There’s a lot wrong with the EU. In Brussels’ European quarter, bureaucrats today can reappear tomorrow morning working for private law firms. Europe faces an escalating war, a cost of living crisis, probable recession and, in Italy, the first ever far-right government of a big member state. Then there’s Vladimir Putin’s nuclear threat: to argue that he wouldn’t do something so self-defeating seems to overlook how we got here. The EU might also lose its American protector if Donald Trump or similar returns to power in 2024.
Partly because of these threats, the EU looks unprecedentedly strong. A so-called “union” that was mostly designed to manage rival internal interests is now uniting against its enemies.
The EU went through years of supposed “existential crises”. In 2012, around when Russia’s economy peaked, the euro was constantly about to collapse. In 2014, a new Italian far-right leader, Giorgia Meloni, called for ditching the currency. The EU was divided between debtor and creditor countries and then, with the “migrant crisis” of 2015, between Germany and almost everyone else. In 2016, Brexiters argued that the EU was going to crumble anyway.