Danger, One EU Crisis May Hide Another: Social Model Anxieties and Hard Cases

Abstract

It is widely agreed in the wake of the French and Dutch referendum rejections of the Europe Constitution that the EU is in serious crisis. This article argues that the EU's crisis is much deeper than ordinarily understood, however. The weak performance of key continental EU economies, particularly France and Germany, is related to structural problems in continental social models and casts a large shadow over the Union's medium-term prospects. The roots of these problems cannot be easily understood using the different institutionalist analytical techniques of contemporary political economy. Nor are they likely to be amenable to quick and clever policy reforms. Instead they are rooted in long-standing features of national social model architecture that have been reinforced, in recent decades, by the domestic consequences of fundamental foreign policy choices, in the French case for renewed European integration in the 1980s and in the German by unification.