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

The analytical core of the paper rests on a distinction between disruption and catalysis. Where much commentary has treated Trump’s approach to alliances as an anomaly to be waited out, Scotto contends that the phenomenon functions instead as an accelerant for dynamics that were already latent in the European project. The European Union has long possessed economic weight and regulatory power, often described through the notion of the Brussels Effect, in which EU standards shape global markets, but it has historically lacked the capacity for collective action in the domains of hard security and high politics. Scholars have described the EU as a regulatory polity, strong at setting rules for trade and product standards yet weak at integrating what are called core state powers: defense, policing, taxation, and the other instruments through which states ultimately guarantee their own survival. Trump’s return to the presidency, the paper argues, has exposed this asymmetry with unusual force.

The first of three interrelated dynamics identified in the study concerns the rebalancing of the transatlantic relationship itself. Since the founding decades of the Cold War, European security has rested on what the historian Geir Lundestad famously described as an empire by invitation, in which Western European states welcomed an American security umbrella in exchange for alignment. That bargain assumed a durable American commitment to European territorial integrity. Trump’s public skepticism toward NATO, his demands that European allies dramatically increase defense spending, and his framing of alliances as transactions in which the United States pays and everybody else benefits have converted that assumption into a conditional one. The paper traces this rhetorical lineage from Trump’s 2016 campaign statements, when he called NATO obsolete and suggested the alliance might be allowed to break up, through his 2024 Republican National Convention speech, showing how the conditional character of American protection has become an explicit feature of the strategic environment rather than a background assumption.

This conditionality has spurred a cascade of EU-level and national initiatives. The study points to the Strategic Compass adopted by the Council of the European Union in 2022, which set out an ambitious framework for the Union to act as a security provider, and to the 2016 EU Global Strategy, which had already urged the Union to learn what the then High Representative Josep Borrell later called the language of power. More concretely, the European Council established the Security Action for Europe, known as SAFE, in May 2025, reinforcing the European Defence Industry Instrument in order to expand joint procurement and strengthen the continent’s defense industrial base. These measures, the paper suggests, represent more than incremental policy adjustments. They signal an emerging recognition that the governance architecture of the EU, historically optimized for market integration and regulation, must now extend into domains that member states have jealously guarded as symbols of sovereignty.

The second dynamic examined in the study concerns Germany’s evolving role in European defense, a topic the author treats as one of the most consequential and most ambivalent dimensions of the current transformation. For decades, Germany was characterized in the scholarly literature as the EU’s reluctant hegemon, an economic giant whose political culture, historical memory, and constitutional constraints made it unwilling to translate its economic strength into military leadership. The Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 prompted Chancellor Olaf Scholz to declare a Zeitenwende, a historic turning point, announcing a fundamental reorientation of German security policy and a special fund for rearmament. Yet the paper highlights the dilemmas that persist beneath this rhetorical shift. German rearmament raises difficult questions about burden-sharing within the EU, about the appropriate relationship between national capabilities and collective European instruments, and about how a militarily stronger Germany would be embedded in European institutions so as to reassure rather than alarm its neighbors.

The third dynamic identified in the analysis is the emergence of a political nucleus for European defense and foreign policy through intergovernmental and minilateral cooperation. Rather than a grand treaty-based leap toward a federal European army, the paper observes that the most significant developments are occurring in smaller, flexible formats. The Weimar Triangle, bringing together France, Germany, and Poland, is cited as one such grouping with the potential to lead on both security and industrial policy. The Franco-German embedded bilateralism that scholars Ulrich Krotz and Joachim Schild have documented as the historical engine of European integration is being supplemented by wider coalitions of the willing and able. This minilateral pattern reflects what the author, drawing on his earlier work on intergovernmentalism in EU crises, sees as a recurring feature of European integration: progress tends to occur through improvised, crisis-driven arrangements negotiated among a small set of pivotal states, which may later be generalized to the Union as a whole.

The paper situates these contemporary developments within a longer intellectual history of transatlantic asymmetry. Robert Kagan’s influential formulation of Americans being from Mars and Europeans from Venus captured a period in which Europe, sheltered under American protection, could afford to invest in civilian and normative power while the United States exercised hard power. The paper also invokes Francis Fukuyama’s thesis of the end of history, the post-Cold War expectation that liberal democracy and American-led order would face no fundamental challenger, and notes how that expectation has given way to a multipolar international system in which Europe must define its own position. Even Renaissance political thought, the author suggests in a historical aside drawing on Guicciardini’s account of Italy’s state system, offers precedents for how middle powers navigate between larger protectors and their own security imperatives. The point of these references is to underline that the current moment is not without historical parallel, even though its specific configuration is unprecedented.

Among the most sensitive questions the paper surveys is the nuclear dimension of European autonomy. A forum in the journal Survival in 2024 debated the prospects for a European nuclear deterrent, and a subsequent 2025 analysis by Lawrence Freedman examined the here and now of Europe’s nuclear options. The paper treats these debates as emblematic of the deeper transformation underway: if American extended deterrence becomes unreliable, European states must at least consider what strategic autonomy would mean at the highest level of escalation. The author does not present a European bomb as an imminent or settled prospect, but the very fact that such discussions have moved from the margins to the mainstream of strategic commentary illustrates how far the terms of the debate have shifted under the pressure of American retrenchment. Similarly, tensions over technology policy, including American criticism of European digital regulation described by the EU Institute for Security Studies as deepening the EU-US rift, show that the rebalancing extends well beyond defense into economic and regulatory affairs.

The paper’s conclusion is deliberately measured. Europe, Scotto argues, may be entering a post-American phase, but this phase is not defined by rupture with Washington. Rather, it is defined by the potential, still unfulfilled, for a rebalanced partnership with the United States and for a more autonomous European role in a multipolar order. The distinction matters: the analysis does not predict a clean break, nor does it claim that European strategic autonomy is already achieved. Instead, it identifies the institutional, industrial, and political building blocks that are being laid, from SAFE procurement instruments to German rearmament to minilateral defense coalitions, and asks whether they can cohere into durable governance. The answer, the paper suggests, will depend on whether Europe can convert crisis-driven improvisation into permanent capability, a challenge that has defeated earlier generations of European strategists but that the current conjuncture makes unusually urgent.

For observers of European politics, the study offers a framework for interpreting the accelerating stream of defense announcements, procurement deals, and diplomatic realignments emerging from Brussels and national capitals. Its central claim, that Trump operates less as a cause than as a catalyst of European governance change, implies that the transformation will not reverse with a change of administration in Washington. The unresolved questions of European defense, foreign policy coordination, and political integration that the American presidency has thrust into the open are, on this account, structural rather than episodic. Whether Europe seizes the moment to build governance commensurate with its economic weight, or continues to rely on an increasingly conditional American guarantee, remains the defining question of the continent’s security policy for the decade ahead.

Subject of Research: The impact of US repositioning under Trump on European Union defense and governance integration

Article Title: Toward a post-American Europe? Trump as a catalyst for EU governance

Article References: Scotto, M. (2025). Toward a post-American Europe? Trump as a catalyst for EU governance. Global Public Policy and Governance, 5(4), 433-443. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-025-00128-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43508-025-00128-6

Keywords: Donald Trump, European Union, EU governance, European defense, NATO, strategic autonomy, transatlantic relations, Germany, intergovernmentalism, multipolarity, foreign policy, defense industry