Fragile Orders: New Book Probes How EU Crises Reshape Intergovernmental Power

The European Union has spent more than a decade lurching from one emergency to the next, and each crisis has left its mark on how the bloc actually governs itself. A recently published scholarly review in the journal Global Public Policy and Governance turns fresh attention to a 2022 book by Matteo Scotto, Fragile Orders: Understanding Intergovernmentalism in the Context of EU Crises and Reform Process, released by Villa Vigoni Editore in Menaggio, Italy. The review, authored by Zejin Liu of Sun Yat-sen University’s School of Government, appeared in the journal’s fifth volume and offers readers a structured entry point into a question that has preoccupied political scientists since at least the eurozone turmoil: when the European Union is under stress, does power flow upward to supranational institutions, or sideways and back down to national governments bargaining in closed rooms?

Scotto’s book, running to 202 pages, takes as its conceptual anchor the theory of intergovernmentalism, the family of approaches in European Union studies that treats member states, and especially their executives, as the decisive actors in European integration. In the classic formulation associated with scholars such as Andrew Moravcsik, national governments negotiate on behalf of domestically defined interests, and the outcomes of those negotiations reflect the relative bargaining power and preferences of the states at the table. A related strand, often called liberal intergovernmentalism, adds a two-level logic in which governments first aggregate domestic preferences and then bargain internationally, with institutions designed largely to lock in credible commitments. The rival view, neofunctionalism, has long predicted the opposite dynamic: crises create functional pressures that push integration forward, transferring authority to bodies such as the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the Court of Justice as spillovers accumulate.

What makes the book’s framing timely, as the review underscores, is the sheer density of crises the Union has navigated in recent years. The eurozone sovereign debt crisis that began around 2010 forced unprecedented interventions, including bailout programs administered with the Commission and the International Monetary Fund, the establishment of the European Stability Mechanism, and the launch of the European Central Bank’s Outright Monetary Transactions program, which signaled a willingness to backstop sovereign debt markets. The migration crisis of 2015 exposed deep fractures over burden-sharing and border control. The Brexit referendum of 2016 marked the first negotiated departure of a member state. And the COVID-19 pandemic produced the NextGenerationEU recovery instrument, a joint borrowing program of historic scale that many observers read as a departure from orthodox intergovernmental caution. Each episode generated its own reform debate, from treaty change proposals to quieter institutional adaptations, and each became a test case for theories of integration.

The analytical stakes of this debate are considerable. If intergovernmentalist accounts are correct, then the Union’s crisis responses should be legible as bargains among powerful member states, with Germany and France setting the terms, smaller states negotiating concessions, and supranational institutions acting primarily as agents of the governments that created them. If neofunctionalist or federalist accounts are correct, crisis responses should show autonomous agenda-setting by the Commission, doctrinal innovation by courts and central banks, and a ratchet effect in which emergency measures, once adopted, are never fully unwound. The empirical record is genuinely mixed. The European Stability Mechanism is an intergovernmental treaty organization outside the EU legal framework, a seemingly intergovernmentalist fact. Yet the ECB’s crisis management, the Commission’s role in policing bailout conditionality, and the community method elements of pandemic recovery spending all point toward supranational entanglement that pure state-centric models struggle to capture.

Scotto’s contribution, as characterized in the review, is to treat these episodes not as isolated stress tests but as a connected sequence through which a particular kind of order, an intergovernmental one, is repeatedly strained and repeatedly repaired. The notion of fragility in the title is doing real conceptual work. It suggests that the EU’s intergovernmental architecture is neither robust in the way federal systems are nor disposable in the way purely contractual arrangements are. Instead, it survives crisis through improvisation: new instruments are bolted on, informal norms are stretched, and the boundary between what member states control collectively and what has been delegated to Union institutions is continuously renegotiated. This resonates with a broader trend in EU studies away from grand theories of integration and toward fine-grained analysis of governance modes, differentiated integration, and the politics of emergency.

The review situates the book within a scholarly conversation that includes long-standing frameworks for analyzing decision-making in the European Union, such as the analytical typology advanced by John Peterson in the mid-1990s, which distinguished among different levels and arenas of EU decision-making, from the day-to-day management of policies to the system-defining choices made at European Council summits. It also connects to comparative work on regional institutions, including the volume Crafting Cooperation by Amitav Acharya and Alastair Iain Johnston, which examined how regional organizations across the world design institutions to manage cooperation and conflict. Placing the EU in this comparative frame matters because it resists the temptation to treat European integration as sui generis, an exception to every rule. Seen alongside ASEAN, Mercosur, or the African Union, the EU’s intergovernmental core looks less like an anomaly and more like one variant of a general problem: how sovereign states build durable collective institutions without surrendering the sovereignty that defines them.

