The war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which began shortly after the breakup of Yugoslavia, influenced the intergroup relations of the former republics and led to the formation of several different (and difficult) collective memories of past conflicts (and the time before the conflict). Although the war ended more than 25 years ago, it has had unprecedented consequences for the citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and has led to a change in population structure and relationships among people within the country. Currently divided into two entities and one district, and burdened by a heavy bureaucratic apparatus and debt, Bosnia and Herzegovina is struggling with the accelerating “brain drain” of its young citizens to EU countries and the influx of refugees and migrants from the Middle East who, unable to cross the border to Croatia, remain “detained” within Bosnia and Herzegovina. In this chapter I will try to briefly present the major problems that Bosnia and Herzegovina has been going through since the end of the 1992–5 war while focusing mostly on intergroup relations, unhealed trauma, and how these interact with high brain drain, corruption, EU accession, and current migrant crisis.

Movements

There are different reasons why people leave the country, but unemployment, low salaries, threatening political rhetoric, high levels of corruption, poor forecasts for the future, and accession to the EU could be considered the most common. As Samir Huseinović (2019) reported, an estimated 30,000 citizens have left Bosnia and Herzegovina since the beginning of 2019, and a further 178,000 citizens have left the country in the last five years. Those who leave are working-age people who want to provide a better life for their families, away from the divisions and still-present nationalism.

While the youth of Bosnia and Herzegovina is leaving the country, there has been an influx of refugees and migrants from the Middle East – particularly in the last two years. Those immigrants do not intend to stay in Bosnia, but they are unable to cross the border with Croatia and continue their journey. Therefore, they are doomed to spend time moving between Bosnia and Serbia, often illegally, in a vain attempt to gain access to one of the countries of the EU.

The post-Keynesian school is a heterodox school of economics the scope and objectives of which can be summarized as Thomas Palley (1996: 9) does when he claims that “[t] he Post Keynesian project represents both a recovery and an extension of the economic paradigm developed by Keynes” (emphasis added). Both terms, “recovery” and “extension”, require some explanation and qualification.

Recovery from the neoclassical synthesis

In the first instance, the message of the General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (Keynes 1936) has to be “recovered” from the limiting interpretation that it was given pretty much as soon as it was published, when crucial choices were made the overall effect of which could arguably be described as the domestication and eventual dismissal of anything truly revolutionary. This is the general body of literature that has come to be known as the neoclassical synthesis and that constituted, and to an extent still does, the bulk of taught undergraduate macroeconomics. In summary, it broadly comprises the IS– LM model developed independently by several, most notably John Hicks in Britain and Alvin Hansen in the United States, combined with a supply side represented by the Phillips curve. Its most influential statement arguably comes in Paul Samuelson's textbook Economics (1948), which has had many subsequent editions since its first publication in 1948. It could be described as the most widely read and adopted textbook in the entire discipline of economics, and therefore its influence is enormous. What Samuelson wrote was an interpretation of Keynes that was not at odds with the rest of economic theory developed until then. This is why it can be described as a synthesis, in that it provides a way of reconciling the novel statement of why an economy would settle at an under-employment equilibrium in the short run only. The longer run was determined exactly as classical (and neoclassical) theory had done, however, so that the Keynesian contribution had not been one of a paradigm shift, or of a scientific revolution, but, instead, one of qualifying the overall statements, which remained classical in their method and outlook.

Democracy in Europe is facing a crisis that is unrivaled since the interwar period. Like 90 years ago, no part of the continent is immune to the challenge. In seeking ways forward, an excellent though perhaps forgotten source is the wisdom of the communist dissidents of Eastern and Central Europe. Many of these activists were inspired by the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, signed in the summer of 1975. After two years of negotiations, this agreement committed states on both sides of the East–West divide to take steps to enhance security, improve economic ties, and promote human rights.

