The European Union’s perennial crisis is historical, not political

To understand the perennial crisis facing the European institutions, we must explore different avenues. Pure political analysis, whilst necessary, is not sufficient to get to the root of the matter. We must therefore try to understand the concept of history upon which the construction of the EU is based; this construction still appears, as it has for many years, to be in a crisis with no end in sight, to the extent that we might assume it to be irreversible. Yet, paradoxically, its very construction also seems irreversible.

At the end of the Second World War, Europe was a land of the defeated. This aspect is sometimes underestimated. On what ‘myth’ can an institution founded by the defeated be built? Even those who had ‘won’ had, in fact, actually lost. France had been occupied and subjugated in a matter of weeks by the German army, and after nearly five years of occupation had been liberated by the Anglo-Americans. The Italians were, of course, emerging from the tragic experience of fascism and, however swiftly they had turned to anti-fascism, they had suffered a disastrous defeat in the war. The Germans were more defeated than anyone else; their country had even been split in two. As for Great Britain, as Brexit has also shown, it has always been rather complicated to regard it as politically part of Europe. Moreover, although it had emerged victorious from the war, it was very soon to suffer an equally bitter defeat with the dissolution of its empire.

Following the catastrophic destruction of the Second World War, unleashed by the primitivist and genocidal power of Nazism – a regime that was structurally bellicose and based on a crude and irrational ‘friend/foe’ dichotomy – a Europe that wished to be different and peaceful could only look to the better angels of its own nature in that guiding principle of the modern age known as the Enlightenment. A rational and clear-sighted vision of human coexistence – as peaceful and multicultural as possible – embodied in Voltaire’s idea of the Amsterdam Stock Exchange as a place of exchange and encounter. A Europe of rights and safeguards, of checks and balances, of a single market and open borders, of moderate, non-authoritarian democracies. In which the continent’s great genius could unfold solely ‘for the good’, serving as a beacon to the whole world which it had once dominated as a colonising and civilising power but which now, precisely because it had been defeated, stood as the world’s new liberal-democratic moral beacon. It was a beautiful dream.

The underlying idea – which, to some extent, still persists, albeit illusorily – is an Enlightenment-era conception of history. That is to say, the idea that history is a linear progression towards the better, towards a greater light of reason, of understanding the reality of the world and of what is good. Let us set aside the fact that Hegel and Marx, in their time, also subscribed to this belief, with the political fallout we are all too familiar with stemming from these two authors. The point is that whilst Europe was rebuilding itself as a gigantic, peaceful political and regulatory mechanism and envisaged reimagining itself as the moral conscience of the world, the world was heading in a different direction.

For decades, we did not realise it, or we pretended not to. We were wealthy enough – and still dominant enough – to believe that this was not the case. We could lull ourselves into a sense of our politically bureaucratised moral superiority. Then, gradually, as the world changed under the capitalist model – which enabled billions of poor people to rise above their circumstances and become competitors, not only economically but also politically, on the global stage – Europe found itself trapped within its own Enlightenment-inspired, bureaucratic and regulatory framework, whilst history no longer appeared as a simple narrative of linear progress towards greater democracy and peace, but as an order made up of ruptures and recompositions, of crises and increasingly rapid resolutions. A new order in which what really matters is not bureaucratised harmony but decision-making. The United States, the other side of the West, is a story unto itself. They won the Second World War and are still young and chaotic, unsettling and therefore in flux. This is what saves them and keeps them alive, alongside their obvious political, military, industrial, technological and intellectual dominance – though these are the offspring of an idea of freedom that remains splendidly unbridled and risky.

The ‘European spirit’, following the devastation of the Second World War, has never been revived. The institutional framework built upon its ashes increasingly resembles a labyrinth devoid of cultural identity and political capacity, constructed in an era now long past, which, in the name of its supposed good intentions, claims a moral high ground that no one in the world has the slightest intention of recognising, leaving it entirely devoid of any identity other than its own regulatory hyper-power. The war unleashed by Russia against Ukraine might, perhaps, have constituted a new historic ‘call to arms’ capable of revitalising the ‘European spirit’, of making the EU something other than that cold, bureaucratic hybrid. After more than four years of war, one can reasonably be certain that this has not been the case.