The EU and the Crisis: Key analytical questions to address

The present article sheds light on the state of the EU through three different analytical perspectives. The first has to do with the institutional tensions we have experienced in the last years. The crisis has impacted the European Union just after the conclusion of the lengthy and complex work of revising the Treaty. Once the Lisbon Treaty started to be implemented, an extraordinary number of new problems meant that decision makers needed to revise the legal foundations of the Union (Fabbrini 2011). The second analytical topic is more related to recent trends in the EU governance. The EU has been in fact an extraordinary laboratory for new modes of governance in recent decades. Especially since the end of the 1990s, new forms of regulation and coordination have been proposed and tested through the EU. Thirdly, the crisis has jeopardised the policy package that has characterised the Union and in particular the Eurozone in recent years.