Yanitsky Oleg N. The Europe and Beyond: the Conflicts, Uncertainties and Hybrid Risks. In: Europe and Beyond: Boundaries, Barriers and Belonging.View from Russia:[Electronic resource]: collected papers European Sociological Association 14th Conference “Europe and Beyond: Boundaries, Barriers and Belonging”(Manchester, GB, Augest 20-24, 2019) ...

Abstract

Recently, the Europe as sociocultural phenomenon and the EU as the institutional one are in the period of transition, the condition in which the old values and structural-functional underpinnings of this conglomerate have become obsolescent, while the new ones are only at the designing or testing stages. This transition stage is full of complexities, uncertainties and unintended consequences. The influx of mass involuntary migrants from the North Africa and the Near East as the outside causes haven’t been the trigger of the above interregnum, it only strengthen the inward instabilities and contradictions and a political struggle between the left and the right. The further the more the inner EU crisis as social institution is generating by an oposing interests of the US top-bureaucracy and a diversity of its old and new member-states and their inhabitants. The ‘iron cage’ of the EU top-bureaucracy is now in a tough struggle with the interests of the bureaucracy of the member-states on the one side, and the needs of ordinary people, on the other. Simultaneously, the EU is incapable to find the balance of its interests in relation to the US, China and Russia. All this clearly shows that the sociological studies of such complex subcontinental and global issues have to be coupled with an interdisciplinary and geopolitical analysis.