When the Helsinki Accords (as they have come to be called) were signed, many critics of détente insisted the Soviets had once again hoodwinked naive Western leaders. The naysayers claimed that Helsinki allowed the Soviets and their satellites to make empty promises about upholding political and civil rights while achieving valuable strategic goals. Neither the accords’ opponents nor the communist governments expected, however, that brave and principled people within these states would use this international agreement, as well as state laws, to pressure their governments to abide by the promises made in that third Helsinki “basket” and that their efforts would help bring about communism's collapse (Thomas 2001).

For more than a decade, activists all over Eastern and Central Europe and the Soviet Union, who pushed for Helsinki to be honored, suffered enormously. They were denounced by colleagues and even friends, prevented from doing the work they loved, arrested, and subjected to various forms of abuse. Still, communist officials could not stamp out the relevance of legal promises and dissidents’ commitments to holding the regimes to account.

Lessons from Prague

The story of the Helsinki Watch groups, as many were called, and particularly Charter 77, the one that emerged in Czechoslovakia in the year of its name, may seem outdated today. Contemporary autocrats and populists appear to have found ways to both depoliticize the majority of citizens and allow most to exercise the civil rights that individuals deem important.

The study of Europe has never been more active. Whether the conversation turns to populism, Brexit, immigration, or austerity, Europe is at the forefront. The same is true when scholars debate the future of democracy, the stability of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), efforts to combat climate change, or the struggle to maintain a multilateral world order. Europe may be the “old” continent, but it is a constant source of interest, inspiration, innovation, insight, and hope for the future.

Research on Europe has continued to grow as well. You can see this progression in the page budgets, citations, and download statistics for the major European journals. You can also see it in the length and breadth of the publishing lists on Europe from the major university and commercial presses. The professional associations that focus on Europe have widened their memberships, multiplied their conferences and workshops, and expanded their remits. Meanwhile, the range of scholars involved in this activity extends ever more widely beyond the core group that straddles the North Atlantic to a dynamic new community of scholars in Central and Eastern Europe and beyond into China, South and South East Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

From research to engagement

The study of Europe has also never been more important. You can see this importance in the wide-ranging misperceptions of Europe that are held on both sides of the Atlantic, in the polarizing debate that surrounded the British referendum on European Union (EU) membership, in the divisions that emerged across the European continent during the recent economic and financial crisis, and in the reaction of many Europeans to the sudden upsurge in migration from Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia. Misperceptions often reveal themselves in European relations with China, Russia, and the United States. Caricatures tend to predominate over subtlety or nuance; increasingly, moreover, both popular discourse and public policy-making seems to bend to stereotypes and away from substance.

The challenge now is to take advantage of this new dynamism in the study of Europe to strengthen and inform popular perception and public policy – not just within Europe and among European countries, but throughout Europe’s relations with the outside world (and particularly in the United States and China).

Over the past decades, Europe has turned into a “continent of immigration” that is increasingly shaped by cross-border mobility and a growing ethno-cultural diversity of its population. The end of the Cold War divide in 1989, the completion of the single European market, and the accelerating speed of globalization have been the main driving forces behind this development. Clearly there is variation in this trend across Europe, but in general terms, Europe now shares some of the experiences of larger and sustained levels of immigration that are characteristic of immigrant settler states such as the United States or Canada. With the gradual, yet momentous, sociopolitical transformation of European societies through migration, the governance of cross-border movement, settlement, and cultural diversity poses some fundamental political and policy challenges.

The politicization of “them” and “us”

The most obvious of these challenges arises at the interface between political contestation and identity politics. Migration has become a highly contested and emotionally charged issue that has transformed competitive party politics in Western democracy. In particular, nationalist-populist actors have made migration and the protection of national borders the central theme around which their political mobilization revolves. Anti-migrant rhetoric and the scapegoating of migrants have become the cornerstone of right-wing populist ideologies across Europe. The resurgence of exclusionary nationalism and anti-immigrant forces has the potential of developing into a veritable threat to the viability of liberal democracies in general and the rights of minorities in particular. The politics of migration is likely to continue dominate electoral agendas and public debates on citizenship, identity, belonging, and community. In this respect, the politicization of migration is critically tied to a wider public debate about the transformation of traditional collective identities that historically have been shaped by legacies of colonialism and images of ethno-cultural homogeneity.

