The EU: Path forward or aporia?

From the outset, the ‘European construction’ has been enveloped by an aura of historical inevitability. Its institutions, and the ‘process’ by which they were established, were regarded as a ‘sovereign remedy’ for the woes inflicted on Europe’s peoples by untrammelled national sovereignty. The burden of expectation the European project shoulders has always been immense.

Americans, whose own sense of manifest destiny is paramount, have, until recently, often been at the forefront of boosting the European institutions. American policymakers and political commentators lauded the Economic Coal and Steel Community and the European Defence Community, between 1952 and 1954, as the most epoch-making shift in the European state system since Westphalia, while American political science placed the European Economic Community on a pedestal in the 1960s.

A handful of scholars, most notably German historian Kiran Patel, have striven to ‘provincialize’ (or relativize) the centrality of the European project in the immediate postwar decades, by describing it as one institutional development among many and by insisting on the need to study it within the wider context of institutions such as the Council of Europe, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Organisation for European Economic Coordination and its successor the Organisation for Economic and Development Cooperation.¹

After 1987 and the launching of the ‘1992’ project to complete the single market, the aura of Europe’s ineluctable destiny grew stronger, and Americans were again prominent cheerleaders. The nascent EU became a core topic for international relations theorists in the late 1980s and early 1990s in top US universities, as the European project’s transformation from litigious customs union to a momentarily harmonious political union appeared to represent a liberal challenge to neo-realist theory.

Simultaneously, US policymakers and policy intellectuals enthused about Europe’s emergence as a potential superpower. Some well-meaning souls went further: Representative Samuel M. Gibbons’ claim, in hearings before the Ways and Means Committee of the House of Representatives, that the ‘1992 program by the European Community is one of the most important peaceful things that has happened in Europe in the last 1,000 years’, surely was an exaggeration.² The EU’s inopportune intervention in the Yugoslavian wars occurred at least partly because the George H. W. Bush administration was convinced that the Europe of the Single Market was ready to take its place on the world stage: ‘an undercurrent’ in Washington’s thinking, wrote James Baker III in his memoirs, was that Yugoslavia would be ‘as good a first test as any’ of the EU’s ability to act as a ‘unified power’ in international affairs.³

After the Maastricht Treaty, above all after the introduction of the euro in 1999, EU boosting turned into ‘EU-phoria’. Europe would ‘run the 21^st century’ announced Mark Leonard, (current director of the European Council on Foreign Relations) in a book that was translated into nineteen languages, yet by 2019 he was writing (together with Carl Bildt) a blueprint for how Europe could stop being a ‘plaything’ of the other powers and could become ‘a player’.⁴ Leonard was not alone. According to Ian Manners, the EU could act as a ‘normative power’ able to spread enlightened policies (such as on the death penalty) across the globe.⁵ American political scientist Andrew Moravcsik thought the EU was a ‘harbinger’ for the political and economic organization of a new global liberal order, while David Calleo’s influential book Rethinking Europe’s Future considered that the new EU’s ‘hybrid confederacy’ was a ‘highly creative evolution of the nation state’ that would enable Europe, once again, ‘to give lessons to others’.⁶

In a similar vein, the British diplomat turned EU policy strategist Robert Cooper thought the EU was the precursor of a ‘post-modern’ form of governance that represented the world’s best future, although Cooper, at least, did not insist on the historical inevitability of the EU’s triumph and recognized that the EU’s efforts to ‘extend the context’, by exporting its model, might run into opposition.⁷

It is worth emphasizing that British Eurosceptics took the EU’s self-evaluation of its historical role as seriously as academics and policy gurus. The more unhinged British Eurosceptics thought the EU was a ‘fourth Reich’ acting as a Trojan Horse for German hegemony. For many Brexiters, leaving the EU was no more nor less than a Dunkirk-like act of national salvation, which is maybe why they are blasé, if not in denial, about its harmful consequences: formal statehood, at least, has been preserved. All the leading Brexiters – Paul Dacre, Nigel Farage, Michael Gove, Boris Johnson, to name but a few – regarded the EU as a mortal peril to British national identity (the writings and speeches of Enoch Powell, Britain’s leading postwar nationalist intellectual, pervaded their thinking, though they might deny it publicly). On 31 January 2020, the Daily Mail, the leading Eurosceptic newspaper, said Britain was ‘free and independent’ once more, as if Britain were a dependency and not an important economy, major cultural influence and permanent member of the Security Council.

One hundred years from now, historians will surely look back at the first quarter of this century in wonder at the hyperbole surrounding the question of Europe and its significance.

