While European leaders insist they are now leaving behind their decade of disquiet, the ravages of the poly-crisis have left the EU with a drained and sickly pallor. The multifaceted nature of the crisis has revealed problems that stem not only from individual issues like Brexit, the euro, insecurity or refugees, but from the very structure of how integration has been designed. At times in the last decade, Europe has got itself caught in a dangerously self-reflexive vortex, dissecting its own gloom yet unable to move forward to a new model of integration – slowly becoming ‘the self-consumer of its own woes’.1 It is telling that one of the most high-profile and intensely discussed novels of the crisis years has been Michel Houellebecq’s Submission – a bleakly nihilistic prognosis for the demise of the whole secular-rational and liberal bases of the European order.2
If optimists are right that the EU is now in a position to embark towards a brighter horizon, then constructive ideas will be required that probe the frontiers of what innovative and distinctive forms of cooperation between states and societies are now possible. Even as a few fragile shoots of hopeful anticipation appear, especially in light of France’s encouraging political turn, there is still an unmet need to think beyond the standard discussions about discrete areas of EU policy reform. It is unlikely that a handful of policy tweaks will suffice to re-energise the spirit of European cooperation. Integration needs to be refounded in a way that challenges received wisdom and inherited truths about what cooperation between nations and peoples looks like. As Lucretia’s tragedy ushered in Rome’s towering republic, the question is whether the poly-crisis might spur a wholesale renaissance of European integration.
The EU’s design flaws are well known and have been dissected and conceptualised for many years. But reforms that fully tackle these flaws remain elusive. The calls for flexibility and a more democratically rooted management of interdependence have been heard for some time. Yet European societies appear to wait passively for these changes to appear. Politicians have been calling for new ideas for many years, but there is little value in them continuing to do so if they show virtually no political will to carry forward radical innovations. As Loukas Tsoukalis writes of the crisis: ‘Politicians from mainstream parties still find it difficult to think that this may be the end of an era; they find it even harder to think out of the box.’3
Afflicted with such a concertina of ordeals, Europe can no longer delay some genuinely inventive and creative reflection. And it needs not only to think but also to act outside the box. Waiting for formal EU institutions on their own to kick-start a fundamentally different process of integration is like asking turkeys not only to vote for Christmas but also to take charge of organising the festivities. So years of mapping out the conceptual problems of the EU integration model must give way to consideration of the practical processes of getting change started. Paraphrasing one famously frustrated intellectual: the point is not simply to interpret the EU, but to change it.4
I have couched this book in the spirit of such a practical agenda. It has not tried to map detailed policy in particular sectors or precise legal changes, but rather to suggest new guiding principles for European cooperation. Agreement and innovation are needed at this level of structural guidelines before the detail of individual policies is filled in. This is an equation I believe that the EU has got back to front in recent years: policy-makers focus on the nitty-gritty of resolving very specific policy crises, but without the anchor of a clear vision for the integration model into which these policies are supposed to fit over the longer term.
However, while I have kept the focus broad and on the structure of the integration model, rather than getting weighed down in discussion of one or more areas of policy or treaty provisions, I have also sought to flesh out in greater substance what some of these guidelines would entail in a practical sense. I have done this after reading countless articles, op-eds and books that suggest sound principles – that ordinary citizens need to have a greater role in the EU and that the Union needs to be less rigid and heavy-handed – but rarely take the next step of proposing a way to implement these injunctions beyond the standard set of existing institutional processes. This calls to mind the classically rooted lament: it is of little use to desire change but not the means to achieve it.
As they approach the end of the book, some readers may still question the feasibility of radical change. They may find themselves comfortable with the broad principles of democratic participation, diversity and flexibility, but also doubting whether it is practicable to let citizens have a say in continental affairs or to allow different parts of Europe to be subject to different kinds of rules and identities. It is because I disagree with these doubts that I have attempted to go beyond simply stating the case for a more democratic, flexible and secure Europe, and rather to sketch out concrete ideas for how these principles might be given substance. Certainly, this is no easy task and the detail it requires pushes at the boundaries of what is likely to be possible in terms of adjusting the European integration model. However, this strikes me as necessary in order to move the debate forward; it is perhaps important not only to find where the potential for a new kind of European project lies but also to discover where the limits to productive change are to be found.
