History books about the European Union are full of crises – empty chairs crisis in the mid-1960s, economic crisis and its European effects in the 1970s, the British budgetary crisis in the 1980s, and we could continue the list. However, in the recent years the EU shows parallel crises – conflict in the Ukraine that ruined the idea of Eastern partnership and currently seems to have extended to a NATO-Russia conflict, crisis in the institutional setup, problems with legitimacy and public trust, problems with leadership and the obvious crises of the Euro, Brexit, migration and the recent COVID-19 crisis.
The course offers an overview of the current crisis areas on the basis of up-to-date social science literature and political analyses and aims to give an insight to both the reasons of the crises and potential ways out.
The course will be based on student contributions and debate. As students are from different EU member states, the gruop can have insights from different EU countries on the EU crisis areas.
1 Euroscepticism + legitimacy crisis
2. Values in the EU – is democracy in crisis in the Member States?
3. Leadership crisis in the EU – the role of Germany and France
4. The European economic model in crisis –the Draghi plan
5. Disintegration? Brexit and disintegration theories
6. Migration crisis
7. War in the Ukraine
8. The EU in the world – strategic autonomy?
9. Enlargement crisis – who is going to join the EU and when?
10. The history of EU crises and the future of the EU.
At the end of the course, the learner will be able to debate about the different crisis areas in the European Union, identify its consequeces to their repsective member state and understand other peoples’ and countries’ challenges connected to them.
It would be useful if participants had previous knowledge about the European Union (history, institutions mainly) but it is not a prerequisite.
Bijsmans, P. (2020). Euroskepticism, a multifaceted phenomenon. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.1062
Michael Blauberger & Ulrich Sedelmeier (2025) Sanctioning democratic backsliding in the European Union: transnational salience, negative intergovernmental spillover, and policy change, Journal of European Public Policy, 32:2, 365-391, DOI: 10.1080/13501763.2024.2318483
Henriette MĂĽller & Femke A. W. J. Van Esch (2020) The contested nature of political leadership in the European Union: conceptual and methodological cross-fertilisation, West European Politics, 43:5, 1051-1071, DOI: 10.1080/01402382.2019.1678951
Lucas Schramm & Ulrich Krotz (2024) Leadership in European crisis politics: France, Germany, and the difficult quest for regional stabilization and integration, Journal of European Public Policy, 31:5, 1153-1178, DOI: 10.1080/13501763.2023.2169742
PATBERG, Marcus: (2021): The Democratic Ambivalence of EU Disintegration: A Mapping of Costs and Benefits. Swiss Political Science Review 27(3): 601–618 doi:10.1111/spsr.12455
Tara Varma and Sophie Roehse : Understanding Europe’s turn on migration. Brookings Institute, 2025.
Niemann, A., & Zaun, N. (2023). Introduction: EU external migration policy and EU migration governance: introduction. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 49(12), 2965–2985. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2023.2193710
Davide Genini, How the war in Ukraine has transformed the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy, Yearbook of European Law, 2025;, yeaf003, https://doi.org/10.1093/yel/yeaf003
Claudia Wiesner, Michèle Knodt (2023) (Eds.) The War Against Ukraine and the EU Facing New Realities. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35040-5 Chapter 6.
Student presentations, gruop work (depending on the size of the group), debate.
Transcript of records