A Europe of Incentives

After months of failed short-term fixes and mounting panic, European leaders from Merkel to Cameron are now agreed that the only sustainable solution to the euro crisis is political integration. In ‘A Europe of incentives: regaining the trust of citizens and markets’ Mark Leonard and Jan Zielonka lay out how a more inclusive Europe could be achieved. The paper also suggests ways to avoid a Two-Class Europe where decision making is dominated by powerful countries, the technocracy-populism trap and continued crushing austerity.

The Scenario Debate

In ‘Four scenarios for the reinvention of Europe’, ECFR’s director Mark Leonard offers a new framework for understanding Europe's efficiency and legitimacy crises, and examines the political and legal obstacles to a solution in different member states, the new cultural divisions in Europe, and the rise of new populist forces. We are running a series of responses from prominent thinkers and academics:

Chris J. Bickerton
"Populism, after all, is politics without policies; technocracy is policy without politics."

Ivan Krastev
"it is Germany’s view of what is happening in the Union that will more dramatically affect the future of the European project than the troubles of the Greek or Spanish economies."

Brigid Laffan
"as the Union intrudes more and more into domestic budgetary and public finance choices, can party politics in Europe adapt to a very different governance regime?"

Josep M. Colomer
"For democracy to survive and retrieve in Europe, responsiveness and accountability of rulers should be moving from the state level to the EU level"

Paweł Świeboda
"no-one dares to ask the question if the euro is still a political project, as its founders tended to believe, or if it is today about nothing else than damage control."

READ ALL THE INTERVENTIONS