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The last Eurocrats? (KENZO TRIBOUILLARD/AFP via Getty Images)
On 6 August 1806, an imperial herald climbed to the balcony of the Viennese Church of the Nine Choirs of Angels and, after summoning the city’s inhabitants with a silver fanfare, proclaimed the legal dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire. By that point, the last Emperor, Francis II, had already signed the papers dissolving the Reich, even though the imperial parliament, the Reichstag, was only formally told on 11 August. By abdicating the imperial crown, Francis II became merely a national rather than a transnational leader — liege of his own assorted territories in Austria, Hungary and the Balkans. The days of a Holy Roman Emperor, claiming to invoke the mantle of Charlemagne and, distantly, Augustus, were over.
Recounting this story, the historian Peter Wilson argues that, although the Empire could perhaps have survived a few more decades past this point, it is unlikely to have survived the “levelling and homogenising forces unleashed by capitalism and industrialisation [by] 1830”. A month in advance of the Empire’s dissolution, 16 of its members had already seceded to join a rival bloc, the Napoleonic Confederation of the Rhine. Napoleon himself, then at the height of his power, had withdrawn French diplomatic recognition from the Empire in May, following his great victories at the battles of Ulm and Austerlitz in 1805.
In short, by the time the Empire ended it had in fact already corroded from within. Some historians go further, claiming that the Empire had effectively ceased to exist as an independent actor even earlier — at the Treaty of Lunéville in 1801, for instance. Others have held that the Empire had long been a corpse that would crumble to the touch, a decline dating back to its internal political reorganisation at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Whatever precise date one might choose, the point is that by the time the end of the Empire finally came, it was almost an afterthought, the formal recording of a death that had happened years, if not centuries, before.
Comparisons between the European Union and the Holy Roman Empire have been a common trope since the founding of the Coal and Steel Community in 1952, and the comparison remains embedded in modern scholarship on the EU. The analogy is structurally justified: both the EU and the Empire are geographically expansive systems that are nonetheless devolved and multiplex structures, with numerous and sometimes even rivalrous centres of political and legal power, very distinct from the political centralisation embodied in the modern sovereign state. And, although we are still far from hearing the trumpeters deliver the blessed fanfare, with the EU summit in Granada yesterday, we can make the comparative claim that the end of our latter-day Reich has also come into view.
In advance of the summit, France and Germany, the bloc’s two most powerful member-states, have staked out their vision for institutional reform of the EU with a report titled “Sailing on High Seas: Reforming and Enlarging the EU for the 21st Century”. And what has been overlooked in the extensive discussion of the report is that it effectively consigns the EU to the same slow oblivion as the Holy Roman Empire — to be corroded from within by centrifugal dissolution. This is quite different from the end of the EU that had been envisaged in recent years. For a brief period across 2015-2019, it seemed at least possible (if still unlikely) that the EU might have been blown apart by a series of populist explosions en-chaîne across its territory. But the Union survived this sequence of ballot box revolts, with its core structures long since insulated from any popular incursions.
Since that abortive period of uncertain and confused national revolt, and with the sole exception of Brexit Britain, national-populists around the continent have all surrendered to Brussels. This began with Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’s ignominious capitulation to the Troika, in 2015, in defiance of his own voters, and has continued to the present day with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s calm acceptance of the strictures of the eurozone. National-populist leaders continue to bleat about the threat of a federal Europe, but this is only to disguise how much sovereignty they themselves have already surrendered as member-states.
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SubscribeThe EU’s clear mission is the erosion of the nation state – it has always been that – by fair means or foul.
The EU can’t hope to function with 27 sovereign states, each with a representative govt. The EU can only ‘succeed’ in a future where decisions are made above the nation state; by institutions, large corporate interests and financial markets, overseen by politicians who remain entirely unaccountable and never have to subject themselves to the inconvenience of achieving a popular mandate. The commission – who sets such policy – operate with no transparency and under no democratic mandate. In the Eurozone it is even more obvious, with markets and credit ratings agencies able to entirely override the will of the people.
EU Solidarity is a chimera, it doesn’t exist – we should by now realise that EU solidarity counts for nothing when set against France and Germany’s wishes. The pandemic merely highlighted the gap between their rhetoric and the reality.
