| Summary/Abstract |
The European Union is typically perceived by its proponents as an avant-garde, anti–power politics polity capable of civilizing its own political space and its geopolitical neighborhood (see Manners 2002; Kaldor et al. 2016). For the past decade, this conventional European narrative has been challenged by a series of events and developments amounting to an allegedly existential crisis of the EU. We unpack the nature of the current crisis and identify three long-term developments within the EU. In order to understand the crisis and its potential consequences for peaceful change in Europe, we use two analytical prisms to explore how and why the EU is, at the same time, a successful example of international peaceful change—even peaceful transformation—in international affairs and plagued by existential crisis. The first prism is realist and explains European integration and its development in terms of the interests of the most powerful states. The second prism is identity constructivist and explains European integration in terms of identity articulations. We do not seek to subsume one of these positions to the other in a theoretical synthesis, nor do we aim for analytical eclecticism—letting each theory do what it is supposed to do best (e.g., leaving the explanation of peaceful change to the constructivists and the explanation of crisis to the realists).
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