In Europe

nowhere to be found. The leaders of some member states still saw the EU as a source of peace and stability, particularly in the long term. Others were attracted primarily by the market. Others still were drawn by the huge funding distributed by Brussels. For the new members from the former Eastern Bloc, the EU was above all the best way to escape the former Soviet Union's sphere of influence, and to make the definitive step to the West. They were not at all interested in the kind of European super-state that inhabited the dreams of the French, the Germans and the Italians in particular, with the euro and a new constitution as its most important symbols. They, after all, had only recently recovered their freedom as nations. For them, the British, Polish and Scandinavian model – one in which the EU was seen more as a free economic zone, managed by arrangement between the various member states – was more attractive than a distinct, cohesive political identity.
    On 17 June of the same year, 2004, the first summit meeting of that new Union immediately ran aground: the twenty-five members could barely agree on a new leader. In an atmosphere grimmer than any experienced before, the Portuguese José Manuel Barosso was chosen at last. Barosso immediately took the opportunity to state that he was not alliedwith any of those ‘naïve federalists’. With that, the feud between the ‘federalists’ and the ‘intergovernmentalists’ had, in fact, been settled. Outside, as usual, demonstrations were held by tens of thousands of people to whom no one listened.
    One year later, the slumbering unrest erupted. In a referendum held on 29 May, 2005, a majority of French voters rejected the proposed European ‘constitution’ – which was, in fact, more a package of existing treaties, supplemented by a number of hardly controversial improvements in the fields of administration and democratic procedure. Two days later, on 1 June, the Netherlands followed suit with a resounding ‘no’. To add insult to injury, the European summit held barely two weeks later was also a fiasco. Even when it came to budgetary matters, the differences proved almost irreconcilable.
    Now it was no longer the small, new or somewhat marginal member states that were causing the problems. No, the core of this profound constitutional and financial crisis lay with the traditional member states, the founding members themselves. The old solidarity seemed to have run its course. The prime minister of Luxembourg and temporary President of the EC, Jean-Claude Juncker, warned that – now that the memories of the Second World War were fading – there was not much time left for the current generation of political leaders to develop a sound structure for the EU. ‘I don't think the generation after us will be able to put together all those national biographies in such a way that the EU will not be split back into its national components – with all the dangers that entails.’ The cover of
The Economist
showed the corpse of the French revolutionary Marat in his bath, murdered by
citoyenne
Charlotte Corday: ‘The Europe that died. And the one to save.’
    I leaf again through the 1906 edition of Bellamy's
In the Year
2000
:‘Workers’ issues. Solved in the year 2000 … Bankers no longer necessary under new arrangement … Dickens, the most popular author of the year 2000 … Prisons now obsolete … Music, public concerts transmitted by telephone …War, done away with in the year 2000.'And, concerning Europe: ‘The major European countries, along with Australia, Mexico and parts of South America, have an industrial structure based on the model established by the United States. Peaceful relations between these peoples isassured by means of an ad hoc league of states stretching out all over the world.’
    What really
has
happened, in and around that once so auspicious year 2000? Some elements of Bellamy's utopia have actually been realised and more. European unification was – and is – above all a unique peace process. From Charlemagne to Adolf Hitler, leaders have tried to create a Europe unified as one people under one ruler. This time, however, the United Europe was a joint construct, and that changed everything. It brought to the heart of the continent – particularly to the two, eternal antipoles of France and Germany – a stability that had been lacking for centuries. In the last sixty years there have been no more wars throughout most of Europe,