What do ‘Europeans’ think? Analyses of the European Union’s current crisis by European elites

Abstract:
The EU has been in ‘crisis’ at least since the 2005 referendums. This article presents different explanations for crisis held by high-level EU insiders, based on in-depth interviews with ‘Europeans’, people whose lives have been deeply invested in the EU through careers either committed to ‘building Europe’ or to observing Europe's building sites professionally. The results demonstrate a variety of causal stories that explain the present situation, the conviction that the EU is entering a new and very different era and pervasive sense of pessimism, all in the form of penetrating analyses.