue is to bring together contributions that address the topic from the perspective of two distinct subdisciplines sharing the same subject, the study of ROs: EU studies and comparative regionalism. Scholars from EU studies typically analyze the origins, the development, and the functioning of the EU; the system of EU institutions and decision-making procedures; and EU policies—but also diverse challenges and crises of the EU, such as the increase of political conflict over the EU (i.e., the politicization of Europe), the rise and consolidation of Euroscepticism, and the rule-of-law crisis and the reactions of national and supranational actors, as well as their implications for the development of the EU. Comparative regionalism looks at a universe of ROs in various parts of the world, frequently changing their goals and membership composition, entering long periods of passivity and including countries with very different foreign policy agendas and political systems, accounting for different attitudes toward regionalism as such. This special issue is, of course, not the first to attempt to connect these two strands of literature. Early theories of regionalism (e.g., neofunctionalism) explicitly looked at both the EU and other ROs (Haas and Schmitter 1964; see also Börzel 2024) and expanded the conceptual repertoire with concepts such as “spillover” and “spillback” to capture their non-unidirectional development (Schmitter 1970). In previous years, several contributions have also linked these two subdisciplines together (Fort and Webber 2006; Murray 2010; Warleigh-Lack et al. 2011; Börzel and Risse 2016; Carbone 2021) in order to study the effect of crises on regionalism (Dosenrode 2016;Telo2016; Nolte and Weiffen 2021). Notwithstanding, the possibilities for two subdisciplines to learn from each other have not been fully exhausted: For example, the emergence of new topics of study in EU research and in comparative regionalism (due to the internal logic of the subdisciplines or specific challenges the EU or other ROs are facing) calls for exploring new opportunities to link these disciplines. As we will discuss below, both subdisciplines offer their perspectives on the resilience of regionalism, thus rendering a dialogue between them particularly important. Promoting the cross-disciplinary exchange holds a lot of promise. It allows us to explore the diverse patterns of resilience (or lack thereof) of international and European actors under the current crisis conditions. Integrating conceptual and theoretical approaches and insights from these subdisciplines also increases their visibility and helps to overcome the fragmentation of the discipline that might weaken its policy impact and influence on the public debate. European Union experts can benefit from a move beyond EU-centrism still present in many studies by considering conceptual K Crises, Adaptation, and Resilience—Exploring Crises Responses of Regional Organizations... 511 developments and insights from comparative regionalism. Conversely, comparative regionalism can also be inspired by the literature on EU studies. 3 Crises, Adaptation, and Resilience in EU Studies and Comparative Regionalism The literature available on crises pertaining to ROs is rich. Concerning crises, we need to distinguish between the two related concepts of adaptation and resilience. The notion of resilience is frequently used in social sciences—though not without criticism—to describe the ability of organizations to cope with stress or, more specifically, to return to “some form of normal condition after a period of stress” (Olsson et al. 2015, p. 1). The concept therefore focuses on the outcome of crises, i.e., the return to normalcy, to capture how organizations cope with these. Trondal (2021) distinguishes between “static” and “dynamic” resilience, the first standing for the stabilization and maintenance of the status quo and the second for adaptation. Adaptation itself can be understood as the process by which order is maintained through the creation of new rules and arrangements alongside existing ones (Ikenberry 2008, p. 13).2Importantly, crisis adaptation can manifest itself in several dimensions: the polity dimension, which refers to the institutional features of the RO; the policy dimension, which involves new instruments and measures within different policy areas; or the behavioral dimension, reflecting how political actors respond and adjust their behavior.3Moreover, adaptation can go in different directions. For example, polity adaptation can lead to institutional strengthening or weakening—that is to say, the creation of new institutions or the weakening of existing ones—and does not necessarily require formal institutional change. In addition to the adaptation ultimately serving their survival, ROs can also turn out to be nonresilient under conditions of crisis, leading to their breakdown through disintegration and even formal cancellation of an RO. The concept of resilience has been applied to studying the international order as such (Risse et al. 2016; Bourbeau 2015), the EU (Riddervold et al. 2021; Bargues et al. 2023), and other ROs (Briceño-Ruiz and Puntigliano 2020), as well as occasionally for comparing the EU with other international institutions (Korosteleva and Flockhart 2020). The literature demonstrates substantial variation in the degree of resilience of individual ROs with respect to different crises and policy areas. While some studies show ROs surviving even under extreme pressure, adapting their roles and functions (Panke and Friedrichs 2024a) and going well beyond their original mandates and objectives (Vinokurov and Libman 2017), other studies look at how ROs turn into phantom phenomena (e.g., Gray 2018) or cease to exist altogether (Debre and Dijkstra 2021). Understanding this variation by means of different theoretical and empirical approaches remains an important research task, which our special issue aims to contribute to. 2Adaptation can be distinguished from transformation, which represents the more far-reaching process of a fundamental restructuring of the existing order and its rules and norms (Ikenberry 2008,p.13). 