A Crisis of Europe

Abstract

On making her way to the 1999 Conservative Party conference, Margaret Thatcher observed that ‘In my lifetime all our problems have come from mainland Europe and all the solutions have come from the English-speaking nations across the world.’ (The Guardian, 1999). This musing, in many ways, reveals some of the enduring issues defining the UK’s relationship with the (European Union) EU. The current Eurozone crisis is just the last in a long line in ‘problems from mainland Europe’ that have had an impact on UK politics. This chapter examines whether the UK’s way of dealing with the EU has changed at all since the economic crisis and whether the crisis in any sense at all challenged the orthodoxy of UK governmental practice. We conceptualise the ‘crisis’ within our analysis using the lens of two approaches to understanding the UK’s relationship with the EU: statist and sociological. The chapter links this UK debate to the legitimacy crisis within the EU that has become exacerbated by the economic crisis, which has created problems for the UK government. The timeframe is linked to the financial and Eurozone crisis that was triggered in 2008 as this is identified as a potentially critical moment both in relation to European integration and the UK’s membership of the EU. However, it is crucial to situate the current debates in previous crises in the relationship between the UK and the EU and the extent to which successive governments have failed to make the case for Europe.