The editors and the contributors to this book have dedicated a very significant part of their academic lives to the study of the European integration project. They have promoted it and they have profited from it: it was the integration process which generated European-wide discourses, multi-disciplinary and multi-national cooperative communities. This common commitment persists. But it has to address unprecedented challenges. ‘The end of the Eurocrats' dream' is meant as a diagnosis and a message. We are, of course, concerned about the state of the European Union. We are, however, also concerned about the prevailing political and academic perceptions of and responses to the multifaceted European crisis. ‘Buying time’, ‘muddling through’, ‘structural reforms’, the management of assumed functional necessities will not suffice to bring Europe ‘back on track’. The European Union needs to be concerned about its legitimacy, about solidarity and social justice within and between its member states, its constitutional condition, the integrity of its law. The message which our title seeks to convey concerns also the past. The chances of a sustainable renewal depend upon an understanding of the past. We will have to re-examine what we thought were valid assumptions. We have to explore potential failures in the design of the European project and the conceptual frameworks which have guided its praxis.
Our objectives contrast, hence, with the many efforts to provide quick fixes or long-term solutions to so many topical issues on the political agenda. We do not believe, however, that everybody who supports European integration, as we do, must also support the Union's overall trajectory and its main policy orientations or be called ‘anti-European’. Quite the contrary: there is a strong need for a debate about fundamentals, especially among those favouring the European project.
We have pursued our agenda in a sequence of meetings, exchanges of draft papers, their discussion and further elaboration. The first meeting was held at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin in July 2013. A second one, organised by the Berlin Social Science Center, followed in December. For a third meeting we convened in London at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in February 2014. The Institute for Advanced Study in Delmenhorst, Lower Saxony, hosted the group for a concluding workshop in May 2014. It then took a good number of months to finalise the contributions.
Are we too late with the delivery of our product? Throughout the duration of our cooperation, the crisis kept generating spectacular news, anxieties and hectic activities. Now, the tensions within the Union are again rising and the future of European integration is more uncertain than ever. The harsh treatment of Greece and other ‘states in financial difficulties’ has caused enormous collateral damage. If proof were needed of the deplorable state of the Union, its failure to respond responsibly to the refugee crisis has documented it. The need for fundamental debate is, in our view, irrefutable.
We wish to express our gratitude for the financial and organisational support we received from the Hertie School of Governance, the Berlin Social Science Center, the LSE, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Delmenhorst. We would like to thank Rebecca Roberts, Paul Smith, Elizabeth Spicer and Richard Woodham and everybody else at Cambridge University Press for their great help, support and patience throughout the duration of our project.
Last, but not least, we would like to underline how much we appreciate the commitment and patience of our authors. We dedicate this book to the memory of C. Maxwell Watson, the former Director of the Political Economy of Financial Markets Programme at the European Studies Centre of St Anthony's College in Oxford. His contributions to our deliberations were of invaluable importance. It was a pleasure for us all to work with him, albeit all too briefly.
