1. The Crisis of Legitimacy of the European Union

It is clear today that the European Union is suffering from a growing loss of legitimacy among social sectors all across Europe. It is ever costlier to be associated with supposed European values such as democracy, progress, wellbeing, and human rights. We are witnessing an organic crisis in the full Gramscian sense of the term — that is, both a consequence and a cause of the post–Maastricht Treaty model. This model has been nothing more than a neoliberal straitjacket, a lethal combination of austerity, free trade, predatory debt, and precarious and poorly paid labor making up the DNA of contemporary financialized capitalism.

Institutional Europe has tried to contain this crisis of legitimacy and governability by granting cosmetic reforms, in the hope of lending a certain mantle of liberal-democratic credibility that it otherwise lacks. The EU governance framework can thus be renewed in five-year cycles, coinciding with European parliamentary elections. This makes it possible to try to obscure the image of a bureaucratic apparatus, hierarchically structuring a balance of power between states aligned along the hegemonic Berlin-Paris axis.