Afterword Summing Up: The Crisis and Europe’s Future

Abstract

Exploring one’s future, particularly during hard and highly uncertain times, is a very difficult task which may seem to not a few to be ‘mission impossible’. However, such a task is not without merit and it can be undertaken by analysing the past and the present, carefully, by keeping in mind previous lessons. Remembering history may be helpful in order to circumvent rash policies and avoid repeating mistakes. In other words, evaluating the pluses and minuses of past and existing systems, and searching for the institutional and policy foundations of the good and bad times may drive to a better future. The present volume makes an attempt to scrutinize the future course(s) of the European Union (EU) against the backdrop of the on-going crisis of the Eurozone and in the context of a deep financial crisis in the industrialized world and entailed reverberations in emerging economies. Through probing the political economy of this multifold crisis and the flaws of EU institutions and policies, the chapters in this volume point towards possible directions of further integration or fragmentation of the Eurozone, of the EU.