Tomorrow’s Europe: a never closer union

Abstract:

Europe is beset with multiple, intersecting challenges and crises, among them unwelcome inward migration, suffocating indebtedness in the southern tier, rising populist nationalism evident from Britain and France to Hungary and Poland, and residue from the 2008 economic/euro crisis, to name the more prominent ones.

Less noticed or commented is the European Union’s need to readdress its foundational rationale and to adapt it to contemporary reality. Its original stated aim to share sovereignty and pursue supra-national integration in an effort to prevent renewed intra-European warfare is no longer relevant, and today’s electorates demand both more say and new justification behind elites’ calls for continuing integration to shore up the EU’s edifice and ensure its institutional future.