The introduction of the Euro in 1999 marked a major step in the European integration project, transforming the EU from a common market into a monetary union. A decade later, the Eurozone crisis exposed fundamental weaknesses in the institutional design of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), forcing the EU and its Member States to confront shortcomings in fiscal governance, financial supervision, and crisis-management mechanisms.

Crisis scholarship often treats major shocks as windows of opportunity that enable policy and institutional change. The Eurozone crisis provided policymakers with several “lessons,” ranging from the need for stronger surveillance of national budgets to enhanced financial-sector oversight and more effective crisis‑resolution tools. These lessons translated into substantial institutional innovations, including the creation of the Banking Union, the European Stability Mechanism, and the strengthening of fiscal coordination procedures. Yet other lessons, such as the need for deeper fiscal integration, which was highlighted in several reports following the crisis, proved far harder to implement, revealing persistent tensions between supranational solutions and Member States’ preference for intergovernmental control.

Drawing on expert and elite interviews, policy documents, news reporting, and secondary sources, the chapter examines lessons that occurred as a result of the crisis and the process that led to them. The chapter presents these findings and discusses their implications for European Integration.

This is one of the empirical chapters from my forthcoming PhD monograph on crisis management and policy learning in the EU.

This paper examines and compares the economic models of three distinct periphery regions of the European Union (EU), the Baltic, Southern and Visegrad countries. The varieties of capitalism (VoC) literature offer a theoretically solid and well-known framework to analyse diverse economic models, nevertheless, exclusively concentrates on the role of supply-side institutions. Recently, the neo-Kaleckian macroeconomics-based growth model perspective (GMP) provides new insights investigating the models of capitalism by concentrating on the demand-side of the economy (drivers of economic growth). Comparative advantages and the engines of economic growth can be determined by capitalizing on the previously mentioned approaches for European peripheral regions, however, the contribution of gradually altering economic sectors, particularly industrial and services sectors to economic growth trajectories remains unknown. The major purpose of this paper is to fill this gap by concentrating on the value added by various industries and services. First, we use the VoC approach and the GMP in a complementary way to establish a common denominator of the two frameworks, and second, we provide a meso-level theory focusing on the value generated by producing goods and services (a sectoral analysis, or industry- and services-level analysis). The last 25 years with distinct periods separated by multiple crises offer an excellent opportunity to detect continuous mutations in national economic models of the European periphery. Our initial assumptions suggest that (1) supply-side institutions differ significantly among periphery member states; (2) demand-side economic developments indicate strong similarities among member states during the pre-crisis period but evolving differences since the global financial crisis; (3) EU (and Eurozone) membership had limited impacts on national economic models during the reviewed period; and finally (4) investigating the distribution of value added by industries and services sectors confirms that seemingly similar economic models show significant deviations.

The characteristics of European values place them at the core of the European integration process, thereby requiring that member states accept and respect them. However, the era of polycrises has called into question the role of European values, as member states often define their content according to their interests or, worse, express their disdain for them.

Following various crises that disrupted the EU's functioning, geopolitical crises pose new challenges for the Union. The nature of the ongoing crisis with Russia has changed following Trump's re-election as U.S. president. The EU faces new challenges not only regarding its geopolitical role but also with respect to the significance of European values in a fluid environment.

That impact is easier to be researched in specific member states, which are located in the EU periphery and are traditionally considered pro-American in their foreign policy. Such is the case of Greece, thus; my focus is directed on the parliamentary debates from the National and the European Parliament, after Trump's re-election: the USA presidential elections were held in November 2024 and Trump officially became President in January 2025. My data will be collected from the MEPs' official pages and from the Greek Parliament's official page. Then, I will code, categorise, analyse, and visualise my data with MAXQDA, applying thematic analysis.

After applying constructivist grounded theory, my results will be coded, categorised, analysed, and visualised with MAXQDA.

The new Central and Eastern European member states of the European Union had shown rather robust differences in terms of economic development at the time of joining the European Union, which has been substantially reduced by now, demonstrating a robust economic convergence process of these economies. While scholarly interest has been strong on explaining why and how such a robust economic convergence evolved, much less attention has been paid to the issue whether the catching-up in economic development also fostered convergence in terms of the size, in general, and the composition, in particular, of the general government budget of the new member states. The distinction between size and structure is motivated by the fact that while government size and economic growth might have no direct causal relationship, the way how the government collects revenues and how it spends on can have a robust effect on both economic growth and convergence. Member states re-allocate and re-distribute one-third to one-half of their GDPs, therefore, it is a highly relevant question whether accession to the EU triggered any sort of alignment in the public budgeting activities of CEE countries in the last twenty years or so.