The Crisis of the European Union
Challenges, Analyses, Solutions
Routledge Advances in European Politics Series

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.

Introduction: The Many Challenges of the European Union

Part I: Perspectives on a Troubled Project

1. Understanding European Union Governance: Political Challenges of the Integration Project

2. Europe’s Unfinished Community of Law: Legal Challenges of the Integration Project

3.The Design of the EMU at the Heart of the EU's Crisis? Economic Challenges of the Integration Project

4. Uneven Development, Partial Europeanization, and Nationalist Retreat: Societal Challenges of the Integration Project

Part II: The Many Faces of the European Crisis

5. The Hegemony of Disorder: The Persistence of Financial Turmoil in the EU

6. Nationalism, Populism and Re-birth of Statehood in Europe

7. Independence and Separatist Movements: Europe between Integration and Disintegration

8. Is the Migration Crisis a Solidarity Crisis?

9. A Europe of Dropouts? The Brexit and the Question of European Solidarity

10. Social Europe still Missing? Flaws of the Spillover Process as the Motor of Integration

Part III: How to Improve the EU’s Problem-Solving Capacities

11. When There Are No Winners, Only Losers: The European Crisis and the Interest Paradigm

12. Intergovernmental Method, Community Method, and Open Method of Coordination: The Resilience, Efficiency and Legitimacy of the EU’s Modes of Governance

13. Segmentation, Differentiation and the Aims of European Integration

14. Democratic Innovations Beyond the State

15. The EU’s Model of Regional Integration in a Functionally Differentiated World Society

Epilogue: There’s Life in the Old Dog Yet! Challenges as Catalyst for European Integration

Andreas Grimmel is Research Associate and Lecturer at the Institute of Political Science of the University of Hamburg and at the Institute for European Integration, Europa-Kolleg in Hamburg, Germany.