As Covid deaths mounted, Italy, a founding member of the EU club, in extremis, asked for assistance from fellow members. The response? A Gallic shrug of indifference swept the corridors of Brussels like the world’s most apathetic Mexican-wave.
Or look at the German Govt’s behaviour in those first weeks of supposed ‘vaccine nationalism’ – openly briefing against AstraZeneca and the UK Govt. Claiming that EU solidarity was paramount and that they “rejected the logic of first-come first-serve,” whilst in reality, the Germans, true to form, had ensured they got their towel onto the sun-lounger ahead of their fellow EU “Club” members by secretly purchasing 70 million Pfizer doses – thus once again proving EU solidarity is a myth, something that is much spoken of but always evaporates in the face of French or German self-interest.
The treatment of Greece after the financial crash should have been the scandal that exposed the implacable heartlessness of the EU to even its most ardent admirers. You can’t be in any way serious about the “European Family” and support the deep and genuine austerity inflicted on Greece, that really did kill off the life chances for a generation and will see Greece in economic ruin possibly for several generations. None of the bail-out money landed in Greece long enough to make a drachma’s worth of difference to the average Greek citizen, it was merely to pay off the bad bets made by German and French bankers.
The “help” on offer to Greece very quickly turned into an obligation that destroyed their already fragile economy in order to pay back the stronger economies of their neighbours to the North.
The ONLY surprise to this is that there are still legions of EU supporters in this country (especially among our own Parliamentarians) who would wish to see us rejoin this “club”.
No surprise that Parliamentarians love the club. They realise their tenure in the British Parliament is insecure, the pay is rubbish and also that the things they really want to do in politics – net zero, imposing woke language codes, reducing prison sentences and the rest – will get short shrift from the electorate once the rubber hits the road. Much better to get rid of the electorate.
Don’t forget also how quickly the Germans virtually closed the borders and then impounded face masks which their Italian ‘friends ‘ had already paid for but which luckily still sat in German warehouses.
“The EU’s clear mission is the erosion of the nation state”
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Well of course. And bears defecate in the woods. Are you seriously presenting that as an insight?
The nationalists across Europe will cling to their countries, but any objective view of Europe would merge the lot into one country, and grow up. When patriotism isn’t busy being the last refuge of scoundrels, it remains, as Einstein remarked, “an infantile disease, the measles of mankind”.
Frank,
Why are you always so cross? I’m not sure what you get out of commenting here – it certainly seems to bring you little joy. Might I suggest going for a walk, it might do you good.
Your criticism of my argument is that it is so obvious as to not need mentioning, yet most Europhiles would deny it vociferously – so perhaps it’s worth making the point after all.
But, whether or not Frank McC personally gets into a tantrum about nationalism or borders, doesn’t change the fact that it is how human societies organise themselves, and how the vast majority of us view the world. Borders won’t be going anywhere anytime soon. You may have to make your peace with the idea. If you allow it to annoy you as much as it would seem to, you’ll do yourself an injury.
Even those within the EU who most want to see a borderless, homogenised Europe, at the first sign of the pandemic retreated behind national borders and sealed themselves off from their neighbours.
As ever the high-faluting rhetoric doesn’t survive first contact with the enemy.
But of course, Frank, you are no different yourself. You claim to be post-national, as though such parochial concerns should be consigned to the past, but what is the issue that gets you most worked up (at least if your commenting history is anything to go by)? ….. Why, it’s Scottish Independence.
Doesn’t that make you just a wee bit hypocritical then?
But then, as the incomparable PG Wodehouse noted, “It’s never been difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine”.
Incorrect target identification.
Frank is from Northern Ireland.”NO SURRENDER”!
So why does he get so grumpy about the SNP and Scottish Indy threads, I wonder?
‘Nowt so queer as folk’.
Franco’s from Belfast if I remember right. We’ve always been a bit angry
With good reason it might be said.
Frank hasn’t responded??
Great response! Hopefully that shuts him up for a while.
So what benefits would we see after the enlightened merger other than making an even bigger country? Einstein’s quote would still apply.
… as Einstein remarked, “an infantile disease, the measles of mankind”.
These kinds of quotes carry little weight. Putting aside the question of their authenticity, regardless of one’s intelligence, one cannot spend one’s life studying theoretical physics and at the same time have had time to orient oneself so that one can speak with authority about profound human qualities.
