The politics of differentiated integration : what do governments want? country report - Estonia

Abstract

This paper studies the salience of and government positions towards differentiated integration (DI) in the European Union in Estonian politics. As the keyword analysis reveals, conceptual debates over DI occur very rarely in Estonia and are usually invoked by specific events, such as ratifying the Lisbon Treaty, joining the eurozone or holding the European Council presidency. On the level of specific DI instances, the salience was much higher, often reflecting the importance of certain policies in Estonian foreign policy agenda or a high level of internal polarization over some specific DI policy. Regarding government's position towards DI, there has been a notable improvement over the years. In the first years after joining the EU in 2004, Estonian politicians very clearly negative towards DI, mostly due to apparent fear of remaining into the slower less integrated group of countries. After joining the eurozone in 2011, the government made a swift change in their position and started showing much more optimism towards certain forms of DI. This rather positive position remained mostly unaltered throughout the last decade, although the government politicians have always emphasised that their first preference is for an EU that moves on together with all the Member States. ; This working paper is part of the InDivEU project which has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement number 822304