European Union is facing one of the most serious crises in its history. Will it be able to overcome this crisis successfullyUndoubtedly, Europe's the European Union is facing one of the most serious crises in the course of integration. It is a crisis related to the very basic elements of Europe's strategic orientation, its role in world politics, its economic strategy and the legitimacy of its institutional structure vis-à-vis the European peoples.

The course to Europe's unification started in the early 1950s and contin-ued in a step-by-step process of mutual compromises amongst sovereign states. The process was founded on both a supranational and intergovernmental model. In the beginning of the 1990s, the integrative effort took the form of a written minimal consensus with the Maastricht Treaty, which set a twofold parallel aim: Political and economic integration, in a way that multilevel interdependence and the pursuit of common macrostrategic goals would guarantee peace in Europe. The pro-cess continued with the signing of the Treaty of Amsterdam and the Treaty of Nice. The latter was meant to prepare the Union for the biggest enlargement wave in EU's history. That was a cata-lytic moment for the EU's operational mode and its strategy.

The European Union's Crisis, Challenges Ahead,European, economic, enlargement, intergovernmental, interdependence, macrostrategic, Political, politics, strategic, structure