Contemporary Crisis Trends in European Union’s Development and Their Influence on Ukraine – EU Relations

Abstract

The European Union is currently facing multiple crises and challenges, the future shape and character of the Union are being increasingly questioned. The processes occurring in the EU have direct impact on its external relations with other countries. The aim of the article is to analyse the contemporary peculiarities and problems of European Union's development and its impact on further relations between Ukraine and the EU. It argues that the crises management has become a new daily reality for Europe since 2009. Further, the article briefly examines the most significant crisis trends in the EU: economic problems, migration crisis, Euroscepticism, security challenges, Brexit. The latter is considered from two perspectives: as the first step to EU's disintegration and as the chance to rethink the European project. Economic problems as Euro crisis, debt crisis, unemployment are discussed and the main measures for their solving are outlined. The origins, scale and consequences of migration crisis for the EU are determined in the article. The next analyzed problem is the rise of Euroscepticism in the EU, the most influential eurosceptic parties in different EU-countries are named. Key security challenges for the EU with the emphasis on the Russian aggression in eastern Ukraine are examined at the end of the article. As the result of analysis it is concluded that the contemporary problems of the EU have mainly negative impact on the development of the Ukraine-EU relations and its future strongly depends on that, how and when the European Union will overcome all effects of recent crises.

Keywords: European Union (EU), Ukraine, migration crisis, Euroscepticism, Brexit, Russian-Ukrainian conflict