The European Union: still "united in diversity"? EU Centre Working Paper No. 5, December 2011

Turner, Barnard (2011) The European Union: still "united in diversity"? EU Centre Working Paper No. 5, December 2011. [Working Paper]

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Abstract

The present fragility of the European project has reduced the credit given to its considerable achievements, especially in intensifying the bonds across a war-torn continent and, since 1989, across nations divided by the Cold War. Yet while far-sighted economic policies have steered EUnification so far, these policies are under threat by a return in some quarters to more nationalistic sentiments and priorities. Generally these latter currents are seen as negative and divisive, yet, as this paper argues from a longer term historical trajectory and across disciplines usually themselves fractured into social science and humanities faculties, such diversity has been and is still now an asset, and, properly weighted, is the one main strength which the EU has in its recovery from the present crisis which, on the one hand, has specific local causes but which, on the other, cannot properly be considered apart from the cyclical and structural properties of globalisation. The paper then argues that policy makers, stakeholders (that is, both EU populations and the global community) should derive strength and resolve from their consideration of the Union’s motto “united in diversity”.

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