ABSTRACT

The European integration project currently faces profound political, economic, legal, and societal challenges. These challenges seem increasingly to overburden the European Union as well as the cohesion among the Member States, and therefore pose a serious threat to the integration project. The EU faces a major task in coping with this situation and it is one that calls for new approaches and ideas

This book addresses the major challenges confronting the EU, analyses the consequences for the integration project, and develops fresh perspectives on the EU’s future prospects for coping with the most debated, current and upcoming issues, such as the rise of Euroscepticism or the contested idea of an ‘ever-closer union’. Renowned experts in European Studies from the fields of political science, law, economics and sociology provide an interdisciplinary perspective on the different dimensions of the EU’s crisis-laden situation and question whether the EU’s existing problem-solving mechanisms and methods are sufficient to address the imminent tasks.

This text will be of key interest to scholars and students of EU Politics, European Politics, European Governance, and more broadly European law, history and the wider social sciences.

chapter |10 pages

Introduction

The many challenges of the European Union

part I|58 pages

Perspectives on a troubled project

chapter 1|13 pages

Understanding European Union governance

Political challenges of the integration project

chapter 2|15 pages

Europe’s unfinished community of law

Legal challenges of the integration project

chapter 3|14 pages

The design of the EMU at the heart of the EU’s crisis?

Economic challenges of the integration project

chapter 4|14 pages

Uneven development, partial Europeanization and nationalist retreat

Societal challenges of the integration project

part II|88 pages

The many faces of the European Crisis

chapter 5|20 pages

The hegemony of disorder

The persistence of financial turmoil in the EU

chapter 7|12 pages

Independence and separatist movements

Europe between integration and disintegration

chapter 9|12 pages

A Europe of dropouts?

Brexit and the question of European solidarity

chapter 10|16 pages

Social Europe still missing?

Flaws of the spill-over process as the motor of integration 1

part III|69 pages

How to improve the EU’s problem-solving capacities

chapter 11|14 pages

When there are no winners, only losers

The European crisis and the interest paradigm

chapter 12|12 pages

Intergovernmental method, community method and open method of coordination

The resilience, efficiency and legitimacy of the EU’s modes of governance 1

chapter |10 pages

Epilogue

There’s life in the old dog yet! Challenges as catalyst for European integration