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This book is a new edition of an earlier work, Surpassing Realism: The Politics of European Integration since 1945, which was published by Rowman & Littlefield in 2003 and reissued, much revised, under the title European Integration: A Concise History in late 2011. This new edition shares many continuities with its two predecessors but also exhibits several discontinuities.

Like its predecessors, this book is a narrative general history that inserts the story of European integration into the wider history of this period. Imperial decline and decolonization; the threat and then fall of communism; the impact of American foreign, fiscal, and monetary policy; and the democratization of the Mediterranean countries and the nations of central Europe are just some of the contemporaneous historical developments whose stories intersected with the history of European integration and have been woven into this book’s fabric. The book deals, in short, with a central development in the postwar political history of the “West,” to use a phrase redolent of the Cold War.

What is meant by European integration? In the previous two editions, integration was defined as the historical process whereby European nation-states have been willing to transfer, or more usually pool, their sovereign powers into a collective enterprise. The European Union (EU), which today counts twenty-seven member states, nearly 500 million inhabitants, an economy almost as large as that of the United States (US), and a complex institutional structure that includes a supranational central administration (the European Commission), an elected parliament, a court of justice, and a central bank, is the outcome of this process. This edition preserves this definition, which has the effect of concentrating the narrative on the high politics of European integration. I make no apology for this. Quite aside from the fact that I am a scholar of political history, a book that dealt in depth with the full administrative history of the European institutions or tried to trace the impact of European integration on the economies, political systems, and peoples of its member states would be many times longer.

There have, of course, been many efforts to find a root cause for the development of supranational institutions in Europe. The desire to supersede ruinous nationalism and ensure peace; the original member states’ need to provide economic welfare and geopolitical security; the need of European states, prodded by domestic lobbies, to adapt to changes in the global economy; the intended and unintended consequences of experiments in supranationalism; and the lingering conviction of the original member states that they could better maximize their relative power (i.e., the extent to which they counted in the world) by uniting are five more or less plausible overarching hypotheses. Other hypotheses might be added, but not by this book, which, like its two predecessors, has no pretensions to do anything more than tell a very complex story clearly and concisely.

That said, this book underlines the idea that European integration would not have occurred had Western European states not abandoned the “autistic power politics” that had dominated their relations hitherto. Finding themselves in a world dominated by the rival superpowers and longing to rebuild their devastated economies and provide welfare for their citizens, postwar leaders realized that they could no longer pursue their own short-term interests with scant regard for the consequences of their actions on their neighbors.¹ In an age of nuclear weapons, moreover, war could no longer be regarded as an extension of foreign policy. The aura of moral approbation that has always surrounded the process of European integration, in both the public rhetoric of statesmen and specialist texts in international relations theory, has ultimately derived from this renunciation of realpolitik.

By turning their backs on power politics, however, the nation-states of Europe did not suddenly become paragons of altruism. They remained protective of their economic, commercial, and political interests and invariably battled hard within the confines of the European Community to secure their goals. Toward the rest of the world, notably over agricultural trade, Europe has also regularly shown that it puts its own interests first, irrespective of the consequences for its principal partners and allies.

With hindsight, the most striking fact about the history of European integration is the tenacity with which the member states have defended their formal sovereign rights. The number of member states increased from the six original nations to nine in 1973, to ten in 1981, to twelve in 1986, to fifteen in 1995, to twenty-five in 2004, to twenty-seven in 2007, and to twenty-eight in 2013, while the sheer number of policies decided at the European level multiplied even more dramatically. However, the essence of the Community’s decision-making procedure has remained the same since the 1950s: major new policy departures are never made unless the member states have reached collective agreement. Only rarely does a “qualified majority” of member states compel their peers to accept a proposal against their will in the EU’s key legislature, the Council of the European Union. Moreover, when the member states negotiate amendments and additions to the treaties that are the EU’s de facto “constitution,” such changes must be agreed upon unanimously.

Indeed, the institutions and procedures of the European Union could not work for a week in the absence of the will to cooperate of the member states, especially the largest ones—Germany and France, but also Italy, Spain, and (since 2004) Poland. This salient fact, which is obvious, but not always fashionable to stress, means that the limit of European integration can be identified with some ease: it is that frontier beyond which lie the policy areas over which the member states of the Union are not prepared to relinquish sovereign power or, put more simply, do not wish the neighbors to intrude upon. The key political institution of the EU—the one where the big decisions are taken—is the European Council, the regular meetings of the member states’ heads of government that set the EU’s agenda, deal with its crises, and in essence, act as its cabinet.

