EU Political System’s Resilience in the Age of Politicization
Location: Malaya Ordynka 17, room 106.
Rapporteur: Sergey Shein , Candidate of political science, research fellow, Centre for Comprehensive European and International Studies (CCEIS), National Research University Higher School of Economics (NRU HSE)
Annotation. The democratic deficit problem in EU polity becomes more relevant in the context of the multifaceted crisis and the politicization of European integration. Taking into account that the category resilience is actively used in the official EU discourse as a system’s ability to reform to counter threats, it is interesting, from a research point of view, the use of resilience as an analytical optics of current EU internal political development. This article aims to analyze, in terms of resilience, the attempts of the EU’s mainstream actors to improve democratic elements in the EU institutional structure during the European Parliament elections 2019 and their relationships with the agents of EU politicization – right-wing populist actors. The main finding suggests that (1) EU politicization exacerbating the problem of democratic deficit and forcing mainstream actors to seek strategies to increase the resilience of the whole system; (2) in order to preserve their own subjectivity in the face of growing populism and the politicization of European integration, mainstream actors choose a strategy for depoliticization, which has decreased the EU resilience; (3) right-wing populist actors are agents of politicization, they play an ambivalent role in relation to EU resilience, being a resource and a threat.