European Union between the Constraint of Borders and Global Competition

The sovereign debt crisis, which currently affects especially the European Union, challenges on the one side the actuality of hard borders and the reexamination of soft borders (Horga & Brie, 2008), and on the other side the need for the European Union to deal with an even more complex global competition, where only a strong actor with strategy and vocation and not reduced national entities can be viable. A major obstacle – the financial crisis – has made many of the researchers, who saw the EU as a vocational actor in the international system and who sustained institutional neoliberal conceptions and attitudes, start doubting such hypotheses by clinging to neorealist solutions. The disfunctionalities between the EU member states within the crisis have fueled a lot of positions, from euro -skepticism, federalism to interguvernamentalism, but also severe critics addressed to the supranationalists, the constructivists and to the people supporting the integration theories, such as governance and policy networks. Starting from this ambivalence, with which the EU has to deal, the volume which we are putting forward introduces the papers of young Romanian researchers who aim to analyze the actuality of the EU borders and the challenges for the beginning of the 21st century on the one hand, and on the other, the pace of the EU in the global competition.