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40 ] Tamás Dezső Ziegler The problem also has a social level: the system of the EU is not explained in our schools, and people in general do not really know how the overcomplicated Union and its institutions work.’ This also becomes important when dubious austerity measures are imposed on a country, like in the case of Greece, and, as a consequence of the interconnected system, individual countries lose their capacity to help themselves. In such a situation, people tend to be far more critical towards European cooperation. Moreover, there are serious inconsistencies in how EU institutions handle specific countries. Same or similar violations of EU law are treated differently, so the perception of fairness of integration is being put into question (Schmitter and Lefkofridi 2016, 216). A massive transfer of power to the EU, which could cope with the ‘no taxation without representation’ problem, is not imaginable at present (Schmitter 2012). Finally, Schmitter and Lefkofridi also claim that with or without the EU... European national democracies have been in trouble for several decades. The paradox of these times is that, precisely when so many aspiring neo-democracies have been emerging in the East, the archaeo-democracies of the West have been sliding into crisis. Their citizens have begun to question the very same ‘normal’ institutions and practices that new democratizers have been trying so hard to imitate. (Schmitter 2012, 44, emphasis in the original) Other scholars, like Erik Jones, also find that unequal opportunities of Member States can cause disintegration (Jones 2018). Integration creates losers and winners, and “if there is some spectacular collapse, it will most likely result from the isolation of one-or-more member states from the rest of the Union. The British sense of self-isolation is one illustration of this dynamic; the forced isolation of Greece in the summer of 2015 is another” (Jones 2018, 449). If Member States do not receive mutual support or empathy from other countries, people will lose faith in the EU. Eppler and her colleagues also stress that the expanded competences of the EU and peoples’ identity could collide: The growing gap between the dramatically expanded competences of the EU on the one hand and the static levels of European identity on the other hand increases the likelihood that the EU’s power has grown to the point where it exceeds the necessary basis of ‘identity’ safeguards. (Eppler et al. 2016, 17; see also Kelemen 2007, 60) These circumstances can generate spill-backs (i.e. the reverse of spillovers), or to put it differently: a ‘transcending cycle’ (Eppler et al. 2016, 3; Lindberg and Scheingold 1970, 199; Schmitter 2012, 46). 5 "This is also true in other forms of integration as well: the Council of Europe, for example, is a nearly unknown organisation by the European public.
