Selected Online Reading on the Future of Europe

To understand the current difficulties and future prospects of European integration, multiple perspectives are required. The essays in this collection explore historical and geopolitical aspects of European integration and their relevance to interpretations of the current climate. They also examine the different regional dynamics of integration and the attitudes that result from those experiences, including in the European peripheries that are so often overshadowed by the dominant centres. In drawing all of these perspectives together, the collection allows the reader to assess the EU's current crisis in context.

This book analyzes the causes of five dilemmas that are shaping European integration- populism, migration, the Euro, Brexit, and enlargement. While critical of the responses of European Union actors in handling these crises, the author outlines avenues which might avoid the potential collapse of Europe.

Is the European Union still a viable project? The last few years have been difficult both economically and politically, while its integrative function and legitimacy have been seriously tested. For many social, economic and geo-political reasons, its expansionary moment has stopped abruptly. On the contrary, the Greek economic crisis and the Brexit referendum have raised the spectre of fragmentation and political disintegration. The promise of the EU as a possible model for legitimate governance beyond the nation state lies somewhat in tatters. Even if the EU may indeed survive most of its current crises, is the project of a EU as a normative project beyond rescue? Ever since Maastricht, the democratic legitimacy of the EU has been a key concern of policy makers, citizens and academics alike. This issue is essentially a normative one, and over the same period our work in this area has been at the forefront in exploring what has come to be known (following an early working paper we wrote with this title in 2000) 'the normative turn in EU studies'. The debate on the democratic form and legitimacy of the EU is one that has gone on for some time and to which we, together with other scholars, have tried to contribute in the course of the last twenty years or so. Collecting articles written over the course of this period is not just meant as the testimony of an intellectual journey, but also a way of tracing such a journey in retrospect and mapping the important moments of the intellectual and scholarly debates that have contributed to shaping both our understanding and our expectations of the EU's possible futures.

Sergio Fabbrini proposes a way out of the EU's crises, which have triggered an unprecedented cleavage between 'sovereignist' and 'Europeanist' forces. The intergovernmental governance of the multiple crises of the past decade has led to a division on the very rationale of Europe's integration project. Sovereignism (the expression of nationalistic and populist forces) has demanded more decision-making autonomy for the EU member states, although Europeanism has struggled to make an effective case against this challenge. Fabbrini proposes a new perspective to release the EU from this predicament, involving the decoupling and reforming of the EU: on the one hand, the economic community of the single market (consisting of the current member states of the EU and of others interested in joining or re-joining it); and on the other, the political union (largely based on the eurozone reformed according to an original model of the federal union).

*Shortlisted for 2016 European Book Prize*Giles Merritt describes himself as a "sceptical europhile". For many years among the foremost commentators on the politics and economics shaping Europe, he was named by the Financial Times as one of 30 "Eurostars" who are the most influential voices in Brussels.Slippery Slope is far from the usual run of uncritical EU-related studies. Its aim is to set alarm bells ringing across Europe with its revealing insights into our increasingly troubled future. Giles Merritt argues that the steepness and suddenness of Europe's decline in the "Asian century" willdepend on the actions we Europeans undertake. And there are two key lessons that we need to face from the beginning. Firstly, the "good times" aren't coming back without a massive effort on our part. And secondly, in a fast-developing world of 9-10 billion people, no single European country cansurvive and prosper on its own.Merritt sets out to sort fact from fiction in his analysis of Europe's weaknesses, and the policies needed to address them. Placing the outlook for Europe in its global context, he assesses Europe's decline in relative as well as absolute terms, and puts forward an ambitious but realistic "to do"list for Europe's policymakers if our comparatively privileged life styles are not to be seriously threatened in the coming years.In the wake of "Brexit", this is a hard-hitting warning that unless Europeans shake themselves awake their future will be increasingly gloomy. Anyone who believes that the economic crisis that began in 2008 is just a blip will find this book a salutary lesson in the reality of Europe'sposition.