National Political Elites and their Views on EU Economic Governance: One or Many EUs?

The crisis context has politicised the debate over EU economic governance stressing the questions of the relationship between domestic and supranational authorities, the degree of mutual solidarity between the member states, the current policy paradigms. Through the analysis of original survey data on national political elites from ten EU member states collected by the EUENGAGE Project, we investigate attitudes towards the future of European economic governance after the economic downturn of the past years. Our results show that burden sharing of the main economic imbalances induced by the crisis is a more supported solution than EU policy coordination. Furthermore, we found that EU output legitimacy matters for EU policy coordination, but not for burden sharing. Domestic elites are positively inclined toward efforts to pool resources to face the main economic imbalances that affect Europe. On the contrary, they are much less prone to delegate policy coordination to the EU, especially when the same EU is not considered an efficient manager in responding to the economic crisis. Thus, economic solidarity among Europeans is a more established principle than EU policy intervention, which is instead a more contested solution, especially by those segments of elites who blame the EU for output ineffectiveness during the crisis. Elite preferences about the economic policy paradigms that should inspire the EU’s trajectory are scattered among national elites. The final picture is one that confirms a broad elite consensus on the EU status quo coupled with divisions and reluctance toward projects of deeper integration.