Europe was shocked by the news that a boat full of migrants sunk into the Mediterranean Sea taking with it fifty-seven people. The episode occurred when the Italian Navy vessel Sibilla, in its effort to protect the common EU borders collided with the migrants’ boat. Some serious debates took place then, raising questions as to whether it was an accident or part of a political effort to stop the flow of migrants or whether the Italian Navy could have intervened and rescued the migrants. The year was 1997 and the non-EU migrants were Albanians fleeing the 1997 civil war that followed the collapse of the ‘pyramid’ banking system in their home country. The transition of the country to market economy and the new ambitious financial innovations had been promoted by the World Bank (WB) and International Monetary Fund (IMF) but also the European Economic Community (EEC).

In the midst of the multifaceted crisis the European Union (EU) is currently experiencing, almost every recent referendum held on European issues has been regarded as another crack in European unity. Not only have the questions addressed to the people – as well as the respective political campaigns – touched upon key areas of the European crisis such as finance and migration; the answers finally delivered were often also unexpected and sometimes even shocking from a European integration point of view.

The Greek ‘no’ to the bailout referendum in July 2015 and the Danish ‘no’ to an opt-out referendum six months later were followed in 2016 by a Dutch ‘no’ to the Ukraine–EU Association Agreement, by a Hungarian (invalid) ‘no’ to EU refugee-relocation quotas and, of course, by the famous Brexit referendum; the British ‘no’ to the EU itself.

Since 2010 the EU has been in an ‘emergency’ situation due to the eurocrisis, where the crisis management by the EU institutions, notably the European Central Bank (ECB), and national governments has been increasingly out of step with the EU Treaties which define the scope of the mandate of the ECB and the EU’s economic policy powers as well as the conditions and limits subject to which Member States have transferred policy and lawmaking powers to the EU in accordance with their national constitutions. The ECB is independent of parliamentary control, which means that it is not accountable to national parliaments and merely has a reporting duty to the European Parliament. Exempt from democratic control the ECB is subject only to judicial review at both EU and national level. At EU level, the competent court is the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) which claims the right to be the sole arbiter over the interpretation of EU law.

Much of the criticism levelled against European policymakers since the eurocrisis has centred around the claim that the adoption of a common currency was an essentially political project which courted disaster by decoupling monetary from political integration. According to what has become a popular narrative, the European leadership chose political grandstanding and symbolism over pragmatism in recklessly pushing forward with a fatally deficient scheme of monetary union. Little wonder, then, that the hubris of political fiat found its nemesis in the hard facts of economics.

I shall argue that this narrative is in many ways incomplete as it leaves out entirely the intellectual background to the steps that have furthered the development of the EU. From the 1950s, the integration process has been underpinned, or at least accompanied and justified, by what might be called the theory of ‘self-fulfilling Europe’: the idea that economic integration, once set in motion, can remove political resistance to European unification by creating factual interdependence and a consciousness of solidarity.

The purpose of this chapter is to further explore the nature of ‘crisis’, and how the incorporation of an economic ideology as ‘solution’ to that crisis in the form of legally binding obligations restricts the ability to pursue alternative courses of action, creating tensions within society. Focusing upon economic doctrine as reflecting ideological positions, the authors consider the way in which the framing of events as ‘crises’, and thereby establishing them as threats to the current political and economic system, enables political actors to facilitate changes that may not otherwise be politically feasible. In particular, by responding to a crisis through the creation of laws that codify an ideologically guided economic doctrine, a temporary state of crisis creates a permanent legal set of obligations. By doing so, prevailing (if not altogether hegemonic) political actors are able to delegitimise alternatives to that economic doctrine as falling outside of the rule of law: there is no legal alternative but to follow that legal obligation.

