With the many consequences of the profound crises faced by Europe today (sovereign debt, euro, migration, borders, values, environment, etc.), terrorist attacks on French soil have sharpened the questions on the legality of emergency powers and the tensions between freedoms and security.



The Brexit discourse that was endorsed by the 23 June 2016 referendum was a veritable wake-up call. The idea of a break-up had been until that moment unthinkable within the European Union since the interdependence woven by the European project seemed to have brushed aside such secessionist pipe dreams. For the world, the EU is in crisis. But what does this mean exactly? Is the EU in decline or finding a new starting point? Different specialists in humanities have weighed in on these questions to attempt to answer them using their different fields of expertise to explore different periods and domains.



Those answers will enable the reader to find a foothold in the many debates raging today in Europe and the take a critical look at the phenomenon of the crisis, which is perhaps now a caricature of itself because constantly used to describe the union.

Presentations of the conference ‘Use and representations of crises in Europe’, Lectures on Europe conference, IRDEIC
 

Bertrand Vayssière is an HDR history lecturer and graduate of the Political Studies Institute in Paris (1992). He has written several publications on the Europe: Groupes de pression en Europe [Pressure groups in Europe] (Privat, Toulouse, 2002); Vers une Europe fédérale? Les espoirs et les actions fédéralistes au sortir de la Seconde Guerre mondiale [Towards a federal Europe? Federalist hopes and actions after WWII] (Peter Lang, 2006, Bruxelles); Reflets de la construction européenne. Réflexions, références et refus du débat sur l’Europe [Reflections on the European construction. Thoughts, references and rejections of debating Europe] (Peter Lang, Bruxelles, 2012); L’Europe, objet renouvelé des sciences sociales: un état des lieux chez les géographes, les historiens et les juristes [Europe, the renewed subject of social sciences – a situational analysis by geographers, historians and jurists] (Toulouse, Méridiennes, 2013); Penser les frontières européennes au XXe siècle. Réflexion croisée des sciences sociales [Rethinking European borders in the 21st century: perspectives from the social sciences] (Peter Lang, Bruxelles, 2015).