Forging a Union for the 21 st Century:From Crisis to Opportunity

Abstract

The trajectory of European integration has never been smooth or linear. Rather it is subject to fits and starts and periods of crises and convergence. In the early 1980s, when the EU faced a series of very difficult problems, it was commonly felt that the EU was losing its capacity to address the problems it faced. This period was followed by the single market project and an iterative process of treaty change that transformed the Union both in terms of geographical reach and policy ambition. We must also be mindful that the EU is a very young social contract of less than 70 years. The emergence of the modern nation state and inter-state system took hundreds of years which underline the fact that the Union is at an early stage of its evolution. Europe’s Union, like all forms of political order, is subject to fissures and divergence which create disintegrative dynamics at times but it would be foolhardy to predict the collapse of the Union. It has become embedded in how Europe governs itself and faces outwards to the world. This paper analyses the legacies of the multiple crises that the EU and Europe faced since 2008/09, it then situates this in the context of the ties and tensions that characterize European Integration before turning to the final argument that Europe’s Union has an important ‘window of opportunity’ over the next five years to set itself on a more stable trajectory.