Whither the Solidarity? Opportunity in Crisis: The Eurozone Crisis and the Future of European Integration

The on-going eurozone crisis has inspired cynics to ask, ‘is the European Union broken, or just broke.’ Alarmist titles such as Is the EU Doomed? and After the Fall: The End of the European Dream and the Decline of a Continent fill the bookshelves of Eurosceptics. Rather than despair, some view the crisis as an opportunity for genuine democratization from the bottom up as a means to revive the European project and the ideals envisioned by its inspirational founders. The eurozone economic crisis has exposed the political crisis that has been festering long before the conversion to the single currency. The chaos caused by the crisis has revealed a profound lack of democratic legitimacy as well as a fundamental undermining of European solidarity that was to be the foundation of European integration. The challenges, many of which pre-date the eurozone crisis, have only served to magnify and reinforce the need for creative solutions to the malaise. The challenges are not just economic, but political, institutional, societal, and international. The crisis has led to a loss of legitimacy and to two contrasting views of Europe: the Europe that has come about in the wake of the eurozone crisis, or a new model of Europe that revives and reinvigorates European solidarity. The initial integration of Europe was a topdown process. It is time for civil society to reconstruct European integration from the bottom up, and from the subterranean politics that has reveled itself so clearly in the countries most affected by the eurozone crisis.