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Integration and disintegration | 39 hardly ever explain their positions in an efficient way to the public, and they have little voice in domestic politics. On the other hand, at the domestic level, the politicisation of the EU is an existing phenomenon (Kelemen 2017), leading to a one-sided communication. As Habermas puts it, as long as the European citizens see their national governments as the only players on the European stage, they perceive the decision-making processes as a zero-sum game in which their own actors have to prevail against the others. (Habermas 2010, 131) Furthermore, in many countries, there is also a lack of proper social policies. Welfare states are under pressure from neoliberals and marketfundamentalists, which can also generate disintegration at the domestic level: the rich get richer, social mobility gets blocked, empathy and the feeling of connectedness are waning. As a result, hyper-individualism and the lonely struggle for survival fills in the void. People also turn away from internationalisation if they feel that they do not benefit from it. Finally, market rules are harmed regularly, as the new nationalism also alters how we think about the European single market (Ziegler 2020). All these have an effect on European countries, and all these developments can generate a certain level of convergence, or disintegration, among the countries. From this perspective, the question is: do these dynamics lead to disintegration or not? THE SCIENCE OF DISINTEGRATION —- EUROPEAN COOPERATION AS A POLITICAL DISCOURSE There are many conflicting interpretations of European disintegration. While some scholars claim that disintegration does not exist at all, some others even foresee the collapse of the EU (Krastev 2012). While this latter view seems to be grossly exaggerated, we should still analyse the different theoretical perspectives one by one. From the perspective of neofunctionalist theory, Phillip Schmitter and Zoe Lefkofridi, but also Annegret Eppler, Lisa H. Anders, and Thomas Tuntschew explained disintegration quite plausibly (Eppler et al. 2016; Schmitter and Lefkofridi 2016). According to Schmitter, disintegration is a multicausal phenomenon, which is made up by different factors. One such example could be the unequal distribution of benefits of European cooperation, like Germany’s hegemonic economic dominance, while others benefit by far less from the European market, and the weaker countries are not compensated for their position.
