Simultaneously with the arrival of important deadlines on tariffs and trade arrangements between the United States and Canada, comparably important and complicated decisions will soon have to be attempted between the United States and the European Union. These discussions take place against a background of genuine and rising concern about the stability and future of the brave European experiment.
It is easy, 80 years after the end of World War II, to forget what an extraordinary accomplishment it has been to establish and maintain such a broad collective unity of the objectives between almost all the European countries west of the innermost republics of the old Soviet Union and Turkey, a total of 27 countries. Except for Sweden, Ireland, Spain, and Portugal, all of these countries were heavily engaged in World War II and many of them, including Germany, Italy, Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Hungary, had the red-hot rake of war dragged over them by the contending sides, often twice. Most were also pounded mercilessly from the air, and Spain, though not a combatant in the world war, in 1939 concluded a civil war in which Italy, Germany, and the USSR intervened, ravaging the entire country and killing more than a million people.
To have constructed out of this terrible hecatomb a functioning economic and social confederacy where there have been no violent disputes between the countries, and the 80 years of peace—especially the last 35 years in the case of formerly Soviet-dominated countries—have produced a general per capita standard of living approximately two-thirds of that of the United States, must rank as one of the most astounding and positive phenomena of international diplomacy in the history of the nation-state.
The performance of these 27 European countries in comparison to their own individual histories has been remarkably positive. Not so upbeat, however, is their competitive performance. As a percentage of world GDP, from 2000 to 2025, while the United States has risen from 18 percent to a current 25–26 percent, and China has risen from approximately 7 percent to 18 percent, Europe has descended slightly from 19 percent to 17 percent.
There is a great deal of evidence that much official Danegeld has been dispensed as part of the settlement to create institutions and continental policies designed to discourage economically any temptation toward the terrible upheavals that the working and agrarian classes of Europe had resorted to countless times with increasing intensity after the French Revolution began in 1789. It is hazardous to generalize too much over so many countries and different economies, but in general it must be said that economic growth has moved more slowly as a result of these socialistic policies, although that growth has been more evenly distributed than it might otherwise have been.
It does not lie with contemporary observers to criticize the determination of the founders of the European Common Market, the precursor of the European Union, to emphasize peace and stability over the maximization of economic growth. But the fact remains that Europe is now facing a much different challenge for reconstruction than after the horrors of the two world wars and the brutal oppressions of a number of the principal European governments between the wars. The comparatively compromised system of capitalism adopted by much of the EU is not ultimately competitive with the United States or even in many respects with China, where a totalitarian government manipulates the value of its own currency and the pricing of its exports and operates almost entirely outside useful international agreements.
The challenging economic decisions confronting Europe and the correct answers to them will almost certainly constitute a radical change of course from the social democratic model that almost all of Europe has pursued from the first days of multi-nationalism with the establishment of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951. The six original members of the Common Market were France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. This was an initial gesture of cooperation between six countries which had all suffered terrible damage in World War II, not only physically, but from the profound and lethal scars left by Nazism, Fascism, and collaboration with brutal foreign enemies.
There is now serious political uncertainty about the viability of the institutions of the new Europe. In practice, the member governments name commissioners to deal with individual policy areas, and these commissioners are like a national cabinet of specialist ministers. They are not individually directly responsible to the European Parliament in Strasbourg.
Ultimately, even more than concerns about immigration, it was the undemocratic European practice of administrative directives showering down from Brussels on every conceivable subject that were not legislated, not adopted by elected people, and were supposedly not appealable, that repelled a narrow majority of the British public and produced the vote a decade ago for the United Kingdom to leave the EU. When put to the test, Great Britain could not justify subsuming the democratic parliamentary system that had gradually evolved in the 800 years since the Magna Carta with relatively little violence compared to most European countries, into the very well-intentioned but altogether unfledged system in Brussels. (Britain has had six monarchs who died violently at the hands of rivals in 960 years, and only one temporary overthrow of the constitutional system, attempted by Oliver Cromwell.) Nor is Brussels a plausible source of authority for the British: Belgium was established in 1830 as a buffer state primarily by the statesmanship of the long-serving British foreign secretary and prime minister, Viscount Palmerston, and has never been a serious political centre.
To strengthen the loyalty of Europeans to an integrated political system, as opposed to just an alliance and free trade area, Brussels will have to self-democratize. Instead of doing this, however, the current leadership is trying to abolish the impractical regime of unanimous agreement for a mere majority. If this proceeds, the Euro-government will collapse, the experiment will fail, and trade negotiations with the United States will become a pell-mell competition between the current ostensible European partners, especially France and Germany.
Europe is at a double crossroads: political and economic.