One could say that he is of course right – in the same way that communism is the obvious solution to a large number of social problems.
You mean like the heptarchy growing into England; or the federal states growing into America; or the hundred or so Asian and slavic language cultures rolled into the Soviet Union…..Quite clearly, once the nation state is abolished, there is never anything nationalist, imperialist or expansionist, or ‘nation-state’ like about the bigger unit…..
Perhaps instead you might think about the complex trade offs, costs and benefits associated with different scales of organization over time….The loss of smaller language cultures? Problems of democratic legitimation? greater difficulty in mobilizing fiscal transfers for welfare states
And how did UK mmismanage Covid? UK Look at state of UK to-day.
Nightingale Hospitals, COVID corruption on scale not seen since the South Sea Bubble, state ‘terror’ propaganda that even Dr Joseph Goebbels would have proud of, and for what?
An average age of death of/with Covid of 83! Three years more than UK’s life expectancy itself.
WE haven’t been so ‘conned’ since the Resurrection.
Covid was a completely new experience which one could argue that the government should have been prepared for, because a pandemic was said to be on the cards; and also our energy problems were foreseen decades ago. Sweden seems to have had the best record with virtually no lockdown. I thiught this was the corrct approach. People die!
Charles your response is over the top and somewhat ludicrous.
Shurely shome mishhstake here?
“support the deep and genuine austerity inflicted on Greece, that really did kill off the life chances for a generation and will see Greece in economic ruin possibly for several generations.”
Austerity didnt do that, their spending did.
You should read Philip Cunliffe’s latest book on the EU. It makes the important observation that while the EU is indeed a project for the dissolution of the nation-State, what drives the process of that dissolution in practical terms is not the authoritarian imposition of this priority by Eurocrats upon nationally elected governments, but the willing surrender of sovereignty by those elected governments to the supranational structures of the EU.
This explains why in the UK immediately following the 2016 vote, Parliament displayed an astonishing – to the voters that is – position of standing upon its own sovereign power in order to make the decision, contradicting the referendum decision, to refuse the prospect of repatriated self-government and instead to return it to Brussels.
All EU member-states possess a political class that does not want genuine accountability to its national electorates (there are individual exceptions to this rule certainly, but they are not typical). The privileges of power and the pomp of high office certainly, but democratic accountability? No thanks. That is why the EU is such an attractive prospect for established political elites.
The Holy Roman Empire’s comparison to the EU is painful and obvious to any student of history. The Holy Roman Empire was unusual for its time. Unlike the hereditary territories of kings and princes that came to be the nations of Europe, the HRE was not a hereditary office. It was an elected office, in which the kings, princes, dukes, and others who controlled the various territories of the empire each voted. Thus it was a position of prestige that conferred advantages to whichever kingdom held it, so it was fought over by the most powerful members. It bears remembering that real power in feudal Europe was based on land, but the title of emperor conveyed no landholdings. It wasn’t just largely irrelevant towards the end. It was irrelevant for the majority of its existence. Since it had no true base of power, it was always subject to being rendered impotent by internal conflict. The author is correct that the EU is probably going to end the same way. The question is this. Where does the power of the EU come from? In the HRE, land was the determining factor. In the modern world, there are several candidates. Marx might argue that power is found in the means of production, or in simpler terms, assets. Going to an even more fundamental level, we might speak of energy generation as the source of power in our modern technologically oriented world. Then, there is the oldest form of power, that of brute military might. Finally, some might still trace power to the consent of the governed, the doctrine of John Locke that the government of the US was largely founded upon. The EU, though, has no base of power in any of these. The means of production are largely held by corporations outside anyone’s authority or control, which is a problem in and of itself, and not one amenable to being solved by an institution with very little real power. Energy is tied largely to the nation states themselves, who exercise considerable authority over the private institutions that actually participate in the energy economy, and most nations have an energy policy, with some being more effective than others. Europe as a whole has comparatively little military might when compared with China, the US, Russia, and probably Iran and India as well. Also, what power they do have is, again, under the control of the various nation states. One might argue that in terms of military power, the capital of the EU is actually Washington D.C. The EU’s one real claim to power was through consent of the governed. The populist movements, though, put the torch to that claim. While they may not have broken up the EU as the author apparently hoped, they did establish that there is a point beyond which people will revolt against centralized federal bureaucratic control. Tribalism is not something that can simply be dismissed for the sake of economic efficiency or free movement. The new EU guidelines seem to be as much an acknowledgement that the original aspirations of the EU were always an impossible dream. That are realizing that they have no real mechanism for forcing compliance and unity among members, and that the public has no interest in unconstrained globalism, and they are accordingly adjusting their expectations. They are no longer pretending to the globalist dream, but conceding the reality of what the EU is likely going to be, an increasingly loose confederation of states whose only real function is to convey mild benefits that go mostly to the most powerful members. As people and governments acclimate to this new reality, the EU will still exist, but decline in importance until it is basically irrelevant. The same could be said of the Holy Roman Empire. History does often rhyme.
