‘Crisis, What Crisis?’ On the Virtues of Muddling Through in European Politics

As a Europe on tenterhooks awaits the next development in the Cypriot crisis this weekend, the sense of popular disenchantment with the European project across much of the continent seems to echo a famous passage by Antonio Gramsci: “If the ruling class has lost its consensus, i.e., is no longer ‘leading’ but only ‘dominant’, exercising coercive force alone, this means precisely that the great masses have become detached from their traditional ideologies…. The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” [1