European Studies used to be dominated by legal and political science approaches which hailed the progress of European integration and its reliance on law. The recent set of crises which struck the EU have highlighted fundamental problems in the ways and means by which European integration...

This paper analyses the EU's response to the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis. It examines the background to the crisis and how the threat to the single currency taxed the decision-making capacity of the EU, while also exposing long-standing fears about an absence of democratic legitimacy. In...

Despite the large output declines suffered by emerging Europe in 2008-09, a major currency and banking crisis was avoided. This paper argues that European economic and political integration was a mitigating factor in this. Cross-border banking groups, in particular, seem to have forestalled a...

Up until the economic and financial crisis, economic conditions in the European regions had been converging. This process has come to a complete standstill in recent years due to lower growth in Eastern Europe and stagnation in Southern Europe.

Among the many meanings given to the idea of a European ‘constitution’, perhaps the most widespread relates to the limitation and constraint of power. Missing from this conception, however, is arguably the very essence of genuinely ‘constituted’ authority: the capacity to mobilise fiscal...

This paper analyses how Italy's decades-long decline turned the country into the euro area's Achilles heel, the most vulnerable spot in the common currency. We use a structuralist framework to synthesise different (competing) supply-side and demand-side explanations, accounting for long-term...