Going beyond the pandemic: ‘next generation eu’ and the politics of sub-regional coalitions

Abstract

The article aims to explain the 2020 approval of ‘Next Generation EU’, the program for helping the EU member states to go beyond the pandemic. The approval of NG-EU is interpreted in the context of a confrontation between three distinct interstate coalitions, coordinating a group of countries from the north (the Frugal coalition) against the core of continental countries (the Solidarity coalition) and then a group of countries from the east (the Sovereignty coalition) against the previous two coalitions allied together. Based on the discursive institutionalism’s approach, the article reconstructs the policy discourse shared by the members of each coalition, coherently utilized along the fault lines which conceptually structured the 2020 policy-making process. The policy coherence and the organizational consistency of the three coalition cores affected the EU policy-making process more than the inter-institutional relations between the Commission and national governments. The article concludes advancing arguments for interpreting the sub-regional segmentation of the EU.