It is a short step from identity politics to the racialized exclusion of migrants. The xenophobia, scapegoating, and populist backlash linked to the refugee crisis, ongoing refugee movements, and demographic change has a strong racialized and racializing element, particularly when it comes to characterizing Muslims

Urban poverty began to lose relevance as a policy problem at the EU level in the early 2000s. By the end of that decade, however, the impact of the global financial and economic crisis brought urban exclusion back to the fore. The importance of the issue remains undiminished. After years of post-crisis “austerity”, Europe's economies appear to be recovering. Even in wealthier countries and regions, however, urban poverty is still high.

The Seventh Report of Economic, Social and Territorial Cohesion of the EU (European Commission 2017a: xv) shows that the risk of poverty or social exclusion remains higher than before the crisis in cities, towns, and suburbs in those countries that were members of the EU before May 2004 (the EU-15). In 2014 there were 34 million people in the EU at risk of poverty or social exclusion living in cities, and 24.2 million people living in towns, and suburbs (Eurostat 2019). Most of these people are concentrated in deprived neighborhoods. These are areas that should become specific policy objectives of the urban dimension of Cohesion Policy in the post-2020 period.

There are other powerful reasons to place the focus for EU Cohesion Policy on deprived neighborhoods. Long-term developments related to demographic trends, technological innovation, climate change, and social interaction will have a stronger negative impact on the inhabitants of deprived urban areas. At the same time, the EU adopted Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development of the United Nations and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015. SDG number 1 is no poverty.

This short chapter proposes a critical review of the experience developed by the EEC and, from 1993, the EU in addressing the problems of deprived neighborhoods from the early 1990s to the present. That temporal perspective is useful in revealing the changing definition of the “urban problem” and the evolution of policy priorities over time. A longitudinal analysis also helps to underscore the lessons learned through the development of a specific policy for tackling deprived neighborhoods over the past two decades. That experience can be the starting point for the creation of a new specific instrument in EU Cohesion Policy to face the problems of vulnerable urban areas after 2020.

This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall, the physical manifestation of the ideological divisions of the European continent and a symbol of the decades-long split between European nations. The European project, which is the term used for the idea of a united Europe, developed as a consequence of World War II and intensified after the end of the Cold War, because it was perceived that the pursuit of national self-interest by European countries has long threatened peace on the continent. With time, this vision materialized in the form of the EU, currently encompassing 28 (27 after the UK left) out of the more than 40 countries in Europe. The success of this supranational entity relies on the premise of eliminating borders between European states and invalidating the role of nationhood and sovereignty, for the benefit of consensual decision-making. Therefore, the question of national sovereignty and the degree to which individual states are willing to forego self-rule is at the heart of the debate on the future of the EU.

The preamble of the Treaty on European Union emphasizes the commitment assumed by all member states to “continue the process of creating an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe”, solidifying an ideal of a European integration, the level of which remains vague. It is precisely this undefined form of the ever closer union which has been the cause of many a disagreement between member states, all of which have demonstrated a distinct understanding and preference for what the end result of the European project should be. Expressions of these preferences could be seen in the numerous opt-outs of the United Kingdom, the referenda in France and the Netherlands voting down a European Constitution, the push for a greater political union of the Western member states versus the partiality for preserving sovereign decision-making of the Eastern member states, and last but not least in the reality of Brexit. While the prospect of the United Kingdom's exit from the EU was observed with general disappointment, many among the European federalists also viewed it as an opportunity for the EU to pursue its plans for a closer political integration. Nevertheless, there remains a dissonance among the remaining EU member states on the final stage of European integration and the level of sovereignty states are willing to cede.

