Wartime super-spillover? The perils and limits of a neofunctionalist approach to Ukraine's single market integration

Emerging scholarship on Ukraine's wartime European integration and the EU's reinvigorated enlargement policy have been marked by the focus on intergovernmental matters and member states' foreign policy coordination. This article challenges this view. First, relying on the neofunctionalist lens, it introduces the notion of a 'super-spillover' effect to explain the wartime intensification of Ukraine's European integration and the plans for Ukraine's gradual EU accession. It illustrates this notion with the case of Ukraine's Single Market integration. Second, while reaffirming the neofunctionalism's usefulness for explaining partner countries' Single Market integration and EU enlargement under crises, the article points to several weaknesses of the neofunctionalist approach. They include the vagueness of the 'geographical spillover' concept and the lack of theorisation as to the sequencing of and the interplay between various spillover logics under crises. It thus contributes to the scholarship on neofunctionalism, EU enlargement policy, Single Market integration and EU-Ukraine relations.