Survival of the Selfless: The EU Sovereign Debt Crisis and Its Effect of Relationships between Member States

Abstract

The European Union is a project designed to bring unity and peace through prosperity. It aims to turn the European continent into the peaceful habitat where 50 distinct and different nation states cooperate and act as a single organism. Its founders aimed to have perpetual peace in the European habitat where all participants cooperate and share. This article is a description of the strongest test this project has had to date, the sovereign debt crisis, and its impact on the relations between member states in the EU. We begin by describing the EU project idea and design and the difficulties it found itself since the beginning of the global financial meltdown of 2008. This was the first major crisis for the Union and it demonstrated lack of proper structural design and volatility of its institutions. As a result, the sovereign debt crisis was characterized by a selfish crisis management mode. The continent was once again divided in the center and the periphery. The center was composed of countries lying in in the inner part of the continent, with high industrial output and financial capabilities. The periphery is composed from countries geographically lying on the edges of the continent and with a high level of debt and low industrial output. Instead of increasing the pace for closer cooperation, the EU moved toward building fault lines with the center trying to impose solutions to the periphery. This article argues for a selfless crisis management mode as the solution to the EU problems. Europeans should act for “the greater good” and consider the nonperforming members as part of a greater whole, a sole organism. The whole body should engage in solving the problems. It is time to complete the EU project building the structures of a single operating unit.