Europe's Future and Strategic Autonomy

Hello, welcome to Origin Story, the show where we take a word, idea, person, event, or in this case institution from history, explain its origins and discuss how it influences how we talk about politics today. I'm Dorian Linsky. And I'm Ian Dunn. If you like the show, you can tell your friends about us. Word of mouth is always good, or consider supporting us on Patreon. They'll have details at the end of the show. This week we conclude the story of European Union with how it became the European Un ion and then how it came close to falling apart. Last week we left it in the kind of mid-80s with uh the abolition of the veto and all the stuff around the single European Act, and that's where we're Well up we see it should be up your de law. That's where the son got it wrong. But those were the days of really good reactionary headlines. Because like that like once they did it once, I was like, well, that's I completely incapable of looking at this name in any other way. Whereas now I just think the headlines you see on the sun, it just they're just not very good. They're not doing reactionary gutter politics as well as I expect from them. Up your delore. Please I beg you to stop saying that. So Ian, before we get to uh Delore, Yeah. Well I mean so look, what where we're kicking off from here is really that it's starting to turn into the institution as we know it today, with the names that we have today and the institutions that we know today, um, and the arrangements that we know today. So the veto and that whole sort of debate that was rumbling through the second part of the 20th century has now been solved. 1974, we get the establishment of the European Council. So up until this point, you just have these kind of ad hoc meet ings of of national leaders get together, have a chat. That's now formalized into three meetings a year into an institution that sits on top of the council of ministers. That's where the ministers from each neighbor state each um nation-state get together. So then you have a really quite formalized structure, right? Because once you have the European Council, which is what it is called and what we still have today, I mean technically it doesn't have all of this executive authority. But the thing is, once you start whacking national leaders with a democratic mandate, with name recognition, with all of these things that all the, you know, the other people in Europe just frankly don't have, it's obviously going to amass that kind of political authority that means that what it says goes. What it says still has to be passed down for signing off by the Council of Ministers, part of the formal structure. But in terms of the reality of political power, it becomes extremely dominant. And it starts to answer that question of, you know, okay, so who speaks for Europe? You know, people start looking to the Council, basically. Then in nineteen seventy-nine, the European Parliament, the first elections are held for the European Parliament, trying to give this sense of democratic legitimacy to the project. And within months, it starts behaving in a much more confident way. So it rejects the community budget for 1980. I mean basically almost as soon as it has that kind of sense of democratic legitimacy, it behaves um with a new form of confidence. But the electorate not really there. So voter turnout, 63% in 1979, really big, down to 43% by 2009 . And even then, people are voting really as a way of commenting on their national politics. You know what I mean? They're not really voting on any kind of Trevor Burrus That's what Euro elections i i in Britain have been like, as far as I can remember. It's basically it's almost like local elections. It's like a referendum on on you know how the government's doing. Trevor Burrus But you see, I think this is a that's such an interesting point, right? Because w people do exactly the same in local elections, as we record this. That's basically what they're doing at the moment. It's a comment on the national picture. But no one really questions whether the you know a local demos exists, you know, whether there's legitimacy in that democratic structure. It's just that voters really struggle to think meaningfully, and are not encouraged to think meaningfully by the press about anything that's you know e,ither below or above the national level. So although the institutions are there and there's a much greater sense of democratic legitimacy and coherent political power to them, there is this anxiety around the democratic deficit that is underlying the project? Right. So I think the son was unfair to Jacques Delors . So I'm going to tell you a bit about him. Born in Paris in 1925, almost exactly the same age as That cher. And he's another of Monet 's spiritual children, like a true believer. He wrote back in 1959, the problems of humanity require solutions at the plan Oh right. He really is. Wow. Yeah. Very very kind of popular. There's a whole load of sort of idealists at that point that sort of um want this sort of one world government, not in a scary conspiracy theorist way. Although obviously that's where it leads to people He's Mitterrand's former finance minister , uh, he becomes president of the Commission, saying in uh January nineteen eighty five, announces this project