Introduction: escaping the politics trap? EU integration pathways beyond the polycrisis

Since 2016, the EU has widely been considered to be in a state of 'polycrisis', where simultaneous, mutually reinforcing challenges threaten the Union's cohesion and legitimacy. Such polycrises may fracture Europe's political space, creating cross-cutting 'polycleavages' that polarise member states and their citizens asymmetrically, thereby constraining the EU's capacity to forge effective compromises on key policy issues. In so doing, they exacerbate the risk of the EU's falling into a multi-level 'politics trap', where negative politicisation of European issues inhibits national leaders from agreeing ambitious solutions in intergovernmental negotiations, while the ensuing deadlock in turn saps the Union's output-based legitimacy and fuels a Eurosceptic 'constraining dissensus'. In this introductory article, we develop an analytical framework elaborating the concepts of polycrises, polycleavages, and politics traps, which we then use to present and interpret the main findings of the contributions to this collection, focused on the Covid-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The most important takeaway from the contributions to this collection is that - consistent with our framework - the EU has clearly proved more resilient to the potential negative consequences of politicisation than many commentators had expected at the beginning of this long polycrisis decade.