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Publishers Abstract:
The debate on the appropriate responses to the crisis is increasingly, and more directly than ever, calling into question the future of the European Union as a polity. This is a remarkable shift in perspective. Since autumn 2008, the financial and public debt crisis had been represented as a purely internal challenge to the smooth functioning of the institutional and legal framework of the internal market and the economic and monetary union (EMU). The present paper does not engage directly in the emerging discussion on the future of the EU polity. Yet, it aims at providing an indirect contribution by pointing to an important aspect that is often overlooked or misrepresented in that debate, namely that the European responses to the crisis since autumn 2008 have already set in motion a number of processes that are reshaping the EU polity. The recourse to a method of EU action based upon intergovernmentalism and dominated by the focus on the sustainability of EMU is, however, not destined to underpin a smooth transition.
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