In this vein, even if some readers may not agree with each of my ideas for EU reform, I hope to have shown that it is possible to think through different and workable ways of reorganising European integration and cooperation. I am conscious that by taking a step further than most accounts and mapping out specific ways of implementing new forms of integration, I am opening myself to objections over one or more of these very practical policy ideas. While it is invariably easier for the analyst to stick to very abstract principles, I believe it is possible to link new, overarching guidelines for the European project with tangible reforms, and with the reflections needed to specify what an alternative EU means in practice.
And if readers don’t agree with all my policy suggestions, I hope the book will inspire them to propose their own concrete ideas and explain why these are better. Despite the momentous trials and tribulations of recent years, too many politicians and thinkers are highly dismissive of the case for far-reaching change to European integration and stridently incredulous that such change is at all viable. Predictably perhaps, many elites self-servingly support reforms that bolster their own influence, while finding ways to resist a dispersal of power among European citizens. Beyond its specific policy ideas, the book aims to convince readers that a spirit of analysis-into-action is the way forward in debates about Europe’s future. This is surely more productive than a widespread, defeatist fatalism that holds the integration model to be impervious to major change. It is also more in tune with the times than EU defenders’ stubborn insistence that any deviation from the inherited integration script is tantamount to Euro-blasphemy.
The book has been animated by a focus on the core principles that I believe can and should form the backbone of a reset Europe: citizen-oriented agency, closely dovetailed to flexibility and diversity, along with a properly founded notion of security. An alternative model of integration should be made up of three pillars: a democratic Europe, a flexible Europe and a secure Europe.
My base assumption is that the EU’s challenge is to conceive of more participative and flexible means of cooperation as a means of rebuilding solidarity – a form of solidarity that will have very different premises and principles from those that have borne the weight of European integration since the end of World War II. The EU requires more than modest institutional tweaks. Rather, it needs fundamentally new thinking on how to go back to basics and reconstruct Europe’s badly damaged sense of partnership and solidarity.
The challenge is a broad one: an alternative EU must encourage more participative local-level debate, but also combine this with democratic processes within which people show better consideration of citizens’ interests in other countries – what I have called euro-civismo. This is the fine and intricate balance upon which a genuinely European democratic project will depend. For the EU to succeed as a democratic project, active citizenship must be local, but not parochial. It must thrive at the national level without being nationalistic. It must be rooted in tangible citizen concerns, but also cosmopolitan mutual empathy. The EU must be about states and societies governing together, but not in uniformity.
Citizen-led change will not diminish the need for good EU leadership, institutions’ formal processes of reform or stronger governance capacities. The need is for more active bottom-up influence and top-down change to complement each other in closer synchronicity than has been the case so far. I have focused on citizen participation in this book not because I see formal, top-down routes to change as any less important, but because these already tend to receive most policy and analytical attention – meaning that the balance of analysis needs shifting towards a focus on bottom-up, popular engagement.
Similarly, and crucially, I have advocated greater citizen involvement in redesigning European integration not because I believe this will engender instant consensus or provide a magic cure-all for the EU’s current strains, but precisely because differences and tensions have become so profound that it is difficult to envisage a successful way forward without such engagement. Many tend disdainfully to dismiss the case for popular participation on the grounds that ‘people have such divergent views’, without realising that this is precisely why democratic involvement is needed. A more democratically participative EU is to be valued not as a means of immediately delivering particular common outcomes, but because an inclusive process for debating differences would give citizens a healthier sense of ownership over integration – and in this way smooth some of the frustrations and antipathies that have arisen against the Union in recent years.
European integration after World War II was the project of an enlightened elite. This elite cultivated creative ways to bind states and societies together in the name of preventing further conflict on the continent. The means were not democratic or participative, but the end goal justified the top-down approach. So much has changed since then – and yet the basic model of integration still stands. It has been fine-tuned at the margins, but not fundamentally revisited.
This paralysis cannot be sustainable. The EU has solved some problems, but has itself created others. History’s cardinal lesson is that each advance sows the seeds of its own reversal. A fast-changing world requires a dramatic volte-face: the EU was set up to ‘lock in’ cooperation and prevent dramatic changes that might presage war; today the EU needs to facilitate change, as future trends are radically more uncertain and require from states and societies constant agile adaptation. The EU’s challenge is so demanding because in effect it needs to make a 180-degree inversion, from limiting to multiplying citizens’ options. The post-1945 logic is past its zenith and now often seems to hinder more than it enables. European cooperation does not have the same unquestioned, cosmic ideal to push it forward today. The crisis has had a chilling effect on what has stood as the core logic of Euro-idealism for many years.
