Europe's Prolonged Crisis: The Making or the Unmaking of a Political Union

This volume outlines a political sociology of crisis in Europe, focusing on state and society transformations in the context of the 2008 financial and monetary crisis and its aftermath in Europe. Dysfunctions of the market and the European economic and monetary system pose severe challenges to the legitimacy of political order at national, European and global level. In this collection, the contributors investigate how the crisis undermines the integrity of political institutions and democratic government at EU and member state level, and analyse how the experiences of social deprivation are translated into political conflict and cleavages across the European space. Evidence is provided for how the return of redistributive conflicts correlates with a 'new politics of identity', nationalism, regionalism and expressions of Euroscepticism. Crisis affects patterns of social exclusion but, as this book reveals, it can also activate social networks and impacts on new forms of solidarity, which are emerging locally and transnationally