The European Union in the new global disorder: Transformations, challenges, and future scenarios

The European Union (EU) is experiencing a broader process of political, economic and social reconfiguration that challenges both established institutional arrangements and the conceptual frameworks through which European integration has long been understood. Over the past decade, the language of crisis has become central to the study of the EU. Concepts such as crisis, polycrisis, resilience, strategic autonomy and differentiated integration have helped scholars capture the growing complexity of the challenges confronting the EU (Joseph and Juncos 2024; Schimmelfennig et al 2023; Ferrara et al. 2022; Lippert et al. 2019; Zeitlin et al. 2019). Yet the current moment also reveals the limits of inherited analytical frameworks. What is at stake is not only the EU’s capacity to respond to successive shocks, but transformation of the very conditions under which European integration takes place. Many of the categories through which European integration has traditionally been interpreted were developed under assumptions of relative geopolitical stability, progressive market integration, regulatory governance and incremental institutional change. These assumptions no longer fully capture the conditions under which the EU now operates. War has returned as a structuring force of European politics; economic interdependence is increasingly recast as a source of vulnerability; digital infrastructures reshape democratic communication and public authority; climate energy and migration pressures expose new form of social and territorial inequality; and geopolitical competition forces the EU to reconsider the relationship between market openness, security and strategic autonomy. This Special Issue starts from this premise. It argues that the EU’s current political moment should be understood less as a succession of discrete crises than as a process of reconfiguration. Reconfiguration does not simply refer to institutional adaptation or policy change, but to a deeper transformation in the relationships between markets and states, internal and external security, public authority and democratic legitimacy, social expectations and collective action. The EU is being pushed to redefine what it does, how it acts, and what kind of political community it becoming This transformation is also social. European citizens are not passive observers of this transformation. They interpret, contest and negotiate the meaning of European integration through their own social positions, political orientations and expectations about the future. While some citizens call for a stronger and more protective Europe, others express distrust toward supranational institutions and support Eurosceptic political projects. These tensions reveal that the legitimacy of the EU is not produced only through institutional performance, but also through social recognition, collective imaginaries and the capacity to provide credible orientations in uncertain times. The central claim of this Special Issue is that the way Europe is studied must also change. If the EU is being reconfigured across institutional, social, economic and geopolitical dimensions, then inherited analytical distinctions — between internal and external politics, market integration and security, policy performance and identity, institutional capacity and public legitimacy — become increasingly difficult to sustain. The task is not to abandon existing theories of European integration, but to test their limits and ask which conceptual tools are needed to understand a polity whose future is being shaped at once by war, strategic dependencies, democratic contestation, digital transformation, territorial inequalities and changing expectations of protection and solidarity.