Seven years have passed since the beginning of the global financial crisis, and five years since the inception of the Eurocrisis; the European Union still struggles to find a stable settlement for its monetary union. Despite the several concessions in terms of sovereignty accepted by EMU member states, an uncontroversial leap into the realm of fiscal integration –which according to many, is essential to permanently solve the EMU disease— is yet to be made. Nevertheless, the Eurocrisis seems to have generated a spillover of integration in areas such as macroeconomic, macroprudential, banking and fiscal policy, which, unthinkable just ten years ago (Prodi 2001) is now hardly reversible. It appears that the engine of European integration – its functional integration dynamics— is once more at work. Against this background, this paper aims to put to the test the essential feature of systemic functionalism: the concept of functional crisis. According with Schmitter, leading proponent of contemporary functionalism, a functional crisis is characterized by both endogenous origins and integrative/disintegrative solutions. The first part of the paper aims to determine the degree of endogeneity of the Eurocrisis by means of an index of crisis intensity on which panel econometrics is applied to determine whether and to what extent pre-crisis integration (or lack thereof) has caused the crisis. The second part studies how the crisis has changed member states preferences concerning fiscal integration by means of a series of structured interviews being carried out with high-ranking officials of the 28 Permanent Representations in Brussels.