of negotiations to transform the EEC, European Economic Community, into the European Union. I mean the names just they're very clearly like the difference between these projects. With a single market, single currency, and common defence policy, not just a a customs union. That's the idea. And there you have it, right? Like by the time that those are the ideas in the mix and it's coming an institutional framework of the council, the commission, the parliament. That is basically the modern EU. So this is the point now where the EU as we know it has sort of been conceived And also around this time, it's sort of the the last gasp of Do you remember Altiero Spinelli from 1943, who's one of Mussolini's prisoners, and he ends up you know scheduled the time seems like a kind of dream, this manif esto he writes, and he ends up becoming a really important part of the process. And he drives this uh draft treaty on the European Union, aka the Spinelli Treaty in nineteen eighty-four. Um so he's he's another one of these kind of idealists. We're still talking here about people who remember the forties, who are very much Yeah, you know, they're born pre war, shaped by that post-war, never-again kind of approach to specifically war between France and Germany. And this sets the table for the Single European Act. In 1986, the 12 members of the EEC signed the Single European A ct, committing to an internal market with the free movement of goods, persons, services, and capital. And actually the idealists are quite disappointed. Like this to Thatcher, this is like this is quite a lot. Spinelli calls it a dead mouse and then dies himself. Not on upon reading the act, but very soon after. And Delore calls it a great disappointment. It sounds much better, in French. Trevor Burrus I just thought I mean the reason that he came up with this idea of the internal market as the way forward was because it was the only way you know he had like a bunch of ambitious ideas. Euro defense, Euro currency. And he'd take it around sort of world capitals. And the only one that had universal support from Thatcher, from Cole, from Mitterrand, was the internal market idea. So it was like, okay, well let's just do the internal market. Well that's but he wanted more he did he doesn't lock in the economic and monetary union. You know, that is th you know obviously that's what you get with Maastricht. But he wanted more sort of m guarantees. What this does do though is it extends the social aspect of Europe . So to health and safety, uh more dialogue between workers and management introduces environmental policy. It's be coming more ambitious slowly, and this is of course not what the UK wants. And as we covered it in our Thatcher episode, this is the point where in Britain, you know, DeLores talks to trade unionists and there's a real sea change in the whole sort of dynamics of how Europe is looked at. It goes from being, you know, predominantly a project that is supported, you know, by right sort of pro free market types, to being one that is also supported by the left. But on the free market , the reason that Thatcher likes it is because what's being discussed is incredibly ambitious. I mean, this is so, you know, before there's a customs union, right? So you put up a tariff, you basically say we're all gonna have the same tariffs, the same taxes on goods coming in. This is something else completely, because what they're finding is that there's a real problem of competing regulation within Europe. So like one country, so fine, you can all say ruin one economy together, but ultimately, if one of you passes a law on health and safety or on the environment, or on animal rights, that's gonna hold up goods coming in. If you say we're not gonna have animal testing on cosmetics, okay, and you're Belgium or something, then suddenly if France has done that testing, you're gonna have to stop those goods coming in. So you get just these constant sort of queues of lorry drivers waiting for days at the border, mountains of paperwork, lawnmowers that can't be solved. And this is fundamentally not about taxation. It's not about tariffs. It's about regulation. The whole of Europe functions as if it was just one market with goods being sent all over the place, as if no borders existed. So at the same time, there are other things happening that are not sort of directly related to that. One is in nineteen eighty five the Schengen Agreement, which is signed in in Luxembourg. It's a tiny commune where the borders of Germany, France, and Luxembourg meet. So again, you know, they've they've always got an eye for symbolism. It starts with just free movement between France, Germany, and Benelux. You know, it's not even the original six. Yeah. It's five. The Schengen area is uh not created for another ten years, nineteen ninety-five, uh as you know, free movement of people. Everyone except UK, Ireland, and Cyprus. What also happens is the EC adopts the same flag and anthem as the Council of Europe, which was that separate older organization, you know, partly set up by Winston Churchill. This is the one that our guy Calaghi suggested sixty years earlier. He finally gets it. Oh to joy. Oh to joy. You know that like the the the British ambassador was really worried once I started talking about a European flag, that Thatcher was