Publications

Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine constituted a watershed in Europe’s post-Cold War history. This Element analyses the consequences of the Russia-Ukraine crisis for the EU’s political development from a Rokkanian perspective of polity formation as boundary change. It distinguishes two crisis logics that have shaped the EU crisis response: attacks, which originate in threats to fundamental community values, and failures, which stem from policy shocks exposing capacity deficits. Our analysis examines five empirical implications of the crisis logics: crisis framing, domestic and intergovernmental preference constellations, crisis negotiations, and boundary-formation outcomes. The evidence shows the predominance of the attack logic resulting in EU boundary change excluding Russia and including Ukraine. In addition, distinct episodes of failure in the domains of energy security, defence procurement, and financial assistance have generated a crisis response resulting in EU-level capacity building.

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.

This research note examines the communication strategies employed by Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries in disclosing or withholding information about their military aid to Ukraine following the Russian invasion. Using a comparative case study design, this research note analyzes the contrasting approaches of Romania and Poland. It explores three competing explanations for the secrecy or transparency surrounding military aid: domestic backlash avoidance, external security considerations, and bureaucratic culture. The findings reveal that electoral incentives drove both Romania’s secrecy and Poland’s transparency. This research note makes an empirical contribution to the understanding of foreign policy secrecy and the politics of military assistance in international relations, highlighting how political leaders may rely on secrecy to prevent the politicization of military aid.

This chapter analyzes Ukraine as the epicenter of renewed great-power rivalry, examining its dual role as both an object of competition and a subject with strategic agency. As an object, Ukraine’s fate is shaped by the competing instruments of external powers: Russia’s military aggression, energy coercion, and revanchist ideology are countered by the United States’ hard power patronage and the European Union’s normative and economic influence. As a subject, Ukraine has navigated this contest through evolving strategies, from post-Soviet hedging (1991–2004) and dual-tracking (2004–2013) to decisive shelter-seeking in Euro-Atlantic institutions since 2014. The chapter argues that Ukraine’s agency is bounded by significant constraints, including military attrition, internal elite fragmentation, and the institutional gatekeeping of NATO and the EU. The analysis also incorporates a post-sovereign lens, assessing how Russian-backed quasi-states in Crimea and Donbas magnify Ukraine’s vulnerabilities. The chapter concludes by projecting future scenarios for the conflict, contingent on the interplay between Western resolve and Russian resilience, and their implications for the European security order.

This chapter provides a comprehensive analysis of the structural changes that have affected civil-military relations in Romania over the past thirty-five years, with a particular focus on intelligence agencies. It explores the transition from a ‘subjective’ form of civilian control of the military and intelligence under the communist regime to a more Western-style ‘objective’ control after the regime change of 1989. The chapter identifies three distinct periods in the transition process, highlighting the obstacles encountered during each period and their impact on the evolution of civil-military relations. Despite notable achievements in effecting democratization and establishing a legal framework for civilian oversight over the military and intelligence, effective civilian control remains elusive. Recent scandals raise concerns about future civil-military relations in Romania.

In this chapter, I examine the implications of the Russo-Ukrainian war for the evolution of great power politics and the reconfiguration of regional orders across the globe. The chapter begins by unpacking the contending theoretical and political interpretations of the war’s origins and of Russia’s revisionist turn in foreign policy—ranging from systemic explanations emphasizing power transition and security dilemmas, to domestic and ideational accounts highlighting regime type, identity narratives, and elite legitimation strategies. I then situate the conflict within broader transformations of the post–Cold War order, arguing that the war represents not only a regional contest over Ukraine’s sovereignty and alignment, but also a critical juncture in the erosion of the liberal international order and the emergence of more fragmented, competitive, and hierarchically structured regional systems. Building on this discussion, the chapter explores how the war reshapes power relations across key regions—the Euro-Atlantic, Indo-Pacific, and Eurasian spaces—by accelerating patterns of bloc formation, decoupling, and strategic alignment. It shows how the war’s global reverberations extend beyond military balances, influencing energy markets, technological standards, and the institutional architecture of international governance. Finally, I reflect on the implications for the study of great power politics: the need to integrate relational and regional perspectives into analyses of systemic change, and to understand how coercion, resilience, and legitimacy interact in sustaining or contesting orders under stress.

