II Countries and Regions, 17 Beyond Legitimacy: Europe’s Crisis of Constitutional Democracy

For anyone under the age of thirty-five, the European Union has been in a state of almost perpetual crisis. The Maastricht Treaty (1992) appeared to be a great leap forward, cementing the three big pillars of European integration: the common market, police and judicial cooperation, and foreign policy. Yet that decade also saw the rise of extreme right-wing political movements in European countries from Austria to the Netherlands and France, and a surge of neo-Nazi attacks on foreigners in Germany. From the mid-2000s onward, the European Union has been nearly...