The Name of the Game: Shaping Europe Through Self and Other

Abstract

This chapter moves on from our two multifaceted players to the overall game in which their fraught relationship is embedded. How have their mutual perceptions affected their representations of the EU and the other way round? The chapter discusses, first, how, for many on both sides, the EU was turning from a promise of prosperity into a threat to it. It then analyses discourses around whether or not, as many have argued, the crisis brought about a 're-nationalisation' of politics in Europe, before moving on to the fate of 'the EU as an agent of progress'.