European Communion and Planetary Organic Crisis

The most common way of theorising the European Union’s crises is to see them as, at best, a run of ‘bad luck’, or at worst as ‘multiple challenges’. This chapter brings two very different perspectives to the study of the European Union (EU) and its crises by theorising European (dis)integration using the Critical Social Theory (CST) of ‘European communion’ (Manners, 2013a) within the context of ‘planetary organic crisis’ (Gill and Benatar, 2020). These perspectives mark a radical break from ‘classical integration theories’ in using CST; from viewing the crises as distinct from each other; and from seeing the crises as particular to the EU. The rest of this section sets out the main arguments for a European communion theory of planetary organic crisis. The following five sections focus on European communion in the context of the neoliberal economic, demographic social, climatic ecological, proxy conflict, and ethno-nationalist political crises of the 21st century. The final section concludes on making sense of European communion and planetary organic crisis.