When she spoke as candidate for the presidency of the European Commission before the assembled members of the European Parliament on 16 July 2019, Ursula von der Leyen articulated Europe's global challenges as follows:

In her speech, von der Leyen delivered a clear vision of a sui generis collective European position. But reality often tells another story. Consider European development policy in Africa. For decades, the EU has undertaken several important steps in realizing its goals of European integration. During the 2000s, the EU passed the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness and began forging a new consensus on development. Now the EU is working to shape international development cooperation in accordance with its agenda to promote human rights, good governance, and democracy. One challenge for the European Commission has been to “produce a statement on EU development policy, a sort of Brussels consensus to counter the Washington consensus” (Carbone 2007: 54–5). With the establishment of European External Action Service in 2010, moreover, the EU is emerging as a major actor in the field of global development.

Nevertheless, there are a number of obstacles to the creation of a common European position on development. Internally, the EU has not overcome the conflicts of interests and competing policies among the member states. Externally, the EU is still facing challenges dealing with stakeholders at the local level in African countries where European interests and colonial legacies often become entangled. Increasingly, moreover, Europe is not the only player.

Analysts and observers of social and political change sometimes have difficulty separating enthusiasms from science. This has been particularly the case in the brief history of European integration. The high hopes of the initial common market years gave way to numerous worries in the 1970s. This moment was followed by renascent European energy, led by Commission activism, around the single market and Maastricht treaty. Many observers then concluded that Europe's growing pains had given way to forwards movement, a judgement that deeply marked scholarly thinking. By the mid-1990s, however, it seemed that this might not be the case. As time went on, it became clearer that what had been greeted as a golden age was really a moment of transition toward significant changes in the EU's constitution that brought their own problems. This essay briefly discusses the golden age and the less golden transition that followed.

From Eurosclerosis to Euro-optimism

By the late 1970s, many observers had written off the EC as a noble but stagnating experiment. Europe's postwar boom had ended in high inflation, low growth, and high unemployment, leading member states to protect their national interests in EC decision-making and erect non-tariff barriers threatening the common market. The European Monetary System (EMS), designed to align currencies and avoid competitive devaluations, had instead revealed the Deutschmark's power and spawned member state discontent. The early 1980s then brought “Eurosclerosis”, with the British blocking EC decision-making to win reductions in their budgetary contribution and France's “Mitterrand experiment” crashing and burning.

France's new-found desire for different EC directions and Helmut Kohl's ascension to the German chancellorship renewed Franco-German collaboration, however. The 1984 Fontainebleau European Council reduced the UK's budgetary contribution and brought the British back into the fold, agreed on enlarging to Spain and Portugal, and led to the appointment of Jacques Delors as president of the Commission.

Having been a Euro-parliamentarian and Mitterrand's minister of the economy after 1981, Delors had in-depth knowledge of the challenges. A progressive Catholic “social liberal,” he was familiar with the EC's many unenacted reform plans, aware of the changes underway in the global economy, in touch with progressive business interests, and, above all, convinced that the EC had to renew itself. In his initial speech to the European Parliament in January 1985, Delors proposed a new initiative to build a single market: a “space without borders.”

Cultural union, along with economic and political union, is one of the aspirations of the EU. From the first gatherings in Switzerland to the Cultural Resolution, with which the 1948 Congress of Europe in The Hague ended, discussions of cultural unity and cultural renewal dominated the postwar European project. In these considerations, the “founding fathers” of the EU were anything but the small-step bureaucrats they are often painted to be. In 1958, looking back on his first year as the first president of the Commission of the EEC, Walter Hallstein set forward his vision for the EC. In “The Unity of European Culture and the Policy of Uniting Europe”, he presented a clear statement on the role of culture in the European project, placing a commonality of culture as the foundation for political and economic aspirations.

