This paper examines how the different dimensions of the crisis have impacted on the EU’s main political actors and policy processes. It shows that there that have been three main effects. First, the powers of and the influence exercised by the EU’s institutional actors have been partially re-shaped during the crisis. They have been so in such ways as to intensify both the extent to which the EU is in some respects intergovernmental in character and in other respects is supranational. Second, the crisis has brought out and exacerbated deep-lying differences between the EU’s main non-institutional actors – the member states –– on key policy issues. Such has been the depth of some of the differences between member states that policy- and decision-making processes in some spheres have increasingly not involved all member states, whilst in others they have sometimes been extremely slow and protracted. Third, the crisis has shown how the EU still has a major leadership problem. One of the main concerns of the so-called ‘constitutional decade’ (the years leading up to the application in 2009 of the Lisbon Treaty) – unsatisfactory EU leadership – has remained, with it often not being clear during the crisis who or what should be providing leadership, and when it has been provided it has often been contested. Further to these aspects of the leadership problem, as the EU has become increasingly differentiated during the crisis such leadership as has been offered has often been so only to parts of the EU. It is thus not going too far to say that one of the dimensions of the crisis the EU has been experiencing in recent years is a leadership crisis.