In truth, both the Euro-boosters and the Eurosceptics grossly exaggerated the EU’s significance. The death of the nation state, and the cultural diffusion of cosmopolitan ideals, mostly existed in the minds of over-excited intellectuals or windbag politicians, or in abstruse academic theorizing, not in the real world. National political identities have always proved more able than cosmopolitan appeals to mobilize voters and peoples, and the construction of ‘Europe’ has not altered that stark fact. Although progressive young professionals move effortlessly from one state to another and converse in fluent English, such ‘Anywheres’ are greatly outnumbered by the ‘Somewheres’ who remain rooted in places and ways of life that are being drastically altered by changing modes of economic production and, even more obviously, by rising immigration.⁸ For two decades now, the centre ground in European politics has been gradually hollowed out by middle-class resentment at high taxes and failing public services, and by a genuinely transnational rejection of cultural cosmopolitanism (think, for instance, of the enormous sales of Orianna Fallaci’s book La rabbia e l’orgoglio [Anger and Pride]).

In part, this growing rejection of the EU’s core values is a paradoxical consequence of the Union’s own success. The EU is authentically a ‘transformative’ project, but the flipside of transformation – as any business analyst can tell you – is upheaval: that is the point. This perhaps would not matter if the EU’s economies were growing. The European project has always been closely associated with higher living standards (rightly), but economic growth, at any rate in western Europe, has stalled and popular expectations have increased. When that happens, troubled voters raise the question of lost sovereignty.

Moreover, despite high-profile efforts to improve transparency, the Commission has failed to connect voters to the EU’s institutions and to instil loyalty. Rousseau would not have been surprised: continent-wide polities tend to have central institutions that are remote from citizens. The ‘democratic deficit’ is intrinsic to the EU, which is another reason for doubting whether the rhetorical aspirations of the European project will ever be realized. There is a growing suspicion, indeed, that the EU is a creation of the ‘boomer’ generation, a solution that made sense when social democracy was a thing, when houses were affordable, and people worked in factories or farms, not from home on their laptops.

So, to return to my title, does this mean that the path of European integration has turned out to be a road leading nowhere, except to uncertainty and confusion? Or is it still a path forward? After all, in the EU’s defence, European integration has been an invaluable concomitant of post-1945 (and post-1989) democratization in Europe. If Europe is, despite our present discontents, a free, prosperous and remarkably civilized place to live, it is thanks to the boldness and vision of Europe’s postwar (and post-Cold War) elites, who created a ‘safe space’ for democratic experimentation in a continent that had little experience of democracy.

I would add that the EU has strengthened democracy among European states, a fact that is often forgotten. Europe’s ‘small nations’ ought to reflect very carefully indeed on whether they would have more effective capacity to defend their interests and represent their views, in a Europe where the EU’s carefully crafted mechanisms and institutional sites for negotiation had been bypassed, or even swept away. E. H. Carr’s 1945 tour de force, Nationalism and After springs to mind: one of the few safe predictions about the postwar world that one could make, Carr averred, was that a ‘Europe of 20, and a world of more than 60 sovereign nation-states, will not return’.⁹ At first sight, his comment can be disproved by a quick look at a map; second thoughts prompt us to realize just how right he was. How many European states were fully sovereign after 1945? (The right answer – unless we include the Soviet Union – is none, though postwar British political history might easily be written as a narrative of how the British political class, of both major parties, has persistently refused to admit that unpalatable fact.)

Carr’s insight has not changed meaningfully. The geopolitics of the present age, and the need for economic scale, rule out a retreat into a traditional nationalist conception of sovereignty if we wish to avoid a return to puny local hegemonies within our little corner of the world, which is no more than a small protuberance of the Eurasian landmass separated by a large lake from Africa. The EU is the only way we have found, to date, to scale up geographically while ensuring that Luxembourg, Slovenia, Greece, the Netherlands, Hungary, the Czech Republic, or even Italy still have a democratic voice, and even a limited power of veto, in the counsel of European nations (Giorgia Meloni, incidentally, understands this point perfectly; every Italian leader since De Gasperi has).

The answer to the question I have posed in the title is therefore to wriggle out of the dichotomy by affirming that the central metaphor is mistaken. The construction of ‘Europe’ was never a well-signposted way to a particular destiny, and nor was it a path that necessarily led us into a selva oscura from which there is little prospect of escape. European integration is a highly contested political process in which decisions can be good or bad, or simply inadequate to deal with the evolving conditions of the time. It is a highly contingent enterprise, like any human scheme, and depends enormously on time and chance, not to mention the ability of leaders, which naturally varies. The European project owes a huge amount to the courage and conviction of a small group of national leaders in the early 1950s and again in the late 1980s – in the 21st century we have not been so fortunate.

