Perhaps more so than at any other time in its history, Europe’s future is open-ended. Media coverage of the EU today deals in ever new ‘crises’: the banking crisis, the democratic crisis, the euro crisis, the refugee crisis and so on. It is indeed difficult to find a silver lining for Europe dominated by crisis in this contemporary reality. Instead, scenarios for a potential re-nationalization and disintegration process abound, with Brexit being but a sign of the times. While acknowledging the manifold problems of Europe and its member states, the reader should keep in mind that the term ‘crisis’ is first and foremost a discursive weapon wielded by those who object to European integration in principle or to Europe in its present form. The term itself suggests a reduction or even reversal of the European Union.

Nevertheless, our era of crises began with the global financial crisis of 2007-2008, triggered by the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in the US, or with the subsequent ‘euro crisis’, the European debt crisis. In hindsight, many Europe analysts saw these financial emergencies as serious, but not life threatening. Only the subsequent critical mass of internal and external crises, from 2013-2014 on, has sparked a real existential dilemma for the European project as such. Precisely because it has entangled external and internal conflicts and constraints, the 2015 refugee crisis, more so than the euro crisis or Brexit, demonstrates the quintessence of Europe in dire straits: Europe’s capacity to take united action has now been called into question as much as its value system and internal solidarity.

During the Cold War, the EU could decide not to invest in its capacities as a foreign-policy actor or to come up with strategies for (soft-power) projection beyond its circle of member states and candidate countries. Since those days of tense stability, the constellation of world politics has fundamentally changed not once, but twice – first with the end of communism and the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc, and again with the emergence in recent years of Russia and Turkey as competitive regional powers. Moreover, under the Trump administration, pressure from Washington on European states to pull their weight in terms of military expenditure has increased markedly.