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Postfunctionalism posits a tradeoff between the functional scale of governance and the territorial scope of community: functional scale is large and transnational for efficiency reasons; community is small-scale and (sub-)national for reasons of social trust and collective identification. COVID-19 has turned this tradeoff upside down: it has shrunk functional scale to the (sub-)national level in the name of security, while lifting expectations of community to the grand transnational scale in the name of solidarity. This reversal of scales has resulted in a rapid rebordering of the Single Market and the Schengen area on the one hand, and a significant debordering of fiscal risk and burden sharing on the other. We reconstruct the evolution of this double-movement from January to August 2020, contrast it to historical trends in the scale-community tradeoff of European integration, and discuss implications for postfunctionalist theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is corporate tax competition a threat to democracy in the European Union (EU)? The answer depends crucially on a positive analysis of the effects of tax competition on national policy autonomy. Most analyses focus on direct effects on corporate tax rates and revenues. We contend that this focus is too narrow. It overlooks the fact that corporate tax competition also has important indirect effects on the progressivity and revenue-raising potential of personal income taxation. We elaborate on these indirect effects theoretically and empirically, and explore the implications for the normative debate on the EU's democratic deficit. Our findings show that European integration can constrain national redistribution in a major way: the democratic deficit is real. Greater political contestation over the EU's policy agenda is desirable in order to mitigate this deficit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]