In hindsight, it is clear that EU leaders took certain over-complacent decisions during the period of EU-phoria that followed the introduction of the Euro, and that some of these decisions were mistakes that have had severe repercussions for the viability of the European project. Attempting to establish a ‘Constitution’ was a misstep; an even greater error was the failure to grasp that the Constitution’s embarrassing defeats at the hands of the voters in France and the Netherlands, not to mention the hysterical opposition to it in the UK, were clanging alarm bells. Had Europe’s leaders listened to the proponents of a ‘Core Europe’, and envisaged ‘variable geometry’ in the EU’s institutional arrangements, as many politicians and intellectuals recommended, it would have slowed the pace of integration, but a pause for breath might – use of the conditional is inevitable – have been beneficial.

After the giant feasts of monetary union and rapid enlargement, the EU arguably needed to digest what it had bitten off and not gulp down another large meal. One cannot but suspect that the EU’s perennial fear, encapsulated in Walter Hallstein’s famous remark that European integration is like riding a bicycle, in so far as one must continue to pedal or else fall off, was critical in the decision to push for an ambitious treaty. But Hallstein’s simile is simply false: even Tadej Pogačar needs to freewheel sometimes and give his legs a rest.

If the failings of the EU in recent years have largely been the result of bad political choices, it follows that good choices – bold leadership – might renew the EU’s relevance and allow it to regain momentum. The gist of this essay is that we need permanently to turn the page on the facile cosmopolitanism of the EU-phoria period. Inflated notions of what Europe is, and can do, help nobody. There is no prospect whatever of Europe spreading enlightened values across the world, nor of the EU becoming a federal state any time soon, nor even of the EU enlarging itself much further – indeed, it may well have to retreat. A prolonged period of pragmatism is needed, in which the EU protects all that it has achieved from Putin, from Trump, from domestic populists, and from cultures and peoples who struggle to assimilate into the European milieu.

This will mean grasping some painful nettles. It will mean, for instance, reducing migration from Africa and the Middle East (and extending European influence in those regions), assembling expensive military forces, distancing ourselves from those Americans who preach democracy but practise intolerance, and enforcing the EU’s own rules against those member states that do not respect democratic norms, or that collude with Russia. It will mean, in short, acting more like a power, but not a ‘civilian power’ or a normative one.

States have a primary duty of protection to their citizens. The EU is not a state, or so it insists, but it also confusingly asserts that it has citizens. It should take the implications of that claim seriously, or else stop pretending. In 2004, in one of the few ‘sceptical’ essays from that time about the European achievement, Robert Kagan reminded us that Europe’s ‘Kantian Paradise’ was guarded by American sentries on the wall. The time has come to put European sentries on guard or acknowledge that individual states will protect themselves by acting ruthlessly in their own short-term interests.

I would like to finish this essay with a thought provoked by Milan Kundera’s famous essay A Kidnapped West: The Tragedy of Central Europe. In this powerful work, Kundera argues that the rich national diversity of Central Europe found unity in culture, ‘which became the expression of the supreme values by which European humanity understood itself, and identified itself as European’.¹⁰ Central Europeans discovered to their shock, first in 1956 and then in 1968, that Western Europe, specifically France, had ceased to be ‘European’ in this fundamental respect. Most Europeans in the West failed to grasp the immensity of the tragedy that had been visited on Central Europe by the Soviet invasions and the ensuing repression of professors, poets, film directors and writers. They saw events in purely ‘political’ terms, not as an attack on European culture. In Kundera’s view, this was because elsewhere in Europe, culture had been eclipsed by the mass media. ‘In Paris, even in a completely cultivated milieu, during dinner parties people discuss television programmes, not reviews. Culture has already bowed out,’ he wrote. In his essay, Kundera briefly speculated about what would replace high culture as a signifier of Europeanness – would it be ‘technical feats’? The marketplace? The mass media? It is plausible to conjecture that an idealized hopeful vision of the EU’s potential to act as an agent of cosmopolitan transformation filled the ‘void’ that Kundera identified in his famous essay, at any rate for Europe’s intellectuals, and perhaps for American observers of Europe, too. If appreciation of great art could no longer unify European diversity, then perhaps the superseding of the nation-state, and building a post-modern polity, might. Such a misunderstanding of what the EU can achieve was indeed an aporia. But that is not a reason to write off the EU as a path forwards.

This article is an abridged version of a lecture Mark Gilbert gave in Prague at the Faculty of the Humanities, Charles University, on 6 November 2025. The author would like to thank Adéla Gjuričová, Jaromír Mrnka and Martin Štefek for their kindness and skill in organizing the event.