This is not to deny that the Union possesses an important supranational dimension. It does. The European Commission, a committee of senior officials nominated by the member states, formulates, after consultation with the member states’ permanent representatives at Brussels, all proposals for new legislation and also keeps vigil over the member states’ implementation of European law. Since the 1992 Treaty on European Union (TEU), moreover, the power of the elected European Parliament to ratify and shape the decisions reached by the member states has significantly increased. The sentences of the Court of Justice of the European Union (formerly the European Court of Justice) have established the supremacy of European law over national law, and the Court provides for judicial review of an overzealous Commission’s actions, or, more usually, of member states too indolent in implementing Community law.

In the last analysis, concern over this transfer of sovereignty to the EU’s institutions was the principal reason why, in January 2020, the United Kingdom finally and messily ended its troubled membership of the European project. “Brexit,” in the last resort, was caused by a widespread perception among the British people that the EU’s powers to make law had gone “too far.” It was necessary to “take back control.” Naturally, this perception was not unanimous, which is why the Brexit issue has provoked such lacerating political conflict. The case of Britain, in fact, has illustrated just how far integration has actually proceeded. The British have discovered the hard way that they could not leave the EU without significant political, economic, and psychological costs. At the same time, they could not stay in Europe without paying a price that millions of its citizens regarded as unacceptable.

The British, incidentally, are by no means alone in feeling that the EU has exceeded its remit. Austria, Denmark, France, Finland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Sweden all have right-wing populist parties that have gained in strength immensely since the previous edition of this book was published. To a greater or lesser degree, all of these parties oppose the EU and wish to reclaim sovereign power from Brussels, especially over immigration. Meanwhile, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Poland, while remaining nominally pro-EU (all three benefit financially from the EU’s regional development programs), have shown a spiky reluctance to adjust to the Union’s norms or principal policies.

Since the turn of this century, moreover, some of the EU’s most high-profile projects—the Lisbon program to make the EU the most competitive knowledge-based economy in the world by 2010; the would-be EU Constitution rejected by French and Dutch voters in 2005; the idea of a common EU foreign policy; the attempt to establish a common EU frontier; the EU’s single currency, the euro—have met with mixed success or outright failure. Such projects were often hailed as giant steps toward building Europe, but member states, or their peoples, pulled back from the implications of “more Europe.”

Supporters of European integration often say, echoing the words of the first president of the European Commission, the German diplomat Walter Hallstein, that European integration is like riding a bicycle: if you stop, you topple over. But it is also true, to develop the simile, that few cyclists have the muscles or the will to ascend the highest mountains and are quite content to spin along the foothills without breaking sweat. Since the introduction of the euro in 1999, the EU has launched itself at some stiff climbs: in every case, several countries’ legs have buckled, and the pack of riders has had to freewheel back downhill.

In other words, the aura of success that has enveloped the process of European integration for most (though not all) of the period since the 1950s is dissipating. If it disappears, there will be repercussions for how the story of European integration is told. The process of European integration is no more immune from revision than any other historical pro-cess.² The years since 2003 have revealed long-standing structural flaws in the so-called European construction, and a straightforward narrative of success, which Surpassing Realism was, on the whole, today appears difficult to justify. A history of the European Union, to be plausible, is one that, as well as capturing the authentic novelty of the process of integration and the indisputable idealism that it has engendered, looks back from the EU’s present and traces the causes of the current malaise—for malaise there is.

In common with the book’s previous two versions, the text is structured chronologically. However, the similarity of method should not disguise the quite significant changes that have been introduced to the book’s contents. Chapter 2, which previously dealt with the five-year period between the war’s end in May 1945 and May 1950, when French foreign minister Robert Schuman proposed establishing an economic community for coal and steel products, now gives much more space to developments before 1945 and concludes with the decision to launch the Council of Europe—a body that was intended by many to be the first step toward a federal United States of Europe—in May 1949.

The third chapter deals with the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) and the abortive European Defense Community (EDC). Following the Schuman Declaration, the ECSC treaty was negotiated by six West European states (Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and West Germany); these same countries sought to construct a defense community, working in harmony with NATO, which was destined to evolve into a federal European political community. The French National Assembly shot this plan down in August 1954: foreign policy and defense cooperation has ever proved to be a thorny topic for the European project.

By March 1957, however, “the Six” had nevertheless negotiated new treaties to promote cooperation in the field of nuclear energy and research, and—crucially—to establish the European Economic Community (EEC), which was a customs union for industrial and agricultural products. The negotiation of the EEC was a hard-fought battle, and many, notably the British government, underestimated the will of the Six to make the necessary compromises. These two treaties, especially the EEC, are the subject matter of chapter 4.

