I study how great-power competition reshapes the institutions of the European Union.

How do crises reshape the internal organization of EU institutions? Existing research treats crises as catalysts for change but offers limited guidance on what kinds of organizational reforms different crises generate. Building on Schimmelfennig’s (2024) attack/failure typology, I argue that attack crises spur steering-oriented changes, whereas failure crises spur operationally-oriented changes. I code 101 organizational changes in the European Commission and the Council across five crises, including the rule of law crisis and Brexit, COVID-19 and the migration crisis, and the Russia–Ukraine war as a mixed case. The findings strongly support the theoretical expectations that attack crises produce steering-oriented organizational changes concentrated on enforcement, compliance monitoring, negotiation management, and political coordination, while failure crises produce operationally-oriented changes. The pattern is robust to recoding contested cases and to alternative decisions about the universe of cases. This paper contributes to institutionalist theories of crisis-driven change by specifying how crisis origins shape not only policy outputs but also the administrative architecture that produces them.

External crises have often been framed as moments of “geopolitical awakening” for the European Union, yet what follows rarely lives up to that promise. Rapid coordination gives way to re-fragmentation and renewed national control. This paper conceptualizes this pattern as reversible empowerment — the informal granting and withdrawal of operational autonomy to supranational actors within fixed institutional arrangements, distinct from formal, treaty-bound delegation. Drawing on the competence-control framework, I argue that external shocks temporarily raise the marginal value of EU-level competence, prompting member states to relax control constraints and empower the High Representative, the EEAS, and the Commission. Once immediate pressure subsides or distributional conflicts re-emerge, member states reassert control through veto exercise, bilateral activism, and procedural recalibration. Empirically, the paper employs process tracing and content analysis of 37 Foreign Affairs Council statements and 16 European Council conclusions (2022–2025). The findings show that CFSP is configured for reversible empowerment. Competence expands in acute phases of external crises and contracts as perceived urgency declines, though each cycle may leave institutional residue that shifts the baseline for subsequent episodes. Within protracted crises, new escalatory events trigger bounded mini-cycles of re-empowerment that do not reach prior peaks. Reversibility seems to be the system’s equilibrium.

This article examines the evolving motivations underlying the European Union’s (EU) enlargement policy, particularly following the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and the accelerated candidacies of Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia. While existing scholarship is built on competing assumptions regarding the EU’s motivation—stressing stability, transformative aims, or the containment of rival great-power influence—these accounts assume unchanging EU motivations. Contrary to such assumptions, we argue that the EU’s enlargement policy has been driven by distinct and shifting ‘policy logics’: transformation, stabilization, demarcation, and cohabitation. Drawing on content analysis of European Council conclusions from 1990 to 2024 and comparative case studies, we show that the hierarchy among these logics has changed over time in response to varying internal challenges within candidate states and external risks. We trace three major phases: the transformative logic dominated the 1990s to early 2010s, stabilization gained prominence from the early 2010s to early 2020s, and a demarcation logic surged from the early 2020s onward, particularly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. These findings demonstrate that EU enlargement policy motivations are not static but dynamically reconfigured, offering new insights into how the EU navigates its neighborhood amidst shifting geopolitical conditions.