Europe's Triple Crisis and the Uneven Role of Institutions: the Euro, Refugees and Brexit

Europe is currently embroiled in three ongoing and interacting crises concerning the eurozone, refugees and Brexit. After briefly describing each crisis, I turn to the ways in which they intersect and the role of institutions in solving the crises. There are two central themes in the paper. The first is that the three crises intersect and feed on one another. The second is that, while institutions can often help, they are not panaceas. Existing scholarship on the EU often implies that the EU operates far from its institutional frontier and that substantial improvements in welfare are just around the corner if only we get our institutions right'. But institutional fixes do not exist for all problems. I argue that there is a large space for institutional improvement in the eurozone crisis, less regarding refugees, and still less for Brexit.