3Articles in this special issue will not focus on how policies have been adapted to recent crises. K 512 L. H. Anders et al. In EU studies, there exists a significant recent literature examining the EU response to various crisis phenomena (Riddervold et al. 2021; Castels 2018; Matthijs 2020; Dinan et al. 2017;DavisCross2017; Habermas 2012; Tosun et al. 2014). Extant research has focused on the plethora of crises (Cotta and Isernia 2020)or the polycrisis (Zeitlin et al. 2019) that the EU has faced in the last two decades and which we have mentioned in the previous section. These works have explored the dynamics of the euro crisis (Jones et al. 2016), the migration crisis (Scipioni 2017; Genschel and Jachtenfuchs 2018), Brexit (Cini and Verdun 2018), the ruleof-law crisis (Priebus and Anders 2024), the rise and consolidation of Euroscepticm (Brack and Startin 2015;vanElsasetal.2016;Treib2021), the politicization of the EU (Hutter et al. 2016), the pandemic (Wolff and Ladi 2020), and, most recently, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (Koval and Vachudova 2024). They analyzed policy reactions to these crises as well as the effect of these crises on the EU. A recurrent finding of these works is that the EU has been “surprisingly resilient” (Riddervold et al. 2021, p. 6, Nicoli and Zeitlin 2024). Even the most challenging crises “have not brought down the edifice” (Ferrera et al. 2024, p. 707). On the contrary, most of them propelled consolidation of the EU (Jones et al. 2021), prompted EU actors to adapt existing policies or develop new policies and instruments, and resulted in the strengthening of supranational institutions, even in areas of core state powers (Genschel and Jachtenfuchs 2018). At the same time, challenges such as Euroscepticism and low public support for the union persist and pose a challenge to the EU (as Brexit has clearly demonstrated) and to EU decision-making, as the prominent concept of the “constraining dissensus” suggests. So far, mainstream parties in different EU member states have in particular tried to address these issues and, for example, seek a way to regain Eurosceptic voters by using different strategies (Meijers 2017). However, the ultimate response to the Eurosceptic challenge has yet to be found, which could lead to an even broader challenge for European democracy: the rise of a genuine transnational cleavage dividing European societies and leading to the disintegration of the EU. Illiberal trends in EU member states and the rule-of-law crisis that have challenged the EU for several years (Anders and Lorenz 2021) are also far from being tackled, with the Hungarian prime minister consistently disregarding the EU’s foundational values and the country now classified as an “electoral autocracy” (V-Dem 2024). Finally, economic crises can lower public support of the EU (e.g., Braun and Tausendpfund 2014; Hernández and Kriesi 2016; Hobolt and de Vries 2016), although so far in most EU member states, support has returned to precrisis levels (precisely, in the states that have had, from the perspective of the citizenry, appropriate policy responses by national governments and/or an increase in economic performance after the crises). In the comparative regionalism literature, crises are frequently cited as reasons for the failure of ROs to achieve their goals or even turn into zombie institutions without actual policy relevance (on crises and regionalism, see Nolte and Weiffen 2021; Saurugger and Terpan 2016). Thus, as in the case of the EU, economic crises (and, more generally, poor economic performance) reduce the support for regionalism and cause countries to engage in more protectionist policies (frequently trying to outbid other countries in terms of protectionism; Park 2019). Crises increase redistributive conflicts, with national governments being tempted to solve them at the cost of K Crises, Adaptation, and Resilience—Exploring Crises Responses of Regional Organizations... 513 neighboring states. At the same time, there have always been examples of more nuanced responses to crises: In East Asia, for example, the global financial crisis of 1998 has stimulated the shift from a more informal economic interaction to the establishment of several regional institutions and a more intensive cooperation of countries (Katada 2012). In post-Soviet Eurasia, the economic crisis of 1998 put an end to the early attempts at regionalism, while the economic crisis of 2008 became the birth hour of more advanced regionalist initiatives (Vinokurov and Libman 2014). A fundamental problem arises if the crisis requires the RO to change its focus, for example, by moving toward a greater focus on common industrial policy or a largescale redistribution of funds; under these conditions, the bureaucracies of many ROs and their member states see themselves as reaching their limits. Similarly, military conflicts and confrontations have been among some of the major factors blocking the development of certain ROs (South Asia being among the most prominent examples; see Dash 2008). While, fundamentally, regionalism reduces the likelihood of wars among their members (Hadjiyiannis et al. 2016), among the ROs existing in different parts of the world, a non-negligible number have members that have engaged in militarized disputes against each other, rendering any progress past the mere rhetoric of regionalism hardly possible. What is interesting from this point of view is that there are quite a few ROs that have survived for decades although they include