Here’s a ritual that has emerged over the past decade. Leaders of 28 countries pull up in limos outside the imaginatively named Europa building in Brussels, where the European Council is meeting. They speak platitudes to the TV cameras, then greet their colleagues, sometimes with a kiss or a fist bump. They are on first-name terms: even the rookie prime minister of a mini-state must find the courage to call the German chancellor “Angela”. Then, behind closed doors, over late-night dinner, they work out a compromise: whether Greece gets a bailout, say, or Britain is allowed to delay Brexit. This scene — described by Luuk van Middelaar in his new book on the EU, Alarums & Excursions— is what power in today’s Europe looks like.
There’s been much overheated talk that next week’s elections for the European parliament will decide the EU’s future. But, in fact, even if populist parties surge, the union will muddle on. In recent years, we have improvised our way into an EU that works for most Europeans of our generation. We now have what Charles de Gaulle called a “Europe of nations”, in which the big decisions are made not by Brussels bureaucrats, or the European parliament, but by national leaders acting in concert.
The Europe of nations has arisen unplanned and largely unannounced. It’s often drowned out by the ceaseless noisy European squabble between federalists and leavers. However, both those groups have been marginalised. They still provoke each other daily with their pronouncements — such as the federalist fantasy of a European army — but neither has the clout to get its way.