Wartime super-spillover?

• Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies
• GGP: Global Governance Programme
• Ukraine

Join Maryna Rabinovych as she explores how wartime dynamics are reshaping Ukraine’s EU integration through a neo-functionalist lens, and the conceptual limits of this approach.

Emerging scholarship on Ukraine’s wartime European integration and the EU’s renewed enlargement agenda has largely focused on intergovernmental dynamics and foreign policy coordination among member states. This talk challenges that framing.

Drawing on a neo-functionalist perspective, it introduces the concept of a ‘super-spillover’ to explain the wartime intensification of Ukraine’s integration with the EU and the plans for its gradual accession. The argument is illustrated through the case of Ukraine’s Single Market integration.

While reaffirming the usefulness of neo-functionalism in explaining partner countries’ Single Market integration and EU enlargement during crises, the talk also identifies key limitations of the approach. These include the ambiguity of the ‘geographical spill-over’ concept and the lack of theoretical clarity regarding the sequencing and interaction of different spill-over mechanisms under crisis conditions. The presentation contributes to broader debates on neo-functionalism, EU enlargement, Single Market integration, and EU–Ukraine relations.