When does the European Union’s geopolitical enlargement durably separate candidate countries from rival powers, and through which mechanisms? Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, enlargement has served geopolitical ends. Its effects in candidate countries have however received less scholarly attention. This article conceptualises geopolitical enlargement as a demarcation project and theorises its outcome. Drawing on Rokkan and Bartolini, we argue that consolidated demarcation rests on two conditions: exclusion and anchoring. Exclusion strips the rival of its external leverage, making exit from its order possible. Anchoring roots European alignment in a domestic consensus that outlasts changes of government and resists capture by rival-sponsored actors. The EU pursues exclusion through substitution and legal incompatibility, and anchoring together with pro-European domestic actors.

Why have France and Germany adopted divergent — and shifting — policies on disclosing their military aid to Ukraine? We argue that domestic politics, not international signaling or political culture, best explains this puzzle. We theorize that leaders use transparency as a legitimation tool to manage audience costs when their policy preferences diverge from a hawkish public. Conversely, when leader and public preferences align, policymakers revert to strategic ambiguity. Using a most-similar comparison of France and Germany, employing qualitative Bayesian reasoning, we find strong support for our argument. Germany shifted to transparency under Chancellor Scholz following domestic pressure, a policy reversed by Chancellor Merz once preferences realigned. France maintained secrecy while elite and public opinion converged, only partially disclosing aid after domestic criticism. Our findings highlight domestic legitimation strategies in shaping foreign policy secrecy, and contribute to the literature on secrecy in foreign policy and on military assistance to Ukraine.

Does war centralize authority in the European Union, or does the EU respond to military threat as it has responded to other crises? Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent degradation of the American security guarantee allow a test of the bellicist “war-driven development” thesis (Kelemen and McNamara, 2022b; McNamara, 2026) against a “crisis-driven development” account that integrates its critics’ arguments into a single causal mechanism (Genschel, 2022; Freudlsperger and Schimmelfennig, 2022; Eilstrup-Sangiovanni, 2022). Using explicit Bayesian reasoning for qualitative research (Fairfield and Charman, 2022), I assess seventeen pieces of evidence on fiscal, coercive, and administrative capacity from February 2022 to October 2026, including process evidence on how EU institutions and member states negotiated the main instruments. Starting from equal priors, the evidence very strongly favours crisis-driven development. So far, the war has been another crisis rather than a game changer.

Governments are building a new class of instruments designed to deter economic coercion ex ante, justifying them in the vocabulary of deterrence theory. Whether that vocabulary transfers, however, is contested and untested, as few studies have specified what deterrence requires of an economic instrument’s design. We develop a framework for assessing economic deterrence by translating deterrence theory’s three C’s of capability, credibility, and communication from the military to the economic domain, and derive nine design requirements for anti-coercion instruments. Because this class of instruments seeks to deter coercion ex ante by threatening ex-post punishment, they are best understood as operating according to a deterrence-by-punishment logic. We further argue that the translation of deterrence-by-punishment to the economic field presupposes the capacity to absorb and distribute the costs of self-inflicted harm as the pivotal condition on which the credibility of this kind of deterrence rests. We probe this claim through a congruence analysis of the EU’s Anti-Coercion Instrument, a least likely case of economic deterrence because of the EU’s institutional and political shortcomings. Our analysis shows that the instrument performs strongly on communication and considerably less well on capability and credibility, lacking above all an institutionalized burden-sharing mechanism. It is best understood as a conditional deterrent, whose potential depends on political conditions its design leaves unresolved. Economic deterrence, our analysis shows, is increasingly seen as vital by governments seeking to counter coercion. Its potential, however, depends on a proper translation of the lessons of deterrence theory from the military to the economic realm.