In fact, Hallstein suggested that the question of culture is more important than the aspirations of the ECSC or Euratom, which had no possibility of inspiring the populace to commit to the common European project. He echoed in this speech ideas expressed similarly by Robert Schuman, Paul-Henri Spaak, Alcide de Gasperi, Altiero Spinelli, and Winston Churchill. Jacques Delors in 1985, following in Hallstein's footsteps, set forward a cultural policy agenda during his first speech as the head of the European Commission:

Yet culture, European culture, and the processes of European cultural unionization have received relatively little attention. The focus on European politics and economics has overshadowed research on European culture.

The importance of culture

A focus on culture is important at this moment during which the European project is fractured: the UK is heading out into the Atlantic, Turkey is aimed eastward, a Eurasian geopolitical trench opens up from the Baltics to the Bosporus, and an EU border regime turns the Mediterranean into a mass grave.

In the 2010s, as large numbers of asylum seekers arrived in Europe, anti-migrant discourses rose throughout the continent. Within this overwhelmingly xenophobic atmosphere, many migrants and members of minority groups did not accept their outsider status but showed that they belong to Europe in different ways. This chapter presents an example from Berlin, Germany which illustrates how minorities in Europe show their centrality to the working of their cities and receive support from different parts of their societies (Filiz 2018). The goal is to provide an example of minority agency and solidarity contributing to the scholarship on how immigrants respond to the emerging challenges they face in Europe.

In 2015, code enforcement offices in certain neighborhoods in Berlin started to enforce a previously ignored law that forbade most shops from opening on Sundays. This law was enforced especially for spatis (corner shop-like businesses that are open late hours and on Sundays when most other shops are closed) in northern parts of Neukölln, a “hip” neighborhood known for sizable migrant populations. This sudden change affected many Turkish shopkeepers – where “Turkish” refers to individuals who migrated from Turkey or whose parents or grandparents came from Turkey, and not to an ethnic identity – who made up a large portion of spati owners and workers, especially in neighborhoods affected by this enforcement. Thus, members of the largest minority in this European capital experienced a bureaucratic dystopia that contradicted Berlin's permitting and diversity-friendly image. Turkish owners and workers did not simply accept this sudden change which threatened to bring an end to their operations. Instead, they responded to this bureaucratic dystopia by defining their businesses as indispensable for this cosmopolitan European city.

Responding to the Sunday bans

The law entitled “Berlin Shop Opening Law” (Berliner Ladenöffnungsgesetz) regulates businesses’ operating hours and states that shops are not allowed to open on Sundays. In response to the enforcement of this law, spati owners established a professional society under the name Berliner Späti e.V (Berlin Späti Organization). The group started their operations when the Sunday bans intensified in 2015 and had their official opening after the local elections in September 2016. Almost all the members were Turkish when the organization was founded.

It is no secret that European studies has suffered a setback in the academy. Maligned in some quarters as the superannuated practice of “Eurocentrism”, or glibly sidelined in others as mere “area studies”, the field has clearly slipped from its once prominent place among institutional priorities. How can we revive and sustain a vibrant interest in European societies among those in higher education who have, over time, succumbed to the notion that Europe is passé? The answer, in our opinion, lies not only in making the ongoing argument for the topicality of Europe – which is implicit in all our work – so much as in developing institutional strategies that provide concrete incentives for students and faculty to engage with it.

The “unexpected Europeanists” of our title are, on the one hand, faculty whose research interests include unlikely or unacknowledged investments in European studies, and on the other, students who may be eager to include European studies in their curriculum, but have not yet been offered flexible curricular options that draw meaningful connections to their primary disciplines. Thus, while we would always welcome new faculty hires and fully declared undergraduate majors in the area of European studies, we focus here upon raising interest in Europe among current colleagues and students whose primary interests lie – or appear to lie – elsewhere.

