The non-passage of the Constitutional Treaty, the discussion over the suitability of Turkey’s entry into the Union and the budget debate are key elements in the crisis that the fifty-year-old process of European integration is currently going through. Anchored from its very beginning to the origin of a scheme from which it has inherited its shortcomings – divergence between the involvement of the political elites and the people, a sometimes incompatible interaction between the processes of integration and enlargement, or the historical protagonism of the Franco-Germanic duet – the entry of ten new member states has changed the balance of power and the distribution of the budget, still hindered by the enormous weight of the Common Agricultural Policy, and has introduced concern among those who have been net beneficiaries of community aid up until now and who will be adversely affected. Despite all of the “internal” difficulties and the perceptions that stem from them, as the financing of the welfare state becomes more expensive due to the ageing of the European population and the unfriendly side of competitive globalisation appears, which accentuates the inequalities among the states and within the societies of each country, the European Union maintains itself to the outside world as a model example of regional integration and as a fundamental actor for defending and promoting such aspects of the international agenda as human rights, multilateralism and environmental sustainability.

ISSN: 1132-6107

48 pp.

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