Since the very start, trade policy has been the showpiece of European integration. Together with agriculture and competition policy, it was one of the few policy domains that were transferred immediately to the supranational level by the Rome Treaties launching European integration. Thanks to the extraordinary European growth rates during the trentes glorieuses in the following decades and the consecutive enlargement rounds starting with the UK, Ireland and Denmark in 1973, the EU became the largest economy in the world by the beginning of the twenty-first century. Lacking ‘hard’ foreign policy and security competences, the ‘Common Commercial Policy’ allowed the EU to play a principal role on the world stage in, but also beyond, the trade sphere.

Cohesion and solidarity between member states are fundamental values of the EU, recognised in Article 3 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU (TFEU). The goal of cohesion is to reduce regional disparities across the EU. The main instruments of Cohesion Policy are the European Structural and Investment Funds (ESIF), comprising the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), European Social Fund (ESF) and Cohesion Fund – as well as agriculture and fisheries funds. As the most direct expression of financial solidarity, Cohesion Policy accounts for around one-third of the total budget (around €370 billion) over the 2014–20 period and significant public investment in many less developed countries. Funding is highly concentrated on less developed EU countries and regions and invested in areas like transport infrastructure, business development, training and education to improve sustainable growth and quality of life.

This part examines the evolution of European regional integration since World War II, with a focus on the dramatic politics of the past ten years. The turmoil surrounding the 2010 eurozone crisis put the EU’s legitimacy at risk and created expectations for major policy and institutional change. Against this backdrop, it explains how recent crises have affected not only EU governance – that is, institutions and decision-making procedures – in practice but also the deeper theoretical understandings through controversies among scholars in the field.

Free movement of labour, migration and immigration have been hotly debated recently, notably during election campaigns, often with a particular focus on the migration of poorer people.1 What is free may not necessarily be fair, and this concern applies to trade as well as labour mobility. The freedom to move in the EU single market should help member states to higher economic performance and citizens to higher standards of living, but the legitimacy of open labour markets depends on the distribution of advantages and gains but also risks between various countries and other stakeholders.

Regional integration in Europe has never followed a clear path. Instead, it developed as a result of a succession of painful negotiations and compromises, followed at times by moments of political enthusiasm marking historic decisions. Over the last decades, the widening and deepening of integration has gone hand in hand, to varying degrees, with mounting popular discontent. Attempts to create unity and to make the EU more akin to a federal state have received little support or have failed. Rather than putting pressure on elites to transfer power to a higher level of governance, as predicted by neo-functionalists in the 1950s, from the 1990s onwards some political parties and citizens alike have called for ‘less Europe’. Mainstream as well as peripheral political parties have increasingly amplified criticism of the EU but have failed to undertake the pledged grand reforms of the Union, thus feeding discontent and claims to disintegration. This trend came to a dramatic climax when, on 23 June 2016, a majority of British people voted in favour of the United Kingdom’s exit from the EU.

Since its foundation in 1951, the EC (and later EU) have grown from six to currently twenty-eight member states.1 The six founding members were all advanced capitalist democracies, which had well developed and competitive industries, generous welfare states and comparatively high living standards. This changed with the successive enlargement rounds. With almost every enlargement, the EU also admitted economically less developed countries (see Box 17.1).

In the Great Recession, sovereign bailouts were deemed necessary to alleviate the stress of indebted countries. These bailouts contained some of the most contentious policies, including austerity, structural reforms, and privatizations that triggered sharp bursts of protest during the Great Recession. In this chapter, we examine the impact of those particular political events on protest within this period, aiming to assess their impact and explore the mechanisms through which they operate on protest behavior. We observe that bailouts had a strong effect on protest, but in a mostly regional pattern, as they were accompanied by massive and frequent demonstrations only in southern Europe but not in eastern Europe. We also try to see whether the effect of bailouts can be explained by a deterioration of economic sentiment, but we find that their effect on protest remains even when accounting for such a decline in prospects. The chapter then shows that bailouts, ceteris paribus, were also much more contested than non-supranational austerity packages. Overall, bailouts have a strong effect on protest, but the regional pattern suggests that this is stronger where possibilities of alternative institutional political representation were available, as in the case of Greece which is examined more closely.

