Jan-Werner Müller in The Guardian: "Leading Writers Respond to the Refugee Crisis"

Network member Jan-Werner Müller (Princeton) joins Ali Smith, Mary Beard, Orhan Pamuk and Pankaj Mishra and others in The Guardian as part of a feature, "The turmoil of today's world: leading writers respond to the refugee crisis." The first paragraph of Jan's contribution is below, and the remainder of his and other contributions can be found here.

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This week, European commission president Jean-Claude Juncker lamented that the EU urgently needed both more Europe and more Union. This sounds like desperate pleading from the head of an institution that has been systematically weakened in recent years, with member state governments – above all, Germany – in the driver’s seat of the EU. But Juncker happens to be right. Both the euro-crisis and the “refugee crisis” have demonstrated that an EU in which nation-states constantly break rules and haggle about who bears the costs of failed policies is bound to lose legitimacy in the eyes of its citizens. The consequences for ordinary people are all too visible: from the suicides of austerity’s victims in Athens to the desperation of asylum seekers in Budapest. [continue reading here]