In the period spanning nearly a decade from the beginning of the financial crisis to the present, the constitutional state and state system in Europe has been affected by a series of challenges to its authority and legitimacy. With regard to the European Union, these challenges are fundamental in that they go to the very existence of the project and to the values it professes to be founded on. They seem increasingly interconnected to the EU and the trajectory of integration rather than merely external to it. For the moment, the EU remains relatively resilient; outside of the UK, appetite for ending the experiment mostly inhabits the political fringes, although even in core countries, anti-European pressures are mounting and Eurosceptic parties are on the ascendency. What is clear is that the challenges to the current system go as much to the legitimacy of domestic regimes and their political authority as to the EU itself, not least from the fragmentary pressures on the state from below in the context of subnational claims to autonomy. In short, the crisis of authority is not merely of the EU but of the regional state system and the governing order in Europe.

This volume brought together scholars from different disciplines to think through the systemic causes of the Eurocrisis across a number of its core dimensions and with a view to illuminating the ‘nature of the beast’, hidden in the large dark room, awaiting further apprehension. The analyses offered drew on a number of different disciplines, from law to political economy, as well as different theoretical perspectives, from Marxism to governmentality studies, to key figures of ordoliberal and neoliberal thought. It is inevitably difficult to synthesise such a wide pool of contributions, particularly since, informed by different theoretical starting points, assumptions and analytical tools, different analyses have inevitably at times produced different diagnoses, conclusions or prognoses. Nonetheless, section I attempts to distil the main ideas that emerge from the volume and that hold our basic thesis together. The common theme of a deeply rooted crisis and the need for a more principled critique indeed appears in all of the chapters, which proves both the necessity and value of dialogue and the sharing of perspectives.

This chapter focuses on the trajectory of the European Union in order to elucidate and discuss its current problems. My main argument unfolds on the historically proven premise that the uneven and combined development of different national economies produces a major contradiction between the trend for greater integration and the continued assertion of national interests, a contradiction which is not likely to be transcended in the near future. My analysis brings forward two points, through a historical exploration of the European integration process.

First, I suggest that what invites further research and guides the formation and the development of the European integration process is geopolitical antagonism. This antagonism has two dimensions. The first revolves around the EU Member States, as countries in competition with each other, and the second encapsulates the ‘external’ antagonism of these nations as parts of a single entity (Europe) vis-à-vis the big geopolitical powers outside Europe (the Soviet Union in a former period, the United States, Russia and China nowadays).

After the adoption of the so-called Six-Pack of EU laws on economic governance in 2011, European Union (EU) interventions retrenched social welfare and collective labour rights in almost all EU Member States. This chapter therefore aims to contribute to a better understanding of the EU’s economic governance regime and the conceptual, methodological and political questions that it is raising.

Analytical concepts should always be ‘elaborated in close connection with some set of substantive problems’. The substantive problem that we address in our ongoing five-year-long research programme (www.erc-europeanunions.eu) is the following: what are the points of intervention or ‘levers’ by which the EU’s new economic governance (NEG) system may be changed by social actors?

In order to be able to answer this question, we use a conceptual framework that is able to distinguish between horizontal and vertical modes of European integration.

Brexit undoubtedly represents a crisis of the European Union, despite its leaders’ attempts to deny this, or even to present Britain’s departure as a moment of renewal and reinvigoration. But crises have the advantage of revealing the essential structures of a formation, and can offer X-ray vision of the antagonisms that constitute them. This is true in a fundamental sense of Brexit, since one of the main driving forces of the British vote to leave the EU – the potentially fatal tension between national sovereignty and the project of European integration – is inherent in that project.

It is important to emphasise that this tension is only potentially fatal. Indeed, as Alan Milward has shown in The European Rescue of the Nation State (a fundamental work largely ignored by the mediocrities of academic EU integration studies), the initial formation of the European Economic Community (EEC) allowed a reinvigoration of the West European nation states by providing a transnational framework of regulated trade that facilitated the realisation of a Keynesian welfare regime.