Integration’s future narrative has to be about the EU being a project to help citizens make autonomous choices, adapt and exert more effective influence over the issues that impact on their lives. The Compact of European Citizens that I mapped out in Chapter 5 would help achieve this reorientation. Under its rubric, a series of citizens’ assemblies would mobilise debates and ideas, from the local to the national and onto the European level. The Compact would ensure citizens’ voices count and that they are able to explore new and open-ended options in a proactive fashion – as opposed to simply having ex post scrutiny over the kind of conventional integration choices presented through formal institutional channels.
In Chapter 6 I outlined ideas for a radical form of flexibility in European integration – one that is capacious enough to encompass the widening diversity in policy preferences currently so evident across Europe. Such radical flexibility would be predicated on dispersed policy communities that member states would choose whether or not to join. Crucially, the citizens’ Compact would have important and defined roles in the process of deciding on more flexible forms of cooperation. And variation would also be explored within individual countries and not only between member states. An important element of radical flexibility is that governments’ decisions to participate in certain areas of European cooperation must, under certain conditions, be reversible. A crucial lesson from the poly-crisis years is that the process of building solidarity might be smoother if citizens and authorities had at least some possibility of reversing direction or applying temporary brakes on certain commitments in times of trouble.
Finally, in Chapter 7 I proposed changes to EU security policy. These adjustments would form an integral part of and lock into the broader redesign of the European integration model. Many analysts lament that the EU has been focused too introspectively on its own economic woes and insufficiently attentive to the tectonic shifts under way in global politics. Ensnared in their internal crises, European governments have sometimes struggled to lift their collective gaze and realise that the EU’s crisis is as much externally driven as internal – as the actions of Vladimir Putin, IS and Donald Trump have now made painfully clear.
European integration cannot be made more effective and legitimate if the EU does not also re-examine the way it does geopolitics. The increasing focus on fortified borders and surveillance is in some measure necessary but is currently imbalanced. A different model of foreign-policy cooperation is required, in line with the broader principles of an alternative EU. The EU should replace its existing modus operandi of basing foreign policy on the supposed allure of the Union’s own model of cooperation with a more flexible, participative and multi-actor model of geopolitics. It will also need to start being a better receptor of useful international experiences. In its myopic self-assurance, the EU still does little to cast around for ideas from those outside who might have more successful integrative, economic and democratic lessons to share.
A broader issue cuts across the three pillars of participation, flexibility and security: these principles of an alternative EU have a bearing on the UK’s future relationship with the integration project. If the EU were to become a radically different political entity, this would feed back into the debate about ensuring a positive British role in European affairs. It would open up all kinds of possibilities for UK re-engagement, as the core EU model the British people voted to leave would morph into a different kind of entity. As the Brexit talks proceed, these kind of constructive crossovers are urgently needed if the increasingly fractious divergence between the UK and the rest of Europe is to be stemmed.
Many politicians, diplomats and analysts commonly assert that whole swathes of reform are already under way. They will invariably respond to criticism of the EU by pointing out that questions of democratic legitimacy and flexibility have been on the agenda for quite some time, and that policy changes are firmly tackling the need for new approaches to integration. They are likely to push back against the position I adopt in this book by insisting that the EU needs to refine its existing cooperation rather than entertain any adjustment to integration’s core parameters.
I hope to have shown that this reaction is too sanguine and analytically complacent. Current deliberation about EU reform falls short of what is required, and in some instances risks pulling the Union in exactly the wrong direction. Measured in accordance with the principles of legitimacy, flexible diversity and reconstituted security, the claim that adequate rethinking is already bearing fruit is not convincing. It is true that concerns about legitimacy, flexibility and security have been on the agenda for several years, but that is precisely why the lack of any tangible progress in addressing such concerns is such an arresting failure. Promises of qualitative reform accumulate and fade, like ‘prologues to an unwritten book’.5 And this is why untried approaches are now warranted.
In the preceding chapters, I have charted how genuinely new ideas are failing to materialise and how most policy options now being brought forward replay rather stale notions of integration. Calls for change still follow well-trodden conceptual paths. We have seen throughout the book, across different policy areas and in relation to the varied challenges facing the EU, how very familiar ideas for reform are being recycled – in the form of proposals that in most cases have been kicked around in policy debates for many decades. In the apparently improved conditions of 2017, leaders seem to believe they can now advance on these kinds of select policy improvements without having to consider re-restructuring the integration model in any fundamental sense.
