More unity doesn’t mean less conflict

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The European Union certainly has some successes to claim. Those who emphasize the role of NATO dismiss the customary refrain that it guaranteed peace in a part of the world that did not lack a taste for war. Yet the European Community and the European Union that followed it have dispelled the very idea of conflict among its members.

The European common market is not as much of a “free market” as some may wish it were. Still, it has played a decisive role in fostering economic cooperation among member states, making their economies more intertwined and more efficient. It grew the size of the “internal market” for European producers of a wide array of goods and services.

When the single currency, the euro, was introduced, many economists forecasted it would soon be dismissed. It did not happen. The European Central Bank, like all central banks in the Western world, has grown more politicized in the last few years and wasted human capital, and political capital too, with its focus on climate change and the so-called green transition, among other non-monetary issues. Its management of the post-pandemic wave of inflation can hardly be considered as “prompt”. Still, the euro could gain points as an international currency because the dollar is in turmoil. If the ECB rediscovers its German soul and concentrates on price stability as it used to, the euro could look like a sounder alternative to the dollar.

And yet, the most ardent champions of the European Union are hardly satisfied. The paradox is that those who most earnestly champion the European ideal are those most likely to ignore the substantial achievements of the European Union as it is.

For such people will never be happy until the European Union looks precisely like a nation-state. This would mean a European army, a much tighter political process, a European Commission that subsumes executive power more closely as we know it in France or Portugal, some sort of “European politics” in which people vote in a fully Europeanized political landscape. Where, in short, being “right” or “left” trumps being Italian or Lithuanian.

Europeanization by crisis

This is a paradox, in more than one way. First, the European dream was predicated upon the need to overcome nation-states, whose thirst for national sovereignty was seen as the true driver of the conflicts that brought bloodshed to the 20th century. Now, instead, it assumes that national sovereignty should be abandoned, but only to be replicated, with the same characteristics, in Brussels rather than in Warsaw or Berlin.

Second, this desire for unity, which, indeed, is openly aimed at resembling the 19th-century national struggles, seems oblivious to the fact that unity and harmony do not necessarily go together. If the EU fostered cooperation and peace, it was also because its most relevant policies limited the scope of potential conflicts. The Common Agricultural Policy is hardly the achievement Europeans should be proudest of, but insofar as it absorbed most of the EU’s budget, conflicts among member states were limited to that, hardly a central part of the continent’s economy.

«The European dream was predicated upon the need to overcome nation-states, whose thirst for national sovereignty was seen as the true driver of the conflicts that brought bloodshed to the 20th century. Now, instead, it assumes that national sovereignty should be abandoned, but only to be replicated, with the same characteristics.»

The advocates of an ever closer union forget that the closer we get to a common fiscal policy, the more conflicts between member states may escalate. If the different sensibilities of the “frugal” North and the “profligate” South did not clash in the past, it is also because fiscal redistribution between the two has been kept within limits.

Last, the essence of Europe has always been diversity and competition – among businesses as well as among national cultures. Some of the key institutions of the EU (like a common market and a common, stable currency) are enabling conditions for such traits.

So far, the EU has advanced through a shabby governance, which the Europhiles resent. They would rather see Europeans embracing enthusiastically their common political future than EU institutions being like a patchwork quilt, to which a new patch is randomly added. For this reason, they have long advocated Europeanization by crisis: leveraging on turmoil to foster new common institutions. The collapse of the traditional transatlantic alliance, together with a – perhaps not completely rational – frenzy about Russia’s foreign policy, is now fueling a new wave of hysteria. The European Commission will endeavour to capitalize on this hysteria to achieve more centralization.

Again, a paradox: a post-national institution that thrives on the oldest trick of nationalism, the search for external enemies.

«The essence of Europe has always been diversity and competition – among businesses as well as among national cultures.»

In the next few years, the European Union may confirm its exceptional nature, which made it a fragile but genuinely original experiment in institution-building. Or it may become a continent-wide nation-state. In rhetoric of its prophets, the latter may sound the more solid option. In practice, it is not sure it will be.