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It seems to me that, during the last decade since the euro crisis began in 2010, there has been a troubling transformation of the EU. I have tried to describe this transformation in four essays I have written over the years since then. 1/7
After the euro crisis began, the EU became more coercive and more German. History seemed to return to Europe – in particular, the problem of hegemony, which the EU had meant to overcome, re-emerged in geo-economic form. 2/7 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.17104/1611-8944_2013_3_279
German power led to an expansion of the use of conditionality in the eurozone. The EU was remade in the image of the IMF in order to be more “competitive” – not so much a “Europe qui protege” as a “Europe qui surveille et punit”. 3/7 https://berlinpolicyjournal.com/discipline-and-punish/
Historically, “pro-Europeans” had been anti- or post-sovereigntist. But after 2016 they embraced the idea of “European sovereignty” – though in the sense of (quasi-)state sovereignty, not popular sovereignty. 4/7 https://berlinpolicyjournal.com/europes-sovereignty-conundrum/
As “pro-Europeans” have gone from seeing the EU as a model to seeing it as a competitor, they have become more defensive and begun to think in increasingly Huntingtonian terms – what I call the civilisational turn in the European project. 5/7 https://www.newstatesman.com/world/2021/02/what-does-it-mean-be-pro-european-today
Thus two right-wing visions of the EU have emerged in the last decade: Merkel’s idea of a “competitive” Europe in which global competition is seen mainly in economic terms; and Macron’s vision in which global competition is seen in civilisational terms. 6/7
Merkel thwarted Macron’s original vision of a “Europe qui protege”, which focused on economic protection – that is, protection from the market. But under pressure from the far right, Macron has reinvented it as a civilisational project focused on cultural protection. 7/7
