Introduction. The EU and the social legacy of the crisis: piecemeal adjustment or room for a paradigm shift?

The present chapter provides a summary of the main events in the European integration process in 2015. It then gives two opposing views of the same events. We first provide a pessimistic view, the EU has not bene able to solve any major problem she has dealt with in the last years. We then provide a more optimistic view: EU instituitons have moved and they have made progresso on many issues. The last part of the text introduces the outline of the book