Abstract
Decision-making in the European Union has changed in formal institutional terms due to treaty reforms and informal institutional terms due to adapted practices not least in reaction to the decade of polycrisis the EU experienced. Most prominently, the altered practices have been interpreted as a dawn of “new institutionalism”, explaining the continuously reinforced role of national governments, on the one hand. On the other hand, post-functionalism has taken issue with non-functional drivers of (non)integration, especially identity. Motivated by empirical observations of how the exit of the UK from the EU was managed internally, this paper challenges both theoretical innovations of the past decade. It takes issue with the explanatory gaps of both theoretical innovations and proposes a model that builds on federalist theory and insides from social movement theory to explain how newly observable decision-making practices can be explained. Rather than disconfirming existing theories, the goal is to offer an explanation that fills the blind spots of recent theory development, both for empirical analysis and to evaluate the normative implications of EU rule.
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