Abstract
“It’s a very strange situation:
this crisis should be ideal for the Left,
but it doesn’t have any answers”
Gathered in Vienna in the early autumn of 2017, a group of academic enthusiasts within the FEPS YAN have focused their research on multilayer democratic reforms as a response to European crisis. Although all of them had different starting points of research, the “reform” was the cut crossing edge that collected them for joint work. At the beginning of this project, we have all been aware that saving Europe out of the crisis is little bit over ambitious.
However, that was not the aim of this research: this research aimed to provide some of the answers to the main questions that have arisen in the fog of enriched Euroscepticism that came out during the ongoing crisis. Being aware that, as Ivo Andric said, all the rivers in this world are curved, but it is ours not to stop straighten them, we have worked on some of the issues that each of us considers crucial, or can be used as an effective tool for making stronger and better Europe, and a stronger left. For the research, authors have used different methods from the social sciences spectrum. The scope of the research are the four areas that have been agreed
upon consensus of the working group. Those are: the democratic deficit in the European Union (EU), the Europe of the regions, the reforms within the political parties and the foreign policy and neighbourhood relations. We have allocated the grassroots of the crisis in those areas, taking into consideration all the aspects that matter such as for example the economic crisis and the migrant crisis. We believe that the aspects and the questions that we are examining, have not been explored enough so far, so we hope to bring them into the light of the wider debate through this paper.