Polity-building in the European Union's rule of law crisis since 2010

While the European Union's rule of law (RoL) crisis has been largely absent from the bourgeoning EU crisis studies, the vast amount of literature examining the crisis and the EU's responses to it cast the crisis in a negative light, depicting it as a challenge with adverse effects for the EU. Drawing on Historical Institutionalism and the EU crisis literature, I trace the institutional responses to the slow-burning RoL crisis and show how altered intra-crisis dynamics after 2017/18 led to a shift in the EU's institutional responses. While before 2018 the EU relied on targeted soft instruments, after 2018 it has increasingly shifted to targeted hard instruments, such as the conditionality procedures. More recently, the EU has complemented these with binding EU legislation regulating certain aspects linked to the RoL, notably the SLAPP Directive and the European Media Freedom Act. Together, these measures have crucially enhanced the EU's leverage over its member states. Hence, I argue that the RoL crisis has gradually led to significant institutional change and contributed to its polity-building. Rather than a federalization, however, this development can be interpreted as the maturation of the supranational EU polity.