Introduction: Fading of a Dream?

Once upon a time, there was a dream - that Europeans would unite after centuries of war-making, nationalist confrontation and cultural xenophobia.

The carnage of World War II and the destruction of the productive infrastructure of the continent created the historical opportunity for economic integration and institutional cooperation as a way to supersede the demons of the past and set Europe on a path of shared peace and prosperity. Those who created Europe knew that a direct political process was not possible, and the economic process was a means to achieve political goals in the future. For almost six decades, a process of multidimensional integration proceeded gradually by successive waves, extending the union from the original six founding members of the European Economic Community to the 28 members of the European Union, woven together in a dense institutional network of shared sovereignty between the participating nation-states.

At the dawn of the twenty-first century the European Union, as dreamed by the visionary politicians and technocrats who dared to engage in one of the most remarkable political experiments in history, could be considered a success. It had become the largest economy in the world, with around a quarter of global gross domestic product (GDP), the largest consumer market, the largest repository of non-military science and technology knowledge on the planet, and a decisive share of global finance, with London and Frankfurt among the pre-eminent financial centres in the world. Peace and security appeared to be solidly established among EU members for the long haul, and the remaining European conflicts were ultimately contained by military cooperation with the United States, in spite of some setbacks such as the war that followed the disintegration of Yugoslavia. Prosperity in terms of income, assets and social benefits was the highest on the planet, albeit with increasing social inequality. Democracy and human rights were rooted in the daily practice of European societies, and the institutions of co-governance, however bureaucratic, kept functioning. Tolerance and international solidarity with less fortunate areas of the world were a key component of the ideology of European institutions, albeit not always reflected in practice. The project of preserving and diffusing European values, on the basis of the original project of economic integration, seemed to have been vindicated. A new round of deeper integration was launched at the turn of the century, particularly with the creation of a common currency, the euro, in most of the EU, and the constitution of Europe-wide research and technology institutions, such as the European Research Council (ERC) and the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT). The power of the European Parliament was strengthened to counter the power concentrated in the European Commission. The moment appeared to have come to establish the legitimacy of the European institutions with the promulgation and approval of a European Constitution. While the notion of the United States of Europe was never seriously considered, the creative construction of a supra-national political union made up of a network of nation-states was paving the way for a historically novel form of continental federalism.

However, this process was accompanied by stagnating economic growth coupled with demographic atrophy and an unhealthy emphasis on intra-European politics. And then the process of integration was stalled as it was challenged by the growing salience of anti-EU feelings in many European countries, culminating in the unthinkable: Brexit, the voluntary exit of a member country (the outcome of the UK referendum of 23 June 2016). Suddenly, the European Union became something quite different from a stable institutional construction: its shape and competences could vary, as could its membership. Will the paralysis of the EU mark the beginning of the twenty-first century, as the collapse of the Soviet Union, an unthinkable event at the time, marked the twentieth century's end? Is the European dream fading? Why? How? What are the roots and the potential dangers of disintegration? What are the prospects and consequences of the multiple crises of the European Union in the early twenty-first century?

These are the questions explored and analysed in this volume from an intellectually pluralistic perspective that aims at minimizing normativity to maximize clarity in the analysis and diagnosis of the crises. We use 'crises' in the plural because the rampant crisis of the European Union as an institutional system stems from the convergence of diverse, interrelated and overlapping crises - financial, monetary, industrial, social, political, ideological, moral, geopolitical, migratory - that feed into each other while being distinct in their origins and their development. The tentative answers to these questions are developed in the various chapters of the volume. However, there is a common thread that may explain the contours of the institutional crisis, and therefore clarify the terms of the debate for the eventual overcoming of this crisis.

We start from the assumption that crises of any institutional system can occur when the performance of the system is perturbed and the perturbations become increasingly serious in character, giving rise to the very real possibility that, without taking further action or implementing new policies or regulations, the system may spin out of control and break down. We also contend that such systemic crises are induced by the characteristics and contradictions involved in the process of institutional formation. Concretely speaking, what this means in the context of Europe is that the crises that have plagued the European Union in the last decade stem to a large extent from the flaws in its construction. And these flaws are almost necessary consequences of the political processes that led to its formation. In other words, the decisions that made possible the development of the EU created the conditions for its multiple crises. Of course, these crises are not only the result of flaws in the construction of European institutions: there are other factors involved too, in some cases stemming from sources well beyond Europe; but only by understanding the institutional flaws can we understand why these crises occurred as they did in the European context, and why they have (or have had) the characteristics and consequences that they have.

Let us review the argument in its historical specificity (much of the data and detailed analyses in support of this argument can be found in the chapters in this volume).

First of all, any stable political-institutional construction requires some convergence of interests among the actors that build the institutions, as well as some form of common identity among the people involved in the process. In the case of the European Union, there is consensus on the fact that there was originally a defensive project, intended to prevent another war breaking out in Europe, that was later used by a few visionary leaders to put forward a utopian project. This was a project of the political and economic elites without the real participation, commitment and full understanding of most citizens. Every major step of economic and institutional integration was intended to make irreversible the process of European unification, with the creation of the common currency, the euro, being the most blatant expression of this strategy of the 'fait accompli'.

European construction started as a defensive project aimed at superseding past wars and preventing future wars. It therefore had to involve the traditional warring nations, France and Germany above all, and the powerful American ally in deterring the Soviet Union in the future - NATO was a necessary complement to the European Union. However, the integration had to start with the economy, the most obvious necessity after the devastation of the war. Integrated markets required broader economic integration that proceeded by leaps and bounds to reach some partial monetary and financial integration.

The utopian project included political integration and cultural integration, as the assertion of European values - whatever their meaning - was an intrinsic part of the project. The tension between economic integration and political/ideological integration was a permanent feature of the European Union and a permanent source of conflicts, primarily between the nation-states that were economically interested but politically aloof vis-à-vis the project, the UK and Scandinavia, on the one hand, and the major continental powers, France and Germany, on the other hand.

This difference in interests took a paradoxical twist in the decision to enlarge the EU towards the East. The interests of the two major nation-states, Germany (after re-unification) and the UK, converged in favour of enlargement but for opposite reasons. For Germany, it was a way to reconstruct its traditional geopolitical hinterland as part of the European project without raising fears of hegemony. For the UK, opposed to political integration, the more nations that joined the EU, the more difficult it would be to create a joint political decision-making body, thus weakening Brussels vis-à-vis the autonomous logic of markets that were becoming increasingly integrated globally. Ironically, it was the enlargement towards the East, and the subsequent migration of workers from Eastern Europe to the UK, that in part fuelled the anti-EU sentiments that found their dramatic expression a decade later in Brexit.

The result of these diverse strategies of integration was...