Contrary to many official government and EU claims, existing reform initiatives do little to bring citizens into the process of integration in ways that are genuinely empowering, agenda-setting or widely participative. Similarly, existing efforts to manage diversity and allow space for flexible integration are sanitised and managerial, and incapable of dealing with profound variations in what citizens and states want and expect from European cooperation. And the way that the EU’s internal and external policies are changing is unlikely to create a more secure Europe, or ensure that foreign policy helps reconfigure the integration model.
Current reforms rarely target the underlying causes of the poly-crisis. The EU has done little to offer more of a voice or protection for integration’s losers, or to dissuade these citizens from turning back to the nation state and national identity in their quest for protective certainty. Useful changes in particular policy sectors have done little to improve the basic fairness of EU decision-making. What is perhaps most striking about the crisis is that nearly all states and all societies feel aggrieved that other states and societies are not respecting their concerns. This can be demonstrated with an anecdote: in July 2016, Jean-Claude Juncker quipped that France was getting its way in many internal debates and escaping economic sanctions, ‘because it is France’. For many other nations, this off-the-cuff remark symbolised everything that is wrong with the EU’s opaqueness and arbitrary political machinations.
Paradoxically, post-crisis reforms have been both overly harsh in the requirements they have imposed upon many European societies and insufficiently robust, as governments simply ignore EU rules with increasing frequency because they no longer judge them to be fair. A new Europe must mend the cracked link between authority and legitimacy. An EU that becomes a panopticon of constant surveillance and control is not the kind of alternative Europe likely to prosper or excite future generations. To date, the measures that governments have adopted to lighten the poly-crisis simply deepen the Union’s underlying pathology. The EU often acts in a way that makes the crisis worse, not better. It recalls Richard III, brooding on his inexorable downward spiral: ‘I am in so far […] that sin will pluck on sin.’6
One reason for all this is that quantitative debate still prevails over qualitative reconsideration. Christopher Bickerton summarises this conceptual gridlock nicely, writing that there is a still-unmet need for ‘recasting Europe as a new project of internationalism rather than as a tired one of integration or federalism’.7 As the poly-crisis has deepened, so the Europhile versus Eurosceptic divide has become sharper and apparently even more all-defining. One side of this debate wants more Europe, the other wants less. Of course, it is impossible completely to get around this more-versus-less choice. But on its own it is not a way of framing the integration challenge that produces the kind of innovation that Europe needs. The pro-versus-anti, more-versus-less dynamic is so deep-rooted and apparently unshakeable that alternative ways of approaching integration are squeezed off the agenda.
Another powerful explanation for the EU’s paralysis lies in the lack of osmosis between institutions and societies. A serious shortcoming is that most current reform templates do not dovetail well with – or grow organically out of – underlying structural trends in European societies. A point I have emphasised throughout the book is that both the ‘more Europe’ and ‘less Europe’ agendas lack a congruent theory of change. They are in effect seeking to put round pegs (their proposed changes to the EU) into square holes (the actual nature of evolving European societies, polities and economies). Many analysts have pointed out that the defining feature of modern society is that of fast-moving and unpredictable fluidity. Yet the EU’s institutional set-up is notable for the very opposite: its essential lack of adaptability.
There is a glaring mismatch between the way that interstate cooperation is conceived through the prevailing practices, institutions and rules of the EU on the one hand, and evolving sociological dynamics on the other. Indeed, this is why so many apparently well-designed and well-meaning reforms seem to be floundering and failing to make a successful move from the drawing board to reality. The existing EU integration script is a dam blocking the flow of new ideas that faithfully mirror shifts in social reality. The EU’s founding myths are so totemic that they militate against radically different conceptions of integration and cooperation that might be more attuned to the new contours of modern European societies. Europe’s empowered social actors would benefit from a few long-reigning Euro-shibboleths being ripped down.
There has been much nervous talk about the old order being swept away by dangerous populists. This now-ubiquitous narrative gives the impression that the EU’s main danger is one of chaos and disorder, requiring the steady hand of incumbent elites. Yet for all the focus on new parties, the old elite is in fact still the dominant political force, retaining its influence and privileges. Contrary to the impression given by much current commentary and discourse, Europe’s main problem is not uncontrolled and insurgent people-driven chaos, but rather the unresponsive and opaque decision-making processes that persist at both the EU and national levels.
Hegel famously wrote about phases in history revealing their internal exhaustion after the fact and when a new phase is already set to begin. In one of the most famous metaphors of political philosophy, he described the epoch-heralding owl of Minerva taking flight and revealing the contours of a new order when the pillars of an existing order were already crumbling. This evocative image pinpoints precisely what is the EU’s most worrying deficiency. Where is the herald of Europe’s new historical phase? While Europe’s old order crumbles, its owl of Minerva remains forlorn and flightless, weighed down by the crippled wings of EU integration orthodoxy.
