Open book projects

Co-edited with Ann-Kathrin Reinl and forthcoming from Routledge in 2027, this handbook provides a comprehensive assessment of solidarity in the European Union. It consolidates and systematically summarises established knowledge across legal, political, social, and normative research, bringing together disciplines, approaches, and subfields that are often treated separately.

Alongside surveying current findings, the volume identifies priorities for future research and bridges theoretical and empirical approaches. It is designed as a reference for researchers and students of the European Union and solidarity, while also serving policy-makers, civil-society organisations, and think tanks working across the EU's multilevel system.

Why do some crises deepen European integration while others stall it or expose the limits of common action? This book develops a political-economy account of crisis-led integration. It explains institutional change through the interaction of cross-border interdependence, inherited institutional commitments, domestic capacity, political mobilisation, and the distribution of crisis pressure across member states.

Its theoretical contribution is a sequential account of crisis-led integration. Crises expose gaps between cross-border problems and existing authority; the symmetry of pressure, inherited commitments, domestic capacity, and political mobilisation then shapes whether governments build common capacity, redesign burden-sharing, or preserve a fragmented settlement. The framework connects functional interdependence to distributional conflict, politicisation, and legitimacy, explaining why comparable pressures can produce different institutional outcomes.

The argument is comparative and historical. It treats crises as structured tests of an existing political order: they can reveal the value of common institutions, intensify distributive conflict, and alter the coalitions that support shared authority. The book traces these mechanisms from the construction of the single market and monetary union through the euro, migration, Brexit, pandemic, and geopolitical crises. Together, the episodes show how repeated crisis management has moved the European Union unevenly from market-making towards polity-building.

This project develops a general account of institutional change under crisis. Its formal core models integration as a dynamic process shaped by crisis intensity and symmetry, interdependence, domestic governing capacity, sovereignty pressure, political mobilisation, supranational identification, and institutional adjustment. The central expectation is that the distribution of pressure matters alongside its magnitude: broadly shared shocks can sustain common responses, while asymmetric shocks intensify disagreement over burdens and authority.

The current formal working paper is single-authored; the proposed book is being developed with Brian Burgoon. The book makes the model inspectable. Formal propositions are carried into a suite of simulations that allow readers to vary political and institutional conditions, observe alternative paths, and identify the combinations that generate advance, stasis, or reversal. A final empirical part compares these implications with historical crisis sequences and measures the degree of congruence between simulated dynamics and observed institutional change. The aim is explanation and disciplined comparison, not point prediction.

Advanced capitalist economies organise technological development through distinct combinations of finance and competition. This book proposes a comparative framework built on two dimensions: the willingness of private finance to absorb technological risk, and the intensity of competition in product and capital markets. Their interaction shapes which firms can scale, where innovation rents accumulate, and how states distribute the costs of strategic investment.

The United States and Europe anchor two contrasting configurations. Deep, risk-tolerant capital markets and concentrated firms support a scale-intensive, Schumpeterian model in the United States. Europe combines more risk-averse finance with stronger competition and fragmented markets, favouring diffusion and incremental innovation while making late-stage scaling harder. The comparison is developed through the automotive, space, and artificial-intelligence sectors, then used to assess how Europe might finance scale and govern market power without abandoning its own institutional strengths.

Global markets are becoming more integrated while political authority and multilateral institutions are becoming more segmented. This book develops regulatory arbitrage into a broader concept of boundary, or polity, arbitrage: actors can exploit the gaps between open cross-border markets and territorially bounded systems of taxation, regulation, and democratic accountability. Incomplete globalisation is therefore treated as a political equilibrium generated within integration, rather than as a temporary institutional lag.

The project identifies the coalition that can sustain this equilibrium: geopolitical powers hostile to democratic international order, domestic political entrepreneurs who gain from reasserting national boundaries, and firms whose advantages depend on differences among regulatory jurisdictions. It asks how this alignment reshapes sovereignty, weakens multilateral institutions and the rule of law, and conditions the reconstruction of legitimate public authority across national, regional, and global levels.