Between 1958 and 1969, the EEC was dominated by the personality and ambitions of the president of France, Charles de Gaulle. The great French leader was determined to transform the EEC into a vehicle for French foreign policy and was adamant, too, that the member states should remain the Community’s key decision makers. This “intergovernmentalist” approach clashed with the more “federalist” conception of the treaty preferred by the European Commission and other enthusiasts for supranational government, and also led de Gaulle to block the entry into the Community by Great Britain, which he regarded, not entirely falsely, as an American stooge. Chapter 5 deals with the indelible mark that de Gaulle left on the Community’s development, which was deeper than many historians of European integration have been wont to acknowledge.

Chapter 6, “Weathering Storms,” and chapter 7, “Consolidation and Innovation,” are dedicated to the development of the Community in the 1970s. In retrospect, it is something of a miracle and a powerful testament to the sense of cohesion achieved by the EEC that Western Europe did not revert to economic nationalism in the 1970s. Wildly swinging exchange rates, rampant inflation, low economic growth, and soaring oil prices were a recipe for protectionism. Instead, cooperation intensified. From December 1974, the EC’s heads of state and government began to meet on a regular basis in what became known as the European Council. This quintessentially intergovernmental body swiftly became the EC’s strategic decision-making body. The EEC admitted Great Britain, Denmark, and Ireland to membership in 1973. The EC also strove to control the damaging effects of fluctuating exchange rates by instituting the European Monetary System (EMS) in 1979, and the member states agreed that the EC Assembly should be directly elected, making its pretensions to be an authentic parliament less risible. A string of sentences by the Court of Justice had, by the end of the 1970s, established that the Treaty of Rome conferred rights directly on the citizens of the member states and that the regulations and directives made by Community institutions enjoyed supremacy over conflicting national laws. These achievements were remarkable given the economic and political turbulence of the 1970s.

The turning point in the history of European integration nevertheless undoubtedly comes between 1984 and 1992. A citizen transported forward in time from 1963 would have found the European Community (as it began to be called in the 1970s) of 1983 essentially similar to the EEC of twenty years before. Trade was much freer, but even trade in merchandise was still obstructed by a host of nontariff barriers. Physical barriers—passport and customs controls—still blocked the movement of citizens of EC member states from one country to another. The EC was primarily concerned with agriculture. In the early 1980s, agriculture took up nearly 80 percent of the Community’s budget, and the disagreements provoked by the costs of agricultural policy absorbed (it sometimes seemed) 99 percent of its energies.

Yet just ten years later, in 1993, our time traveler would have been astonished by the degree to which the Single European Act (SEA, 1986) and the Treaty on European Union (1992) were enabling people to move, buy, invest, and sell across the member states of what was now called the European Union. The traveler would, moreover, have been equally astonished at the policy responsibilities that had been transferred to the Community level and at the growing role played by the EU’s supranational institutions.

Chapters 8 and 9 describe how this transfer of responsibilities was decided and how and why the member states decided to move forward so far and so fast to “complete the single market” and, in the teeth of fierce British opposition, to complement the single market with a plan for a single currency, an autonomous central bank, and enhanced powers for the directly elected European Parliament. The shock of the unification of Germany was the decisive impulse for this acceleration in the pace and scale of European integration. The French historian Frédéric Bozo has rightly dubbed the Treaty on European Union that emerged at Maastricht a “quantum leap” for the integration project as a whole.³

The final two chapters are concerned with the EU as it has developed since Maastricht. In brief, it is a story of hopes dashed, or at least blunted. After Maastricht, and especially after the introduction of the euro in 2002, the EU enjoyed an Indian summer of favorable attention from the international punditocracy. The EU was depicted as an emerging superpower that would dominate the twenty-first century; an organization whose postnational institutions, environmental friendliness, commitment to peace and human rights, and general aura of sanctity made it an exemplar for the rest of the world—and especially for the “Toxic Texan” and the neoconservatives lurking within the Washington beltway. The EU would match the United States as a force in the world by virtue of its superior way of life, such commentators asserted boldly.⁴

Such panegyrics to the EU’s soft power attributes were taken seriously by some surprising people. The EU in the late 1990s and early 2000s generated a mood of progressivism that recalls (to those who have read both literatures) the enthusiasm of many liberal intellectuals and scholars across Europe for the League of Nations in the 1920s and early 1930s. In both cases, ideals ran into hard facts. In the 1930s, it was the rise of fascism that exposed the League’s weaknesses; in the 2000s, economic issues and recalcitrant voters exposed the shortcomings of what this book has dubbed “EUphoria.”

Chapters 10 and 11 deal with both this mood of optimism and with the EU’s dashed hopes. Chapter 10 surveys four of the policy areas in which the EU took major decisions between 1992 and 2009: monetary union; enlargement to central and southeast Europe; the EU’s dissensions over issues of foreign policy, especially the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which split it into two angrily divided camps; and the negotiation of the EU Constitution, which, in hindsight, was an excessively bold step forward. The Constitution’s defeat at the hands of French and Dutch voters in 2005, which opens chapter 11, was emblematic. Europe’s leaders ought to have realized that their own soaring hopes for the continent’s political future were not necessarily shared by their voters.

