Europe in Hard Times. A Conversation with Dieter Grimm and Michael Wilkinson, Leonardo Mellace (ed.)
The past few years have been a lot more challenging for the European Union because of the obstacles it had to face, which created quite a few worries. The British Referendum, which decided the exit of Great Britain from the European Union, and the incessant landings of refugees along the coasts of the Mediterranean Sea, along with the lasting economic crisis, seem to have given vent to a debate, polarizing the attention of many scholars about the future of the Union.
The economic crisis seems to have weakened the effectiveness of European democracies, enough to look at new reflections about the rights of the citizens, especially of the poor and economically marginalized ones. However, the economic side is not the only one the scholars are concerned about; also, the geopolitical aspect implies different problems and questions that are not merely conceptual. The Brexit vote in the UK seems to have strengthened a tendency towards the disintegration of the European Union. Furthermore, the economic rescue of those countries risking default included new regulations and management techniques that limited the political and economic discretionary power of the single states. The logic of solidarity expressed in the national Constitutions seems to have been sacrificed in favour of the free market, the preservation and the expansion of what had turned into the main priority of supranational lawmaking. In such a context, the dissatisfaction and the fears of the forgotten and the excluded are growing deeper.
That being said – and here I combine several questions which have been raised – some aspect must be analysed further, and this is what I am about to with the help of two distinguished professors, Dieter Grimm and Michael Wilkinson.