going to lose her mind. He says, You can imagine Margaret's reaction when this document thuds on the doormat of Ten Downing Street. And so the community's way of just getting past it is it's just going, it's not a flag. It's uh It's in the end they say it's a logo. And so incredibly they're bought off. But what they recognize is by the time you put a logo up a flagpole, everyone's gonna think that's a flag. You've also got 1987, the Erasmus scheme, which is dear to many people's hearts. Yeah. I mean, my my mates in uni, that was like, you know, you have these seminal moments of your youth. That was probably the closest that that Europe touched you, really. Like in terms of your life. They'd bring friends back, they become your friends, you know, people married. I mean it was huge for the people that were part of it, it's absolutely massive. Well, a lot of fiercest Remainers, you know, were people who had experienced um, you know, European cooperation through the Erasmus scheme when they were at uni. Yeah. The other thing here is we've got expansion. I talked there about twelve members signing the Single European Act. And I think maybe last time we spoke we were talking about the nine, right? So you've got if you want to join, just to remind people, you signed a treaty of association, which is the first step to membership, the first people to sign that were Greece in nineteen sixty-two, finally joining in 1981. So it's a long old process. So then that becomes the 10. 1986, Spain and Portugal joined. That brings a total to 12. Now, all three of those countries, poorer countries at that point, relatively of, the South emerging from a period of authoritarian stagnation. Trevor Burrus People underestimate just how poor they were about then, by the way. Like Spain was when you talk to people who were sort of visiting in the late 70s, even the early 80s, doesn't it's not the Spain that you think of now when you picture it in your head. And they come out from the Franco, Salazar, the generals in Greece. They all saw their future in Europe, sort of anticipating what happens with the countries of Eastern Europe, right? What this requires, though, is a vastly expanded system of regional subsidies, grants, agencies to administer them. You know, so that you don't have these kind of neglected poorer regions. And this does breed an incre asingly cumbersome bureaucracy and in many kind of localities corruption. So this is the first example of how expansion, while part of the whole project, brings with it these problems. And now of course it seems weird to think of Spain and Portugal particularly as being these sort of problematic, poorer, recently authoritarian countries. Because they they seem fundamental to Europe. But that that is a kind of a bit of sort of foreshadowing of what happens at the end of the Cold War. Trevor Burrus What a tremendous success those two countries have been, really, as examples of like how cleanly and effectively um you can come out of authoritarian government. Aaron Powell So just to sort of to set up this clash here, you've got this Delore's blueprint is very much rooted in the social democratic politics of post-war continental Europe. Thatcher obviously has a more neoliberal vision. So it's her infamous Bruges speech in 1988 , which is not like anti-Europe, but it's anti-what it what Delore wants it to be. And cut from the first draft was the line, forget a United States of Europe. But she's not fully Euroskeptic. She says Britain does not dream of some cozy isolated existence on the fringes of the European Community. Our destiny is in Europe as part of the community. Really important distinction, which gets eroded over the years, including in her own brain. But this inspires the Bruges Group, which attracts more than 100 Tory backbenches. So this is the sort of start of proper Tory Euroskepticism. And then like you said, the Labour Party and the unions, who until I can't remember what year, Neil Kindock managed to get Labour to drop their opposition to membership. Yeah, yeah. But it's around this time, it's the late 80s, in the party positions, they haven't flipped yet, but they are beginning to reverse. Yeah. So interestingly, Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev, uh, who obviously we covered quite extensively in the last season, is the first Russian leader since the nineteenth century to see Russia as part of Europe. He likes to say Europe is our common home. And in nineteen eighty-nine, before uh the Berlin He tells the Council of Europe in Strasbourg there should be a restructuring of the international order existing in Europe that would put the European common values in the forefront. He is speaking sort of fluent European at this point . He actually meets with Mitterrand to dis sorry, that was excessively French pronunciation, to discuss a greater Europe stretching from the Atlantic to the Urals. And his idea is eventually this will do away with both Incredible. Many reasons why this does not come to pass. One of them is because as uh Gorbachev famously failed to recognize, European countries were desperate to get away from Russia . Very happy to move towards Brussels, or indeed Washington, but really don't want Russia to be part of the picture any more. But it's it's fascinating that it's like one of those