The Crisis of the European Union as a Complex Adaptive System

Abstract

The present article argues that the current crisis of the European Union (EU) is much deeper and more profound than many EU officials and analysts care to admit. Taking the so‐called sovereign debt crisis and the refugee crisis as illustrative case studies it is argued that the crisis needs to be reframed as a Complex Adaptive System which is self‐organizing in a deeply incoherent manner and which current EU policies are not only not addressing but exacerbating. As an alternative, the article suggests using Adaptive Action as a framework to identify the conditions which sustain the current dysfunctionality of the European Union and makes concrete suggestions on how these conditions can be altered. Areas of further research are also identified.

Destruct, direct and suppress: Sputnik narratives on the Nordic countries

“…This is in line with Roselle's findings (2017), indicating that Russian narratives on the 2011 military intervention in Libya and the 2014 Ukrainian crisis aimed to weaken international alliances by undermining internal cohesion. Such efforts are especially harmful as Western democracies are challenged by societal polarisation and institutional crises (McCoy, Rahman, and Somer 2018;Lehman 2018). Therefore, it is not surprising that even seemingly strong democracies feel vulnerable to malign narratives (cf.…”

The development of EU health policy and the Covid-19 pandemic: trends and implications

“…In European integration, Complexity acts as a bridge between the more positivist and reflectivist theoretical perspectives (Geyer 2003;Geyer and Rihani 2010;Lehmann 2018). Complexity recognises the importance of orderly structures and institutions and the ability to make positivist claims about them.…”

The European Union: From a Complex Adaptive System to a Policy Interpreter

“…The next section argues why complexity theory is a relevant and enabling framework, and presents the main elements of the notion of the EU as a complex adaptive system, looking at how this theoretical perspective makes clear new instances of EU agency and policy learning. Conceptualizing the EU as a policy interpreter means focusing on how institutional learning happens as a consequence of iterative adaptation (Geyer and Rihani, 2010), in which feedback loops (Lehmann, 2018) initiate and hone the adaptation process. These loops are at the core of a self-organizing process through which complex entities change as an outcome of a multistage policy learning dynamic.…”

“…These conceptual developments have not gone unnoticed by studies on EU actorness, which have exploited them mainly to point out the challenges and contradictions faced by accepting the complex nature of the EU. The theoretical frameworks developed by Geyer and Rihani (2010) and Lehmann (2018) are useful for defining what a complex adaptive system is, and for understanding its main elements in relation to the EU. A complex adaptive system is formed by multiple elements that interact in non-linear ways.…”

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