Recognizing that without students there is little point to an enhanced European studies faculty, we propose a two-pronged approach. To cultivate the undergraduate base at both Georgia and Notre Dame, we have in collaboration with other colleagues created new and flexible undergraduate curricula featuring “transnational European studies”. At the University of Georgia, Benjamin Ehlers and Martin Kagel introduced a transnational European studies minor; at the University of Notre Dame, Heather Stanfiel, and William Donahue have introduced a transnational European studies major with multiple points of entry. To foster broader-based faculty interest, we offer an annual interdisciplinary, Berlin-based seminar that convenes a vertically integrated group of scholars ranging from advanced graduate students to established senior scholars.

Crises of society, economy, and democracy are rocking the foundations of Europe. As Nathan Gardels writes in the Washington Post (21 September 2018): “Across Western democracies, the social cohesion that once sustained political consensus has severely eroded.” Social cohesion requires interdependent individuals to perceive societal well-being as crucial to peace and prosperity, and to cooperate for shared social goals (Council of Europe 2008: 7). Yet marginal groups are suffering in the contemporary political, economic, and social climate, and outsiders are increasingly vocal about their discontent. Right-oriented protest groups often concentrate their free-floating rage on border-crossing flows of refugees and workers. Yellow-vested protesters and neofascist memes more broadly signal malaise with state authority and with societies that forget the leftovers.

Economic malaise certainly contributes to the crisis of social cohesion. Postindustrial change, a jobless recovery from the financial and euro crises, and rising inequality threaten economic well-being, and citizens at the margins receive little from mainstream society. Child poverty rates are on the rise in two-thirds of OECD countries. Young people who are not in employment, education, or training constituted 14 per cent of 15–29 year olds within the OECD in 2016.

The crisis of social cohesion also reflects the deficit of democracy within the EU and receding agreement on the mission of the EU. Despite ardent efforts to construct a supranational Europe with symbols and narratives, a collective European social identity seems out of reach, as few consider the EU to be a whole that is larger than the sum of its parts. Mass voters fear that EU elite technocrats have little interest in respecting national political and cultural traditions. EU collective action is grounded in political or legal logic, rather than in cultural norms of cooperation. This democratic deficit contributes to a legitimation crisis of both national and supranational political authorities.

Varieties of society in a global context

Countries have historically built on diverse models to reconcile growth and social solidarity. These models make different assumptions about the importance of marginal groups to national growth projects and to the health of the polity. The social democratic model found in the Nordic countries posits that each individual should contribute to building a strong society and economy.

I must confess to being a late convert to post-Keynesian economics. It never featured in any of my undergraduate or postgraduate studies. My earliest recollection of coming across any of its proponents was at a Royal Economic Society conference at which one of the keynote addresses was given by Paul Davidson. That evening, I remember confessing to an established professor I was with to not knowing anything about post-Keynesians, and his reassuring me that it was not something I needed to worry about. There matters rested until staffing changes at Durham meant a reallocation of authors and topics in an introductory course of history of economic thought, so that John Maynard Keynes came into my part of the syllabus. I thought I knew what Keynes had said, but, obviously, set about reading up on the topic again. It was then that I realized that what I thought he had said was mostly inaccurate, if not wrong altogether. I also realized how much I had missed out and how valuable that was. The rediscovery of Keynes himself was one of the first steps. It was reading up on Keynes that led me to the post-Keynesians, in particular Davidson on rational expectations, which was very much a chance find, and John King on micro-foundations. From then on it has been my personal journey of discovering a literature that I truly wish had featured earlier in my economic education. The more I read, the more I found that interested me. Much as John Hicks wrote to Davidson in private correspondence (about ergodicity), sometimes one needs a specific word for one's thoughts to find shape. It was the same for me: many doubts, which I had somehow suppressed on various elements of mainstream economic theory, I found had already been addressed by post-Keynesians, often, but not always, following a lead from Keynes himself.