This is an interesting post – but the lack of paragraph breaks means, I suspect, that few people will read it to end. Shame.
I’m young enough not to think much about proper writing form when I post in comments, but you’re quite right. Thank you for this bit of constructive criticism. I shall endeavor to improve in the future.
There is an edit button 😉
Marx might argue…No, he firmly posited. The capital of Europe is actually Washington, absolutely, but the tail wagging that dog (of war) is only a couple of hundred miles north, on Wall Street, the beating heart of capitalism.
I wanted to say it’s the EU that’s wagging the dog in its bid to deflect attention from NATO (de facto Washington) which – as has been pointed out by several Unherd contributers – has more members in it’s alliance than the former.
Well, the bit about Marx was simply dramatic flourish. My language leans to the flowery sort at times. You’re quite correct of course. Sadly, you’re mostly correct about the rest as well.
You might have mentioned that the ‘electorate’ of the Holy Roman Empire, for much of its history consisted of only SEVEN men. Three Archbishops and four secular rulers.*
No doubt the EU will wish to follow this astonishing example of democracy?
(* Archbishops of Mainz, Cologne and Trier. Plus the Count of the Palatine, King of Bohemia, Duke of Saxony and Margrave of Brandenburg.)
The great political philosopher Enoch Powell said that the EU cannot thrive because there is no European demos.
How do you create a demos? You create it in the hearts of the men that win a war against the Enemy. Just as Bismarck created the German nation with his three little wars in 1862, 1866, and 1870.
The EU, which is rapidly turning into the political wing of NATO, has already created such an enemy in Russia, but it cannot win a war against Russia.
Russia can’t even subdue Ukraine.
Yeah, sure.. Ukraine is doing fine.
Sometimes I wonder if there is enough German, French, Dutch etc. “demos” left to go back to the European nation-state. What, considering the rapid demographic changes that are taking place, would constitute a particular, say, German “demos” in the (near) future?
In Powell’s time there were existing national demos that inhibited the emergence of a European demos. Destroy existing demos and you eliminate demos as a source of power, and you eliminate demos as a blocker to others perusing power. High immigration, low integrationlow integration, and fragmenting culture might do the trick.
“War is the health of the state”
Randolph Bourne
The demos is nationalistic, naturally. Each country’s identity depends upon its differences from the others. Being proud to be Swedish is being proud of not being Norwegian. Being raised in a country as citizen of that country, the majority have deep allegiance to it and when times get tough turn inward to what they know and can identify with. This is a simple reflection of the frail human condition. As Europe comes under increasing pressure from external sources, immigration, energy dependence, the rise of new trading blocs etc, but particularly mass immigration from the Sahel and wider Africa and Asia, with their vast cultural differences, so the citizens of member states become more nationalistic as has been seen. We now see border controls being erected between member states, even in Germany, and a refusal by the more conservative Eastern members to comply with rules and accept a degree of the burden this has created.
The main argument, as Brexit proved, against the politicised EU, as opposed to the common market we joined, was the loss of sovereignty, of control over the most fundamental aspects of our island’s governance, and we have since proved, as has been agreed only yesterday by the Governor of the BoE, that the decision was correct. That some will still disagree in light of what is now happening in the EU is frankly bizarre. And what is the response of the Euro evangelists in Brussels to the increasing nationalism within its purview? On 14th September a 116 page draft paper was submitted by Verhofstadt and others, the effect of which would be:
“Thus, the proposal clearly diminishes the Member States’ role as the real masters of the Treaties. While art. 50 TEU would still allow individual departures, the amendment would displace the principle of unanimity. This would diminish the ability of single Member States to stop the decision-making process at the European level. Accordingly, the influence of national parliaments would also shrink. In the event a Member States opposed a majority decision, it would have to withdraw from the Union to prevent its application. A similar situation would occur with the procedure for Treaty change: following the proposed revisions of art. 48 TEU a reform would require only four-fifths of the Member States or alternatively the majority of EU citizens in an EU-wide referendum (amendments n. 72-75). This effectively forces dissenting MS to choose between reluctantly accepting Treaty amendments or exiting the Union altogether.” ( verfassungsblog dot de/a-leap-towards-federalisation/ ).