ideas, like we were talking about the the um federal union of Britain and France in 1940, which doesn't happen and therefore sort of gets forgotten. But it was like it's a big, big ambitious idea. Trevor Burrus There's just this psychological process that big countries have to go through of do you want to be involved? Yeah. And th in this story, you know, we've seen France struggle with it. We've seen Britain struggle with it and ultimately tear itself apart over and over again over it. Is it just too big to just be like, no you, know what, we can't accept that kind of more limited but rational status within the club. We still want to act like we can control the world. And of course Russia, what you're seeing there is that brief flicker of a moment where Russia could even think in those terms. Before it obviously could not, and now it obviously cannot, but for a few years there, you know, more optimistic dreams were possible and a greater sense of modesty. Like where there's a real sense of confidence now is in Europe. I mean you look you look at that single European Act, that is the first major revision of the nineteen fifty seven Treaty of Rome. Now how do organise how do any organization, including countries, stay alive is they by revising their foundation treaty. You know what I mean? You can have it through common law, or you can have it through, you know, uh the way that the Americans treat their own constitution. And that's what's suddenly happening here. It's unleashing this sort of tidal wave of of of renewal. So you get revising ions com in, Maastricht, nineteen ninety two, Amsterdam, nineteen ninety seven, Nice, two thousand and one. For this period, this is confident, this is moving forward, it's dynamic Europe, it's ambitious Europe. And then as, if sort of all of history were bending itself to this process, the Berlin Wall falls down. And once it falls, you just the first thing you have to think is you just like, well, Europe for the first time really means Europe. Like what was previously institutional Europe is now geographic Europe. And there is really almost nowhere up to the boundary of Russia, and you know, given what you just said, perhaps even perhaps including even Russia, that couldn't potentially be part of the project. Not only that, but Brussels now kind of is facing a scenario where it might have responsibility for a whole fucking continent, which it said it wanted, but the reality of that responsibility is something else. Well it's deeply problematic. Tony Jutt, who I I keep coming back to, you know, he sort of argues that the Cold War was very good for the European project. It was the reason it was born, it was the reason it was able to grow as it did. He calls it a happy coco on for for Europe . Because what you've got here suddenly I mean there's a lot it's very problematic in lots of ways, even though it seems uh you know how w how wonderful. One is that actually Western Europe and Eastern Europe, going back centuries, did have quite different identities. Yeah. Yeah. It wasn't just, you know, the Iron Curtain falls and suddenly they're separated. No, there's always been quite a different sense of whether you whether you live in Serbia or Brussels. Yeah, or it's like like North London and South of the River. Like never can you bring these kind of cultures together. And uh no wars so far. So it's really freaks a lot of Western European leaders out. Immediately, Mitterrand hopes that that Gorbachev will block the reunification of Germany. Thatcher on the day the Berlin Wall says first he says this is wonderful and then she goes, My goodness, this is dangerous. We better be sure this doesn't get out of hand . So they they don't really neither France nor Britain really want German reunification? And as indeed, as they fear, particularly Mitterrand fears, Germany does reunite and you know at high speed. And it eclipses France at, last in, terms of power , in terms of GDP, France no longer leads Europe. Right? This is the sort of the end of French dominance. In fact, slowly English begins replacing French as the common language in Brussels. There's also this anxiety about eventually having to absorb these Eastern European states, which they've got a weak democratic tradition. I think Czechoslovakia is the only one that had a strong democracy between the two world wars. Of course, they've got very needy econom ies, but they think well the EU represents the future and NATO membership. This I love this interrelation between NATO and EU politically. You know, less as a defense alliance, but most as it' as political stepping stone. So a lot of these countries, they're allowed to join NATO because they're not yet ready to join the EU. But it's almost like used as like, you know, it's almost like a waiting area, which of course is not actually what NATO is, but that was the purpose it served politically. There's also this question, you know, of what it does for your internal dynamics in terms of the relative size of countries in the EU. So I mean, you know, when it starts, you've got a ratio of one to one in the early years of large to small countries. You've got Germany, France, and Italy, and on the other hand, you've got Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg. Right. Okay. Then at this point, we're talking seven smaller