Introduction: Towards a Critical Political Economy of European Governance

Just before this book went into production, the Irish rejected the so-called Lisbon reform treaty, that is, the treaty that after long and arduous negotiations was designed as a substitute for — and containing almost identical institutional reforms as — the European Constitution that had been voted down three years before by the French and the Dutch in the référendums of 29 May and 1 June 2005. Although it is too early to analyse the causes of the Irish ‘no’, or to predict the precise consequences of this dramatic event (beyond the fact that its planned entry into force of the treaty in 2009 now seems unlikely), it is clear that it is another slap in the face of Europe’s political elites, and has brought the European Union (EU) into a new deep crisis after it had barely recovered from the one it faced when the Constitutional project turned out to lack the necessary popular legitimacy