Europe?s Crises

Today, the European Union is facing a crisis as serious as anything it has experienced since its origins more than half a century ago. What makes this so serious is that it is not a single crisis but rather multiple crises - the euro crisis, the migration/refugee crisis, Brexit, etc. - that overlap and reinforce one another, creating a cumulative array of challenges that threatens the very survival of the EU. For the first time in its history, there is a real risk that the EU could break up.

This volume brings together sociologists, economists and political scientists from around Europe to shed light on how the EU got into this predicament. It argues that the multiple crises that have plagued the European Union in the last decade stem to a large extent from flaws in its construction and that these flaws are consequences of the political processes that led to the formation of the EU - in other words, the decisions that made possible the development of the EU created the conditions for the multiple crises it experiences today.

This timely and wide-ranging book on one of the most important issues of our time will be of great interest to students and scholars in the social sciences, to politicians and policy-makers and to anyone concerned with Europe and its future.

"Castells and his colleagues convincingly show that the multiple crises facing Europe today - from Greece to Brexit - are not problems imposed on it from without but are to a large extent crises of its own creation. Their wide-ranging and insightful account should be read by everyone concerned with Europe and its future - and above all by those politicians and policy-makers who could change the direction of the EU before it's too late."
Paul Mason, author of Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future

"To understand what we Europeans must do to secure a brighter future together, firstly we must understand the multifaceted nature of the challenges that our common project is facing. This insightful book reminds us that constructive self-criticism is an indispensable exercise in today's Europe."
Javier Solana, President at ESADE Geo-Center for Global Economy and Geopolitics and Distinguished Fellow at the Brookings Institution

"Europe's Crises takes the reader on a journey of relationships and interdependencies, from Maastricht to Brexit [,..] [and] unlike the mainstream media's insistence on hiding the wider context, the reader is constantly reminded of the history, geography and wider geopolitics impacting on the daily lives of Europeans."
Morning Star