Chapter 11 concludes the book by examining the mood of deep crisis that has taken hold in the EU since the previous edition of this book was published and attempts to draw some tentative conclusions for the Union’s future. The period since the Lisbon Treaty entered into force on December 1, 2009, has been a grim decade of crisis management (or mismanagement), full of “alarums and excursions,” to cite the title of the best book on the EU’s difficulties in these years.⁵ The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune have peppered the EU from all sides, and the EU has taken a number of painful hits. The global economic slump almost caused the euro to crash; humanitarian disasters in Africa and Syria led to a flood of migrants arriving in the EU and tested the EU’s vaunted commitment to free movement of people to the breaking point; populist parties proclaiming their “sovereignist”—or nationalist—sympathies emerged. Most dramatically of all, as I mentioned above, the UK voted in June 2016 to leave the EU. “Brexit” has paradoxically shown the Union’s resilience, however. The British found it extremely difficult to disentangle themselves from the EU satisfactorily: it became a national psychodrama. Meanwhile, the twenty-seven remaining nations maintained a common front in the negotiations with the British: nobody tried to cut themselves a special deal before Britain departed.

Still, despite its resilience, it is useless to deny that the EU today is looking like tarnished goods. Its future may be predictable by Madame Sosostris’s “wicked pack of cards,” but lesser mortals without this precious theoretical tool should acknowledge that almost anything, including the disintegration of the EU (but also the transformation of the EU, or a large part of it, into a political entity that has taken on more of the key competences of a nation-state), is possible over the next five to ten years.⁶

This summary of the book’s contents has already given away one point of narrative technique: the book is not what the historian Herbert Butterfield notoriously identified as “Whig history.”⁷ The study of European integration has sometimes been the last redoubt of history of this kind. In much the same way that scholars once depicted English constitutional history as a seesaw battle between reformist “Whigs” (Liberals) and reactionary “Tories” (in which British parliamentary democracy was at length perfected by Whig statesmen despite the low cunning and the self-interested opportunism of the Tories), many scholars of European integration have portrayed European integration as a historical process whose forward march has been hampered by states and national leaders (de Gaulle and Margaret Thatcher—indeed British leaders more generally—have a starring role as villains) irrationally attached to the principles of national sovereignty, which has resulted nevertheless in a unique polity that is an example to the rest of the world.

The problem with seeing any history in terms of reactionaries versus progressives is that it “abridges”—to use Butterfield’s term—the historical process. According to Butterfield, the historian’s job is rather the “analysis of all the mediations by which the past was turned into our present.” It is to “recapture the richness of the moments, the humanity of the men, the setting of the external circumstances, and the implications of events.” When writing general history, which is of necessity a compressed summary of the whole, we have the right to expect, Butterfield adds, that the historian has not, by the selection and organization of the facts, “interpolated a theory . . . particularly one that would never be feasible if all the story were told in all its detail.”⁸

I agree with Butterfield’s injunctions on how to write general history. I have accordingly concentrated on capturing the much that was contingent about European integration and on evoking the drama of its many crises. Europe might have taken any number of forks in the road: striving to convey how easily things might have turned out differently at every important juncture was the book’s major challenge (and the one, whatever the book’s defects, which I am most confident of having met). In addition, as I hinted earlier, I have made a deliberate choice not to advance a broad theory to explain the dynamic of European integration but to concentrate on clarifying the issues at stake at any given moment in the EU’s emergence and explaining specific outcomes in such detail as was possible, given the amount of space available.

All the same, it is important for a general text not to become too immersed in detail. Detail for the sake of detail is an occupational hazard for professional historians, and scholarship on the history of European integration—if a gentle euphemism may be permitted—is not immune from this failing. Just as the EU itself can seem forbidding and opaque to its citizens, so can the EU’s history. Specialists who focus on a particular policy or event dominate the corpus of scholarship on the EU’s history. This book, by contrast, attempts to outline what European integration has amounted to. I would be the first person to advocate supplementing this book with more detailed studies on individual chapters in the EU’s story.

This caveat aside, I hope this book’s attempt to sketch what the Polish-British historian Lewis Namier called “the nature of the thing” is regarded as plausible. Historiography is ultimately portraiture, not scientific explanation. If a subject is drawn too boldly, it easily becomes a caricature; if drawn too fussily, it loses the character of the sitter. If it is drawn too remorselessly—warts and all—it will likely be relegated to the attic and kept out of public view. This book is not always a flattering portrait, but it is a sincere attempt to capture a very complex character in an impartial way. And if the finished portrait has too many wrinkles for the taste of some, it will at least act as a corrective to the many extant portrayals of a thriving subject blooming with health.