Re-ordering the EU and Europe: Old Boundaries and New Challenges

This chapter interrogates the changing nature of European order, and the EU’s role within it. It begins by exploring the ideas put forward by EU policy-makers that the EU is a ‘garden’ of peace and order, and that the world outside is often a ‘jungle’ that needs to be subjected to the EU’s civilising influences. It goes on to assess a number of key junctures in the search for European order since the end of the Cold War, and the extent to which these have led to any form of new order and stability. It then argues that one of the EU’s key roles in the (re)ordering of Europe has been the construction and maintenance of boundaries—geopolitical, transactional, legal/institutional and cultural—drawing upon work by (Smith, Journal of Common Market Studies 34:5–28, 1996) and evaluates the extent to which those boundaries have either contributed to the ‘ordering’ of Europe in the recent periods of change, conflict and crisis or created new challenges for EU policy-making. Finally, it focuses on the current ‘omni-crisis’ in Europe and on the EU’s role(s) in it and assesses the extent to which concepts of boundaries assist the study of EU policy and its impact.