countries and three big ones. And they start looking out to Eastern Europe. I mean, by 2020, it'll be five large countries to 21 smaller ones. And suddenly that internal process of how you negotiate around those things and what that means politically for everyone's relative status, which we're all highly concerned about, becomes complicated. Honestly, I think the this would have been even more difficult if it wasn't for Helmut Cole. And the way that his sort of national priorities for Eastern um West Germany were combined with that broader European question. So I mean he does a speech in the Strasbourg Parliament where he says Europe is not only London, Rome, The Hague, Dublin and Paris, it is also Warsaw and Budapest, Prague and Sofia. And I think you needed someone to just sort of be like, no, there this is part of the project, this is part of what we said from the very beginning, from the birth pangs of this thing, that this is supposed to be an immense new project in political society. And you can't just sit there blinking and panicking about what it will involve. Not to doubt his sincerity, but kind of if you're arguing for German reunification, therefore you're bringing East Germany in politically, you can't really go, Well, this former Soviet satellite is fine, but not Bulgaria or Romania or Czechoslovakia. And his international incentives both pointed in the same direction, unlike everybody else. So there's another factor coming up to the negotiations of the Maastricht Treaty in 1991 is the violent breakup of Yugoslavia, which highlights the dangers of nationalism. Obviously, this runs really throughout the 90s in different places. First, it's more Croatia and then Bosnia, eventually Kosovo. Now, the president of the council, uh Jacques Pu 's I actually don't know how 's it elled poo's quite funny just watching you say the word poo in a variety of like increasingly losing the same way to pronounce it. Probably the S is silent, so it probably is Jacques Pooh . One more time, just for good luck. Jacques Pooh from Luxembourg. And he thinks this is a real moment of reckoning. He goes, this is the hour of Europe. This is not the hour of the Americans. But of course Europe utterly fails to keep the peace there. And the resolution does come down to America and NATO after all. And it's kind of a humiliation for Europe as a military and peacekeeping force. So there's so much going on in the background of Maastricht and anxiety about what is going on in this other half of Europe that has suddenly become liberated Yeah, yeah, exactly. nineteen ninety about a political union in response to what's to what's happening. They send a letter to fellow governments um a couple of months later, in the light of the far reaching events in Europe and in view of the completion of the single market, we consider it necessary to accelerate the political construction of the Europe of the twelve. We believe it is time to transform relations as a whole among the member states into a European Union. No one really has any idea what the phrase European Union means. Right. But it just sounds important. I mean, it just sounds like it lives up to the moment. And they eventually decide it means increases in democratic legitimacy and economic and monetary coordination and a common foreign policy. Not all of these things are going to happen, you may have noticed. But that's the that's the end. And that just drives That cher fucking mad. And in the end, it actually ends her, to be honest. Because, you know, she goes back, one and sometimes she says to the Commons the President of the Commission, Mr De Laws, said at a press conference the other day that he wanted the European Parliament to be the democratic body of the community, he wanted the Commission to be the executive and he wanted the Council of Ministers to be the Senate. No, no, no. As we covered in our Thatcher episode, that moment is the beginning of the end of her time as Prime Minister. There is a very polite murder by Jeffrey uh Howe, Deputy Prime Minister. And you know, the lots of you know Westminster twos and pros, but really she is destroyed by the inevitable movement of European history at that stage. She cannot stand up to it. The end result does not reflect what Delors wants. There is no, you know, you're not you're not gonna have nation states not gonna give up their control over the issues of war and peace, you know, and foreign policy. They're just not. But at the same time, she could not hold back the momentum of that moment, and it did destroy her. Aaron Powell Well the reason I said that the parties hadn't flipped yet is because yeah, Thatcher is moving towards what we recognize as a classic Tory Eurosceptic position. But you know, she the reason she falls, like you said, she falls out with the Chancellor Nigel Lawson and the Foreign Secretary at that point, Jeffrey Howe, overjoining the exchange rate mechanism. And then she's also opposed by the replac ements, John Major and Douglas Heard. Like all these kind of senior figures are just like, even if they're not like, you know, passionate sons of Monet , they they are like we really need to to join this. I mean the one But she becomes quite an isolated figure. You know, the backbenches in the Bruges Group agree with her, but most of the cabinet do not. It's pretty