Is Europe facing a new Era? The Treaty on Stability and the Struggle for Economic Sovereignty in a Political Perspective

The current European crisis is not only the crisis of a single country or the crisis of a small group of countries; this crisis is structural. It is not a crisis similar to the 1929 crisis, or similar to the crisis of the 1970s. To face it  the European Union (without the United Kingdom) has agreed to sign a Treaty on Stability, which is intended to provide economic measures to reduce public debt and to control public finance. This system, however, has a critical weakness: it perpetuates the gap existing between a fully integrated economic system and independent political decision making on the part of EU member states.

Piero Graglia, currently a visiting Fulbright scholar at the Center for German and European Studies at Georgetown University, will address the challenges that the European Union is facing at present. Graglia's analysis of the European crisis will focus on the political context of the EU framework, and will highlight some of the impediments to solving these challenges.   

Piero Graglia is a  visiting Italian Fullbright professor at the BMW Center of German and European Studies and at the Department of Italian at Georgetown. He has a PhD in History of European Unity and Federalism from the University of Pavia. His field of expertise includes the history of European integration, politics and international relations, and European history. Graglia has taught at the University of Florence, Romania, Naples and Rome. He is currently a researcher at the School of Political, Economic and Social Sciences, University of Milan where he teaches History of European Integration and History of International Politics. In 2008 he has published with Il Mulino in Bologna, after twelve years of research, the first complete biography of one of the founders of the European Union, Altiero Spinelli (theorist of the European Federalism, European Commissioner and MEP, born in 1907 and dead in 1986).