Europe is often cast as lurching from one near-death experience to the next, from the eurozone crisis and Brexit to a pandemic and war on its borders.
And yet, it endures. Opening the EGPP Seminar Series for the new academic year, Catherine De Vries and Alexandros Kentikelenis will join us to discuss their new book (Oxford University Press, October 2026), in which they argue the EU is better understood not as a machine moving towards ‘ever closer union’, but as a living political organism: incomplete, internally differentiated, and capable of adaptation under pressure.
This proposed reframing shifts attention away from debates over ‘more’ or ‘less’ Europe and towards the ways European institutions, member states, and publics reconfigure authority, resources, and narratives in response to stress. The talk will elaborate on two concepts central to the book’s argument: adaptive strength, the Union’s capacity to improvise, learn, and recombine institutional instruments; and effective sovereignty, Europeans’ collective ability to shape cross-border outcomes that no member state can control alone.
Joined by Deirdre Curtin, Claudio Radaelli, and Stefano Bartolini as discussants, the authors will flesh out a conceptual toolkit that offers a way to rethink Europe’s persistence without treating survival as either proof of success or a substitute for political choice.
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