The next stage in my post-Keynesian journey came when the newly instituted third-year undergraduate optional module dedicated to this heterodox school came to be vacant without ever having run. I was called to step in. In this, as in many other things, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my then colleague Dr Mark Hayes, who had proposed the module and done the preliminary work for bringing it into existence, but had found himself unable to deliver it in the end.

The place of European studies in the landscape of North American social sciences has faced serious challenges since the seventies (Lamont 2013). The general decline of area studies after the transition away from a colonial, and then Cold War-inspired, geographical organization of knowledge production has meant a redefinition of the position of European studies within the social sciences field over the past several decades. This trend has materialized in a highly regrettable decline in funding from some of the main American supporters of independent social science research on Europe, most notably the Ford Foundation and the German Marshall Fund (both following earlier signals from the Mellon Foundation).

Concomitantly, the Global South has come to exercise a growing and powerful attraction on our undergraduates, due to shifts in what it means to be progressive for today's young, the intensification of globalization, and the booming economic and political importance of countries like Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (BRICS). This trend is affecting academic hiring patterns, including the turn of history departments toward global history and the accelerated hiring of experts in areas other than Europe. Although itself a positive change, such a disciplinary shift is not without consequence for European studies.

Similar transformations operate in other disciplines (Lamont 2009). To simplify greatly, within political science, an American politics-based methodological push which went hand in hand with the adoption of economics as a reference point has transformed and challenged European comparative politics, a field with a long lineage of Weberian-inspired qualitative analysis. For its part, US-based anthropology of Europe prospered for a while, albeit just when the discipline itself went into a state of decline. At the same time, macroeconomics continued to veer away from country-based analyses, to focus more exclusively on theoretical innovation and modeling. As for sociology, research endeavors in my field were never firmly grounded in geographic divisions, and very few of my contemporaries have developed intellectual identities as proper “Europeanists”. Instead, while a number of sociologists are serious regional experts, it is not unusual that members of my tribe take on regional topics in a more superficial fashion: they aim to make theoretical or substantive contributions by drawing on evidence that “happened” to be gathered in Europe.

The EU's ongoing rule-of-law crisis, entailed by constitutional backsliding in some of its member states, and the fierce debate as to whether and how EU institutions should intervene, have grown into one of the core issues of the European project. Nowadays, it is generally accepted that the rule-of-law predicament undermines the European integration and, sooner or later, a solution needs to be found. But how can there be a rule-of-law crisis in the EU? Rule of law and human rights (hereafter collectively: rule of law) are said to be the fundamental values of Europe (Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union) and the EU has its own detailed bill of rights (EU Charter of Fundamental Rights).

The problem is that EU law has no doctrine of “diagonality”. This term refers to the application of EU rule of law against member states, as opposed to “straight application”, which refers to the application of EU law requirements against EU institutions, as well as the application of national constitutional requirements against member states. EU law contains a comprehensive set of rule-of-law requirements, which have a full application against EU institutions (“straight application”) but only a very limited one against member states. EU rule of law applies to member states when they implement EU law (“paradigm of scope”), however, notwithstanding its substantial spillover effects, this diagonality is false, as here member states act as the agents of the EU (“apparent diagonal application”), contrary to cases, where EU rule of law is applied to member states acting in their own field of operation (“genuine diagonal application”).

The dead end of the European rule-of-law debate

The ongoing rule-of-law crisis in Europe brought to the fore a fundamental contradiction of the EU's legal and institutional architecture. On the one hand, rule of law and human rights are (at least on the level of declaration) at the cornerstones of the EU: they are clearly recognized by the founding treaties, serve as non-negotiable preconditions for accession, and ensure that the various European mechanisms based on mutual trust and recognition are operational and effective. On the other hand, EU law has no doctrine of diagonality and appears to have very limited power when encountering recalcitrant member states who are contemptuous of the EU's fundamental values.