So there it is, the EU darling’s answer to dealing with an increasingly turbulent world is increasing federalisation, centralisation with a consequent diminution of the identity of nation states and their citizens rights, traditions and identities. How could it possibly fail ….
The EU will never stop. There are too many vested interests, too many cushy high-paid jobs. Think of the unemployment figures!!
You could also argue that any trading association that becomes infected by politics will eventually lose sight of its core purpose and fall to pieces. So just as the Hanseatic League fell to bits, so will the EU. You could also argue that the British Empire grew through trade before it became ‘political’ and fell to bits.Another theme predicting the end of the EU.
I was reading Oswald Spengler earlier. He said the rot set in when Europe changed from being an area on a map to being defined by politics and rather than states ruled by monarchs, it became defined by political parties. The sooner the EU communist nightmare ends the better.
“Perhaps more significantly, the prospect of tiered membership also gives Paris and Berlin the scope to downgrade the membership of Eastern rivals in future while still keeping them in the Union, thereby allowing for punishment of “rogue states” while avoiding the awkwardness of actually expelling them from the Union”.
I don’t think so. I don’t think any of these “naughty” states would ever agree to a structure whereby France and Germany (or probably some kind of majority of member states) could downgrade them in any way. Unless the relevant prospective changes may also be achieved by a majority agreement.
I keep reading things about the use of passerelle clauses and a total aversion to treaty change…and it makes me very doubtful about whether these plans for a “multi-speed Europe” will ever be realised. As the Scottish writer McGarvey points out in his article today, there is a clear need, but no appetite/ability, to effect radical change.
I’m also going to cast doubt on the idea that – even if this structure change does become reality – Ukraine & co are ever going to accept some kind of second tier membership. They’ll think of it as second class – and they’d be right. For years, the talk has been about full membership and that is what they’ve come to expect.
And it has never been possible under EU treaties to “expel” a member state. Haven’t read anything about the new plans but I doubt they’d include the possibility of total expulsion in the future.
Also, taking the Holy Roman Empire as your comparison here seems a bit strained. Even after the HRE was dissolved, Austria-Hungary carried on as a major European power until its own extinction after WW1.
Under the right circumstances, various countries might be happy to “downgrade” themselves to the lower tiers. I suspect even the U.K. would have been happy to stay in and do this if it meant lower contributions, no free movement and no legal supremacy.
“… a clear need, but no appetite/ability, to effect radical change”. Sadly, that applies to national governments across Europe, not just to the EU.
I tend to agree that this plan will never be implemented but the fact it is being discussed seems to indicate the waning of the institution.
Austria-Hungary was a separate entity from the HRE. The two are only closely associated because the Habsburg rulers of Austria-Hungary managed to monopolize the title of emperor for themselves, either in the person of the Austro-Hungarian Emperor or some other family member for most of the 16th century onward. There was quite a bit of overlap between the two, but they were never united, and the Habsburgs made no serious attempt to change the status quo. They mostly used the revenue they could generate through the HRE to finance their wars with the Ottomans, and they were some of the more effective rulers of the HRE. During the 17th and 18th century, the rise of Prussia as a significant power in Germany and a rival to the Habsburgs steadily eroded their power over the HRE (Prussia was also a member). The two were almost always opposed to one another and Prussia’s expansion came largely at the expense of the Habsburgs. They couldn’t really coexist. That factor more than anything else led to the end of the HRE.
One Napoleon Bonaparte destroyed the Holy Roman Empire, and replaced it with the Confederation of the Rhine.
An interesting article that, from an insular perspective, illustrates the Britain’s Rejoiners will have difficulty defining what it is they want to join.
P.S. The pedant in me wonders if “common trope” is not a tautology.
