A revealing and candid portrayal of a Europe improvising its way through a series of crises. Forced into action by a tidal wave of emergencies, Europe has had to reinvent itself, casting off its legal straitjacket and confronting hard issues that threaten its own political identity.
Prologue Part I Acts and Scenes 1. Improvising: the euro crisis 2. Negotiating: the Ukraine crisis 3. Setting boundaries: the refugee crisis 4. Uprising: the Atlantic crisis Part II The Theatre 5. Two foundations 6. Directors and actors 7. The opposition takes the stage Epilogue
A revealing and candid portrayal of a Europe improvising its way through a series of crises. Forced into action by a tidal wave of emergencies, Europe has had to reinvent itself, casting off its legal straitjacket and confronting hard issues that threaten its own political identity.
Crisis after crisis has beset the European Union in recent years – Greek sovereign debt, Russian annexation of Crimea, unprecedented levels of migration, and the turmoil created by Brexit. An organization originally designed to regulate and enforce rules about fishing rights, wheat quotas and product standards has found itself on the global stage forced to grapple with problems of identity, sovereignty and solidarity without a script or prompt. From Paris to Berlin, London to Athens, European leaders have had to improvise on issues that the Union was never set up to handle and which threaten to engulf this unique political entity. And they have had to do so in full view of an increasingly disenchanted and dissonant public audience. In this candid and revealing portrayal of a Europe improvising its way through a politics of events and not rules, Luuk van Middelaar makes sense of the EU’s political metamorphosis over its past ten years of crisis management. Forced into action by a tidal wave of emergencies, Van Middelaar shows how Europe has had to reinvent itself by casting off its legal straitjacket andconfronting hard issues of power, territorial borders and public authority. Alarums and Excursions showcases the fascinating relationship between the Union and the European heads of government, and the stresses it must withstand in dealing with real world events. For anyone seeking to understand the inner power play and constitutional dynamics of this controversial, but no less remarkable, political institution, this book provides compelling reading.
Luuk van Middelaar is a historian and political theorist. In his role as a speechwriter and close advisor to the president of the European Council (2010–15), van Middelaar witnessed the political theatre of Europe from the front row. He is currently a professor at the Europa Institute of Leiden University. His previous book, The Passage to Europe (winner of the 2012 European Book Prize) has been translated into more than ten languages. He was advisor to the acclaimed BBC programme, Inside Europe: Ten Years of Turmoil (2019).
