Why do governments seek to internalize certain policy issues while internationalizing others? While higher flows of trade and capital have strengthened the web of interdependence between EU member countries (MCs), globalization and pandemic-related policymaking have unveiled governments’ latent tendencies to look internally to resolve certain policy matters while relying on EU institutions, international organizations (IOs), and external entities to resolve others.
The dominant narrative on EU politics maintains that the EU has the capacity to shape the utility and policy choices of member- and candidate states’ governments in significant ways: mechanisms ranging from membership conditionality to monitoring policies, to fiscal deployments empower the EU to influence national policies while simultaneously regulating international policymaking. These explanations however do not fully explain variation in governments’ choices to internalize certain policy issues and internationalize others, particularly when we compare countries that share similar economic and institutional foundations. This approach does not fully explain, for instance, why EU countries---bounded by the same EU membership regulations--- responded to the pandemic by nationalizing education and health policy but internationalizing fiscal policies needed to mitigate the crisis to the level of the EU, IMF, the World Bank, and other IOs.
In this article, I complement previous research on policy (inter)nationalization by emphasizing the role of domestic factors and external actors in shaping governments’ policymaking calculus. I empirically assess my argument on a data set comprising education and health policy indicators across the EU member- and candidate-countries prior and during the global health crisis.