As part of ECFR's 'Reinvention of Europe' project, the authors examine the euro crisis from the perspective of Spain, and argue that new powers must be transfered to the EU alongside an improvement in democratic governance and the acceptance of a new European social contract.
Citizens across Europe are being asked to replace politics and economics with a sheer act of faith in austerity. But it's clear that they are starting to feel the need to stop this nonsense, and European leaders need to take this seriously.
The lack of a defined European response to the current crisis is forcing EU member states to renationalise their own foreign policy, rather than forge common positions. This new age of geoeconomics carries a hidden cost for Europe in the long run.
Just as the mechanisms that made democracy function in city states were not adequate for governing nation states, representative democracies today are showing themselves incapable of managing, effectively and democratically, the system that is emerging in Europe.
EU member states worry too much about speaking with one voice. But endless unified expressions of 'interest and concern' about the situation in Tunisia and Egypt show that the problem is that others aren't listening because we often have little to say.
It is easy to resign oneself to the idea that 'Chinese democracy' is an oxymoron. Yet the potential implications of democratisation in China are so huge that the possiblity of it happening is worth imagining. Lu Xiaobo allows us to do so, if only for a few hours
Germany was a model for the post-Franco rebuilding of Spanish democracy, and for a time was perhaps Spain’s most important ever partner. The switch to rivalry in recent years, and Spain’s failure to support Germany while it struggled with the financial implications of reunification, has meant that Madrid’s erstwhile allies in Berlin are distant at this hour of crisis
In the past, Germany has been both a model and a partner for Spain. But there have been deep-seated changes in how Berlin views southern Europe, and seen from Spain, it is as if Germany has decided southern Europe is a burden that prevents it from going global and needs to be dumped
At first glance the recent Franco-British treaty on defence looks like a model of pragmatism, tinged by a British desire to keep greater pan-EU defence cooperation at bay. But like so many European agreements over the last decades, this aspiration to preserve sovereignty may not prevent the treaty contributing to exactly that higher level of cooperation
Spain has a new minister of foreign affairs – Trinidad Jimenez. So what are the priorities? Firstly, to restore international confidence in Spain, but then to think of the long term challenges in a world that is changing quickly