The proposals that make up the three pillars of my alternative, reset Europe invite a provocative concluding thought: under a reimagined integration model, would the EU as such even need to exist any more? European cooperation might proceed without any single enveloping entity, or single treaty, or consolidated legal structure, or encompassing institutional umbrella. Might an alternative Europe be made up of a series of policy communities, in combination with the Compact of European Citizens – and have no need for a construct called ‘the European Union’?
Disbanding the EU as a single entity would have the advantage of showing that European integration was certainly moving beyond business as usual. To disaffected citizens, it might represent an enlivening new start. It would help move away from a situation where there is one distant, heavy-handed and opaque supranational centre. In highlighting that the EU is not innately coterminous with workable and effective European solidarity, such a radical and controversial step might help clear away the grievances aimed at the EU that have accumulated over six decades. Indeed, some may believe that starting from a blank slate is now the only way to inject a meaningful reform dynamic into European integration.
I have not advocated or explored this route in the book. I have sought principally to identify the right bottom-up organising principles for a new Europe. Those principles that I have proposed could be advanced within the framework of the EU – and indeed I believe they would most productively be pursued through a rebooted Union. I have treated participation and legitimacy as means of improving EU powers and capacities, not of hollowing out the Union’s institutional edifice. Too many would see closing down the EU as an acknowledgement of failure; such a step would be widely interpreted as a lowering of ambition and the beginning of a more fractured Europe. And, of course, the resistance to contemplating a completely fresh start would be considerable.
If the troubles afflicting Europe were to intensify even further and put in doubt the integrity of the EU’s basic institutional framework, principles for a new beginning might then be needed. If the crisis were to return with even greater destructive vengeance at some point in the future, this book’s ideas might still be relevant to thinking through how a post-EU integration process could be fashioned as a modernised and upgraded project, not a mere dilution of the current EU institutional framework. For now, it is thankfully unlikely that the poly-crisis will get anywhere near reaching this point. In 2017, amidst ubiquitous assertions that ‘Europe is back’, the EU’s moment of most acute danger appears to have passed. But it might be no bad thing to have contingency alternatives ready to sustain productive European cooperation if the spectre of a major fracturing of the EU were to reappear.
Moreover, it should be pointed out that the more governments and EU institutions continue to stonewall on radical reform, the more citizens and other actors will feel themselves justified in exploring extra-official pathways to reform. As we saw in Chapters 4 and 5, many citizens’ groups are already moving to create their own systems of social debate and interaction that are largely indifferent to official EU channels of influence. Some today intimate at campaigns of civil disobedience against Union rules. It might well be that an alternative Europe emerges in this way – by societies themselves chipping away at the EU’s authority and bypassing its formal practices to establish new forms of cooperation and solidarity. Anyone thinking that such a scenario is ridiculously far-fetched might take a close look at the unprecedented intensity of social protest that has rocked Europe in recent years and how this reflects a growing popular disillusion with the EU’s continually unmet promises to listen to and engage with citizens’ concerns. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that the EU as such will be simply left behind by social trends it has failed to grasp or take seriously.
Such forms of radical innovation would help rebut an often-heard riposte that is of broad and vital importance. Traditionalists tend to dismiss ideas for a flexible or alternative Europe as merely a lesser Europe. This does not need to be the case. It may measure as ‘less’ on some existing scales of integration, and yet entail more of other kinds of cooperation. There may be fewer formal rules and centralised laws, but more contact between citizens and more popular engagement beyond the relatively narrow sections of the population fully comfortable with the current EU labyrinth. There may be fewer single-template uniform policies, but more examples of informal networks of cities, citizen forums and select groups of states pushing cooperation into new areas.
I finish with an important clarification and caveat: the book’s template for an alternative Europe does not offer a quick fix, nor a firm road that is guaranteed to take the EU easily to a quiet and idyllic destination. It is not about returning to a prelapsarian, idealised European unity. If offers citizens the chance to remake integration in a way that more closely resonates with their interests, concerns and aspirations – it does not specify what the end points of that remake will be. Alternative Europe does not define a destination, but rather seeks to propel and aid a journey – towards whatever destinations European citizens deem appropriate. It points towards an EU that would rest a little less on Jean Monnet and more on the spirit of A Clockwork Orange – a novel whose moral suggests it is better to be free to err than to have goodness or correctness handed down from a higher authority.8
Of course, in the context of the poly-crisis, elites have expressed a fear that more popular participation, more flexibility, more diversity and risky innovation will simply amplify today’s turbulence and sink the whole European project. But my premise is that more engaged debate could encourage citizens to build bridges, to shape productive coalitions and networks. The very process of airing differences and assessing what citizens really want from Europe might be what best enables a more common spirit of solidarity very gradually to take shape.