members engaged in more or less open confrontation with each other. While they obviously fail to achieve substantial progress in terms of economic and political cooperation, they can still be useful, e.g., as fora for dialogue and information exchange. Finally, ROs have been actively involved in peacekeeping and mediation of civil wars in their member states (with mixed success, though; see Gartner 2011; Lundgren 2016). Ultimately, comparative regionalism does not provide a universal answer to the question of the resilience of regionalism. Many studies of ROs (e.g., in Latin America, see Jenne et al. 2017; for post-Soviet Eurasia, see Obydenkova 2011) are inherently skeptical of the ability of these ROs to deal with crises, considering them a sort of “good weather” phenomena, becoming increasingly fragile under the pressure of crises. Other studies, however, have come to the conclusion that non-European ROs can also show a high level of resilience, although this may refer more to the ability of the bureaucracy of ROs to adapt and persevere than to them actually contributing to public goods they were designed to provide. A common theme in both EU studies and comparative regionalism is that the nature of the challenges facing ROs also changes over time. For instance, COVID19 constituted an unprecedented shock for which hardly any country in the world was prepared (Nikitina and Arapova 2022; Yingi and Hlungwani 2022). In the same way, the current process of deglobalization constitutes a fundamental game changer, requiring adaptation and transformation on the side of ROs (Walter 2021; Libman 2022). Furthermore, Russia’s war against Ukraine represents an unparalleled challenge, giving rise to debates concerning the (lack of) “bellicist” integration in the EU4and Russia’s involvement in and strengthened ties with Eurasian ROs. Though both EU studies and the comparative regionalism research are concerned 4We use the term “integration” here because it is predominant in the respective discourse. K 514 L. H. Anders et al. with analyzing the crises and challenges ROs face, the fundamental perspective of these two lines of research is a very different one. While the European project has, of course, experienced crisis periods and stagnation before (e.g., the 1970s, as mentioned above) and has had to deal with major integration setbacks (like the failure of the EU Constitutional Treaty in 2005 or, more recently, Brexit), ultimately, the story of the EU is (still)5predominantly narrated as one of success. Textbook evidence usually presents European integration as a progressive story (Gilbert 2008,2020), i.e., as a “process whose forward march has been hampered by states and national leaders [...] irrationally attached to the principles of national sovereignty” (Gilbert 2020, p. 9). European integration is thus interpreted as unprecedented in many ways, reinventing itself and finding new ways of dealing with historical challenges through policy adaptation and innovation as well as further integration. In contrast to this, European disintegration—although its possibility is obviously on the public agenda—is an area that has been neglected by most EU scholars (due to the “normative bias” of European integration research, which places greater emphasis on successful deepening and enlargement, i.e., considers them worthier of study than crises and setbacks; see Faber and Wessels 2005). More recently, however, a number of important exceptions (cf. Vollaard 2014;Webber 2014,2018) examine this disintegration prospect, as well as analyze the EU as an institution in a “state of permanent crisis.” Therefore, it may be beneficial to systematically confront the traditional scholarly literature of EU studies with its biased narrative (for a good overview, see Gilbert 2008), with different perspectives and strands of literature. As already suggested by Vollaard (2014), comparative approaches—such as comparative regionalism—are valuable in this regard. Comparative regionalism holds a much more skeptical attitude about its object of study. A topic of paramount importance for comparative regionalism is the implementation gap: Many ROs seem to fall short of the official intentions of their designers (at least, in the form in which they were declared publicly; Vinokurov and Libman 2017). In many cases, these are examples of a high level of cooperation (e.g., the Economic Community of West African States, which manages to implement concerted military interventions in its member states [see Börzel and van Hüllen 2015], or the Eurasian Economic Union, which succeeded at creating a functioning economic RO in Eurasia after two decades of failed attempts [see Vinokurov 2018]), but these are perceived as deviations from the pattern of failures—it is not uncommon for observers to be highly skeptical about new ROs, with their preexisting beliefs being that these organizations are going to perform poorly rather than succeed. While the difference between EU studies and the comparative regionalism perspectives has been explored before, further research on this topic is certainly needed. 5This narrative, of course, may change over time and when European integration will be analyzed more through the lens of historians than by political scientists: “[H]istory, like the weather, is apt to play tricks on those who think they have figured out the long-range forecast” (Gilbert 2008, p. 656). So far—and therefore we have added the word “still” in the text—a progressive story of the EU is being told by most EU scholars, but different narratives of European integration are definitely also part of the research literature (see Gilbert 2008,2020; Vollaard 2014; Webber 2014), and “these may come to predominate if the European project loses its aura of success” (Gilbert 2008, p. 641). 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