This volume brings together contributions by a new generation of Romanian foreign policy analysts reflecting on the challenges, blind spots, and opportunities of Romania’s external action at a moment of profound geopolitical uncertainty. Against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine, renewed great power rivalry, and the erosion of the post–Cold War liberal order, the collection asks how Romania can remain a credible, visible, and proactive actor within the European Union and NATO while adapting to a more fragmented and competitive world. Collectively, the volume argues for a recalibration of Romania’s foreign policy thinking—from a reactive and formalist diplomacy to one grounded in strategic vision, institutional capacity, and democratic legitimacy. It calls for better coordination between domestic and external communication, stronger regional coalitions, and an active investment in Romania’s intellectual and diplomatic infrastructure. The overarching message is that greater visibility abroad requires deeper reflection, coherence, and participation at home.

This book offers an in-depth exploration of the evolving dynamics of European integration in the Western Balkans, analyzed from a Romanian perspective. Against the backdrop of renewed geopolitical competition, including Russia’s war in Ukraine and regional tensions, the work reassesses opportunities and challenges for EU enlargement. Covering the period from 2015 to mid-2024, it examines Romania’s role and vested interests in the region, focusing on justice reform, energy policy, and minority rights. Through a comprehensive analysis and forward-looking insights, the book sheds light on Romania’s involvement in shaping the future of the Western Balkans within the European Union.

Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine has thrust the Black Sea to the center of Europe’s security agenda, sharpening Romania’s long-standing concerns about Russian revisionism. Bucharest seeks to recast the region’s security architecture through deeper NATO engagement, stronger deterrence, and tighter minilateral cooperation (B9, Three Seas). Yet progress is constrained by divergent threat perceptions among littoral allies, notably Bulgaria’s ambivalence and Türkiye’s gatekeeper role under the Montreux Convention, which limits a sustained non-littoral NATO naval presence. Romania’s approach couples advocacy for greater allied deployments, ISR and coastal defense modernisation with efforts to diversify partnerships and defence production, including ties beyond NATO. The durability of this strategy hinges on continued US involvement and on Europe’s ability to expand defence capacity without diluting transatlantic cohesion. Domestic political volatility further complicates execution. Romania’s wager is that persistence can turn the Black Sea from a security gap into a pillar of a renewed Euro-Atlantic order.

This report analyses the evolving patterns of security cooperation in the wider Black Sea region in the aftermath of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It argues that the region’s growing strategic importance for both NATO and the EU has not yet translated into coherent institutional or operational cooperation. Divergent national threat perceptions, uneven defence capacities, and differing relationships with Western institutions continue to fragment the regional security landscape. The study compares the strategic postures of the main littoral and partner states and identifies key obstacles to coordinated action, including the persistence of Russia’s veto power and the absence of a shared long-term vision. To address these challenges, the report proposes concrete measures: fostering joint defence production, enhancing regional mobility and connectivity, adapting multilateral frameworks, and integrating Türkiye more closely with EU defence efforts to transform the Black Sea from a vulnerable frontier into a consolidated security space.

This brief argues that China’s influence in Central-Eastern Europe and the Western Balkans is primarily demand-driven. Rather than Beijing successfully pulling the region away from the West, domestic politics and elite preferences in CEE/WB determine when and how governments court China to signal strategic autonomy from Western partners. Empirically, Chinese economic ties remain modest relative to EU–US linkages; political influence is generally low, with notable outliers such as Hungary and Serbia where leadership choices amplify engagement. Across the region there is no stable relationship between economic exposure to China and higher-level political alignment. The 5G/Huawei cases further illustrate divergence: most states joined the US-led “Clean Network,” while a few maintained openness to Huawei. The brief recommends shifting Western policy from alarmism about China’s “supply” to mitigating domestic vulnerabilities and incentives that generate the “demand” for Chinese partnerships, including targeted counter-incentives for smaller, less-integrated economies.