Like so many historically illiterate writers, Mr. Cunliffe completely misses the nature of the Holy Roman Empire. The EU today is nothing like the HRE, and the Franco-German “reform” will make it even less like the HRE. The EU’s best chance of survival is to become more like the HRE. Europe could count itself fortunate if it could last three hundred years, the time from Maximilian’s Reichsreform to the HRE’s final dissolution.
Pundits always focus on Prussia, Saxony, Bavaria, etc., for whom the HRE was irrelevant. This misses the fact that there were untold smaller polities, and polities of many different types (free cities, incorporated rural entities, ecclesiastical territories, etc. etc.), who would not or could not go down the road to the state-building of enlightened absolutism. For these polities, the HRE subsidiarily provided an administrative, judicial, and diplomatic framework and support which enabled these polities to maintain their uniqueness and independence.
It was a mindbogglingly complex landscape – an irregulare aliquod corpus vel monstro simile. Napoleon secularised all the ecclesiastical principalities and mediatised the scores of free cities, imperial knights, and rural corporations into the newly created kingdoms, grand duchies and duchies. The HRE lost its raison d’être.
The accomplishment of the EU was to move away from the post-HRE Nation-State brought about by Romanticism, and make the EU a structure of States, within which all nationes could flourish regardless of State borders. The EU’s ambition since Jacques Delors has been to transition the EU into a State, a one-size-fits-all, militarised entity – that is fatally wrong. The EU must transition to enabling more diversity of political solutions while guaranteeing the rights of all citizens (specifically including ethnic Russians).
One of the principles of the EU is (or was) subsidiarity – the EU only does those things the member States cannot, just like the HRE did. It is this principle that the EU needs to reflect on. And the EU must abandon its bizarre and lunatic ambition to be a military player.
The EU and the common currency has been dying since it was formed.
It cannot work.
The only way it could work would be to have a United States of Europe with a strong central government.
Even then, the US has the distinct advantage of a common language, common history and a common culture. Yes, there are regional differences and yes, states have a lot of autonomy, but the federal government generally has the final say on most things and as different as NYC and Dallas are, when you enter them you still know you are in a US city.
I disagree. Most of the really important things, those that effect our lives daily, are controlled by the States. Public schools, alcohol, tobacco and firearms laws, voting rules, much of the land use and zoning rules, financial regulations, corporate taxes, etc.
The Democrats over the years have driven themselves into a very weak position by railing against States’ rights and ignoring the potentials for advancing their agenda. The Republicans, on the other hand, have been much smarter about it.
The commonality so evident all around the US is about Kmart, McDonald’s and Disney etc.
Agreed. The federal government’s sole purpose was to be defense. Then Roosevelt & Progressives began burdening the federal government with welfare programs and regulatory bodies. The abortion tug-of-war is essentially one of states’ rights versus the imposition of a Democrat/Socialist/Communist top-down dictate. Long live the ghost of States’ right advocate Thomas Jefferson!
I didn’t mean to tack quite so far a-starboard. Issues like clean air and water, and a bare minimum wage are really only possible to address across the whole nation at once.
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UK has created a gigantic bureaucracy that is busy with “doing the right thing”. Whatever the least productive the best paid people on Earth think they can regulate, they will. UK finished their AI regulation proposal a week before OpenAI launched ChatGPT. They will never have European Google, Amazon or OpenAI but in terms of regulating innovations out of existence, they are #1.
The fall of the Absurd Reich. I so hope so.
All of this palace intrigue and inside baseball is fine, and I do appreciate the analysis, but events can rapidly overturn all of it.
Imagine for a moment if Georgia Meloni finds her backbone and deploys and Italian Navy to blockade Tunisia. Imagine if Victor Orban refuses gets tired of his country’s treatment and sovereign vetoes everything. Events have a habit of pushing past analysis.
It looks like all those billions George Soros spent to shape Europe to his design were for nothing. One hopes this is among his last thoughts before he goes off to his fully woke hell.
If the author followed EU sources, rather than UK ones, he would know that this (wholly non-unofficial) notion of a multi-tiered membership of the EU only appertains to the speed of adherence and convergence of new member states and does not remotely challenge the objective of “Ever Closer Union” for all member states. As regards his historic comparison, he should perhaps reflect that just 60 years after the demise of the Holy Roman Empire there was created a new, and rather more formidable Reich.