Europhile includ ing, you know, crucially John Major Attention all passengers. The Uber ride for Mark and Jamal's romantic weekend will depart in four minutes from platform six. Your ride comes with a rolling countryside sunset view and a table seat ide al for playing FTSE bene ath. Thank you for booking your tickets on Uber . Trains on Uber . The MailDill Plus is now on the McDonald's Saver menu and comes with a choice of one of five bonus sides. Bag a mayo chicken or cheeseburger with medium fries, a selected drink and a bonus side all for $5.59. We're talking a mini McFlurry, apple pie, four nuggets, or even another mayo chicken or cheeseburger on the From eleven a.m. not on delivery. Includes a selected savor menu burger, medium fries, selected medium drink, and a selected bonus side. Price and participation may vary. Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money. Because behind every headline is a bottom line. Whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion-dollar sw ings, there's a money side to every story. And when you see the money side, you understand what others miss. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now at Bloomberg dot com Okay, so she's she's gone. Thatcher's gone what? Late ninety nineteen . Not there. The thirty-one hours of negotiations at Maastricht on the ninth and tenth of december nineteen ninety-one. You've got Mitterrand, you've got Cole . And as you suggested, Cole really wants political union. Britain and France don't. So the cornerstone becomes monetary union. Now this is really significant because it is run on German principles. Fiscal prudence. Germany, of course. Absolutely scarred by still by like the hyperinflation that is sort of partly blamed for the rise of Hitler. It's like you've got to get your finances tight. And therefore, the whole you know, the model of fine the the financial model of the European Union is very German brained. Yes. Which becomes a big problem later. UK for the first time sort of breaks from Europe since nineteen seventy one by opting out, of course, of the single currency. Yeah. And the social chapter regulating Labour. It signed on the seventh of February, nineteen ninety-two. I remember this at the time being such a big deal. Oh really? Like it really was like the year of Europe, 1992. Citizens of member states all became citizens of the European Union, voting rights, free movement. So it establishes the central bank and the idea th though not yet the reality of the Euro, which I love the fact that uh remember it was uh preceded by the ECU? Oh yeah, yeah. You loved the ECU, didn't you? The ECU. But the Germans thought the ECU, even though it's uh stands for European currency unit. They thought it sounded too French. The euro is kind of modeled on the Deutschmark. Again, it's very driven by Germany. Implementation is slowed down because there's three referendums. Bloody referendums. Denmark votes no until it's given an opt-out from the currency. It votes again. Yes. France passes it only narrowly, which I think is really interesting. France is always amb ivalent. More ambivalent than we think. It's a damn sight more Eurosceptic than people would typically realize. Ireland passes it by 70%. They love Europe. Um comes into force on the first of November 93. Now, one thing I didn't know or had forgotten, you know John Major's famous speech about British identity? Oh. He quotes all were. Fifty years from now, Britain will still be the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, etc. etc. This was actually him defending Maastricht to touries. Going, yeah, we can join, but Britain will still be Britain. So it wasn't this jingoistic rejection of Europe. It's going, this is the essential qualities of Britain that will not be eroded by membership of Europe. And of course all the way through, you know, to to to this day he is in you know sort of an ardent remainer. Oh he's just completely brilliant on this issue. But that completely I always thought that was this sort of laughably jingoistic speech, but the context was was anything as a but didn't he take out all the bits where Orwell refers to the He only quotes one line from Orwell, which is the old maid's bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist. So to be fair, he's not saying Orwell would agree with me. He's taking like one line. Oh, very good. Okay. You know what? I always just presume that was the way it was presented of misquoted and sort of small little Englander. And it's very reassuring given that I like him a lot to actually not have to put that in the negative ledger. Yeah, yeah, it's interesting context. Um there's a fantastic sort of innovation in 1993, which really which actually isn't talked about but become, I think is sort of powerfully important for Europe's mission, which is called the Copenhagen criteria, which would also be a very fine name for a spy novel. And it's when they come up with a sort of formal criteria for new members, stable democratic institutions, functioning market economy, and the absorption of eighty thousand pages of That's even more than uh what you're meant to read before agreeing to your latest Apple update, isn't it? What I love about this is it just becomes this sort of litmus test for progress . You know, it's it's sort of like you put down