There was no European-wide wave of protest triggered by the Great Recession. Instead, a protest wave swept across southern Europe, which was, however, mainly due to the developments in Greece. In Greece, the crisis gave rise to a sustained wave of protest that covered both the shock- and the Euro-crisis period. But even in the case of Greece, this wave had already been under way once the economic crisis really hit the country. Moreover, while the crisis also gave rise to protest waves in Cyprus, Portugal, and Spain during the Euro-crisis, it did not do so in all southern European countries. There were no waves to speak of in Italy and Malta during any part of the Great Recession. In north-western Europe, with the exception of Iceland and the UK, protest seems to have developed largely independently of the economic crisis, while we have found some country-specific waves in central- and eastern Europe. But the eastern European waves, too, had either already accelerated before the intervention of the Great Recession, which only contributed to their peaks (Latvia, Lithuania), delayed their decline (Czech Republic, Hungary), or was actually unrelated to the protest (Bulgaria, Estonia). A lot of protest during the Great Recession responded to country-specific conditions which were entirely unrelated to the crisis.

Protest Event Analysis is attractive to social movement scholars because it is an unobtrusive technique that can cope with a large amount of unstructured data. However, it has also drawn some major criticisms such as its susceptibility to reporting bias. This chapter sets out to engage with these criticisms by discussing and defending our choice to rely on international news agencies publishing in English and by identifying the strengths and weaknesses of our dataset compared to two external datasets. On the one hand, we find that our dataset is more precise than the Integrated Crisis Early Warning System (ICEWS) data, which suffers from duplicated events and misclassifications of the protest form. As opposed to the ICEWS data, our dataset actually reveals the major waves of demonstrations across Europe. On the other hand, we evaluate our semi-automatically compiled data with help of data derived manually from national newspaper articles and news reports for Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, the UK, Hungary, and Poland. This comparison shows that our data have a slight tendency in the direction of covering larger events and events taking place in the capital more than other events.

The chapter establishes that economic and political grievances matter for economic protest in general and public economic protest in particular. In addition, it shows that, during the period covered, political grievances have been strongly influenced by economic grievances across Europe, but most clearly in southern Europe. While the rapid recovery of the countries of north-western Europe and the pain tolerance in the countries of central and eastern Europe probably served to limit the impact of the economic grievances on political dissatisfaction, the fact that the southern European countries not only were hard hit by the economic crisis, but also experienced a relative decline with regard to the other parts of Europe, most likely enhanced the impact of economic on political grievances in this part of Europe. Moreover, it is also above all in southern Europe that the effect of economic on political grievances was conditioned by state capacity and IMF interventions: while weak state capacity enhanced the effect of the former on the latter, IMF interventions attenuated it. Finally, a core finding of this chapter is that economic protest was most heavily influenced by the joint effect of economic and political grievances. Protest mobilization was particularly pronounced whenever dire economic conditions and dissatisfaction with the political system rose together and reinforced each other.

This chapter contains a study of diffusion among political protests in Europe. We start from a theoretical perspective that assumes protests as inherently interdependent across countries. Hence, we link geographical proximity to the likelihood of protests and we apply a spatial panel data analysis to study this link at the European, regional and cross-border level as well as for different time periods and forms of protests. The results show that spin-off movements across the continent learn from or emulate initiator movements in many instances, but that this diffusion is largely confined to the cross-border level. As a consequence, we did not find sustained protest waves that capture the majority of European countries at once. Similarly, cross-border diffusion is also only relevant for some regions and during some time periods but not universally. It seems that the grievances and opportunity structures in different European countries are varying too much in order to support widespread and long-ranging waves of protest.