Fault Lines in European Integration. An Introduction

One decade after the collapse of Lehman Brothers heralded the economic and financial crisis that would keep the world in suspense and provide the initial spark for a range of processes of economic restructuring, the project of European integration finds itself confronted with a variety of problems that impede the realization of policy cohesion on the European level. In this introductory chapter, the editors define a transdisciplinary framework for analysing the current crisis in its multidimensionality and present the different political, socioeconomic, and economic approaches employed therein. Combining the neo-Gramscian concept of hegemony with a heterodox economic approach, the chapter focuses on questions of policy coherence, democratic accountability and economic restructuring. The chapter provides an overview of the fault lines in European integration and retraces how areas of economic and democratic governance, financialization and militarization, the rise of the extreme right, as well as social exclusion, welfare and migration are facets of this process.