this set of mechanisms like okay, well here we are, so you know, and it's civil liberties and democracy and liberal liberal democracy, it's a mechanism for freedom. And each country that wants the economic advantages of Europe passes through that mechanism and shows that it satisfies those tests. Now we're going to see later, particularly with Hungary, that the trouble with it is that once they're in the club , you can start backsliding, and it's quite hard to come up with consequences for countries doing that. But as a mechanism to get a like a lot, you know, hundreds of millions of people who have been living in an auth in very corrupt author itarian regimes and transfer those regimes into Western democracies, it is hugely, hugely effective and doesn't get as much praise as it should. It's interesting though, the first ones that join, take you up to fifteen, are like Austria, Finland, and Sweden. So it's very much like You're playing on easy mode. We're playing on easy mode there. Nobody's going to argue with Finland. So I think one thing that that comes up sometimes in political history is, that the moment of apparent triumph is also when the backlash begins and problems begin. So Francis Fukuyama, coming back to him again with the end of history, he said that the European Union represented the end of history even better Um But that's like the future. It's not unfair at all. Um but I found this quote from Tony J in nineteen ninety-six where he thought that Europe had already peaked, and he warned of these problems ahead. German dominance, not in a scary way, but in a kind of cultural finan The problem of expansion to the East, slower growth, a growing welfare bill, and nationalist immigrant politics. In which to forge any convincing human community. Which I mean I might disagree with that, but he certainly flagged up some of the problems. Trevor Burrus I don't think you'd be feeling terrible about how those forecasts worked out. This is the first evidence of really of this far-right backlash to EU. So you've got uh the Austrian Freedom Party in uh Austria. Uh Jorg Haider says we Austrians should answer not to the EU, not to Maastricht, not to some international idea or other , but to this our homelands. EU is representing globalism. You know, the other. The rootless cosmopolitans. A politics professor called Alan Sked founds the Anti-Federalist League in nineteen ninety-one specifically to oppose Maastricht. One of its first members is uh twenty-seven-year-old Nigel Farage. This turns into UKIP in nineteen ninety-three. You've also got James Goldsmith's referendum party, which initially um is more successful than UKIP. You got Boris Johnson writing his bollocks in Brussels for the telegraph and just making up stories about, you know, crazy Eurocrats and their bananas and condoms, condoms on bananas . So you know the sort of the story of Brexit begins around this time. It begins in opposition to to Maastricht. Yeah, yeah. This is absolutely this is the origin of Brexit. Going all the way through the the nineties and Tories just getting increasingly far away from Major. Of course, John Major. We're not going to go into all of this. But the Bastards, his famous thing calling the Euroskeptics the Bastards. You know, but they're the the future of party, unfortunately. This is the peak, I think, this period, this peak of European confidence, of European ambition. And it is about to come kind of crashing down. And the beginning of that is really in 2004 with an attempt to write a constitutional treaty. Oh yeah . It starts 2001, leaders asking, well, maybe you know, instead of all these revisions of the initial text, we could just, you know, just write a constitution. And there's always been this kind of dream of, oh, we never had the moment. You know what I mean? We haven't had the tennis club oath. We haven't had the moment of writing the US Constitution. We haven't just had this founding moment that we can look back to. It's all very ad hoc. And it feels a bit tenuous a lot of the time. So they set up a convention to contemplate a new European treaty, new kind of founding document. It writes it, the member states tear it to fucking pieces and about they have exactly the kind of fights you would over the next few years you would expect. But then perilously it goes out because certain countries are gonna have referendums on it. Right. Among the countries that are gonna have referendums are France and the Netherlands. And in 2005, both countries vote against the Constitution. Now, the French the thing is as well, what's most disturbing about it, I think, is that for you know, the Commission and the Council is that they're not even voting against it for the same reason. Like the French vote's actually very left wing. I was actually in France during that period and I remember it was a like another Europe is possible, you know, saying it was basically that's an Anglo Saxon economic model. It was essentially the sort of British left argument before Delors. It was like a Lexate. It was Lexate, exactly. Le Lexit. Le Lexit, yes, exactly. Um the Netherlands one was that it was a sort of challenge against national identity . So then another Europe isn't possible and this one isn't either. You can all fuck off now. So because they were it felt like quite a comprehensive