Policy discussions in Europe today are filled with gloomy predictions of more hard times to come. Political uncertainty generated by the shock waves from the largest postwar surge in Muslim immigration, the continued pressure from Russia along the eastern flank, and the surge of public rebellion against the established political parties continue to chip away at an EU institutional construct that only a decade ago was touted as the future not just for Europe but perhaps for the rest of the world as well. Europe’s relationship with the United States has come into question too. Discussions in most of Europe’s capitals now routinely default to criticism of the Trump Administration and U.S. politics and policy in general, but they offer precious few insights about the path forward for Europe beyond assertions that foreign policy independence is imminent. In European politics, where the center has fractured, shrunk, or simply imploded, political inertia is increasingly the default. And that’s bad news for Europe, in terms of both the future of the European Union and the continent’s overall security.
Historically, whenever a turbulent political wind hit Europe, the default response was to press the “institutional button,” seeking to address each crisis du jour by expanding the supra-European organizational overlay in a seemingly unshakeable belief that the crisis was merely another sporadic manifestation of residual nationalism and that “more Europe” was the panacea. Even today, as the United Kingdom is about to march out of the European Union and established parties from the Netherlands to France to Germany reel from electoral body blows, “more Europe” remains the go-to answer, as though tightening the institutional screws could somehow infuse fresh energy into the vision of European federalism. The common European project seems stuck in a rut, and the fresh fault lines between the Continent’s western and central parts are a sign that Europe’s populations are ready for anything but more business as usual. And yet the European fascination with institutional restructuring is cresting again: The leader of Germany’s SPD, Martin Schulz, has called for the creation of a “United States of Europe” by 2025.
Europe is locked in a race against time to determine whether in fact its leaders can shed the ideological straitjacket forged in the past two decades of would-be, all-encompassing federalism that saw Europe’s future as one of incessant progression towards a supra-national Union. Today it is precisely the elite’s continued unwillingness to let go of its misconstrued conviction that federalism must absorb and subsume ever-more of the legitimate prerogatives of sovereign democratic nation-states that is causing Europe’s political paralysis. This ideological straitjacket, and the attendant fear that any accommodation of individual states when it comes to how they choose to respond to public pressure at home, will undermine the very idea of Europe. The idea that centralized federalism can or should be imposed on Europe’s nations constitutes arguably the greatest potential risk to Europe’s future. If unaltered, this ideological certitude may lead the continent to split into a “two-tiered Europe”—with the post-historical Western half finally launching the long-touted federal project while the peripheral non-Eurozone remains stuck in its “modern phase.” But, even more likely, it may actually cause the Continent to splinter into ad hoc clusters of states driven by shifting security considerations and national priorities. The idea that such a “Carolingian Europe” can in the 21st century be anything but a fallback position from what should have been—and can still be—a robust European treaty-based organization of strong nation-states should have been exposed as a dangerous delusion when the British decided to call it quits on the EU project. While one can certainly entertain various institutional schemes whereby such a new “core European Union” could become more governable from the center than the pre-existing design, it is simply dangerous to believe that a Europe without the United Kingdom engaged in its security and defense can be a serious actor in world politics, or that it will remain stable and continue to thrive economically if newer members of the European Union are condemned to a peripheral status. Furthermore, Europe’s security and prosperity without a strong Transatlantic link to the United States embodied in a revitalized NATO is a chimera; while the common European project is an important part of that larger architecture, Europe has always been more than the European Union, and the United States remains its essential ally and partner.
Amidst the calls for “more institutionalism,” at times in Europe one still hears voices of pragmatism and common sense that seem willing to acknowledge that a nation’s right to determine its destiny is not antithetical to values like democracy, free markets, and open societies. In fact, a number among Europe’s elite are beginning to wake up to the realization that, while European and American publics may not have all the right answers to their nations’ current predicaments, they are nonetheless asking the right questions on immigration, economic policy, national power, defense priorities, and most of all national sovereignty.
The idea of a Europe that is more than the sum-total of its nation-states remains one of the most captivating and valuable projects to come out of the carnage of the Second World War. Since its inception, it has embodied a tension between the European and the national, both within and between states, as the two vital elements that could ensure a “Europe whole and free and at peace.” Backed by American security guarantees, from their inceptions the Coal and Steel Community, the European Economic Community, and even the early iterations of the European Union ideal were still grounded in the fundamental premise that a continent with more than two millennia of history—indeed the birthplace of the modern nation-state—is not reducible to a vision of a centralized supra-national entity, regardless of how postmodern and post-national its leaders may believe themselves to have become.
What Europe needs today is less preaching from Brussels about the impending brave new world of a two-tiered Europe and more direct capital-to-capital engagement, with political leaders speaking privately and plainly to each other, cutting deals that will lay the foundations for a new intra-EU compromise. It is time to set aside the belief that Brussels has even most of the solutions to what ails Europe today, as well as the notion that re-engagement at the national level within the European Union’s structures would somehow doom the common European project. The reaffirmation of core Western democratic values should be a sine qua non of this process, but so should a deep respect for the sovereign rights of nations to chart their course and enter into binding agreements, all buttressed by a sense of genuine humility in every capital about the limits of what federalism and supra-nationalism can accomplish in Europe—i.e., a recognition of the fact that it can only go as far as the demos is willing to allow.
The common European project—the child of founding fathers such as Konrad Adenauer, Jean Monnet, and Robert Schuman, as well as Joseph Bech, Johan Willem Beyen, Winston Churchill, and Walter Hallstein—remains as open to our competing interpretations and as relevant today as it was in the 1950s and beyond. However, at its core the success of the European Union going forward depends upon the relationships among its member-states. Hence, planning for Europe’s shared future is not a “glass half-full/half-empty” discussion over how to reframe its institutions yet again, but rather a discussion about what is in the glass in the first place. If Europe accepts that supranational institutions are only as good as the relationships between the states who forged them, then it will have finally begun the process of breathing new life into its common project. It’s well past time.
