European Integration Past, Present, and Future: Moving Forward through Crisis?

“European integration always moves forward through crisis” is an often-heard refrain from European leaders, EU officials, and scholars of European integration. This paper aims to expose this persistent myth by answering two sets of questions: (1) Is this historically correct? Does EU integration always move forward through crises and have crises in the past led to major breakthroughs? (2) Is the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis, which started in the spring of 2010 with a pending Greek default, qualitatively different than previous challenges and has the EU response been sufficient for it to stave off future crises? After reviewing the historical record of past crises in European integration, the answer to the first question is a definite ‘no.’ Many crises have been proclaimed in the project of postwar European integration without producing any major responses, and there have been plenty of great steps forward not triggered by a crisis. What has explained the past major institutional innovations has more to do with the ideas held by individual EU leaders than with any structural or material interest-based logic. The answer to the second question is ‘yes’ and ‘no.’ The euro crisis is qualitatively different than the previous crises because a ‘comprehensive solution’ requires a much bigger transfer of sovereignty than most national leaders have been willing to contemplate to date, which has made the EU response inadequate so far. At the same time, Brussels’ control over fiscal policy has grown substantially, but without the democratic legitimacy needed to be effective.