EU Break-Up? Mapping Plausible Pathways into Alternative Futures

Abstract

Following Brexit, the rise of populist Eurosceptics across the EU, Central Eastern Europe's flirtation with 'illiberal democracy' and the sovereign debt crisis, which essentially still remains unresolved ten years after it started, even some of the EU's most enthusiastic supporters are today wondering whether the EU could actually break apart. In the paper, I propose the scenario-planning method to address this question and to think about the future of the EU in a structured way. While the method is already well established in the study of socio-technical systems, the paper tests its transferability to the political economy of the EU. Along two drivers, the material struggle to tame globalization and the ideational struggle to fill the void that is resulting from the deconstruction of neoliberalism, the paper maps four plausible pathways into alternative futures. I conclude with a discussion of the potential of scenario-planning to improve the transfer of knowledge from academia into practice.

Eurovisions: An Exploration and Explanation of Public Preferences for Future EU Scenarios

“…We designed scenarios that were plausible (regardless of how likely they were); differentiated, that is, covering the whole spectrum of possible futures and as mutually exclusive as possible (cf. Meyer, 2018). As mentioned previously, we expect to find a greater variety of preferences leaning towards less Europe, which are, therefore overrepresented among the scenarios.…”

“…Our scenarios and related clusters have several commonalities with the so-called 'pathways' into alternative EU futures established byMeyer (2018) using a very different method; namely, the scenario-planning method (see alsoSchoemaker, 2016).…”

One union, different futures? Public preferences for the EU's future and their explanations in 10 EU countries

“…In an attempt to guide the debate about Europe's future, the European Commission has published a ‘White paper on the future of Europe’ that outlines five future scenarios for the EU (European Commission, 2017). However, we know little about what EU citizens think about these or possible other scenarios for the EU's future (Meyer, 2018).…”