Debates about the future of Europe have an unreal quality about them these days. Eurosceptics – most noisily in Britain but also elsewhere – still live the old nightmare of a united states of Europe. Yet on the other side of the barricades, the pro-Europeans could scarcely be said to be celebrating. They are more likely to lament the European Union’s palpable failure to claim a say in global affairs.
Were I to count myself among the sceptics, I would have claimed victory some time ago in the imagined great struggle between sovereign nation state and Brussels-led behemoth. The integrationist impulse that led to the creation of a single market and a European currency has long since dissipated.
If ever there was a moment when it might have been feared the nations of Europe were being subsumed into a federal superstate it passed a decade and more ago. Any residual doubts on that score should have been dispelled by the robustly nationalistic responses of Berlin, Paris and London to the international financial meltdown.
The once legendary Franco-German motor is in serious disrepair, too feeble to drive a Union now enlarged to 27 states. Grandiose talk of Europe’s emergence as a superpower alongside the US and China has been lost to its weak economic performance and even weaker political leadership. The rest of the world looks on with scorn (Beijing and Moscow) and disappointment (Barack Obama’s administration in Washington).
As a member of the pro-European camp I find myself torn between standing up for the significant successes of the European enterprise and lamenting all the missed opportunities. Half the time the cup is half-full; the other, half-empty.
Among audiences friendly to the less than startling idea that it makes eminent sense for Europe to pool its capabilities if it wants to remain visible in the fast-turning kaleidoscope of global power, I tend to accentuate the negative. Europe has become the greater Switzerland of the 21st century: comfortable, complacent and unwilling to venture abroad.
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