EUROPEAN UNION TOWARDS 2020 AND BEYOND: A NEW “ZEITGEIST” AND THE CHALLENGES AHEAD

The economic crisis has had a serious impact in many but not all economies of the world. As for the European Union, the Greek crisis and the Eurozone crisis have led to a structural and conceptual crisis. This impact generated a lot of commentaries, analyses and proposals of solutions. Most of the discussions have remained either technical, looking for solutions within a paradigm that is no longer valid, or looking towards the past and asking a lot of “what ifs” that are not anyway of particular relevance. This paper took a different perspective, that of a change in the “spirit of times”, a change in the way people understand reality and the way they picture their expectations. In our opinion European Union lost, to a large extent, the contact with the perception of times and expectations of the people from the 27 member states. European Union leaders look for technical solutions but the 500 million people look for a vision and a motivation, a sense to justify it all. This is, in our opinion the real challenge for the years to come.