EU will survive as long as it can be used as an escape goat by the nation-state politicians all over Europe (think Orban or Meloni but also Macron or… Le Pen) or as a proxy by NATO.
The argument isn’t clear – So the holy Roman empire dissolved to be overtaken by Napoleon? Not much nation state resilience there – it’s just one empire to the next?
Cunliffe’s excitement over this report is mystifying. The description of ‘Associate Membership’ on p.35 sounds exactly like Norway-style EEA membership, just under another name. It’s nothing new,
And the EPC currently has nothing to do with the EU except that 27 of its 47 participants are members. The report seems to fantasise that the other 20 members will allow the EU to take charge of it, but it seems unclear why they would do so. It currently seems to be a venue for leaders to sniff each other’s bottoms and see who is up for a spot of quick bilaterals, and involving the European Commission might be a bit of a passion-killer.
The report just seems to be a rebranding exercise that cannot imagine a Europe that does not orbit the ideal of ever-closer union.
Philip Cunliffe’s view here is certainly very interesting, but I am not quite 100% persuaded that he’s correct. Maybe that’s just because I’m one of the Brexit voters he considers paranoid about the danger of Europhile sabotage of Brexit as an ongoing project, of course.
I accept that he could be right that if the EU permits the establishment of outer tiers of membership, this could well undermine the point of inner tiers of membership. What I doubt is that the EU’s power brokers have failed to spot this danger, so I’m fairly sure that no outer tier of membership would be offered that would appear more attractive than the fiull membership that will eventually create full political union.
The thing is, I do want him to be right about this. It would vindicate Brexit and at-least partly soften the spiky political relationship between the UK and the continental nations that the bungled Brexit negotiations caused over the past few years.
Centrifugal dissolution? Lovely. UK out at the edge, nothing in the centre and transitional turmoil in between. Very apt. The new Dark Age. That’s what followed the loss of Roman influence last time and wars after the holy version.
Was the Holy Roman Empire a regulatory superpower?
In that context, are the concentric circles another form of the ‘gearing’ by which the EU has always worked?
When I hear Baerbock stating ‘eine Union von Lissabon bis Luhansk’ I wonder where she has hidden her block moustache, and you can rest assured that Mr. Putin knows the answer.
The EU is basically an unelected bureaucracy overriding the elected governments of the member states. Inevitably, it will fail once an elected government decides that either they don’t need the handouts anymore, or they get fed up with being told what to do!
Am cancelling my sub to unherd as its attitude to the UK leaving the EU is obnoxious.
Care to elaborate? Reasoned arguments can be made both for or against leaving the EU, and I’ve seen both in unherd, but none that indicates an obnoxious attitude (whatever that means in this context)
Brexit has happened, and these cranks still can’t stop yakking about the EU. It’s obvious that you are addicted to your EU scapegoat – *even when the EU is no longer relevant to Britain, you’re still banging on about it*. In God’s name, get a life, would you? You’re embarrassing yourself.
You’re also mired in a delusion re restoring “Europe’s sovereign nations”. Divided, Europe is globally insignificant. There are no serious individual world powers in Europe, and that includes Britain.
Anti-EU sentiment is based on the superficially attractive notion of “reclaiming sovereignty”. That kind of nation state sovereignty no longer exists, unless you’re someone with limited experience of how the world actually works.
In 2023, most national parliaments are toy parliaments, amusing themselves with flags, trappings and grandiose slogans, the baubles of a long-vanished influence. In a world where economies are supra-national and where (apart from a couple of superpowers) independent military deterrence is an impossibility, they’re little more than glorified county councils. Through hundreds of treaties and thousands of common regulatory standards, national sovereignty has been shared and hollowed out to the point where it barely exists.
Away from the bluster and the blue passports, the main feature of the UK’s much-vaunted post-Brexit “sovereignty” is its new economic vassalage to the US.
It is a mistake to conflate sovereignty with power. A powerless state can be entirely sovereign, as long as it is making its own decisions, even when the environment is one not of its choosing (which of course it never is), and where its options are consequently highly circumscribed. By contrast a non-sovereign state (which is not really a state at all) is one whose decisions are made for it somewhere else, by someone else.
What a load of nonsense. UK is now paying the price of its live in the past decision to leave the EU…wake up!
It’s now 2023, maybe you should stop living in 2016.