George Ross and Jane Jenson, Université de Montréal
Since the 2005 referendums rejecting the Constitutional Treaty, the global financial downturn, and the Euro-zone crisis, even optimists have begun to conclude that the EU faces an historic choice point and its future is not guaranteed. The collective imaginary (see Hall and Lamont, Successful Societies) that served well for decades after 1957 and that generated innovative institutions and practices through the 1990s seems to have lost its way. Concern has generated a flood of recommendations for serious, sometimes dramatic, institutional reform, policy change and new ideas for rethinking the EU. This paper has two goals. The first is to compare recent publications about the Union’s challenges from veteran EU analysts and public intellectuals. The criterion for inclusion is that each has the ear, from near or far, of EU policy communities. The paper tracks the analytical foundations of each analysis, including its assessment of the EU’s basic flaws and possible futures. Its second goal is to determine whether out of these many efforts by engaged intellectuals it is possible to discern signs of a reconfigured collective imaginary suitable for tomorrow’s EU. While never sufficient in itself, intellectual work by public intellectuals is a necessary element of any adequate response to crisis. Thus a finding that there is a polysemy of voices presents a portrait not only of the EU at a crossroad, but also an état des lieux of post-crisis “big think” theorizing still unable to provide signposts for any way forward.
