ABSTRACT
This collection of essays came together alongside two developments that will have a lasting impact on the euro area — the ‘Five Presidents Report’ (2015) on ‘completing Europe’s economic and monetary union’ and the events surrounding the end of Greece’s participation in the second bailout program. These developments underscore why we believe the crisis in the euro area can only be understood at the juxtaposition of insights from different disciplines. They also illustrate why we chose to highlight themes related to multilevel governance, policy ideas, distributive bargaining, and popular legitimation in our introduction. The goal of the ‘Five Presidents Report’ is to strengthen the European Union by drawing the right lessons from the crisis and then implementing them in a manner that will reinforce action taken at the member state level while shoring up popular support for European integration. The situation in Greece, even if it is a rather
particular case among all Eurozone countries, suggests that we are still far from achieving that objective. The purpose of this short conclusion is to show how the essays in this
collection can move us in the right direction. Along the way, we hope to underscore what useful progress has been made and where more attention should be directed. As we announced in the introduction, this is not a definitive exercise. Often we can only point to problem areas or raise useful questions. That is useful nonetheless. When we say European integration is a work in progress, we should probably underscore the importance of ‘work’ as much as ‘progress’. Much remains to be understood and then put into action before anything substantial can be accomplished. This conclusion has three elements. It starts with an assessment of where
things stand based on the analysis provided in the preceding essays. The second section looks at priorities for action. Here we admit that there is room for contestation, even among our own contributors. The third section extends those immediate priorities into a longer term agenda. The final section offers suggestions for further research based on this analysis.