At the time this chapter was being completed (December 2017), things had decidedly started looking up for the European Union (EU). A number of electoral hurdles had been cleared by pro-EU mainstream political forces, the economy was gaining momentum and the Brexit negotiations were shifting the mood both in the UK and the rest of Europe in a decidedly more pro-EU direction as well as revealing the UK’s direly weak hand and the extent of the EU’s leverage. Emmanuel Macron’s proposals for EU reform – laid out in his Sorbonne speech – have crystallised a new optimistic mood, revolving around the issue of how to reshape Europe’s federal order in order for the EU to take the next step in the process of integration. Although these developments are part of the ebb and flow of current affairs, they provide some added weight to the argument put forward in this chapter.

The European project has perhaps never been more thoroughly disputed across the whole range of the political spectrum, than it is today. From the far left to the far right, the ongoing crisis is precipitating robust reactions, sometimes caught up in extremist and xenophobic rhetoric and at other times motivated by progressive egalitarian demands. This analysis explores the constitutional relevance of the above developments with a special focus on the constitutional facets of the main outcome of the crisis, austerity, and the response given by European societies.

Constitutional discourse on the European crisis often tends to emphasise the constitutional mutations and institutional shifts of power equilibrium within both the Union and its individual Member States. Within Member States, the strengthening of the executive power has almost become a leitmotif as the safeguarding of austerity under the pretence of necessity and at the expense of democracy informs parliamentary routine.

In a version of an old eastern fable, an elephant stands in a great dark room. Five ‘wise men’, who have never come across such an animal, are granted entrance by the king and asked to describe it. The first goes in, touches the elephant’s leg and, as he comes out, firmly declares: ‘the elephant is like a pillar’. The second goes in after him, but feels the elephant’s tail, thus stating that he disagrees with his colleague; the elephant is like a rope. ‘You are both wrong’, the third one says, having touched the elephant’s ear; ‘the elephant is clearly like a fan’. The fourth touches the elephant’s belly and describes the beast as a wall, while the fifth is awestruck by touching the tusk, which leads him to conclude without a doubt that the elephant is like a tree’s branch. On hearing their conclusion and heated argument, the king scolds them for not having discussed their findings with each other, or not doing as simple a thing as taking the initiative to light a candle before entering the dark room. If they had, they would know the elephant’s actual form and nature.

Two dates help place the eurozone crisis in historical time, even though historical events are almost impossible to delineate with great precision. The sharp phase of the crisis began in May 2010 as the Greek government was shut out of the international markets, and was forced to accept the country’s first bailout. By 2012 the sharp phase was over but the crisis continued for considerably longer, especially in the peripheral countries. In August 2018, a different Greek government, after fully submitting to the demands of the official lenders and completing the course of the bailout programmes, began to regain a form of regular access to the international markets. The eurozone crisis had been formally pacified.

This chapter analyses the Treaty on Stability Coordination and Governance (TSCG), as an emblematic example of the New Economic Governance. The New Economic Governance is the ensemble of economic and fiscal reforms that were introduced in the wake of the financial crisis. In this work, when we talk about New Economic Governance we refer specifically to: the European Semester; the Six-Pack; the Two-Pack; and the TSCG, better known by the name of its Third Title, ‘Fiscal Compact’. All these measures have been adopted by European institutions to deal with the financial speculation on the euro and the financial crisis after 2008. Together with the Financial Aid Programmes and the extraordinary measures of the European Central Bank (ECB), these financial and economic regulations form the institutional answer to the financial crisis in Europe.

In its management of the eurozone crisis, the European Union (EU) reformed its economic policy regime and forged what has become known as the New Economic Governance (NEG). The NEG is constituted by an ensemble of directives, regulations and measures. It consists of the Six-Pack (five regulations and one directive), the Two-Pack (two regulations) and the European Fiscal Compact (or the Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance in the Economic and Monetary Union (TSCG)). Together, they tighten up surveillance and procedures pertaining to the 1996 Growth and Stability Pact. As such, they form a quid pro quo for measures in the field of monetary policy, which attenuated the prohibition against the European Central Bank (ECB) lending to EU institutions and Member States, but which nevertheless became necessary to save Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) against collapse: the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), as well as the Long-Term Refinancing Operations (LTROs) but above all the Outright Monetary Transactions (OMT) of the ECB.