The Politics of Accommodation in Europe

In this article, I posit that the EU is a large-scale experiment in working out ways of reconciling various modes of integration within a political and institutional framework that is highly sensitive to the need for accommodation. That aspect of the EU has not been adequately addressed by the mainstream theoretical perspectives on the EU, in the sense that they do not contain the requisite analytical tools that enable us to capture the distinctive features of the EU’s approach to handling politicized difference and diversity. The clue to that is the notion of accommodation. Showing more precisely how accommodation manifests itself in the EU provides us with a clearer understanding of why the EU relies on such a rich arsenal of mechanisms and process logics in the integration process; it yields a clearer sense of how and the extent to which what we refer to as integration has a strong accommodationist accent; when and where that is the case; and when measures get subverted from their alleged aims. The purpose is thus to provide a better grounded theoretical conception of the development of the EU, a conception that is also more attuned to the challenges brought on by the euro-crisis whose distinct manifestations must be traced back to the EU’s nature and development.