Europe has for centuries suffered periodic challenges to liberalism. Each of these has ended in ultra-aggressive nationalism, ethnic supremacism and chauvinistic authoritarianism in part because elites, technocrats and ‘men of letters’ fomented each backlash with little citizen participation. Each backlash ended up more elitist and damaging to ordinary citizens than the internationalist liberal rationalism its architects excoriated. The history of previous anti-liberal counter-projects provides sobering lessons for the EU’s current crisis, as different sets of elites fight over alternative political projects with equally paternalistic disdain for citizen-led reform.9
Citizens need to discover ways towards such solidarity themselves; they will continue to resist it if such idealistic visions are dropped on them from above. Citizen participation and deliberative democracy will not generate perfect European harmony and understanding, but if citizens have some chance to put forward their opinions about the future of the EU and to argue these out, they are more likely to accept the eventual decisions taken at a European level – even if those decisions do not completely correspond to their own individual preferences but rather balance others’ different interests.
Elites still use the standard template of integration as a crutch for a European citizenry that they assume is unready to bear the weight of responsibility for a shared future. Yet surely it is too pessimistic to believe that European populations stand eager to revert to mutually damaging hostility were the EU’s existing institutional architecture to be modified. Rather, a better description of the current situation is that a broadly European spirit survives, but is encased in dangerously ossified institutional structures. While nationalist visions now claim attention, European states have not clamped shut and Brexit is for now an exception, not a model.
Much current thinking is back to front, and mistakes cause for effect. Populists have gained ground because citizens feel they lack a voice. European cooperation must make the journey back from the desocialisation of recent years to resocialisation, based on new avenues for trust. A longer historical view shows that the deepening of democracy has often gone hand in hand with the development of European-level cooperation – advances in popular participation routinely helped marshal support for alliances throughout the European state system.10 Applying such lessons to today’s predicaments, we might reasonably expect that getting democracy right could nourish cooperation between states rather than drain away integration’s lifeblood, as elites seem to fear.
Democracy and flexibility will be about combining European solidarity with fostering the kind of subaltern participation and identities that are already taking root. Indeed, while it is important to be aware of the likely substantive outcomes of participative democracy, democratising the EU to some extent needs to be prioritised as an end in itself. When Eurosceptics talk of a more democratic EU they have in mind means to prevent European-level decisions. When EU elites talk of a more democratic EU they have in mind means to legitimise existing integration templates. But democracy should be neither simply spoiler nor co-option. Participation is to be valued on its own terms and not simply as a means to other, preset agendas. As they now optimistically explore policy initiatives to move the EU beyond its poly-crisis years, European leaders would be mistaken to continue dismissing the issues of participation and legitimacy as merely second-order expendables – desirable in principle, perhaps, but not really a priority.
The EU was built on weak civic foundations. Simply carrying on adding to the existing building in accordance with the original design plans will make the whole structure even more precarious. Europe first needs to strengthen the foundations upon which integration stands. And it must then look for lighter architectural designs so the integrity of the EU house is stronger, for longer. The question most commonly posed is: what must be done to save or strengthen the EU? But surely this is the wrong question. The EU is a means to an end, not an end in itself. The better question to probe is: what reasons and demands are there for designing a better form of European cooperation? What is the question that a new phase of European integration should really be seeking to answer?
This image of going back to rebuild Europe’s foundations with stronger materials is not meant to put limits on the depth of integration. Rather, it is to suggest that cooperation must in the future grow more organically than it has been allowed to do in the last several decades. Only this can slowly reassemble the EU’s distempered base of loyalty. The long road to an alternative Europe will not be smooth and the process will not be linear – the new integration model will be more workable precisely because it will move firmly away from such assumptions.
In sum, this book has suggested ways in which European integration needs to put down deeper roots before it can regain momentum. This will take time and involve much uncertainty. But it is possible if there is a willingness to reimagine the contours of European cooperation. And such patience and commitment to begin from the EU’s core foundations can be made to pay off over the long term. The deeper river runs more smoothly.