Rethinking European integration process in the light of crises

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2017
Özoflu, Melek Aylin
This thesis analyses European Union’s integration processes in the light of EU’s cumulatively experienced crises within its sixty years old history. In this way, it presents the importance of the crises in the European political cooperation project. To this end, firstly it examines EU’s integration crises along with its dynamics, main motives and imposed challenges against EU’s harmony. Then it shifts its direction to the historical overview of the integration crises stemming from different reasons. Such an overview helps present concrete picture in acquiring the accumulation of EU’s crises that lead the political project into the critical junctures. Lastly it explores most recent internal and external crises of the EU. This thesis argues that EU’s crises have left no appetite for neither further deepening nor widening. While the EU-wide debate is shifted from ‘integration’ oriented issues to ‘disintegration’ debates, EU has found itself in the vicious circle and chain of crises. In this respect, this thesis argues that overcoming from these crises has largely impeded the stream of integration.

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Citation Formats
M. A. Özoflu, “Rethinking European integration process in the light of crises,” M.S. - Master of Science, Middle East Technical University, 2017.