Democracy and Cascading Crisis in European Union

Scientific Essay from the year 2021 in the subject Politics - Topic: Globalization, Political Economics, grade: 1, Central European University Budapest (Institute for Advanced Studies), language: English, abstract: This essay follows two main lines of argument. The first is that the critical issue in the current political and social crisis in the European Union is the lack of democratic representation and control. The crisis in the European Union is not one but many, shifting its many forms between financial, economic, social, and political domains. The second line of argument might be read as a direct reversal of Friedrich von Hayek's conclusions elaborated in 'The Road to Serfdom'. He claimed that the state regulation of the economy and finances bears the seed of the future fall into authoritarian rule. The author takes an opposite stance, urging that the unregulated market economy and its proneness to financial hazard, the consequence of which are financial crises and major destabilisations of economies and social security of the citizens, is potentially even more direct a road towards an authoritarian rule and that the elements of such developments can already be traced in Europe.