ABSTRACT
This chapter asks whether the crisis in Europe today has a dialectical quality. Drawing on ideas from Jürgen Habermas’s classic text, Legitimation Crisis (1975), to characterize the crisis, it posits that the European system lacks the “self-healing powers that are necessary for a recovery” and that its subjects find themselves, like the dramatis personae in classical tragedy, at the “turning point in a fateful process”. This already challenges the generally benign readings of the progressive, self-reforming nature of the European Union, through which each positive step in European integration is a successful response to a new crisis. It then asks whether they can “summon up the strength to win back their freedom by shattering the mythic power of fate through the formation of new identities” (Habermas, 1975, p. 2). At stake here is the scope for a democratic solution to the triple European crises of financialization, neoliberal austerity, and the democratic deficit. This involves two sets of issues: first, the ability to diagnose these crises and the current conjuncture, propose organic solutions based on a realistic analysis of the past and present that not only identifies causes; and, second, proposals about feasible reforms as well as the agents or agencies that might deliver them, and indicate how the balance of forces can be reorganized at different sites and scales to deliver these reforms. In short, economic analysis must be combined with political analysis because economic reforms occur within specific political forms and are pursued by specific political agencies.
