The EU thread

[Sheilbh]

Yeah good point there Zoupa. I agree with Sheilbh as well.

What is frustrating is that the challenge from Russia and the abandonment by Daddy America, at this stage, could be leveraged into a rallying cry of more European unity. Maybe it will happen. I just don't see any movement toward that.

I agree with Zoups again. Although again on those suggestions they require some form of united command (a la NATO) and political willingness to actually do that - and to take a risk for someone else. I think this is the point I've made before I don't think there is, yet, a common, shared European view of the risk. So, for example, will the Romanians be willing to push Russia in order to help deter Russia in the Baltics? Maybe, but perhaps not. I think aside from the equipment that practical "leadership" of the Western alliance in the Cold War was a big positive of the US.

I think your last point is why I am more pessimistic on this. Because I think there's a bit of hand-waving away the political constraints and challenges at an EU level.

What your saying is basically the Delors/van Middelaar theory of the EU advancing through crisis or that series of coups. Faced with very difficult challenges at various points in the post-war, European integration was away to overleap those problems. That's a reading of the process of building the EU that I basically agree with. It's not slow gradual building of layers but imaginative leaps forward in response to moments of crisis like Korea and Suez, the oil shock, the end of the Cold War.

My worry on that front is that I think that process has, in effect, stalled. Whether it was the Eurozone crisis, the migration crisis, covid and post-covid (and I had very high hopes for Next Gen project), the invasion of Ukraine and now Trump II - the EU has not advanced through crisis. Whatever drove that mechanism seems to have broken. It has taken some measures and maybe just enough to keep the show on the road but not much more. But I think the problems are accumulating, the EU is already operating at the very outer reaches of what the treaties can do - but I still don't see the sign of the next advance through crisis. I see, at best, stasis. And I'm not fully sure why.

I'd add that to Zoups point I think Macron is the only European leader who has had an analysis and a solution - and I think did see this as a problem with further integration as a solution. He pushed it in his first term and I think in many ways the failure of that project is the tragedy of Macron (and, possibly, Europe). I don't always agree with him and I think he can be impish in how he expresses it, but I think he's Europe's Cassandra in recent years.