The Maastricht Treaty, the 1992 agreement about currency, citizenship and freedom of movement on which the present European Union is built, was drafted for a world that was disappearing. Back then, only a handful of richer countries — France, Germany, Britain and the Netherlands among them — had significant immigration, and already majorities were unhappy with it. These countries were industrial powerhouses, with economies structured to favor workers and benefits that were envied around the world. They had big militaries, which they no longer seemed to need now that the Cold War was over.
One way to look at the E.U. project, in fact, was as a codification of the values that had won the Cold War. That values win wars is a bold assertion, but back then, the West was in a self-confident mood. The prime minister of Luxembourg (and later, European Commission president) Jean-Claude Juncker was soon crediting European integration with having brought “50 years of peace,” even though the European Union had not yet been founded when the Berlin Wall fell. A more sober analysis would credit that peace to American occupation, NATO vigilance and Russian caution.
From the outset, the union was the expression of a love-hate relationship with the United States. On the one hand, it was emulative. Europe was to be, like America, a promise, a dream, a multiethnic experiment based on rights and principles, not blood and soil. It was a constitution-making project. On state visits to Washington in the late 1990s, Germany’s foreign minister Joschka Fischer would stroll around a Borders bookstore looking for books on the American founding.
On the other hand, the European Union was rivalrous with America. It meant to consolidate the continent’s nations into a military-economic bloc of almost half a billion people, partly so Europeans would no longer need to dance to the tune of the American empire. For the French and Francophile theorists who conceived the union, it was a ruthless state-building project like those of Cardinal Richelieu under Louis XIII and Cardinal Mazarin and Jean-Baptiste Colbert under Louis XIV. American diplomats often blessed the E.U. project. They were naïve to.
There was only one way to get the power required to build a European superpower: by usurping the prerogatives of the continent’s existing nation-states. Tasks delegated to Brussels were considered to have been delegated to it permanently. The fight for leadership between Brussels and the national capitals was not a fair one: Brussels was a lean, mean, efficient and ideologically unified bureaucracy staffed with political system designers; the old nation-states were a dozen or two messy, contentious multiparty democracies that could agree on nothing. By the start of this century, London, Berlin, Rome and Athens were much less self-governing than they used to be, to the alarm of voters and to the benefit of populists. Brexit was one result.