For readers outside the specialized field, the practical implications are easier to grasp than the theoretical vocabulary might suggest. The way the EU handles crises determines who pays, who decides, and who is accountable. Intergovernmental crisis management tends to concentrate decision-making in European Council meetings and finance ministry negotiations, venues where heads of government answer to national electorates but where transparency is limited and smaller states have thin margins of influence. Supranational crisis management routes decisions through the Commission and the Parliament, adding layers of legal constraint and democratic oversight but also slowing responses and insulating decision-makers from direct national control. The pandemic recovery fund illustrated the trade-off vividly: joint borrowing on that scale would have been unthinkable under a strictly intergovernmental settlement, yet its distribution was negotiated in marathon summits in which national leaders, notably the so-called frugal states, extracted rebates and conditions. The resulting instrument was neither purely federal nor purely intergovernmental but a hybrid forged under emergency conditions.

The book’s attention to the reform process, as the review emphasizes, extends the analysis beyond crisis response to the question of what comes after the emergency. Formal treaty revision in the EU is famously difficult, requiring unanimity among member states and, for many changes, ratification in every national parliament and, in some cases, referendums. The bitter experience of the rejected Constitutional Treaty in 2005 and the years of institutional wrangling that produced the Lisbon Treaty taught EU actors to prefer instruments that avoid treaty change: intergovernmental treaties among subsets of states, enhanced cooperation among willing members, reinterpretation of existing legal provisions, and informal agreements among institutions. This repertoire of reform without revision is precisely the terrain on which fragile intergovernmental orders are maintained. It allows the Union to adapt to shocks while deferring the fundamental constitutional questions that each shock raises, a strategy that buys time but, critics argue, accumulates democratic and legal ambiguities.

There is also a normative dimension that the review’s framing invites readers to consider. Intergovernmentalism is often defended on democratic grounds: national governments are elected and accountable, so concentrating power in their hands keeps EU decision-making tethered to national electorates. It is criticized on the same grounds: intergovernmental bargaining happens behind closed doors, empowers executives over legislatures, and leaves citizens of smaller or weaker states with little say over decisions that bind them. The fragility Scotto identifies is therefore not only institutional but democratic. An order that survives crisis through executive improvisation may erode the legitimacy it needs to survive the next crisis. As the European Union confronts ongoing debates about enlargement, treaty reform, defense integration, and the rule of law within member states, the question of whether its intergovernmental core can absorb further strain remains open.

The review by Zejin Liu, published on 14 July 2025 in Global Public Policy and Governance, a journal affiliated with the Institute for Global Public Policy at Fudan University, signals that these questions are being read well beyond Europe. For scholars of comparative regionalism and global governance, the EU remains the most institutionally dense experiment in voluntary supranational cooperation ever attempted, and its crisis-driven evolution offers lessons, and warnings, for every other region contemplating deeper integration. Scotto’s book, whatever its ultimate place in the theoretical literature, addresses the central paradox of that experiment: the Union is simultaneously a construction of sovereign states and a force that constrains them, and the tension between those two identities is not a design flaw to be engineered away but the enduring condition of the European order itself. Fragile orders, the book’s title suggests, are the only kind the EU will ever have, and understanding their fragility is the first step toward understanding their resilience.

Subject of Research: Intergovernmentalism in European Union crisis governance and institutional reform

Article Title: Matteo Scotto: Fragile orders: Understanding intergovernmentalism in the context of EU crises and reform process Menaggio, Italy: Villa Vigoni Editore, 2022, 202 pp

Article References: Liu, Z. (2025). Matteo Scotto: Fragile orders: Understanding intergovernmentalism in the context of EU crises and reform process Menaggio, Italy: Villa Vigoni Editore, 2022, 202 pp. Global Public Policy and Governance, 5(3), 297-301. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-025-00119-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43508-025-00119-7

Keywords: European Union, intergovernmentalism, EU crises, institutional reform, European integration, eurozone crisis, Brexit, COVID-19 recovery, EU governance, regional institutions, book review, political science