full spectrum rejection, and there was like a real it this is the moment. In fact, that moment, those two votes, progress just stop s. And it doesn't really ever come back . So there's a moment of shock, the ratification process is put on hold . Yeah. All talk of constitution is abandoned. And the confidence of the last two decades has gone . And then it sort of retreats to its usual disingenuous background steps. Which is, you know, oh you know, but it's not a constitution. We're just gonna put we're just gonna write this treaty revision over here called Lisbon. Yes. Don't worry. Don't worry about that. There's nothing to see here. And of course, basically Lisbon is all the bits of the Constitution without the Constitution bit that's sort of stuffed into this thing. And and off you go. And it's that that there's a return. It was almost like there was this flicker because of the the end of the Cold War, because of the expansion of Europe, because of the creation of the single market, the parliament, the council . That it was just like, no, you know what, we can do this. We can be a state that talks about itself and is honest about what it is trying to do. And instead, then it's like, oh no, we're gonna go back to that thing where what we're planning is actually tremendously ambitious, but we will never admit just how ambitious it is, because it's gonna scare people, and we'll just sort of sneak it under the door instead. Well you know in part one we were talking about ideas of Europe and what Europe was and how the Enlightenment it became synonymous with not an empire anymore or a religion, but sort of civilization and progress. So the draft treaty uh on the Constitution uh was watered down long before these referendums never agreed. And there's some fascinating text that was put in there, very m uh Monet style. Europe is a continent that had brought forth civilization, its inhabitants arriving in successive ways from earliest times, have gradually developed the values underlying humanism, a quality of persons, freedom, respect for reason. It says a reunited Europe intends to continue along the path of civilization, progress, and prosperity for the good of all its inhabitants. This is a real sort of soaring idealistic language and obviously ruthlessly cut out before before anyone could read that kind of hippie bullshit. It's harder than even what you do to my copy on Google Docs when we're writing a book together. And the trouble is I just think that sense of confidence goes from it at almost exactly the wrong moment. You know, this is 2007 that Lisbon is signed. And what's about to happen? The financial crisis is coming. The Eurozone crisis is coming. Populism is coming. It's just like it's weakened, it loses its confidence. And what's about to come is just a rolling series of crises that are just going to pummel it into the fucking floor. Trevor Burrus And of course, what Lisbon does is it has uh Article 50, which for the first time makes provisions for a state to leave the EU , just as it has been so ambitious. 2002, the Euro goes into circulation, right? In 15 uh countries. First common European currency since the Romans. 2004, this is how many countries join? We'll be talking about the nine, the twelve, the fifteen. Yeah. Right? 2004, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, and Slovenia. It's now the twenty-five and only the UK and Ireland don't choose to impose immigration quotas on the citizens of those states. Yeah. Which explains a lot, obviously, about Brexit. It's expanded so fast. There's so many there's so many people. It seems like it seems like, oh my God, it's unstoppable. It's just sort of it's booming. And yet all of these problems you can see bubbling up, maybe I don't know. I I don't want to say, oh, it grew too fast or the foundations weren't strong enough. But certainly like you said, it seems to have it seems to have reached a certain limit, just as mortgage providers in Florida It should be pointed out since 2004 there have only been three new members Bulgaria and Romania in 2007, Croatia in 2013 . Turkey uh still waiting. When do you think it signed its treaty of association? Oh fuck, I know. That's it's crazy, isn't it? Is it like fucking nineteen sixty four or something? It's nineteen sixty four, is it? Yeah. Oh nice. Applied for membership in nineteen eighty seven, recognized as a candidate in nineteen ninety nine, negotiations begin in two thousand five. Still not a member. I mean there are particular reasons. Yeah, now it's different. Yeah. It's all about Serdwan and you know Of course. But I mean basically back then it was because it was too big, it was too poor, and it was too Muslim. And it was too Muslim. Exactly that. And it raised questions that people didn't want to have about, okay, well, actually, so so this is not, you know, there's no religious boundary along with the geographic boundary. And suddenly, once you started asking that question, people were coming back with some very grotty answers. So this is why in it there's a lot of different reasons why it's sort of losing its momentum and that whole idea that Jean Monet had and that, you know, Jacques Delors recognized, Roy Jenkins recognized, um, was that it had you have to keep reinjecting energy into the project. It has to keep moving forward, whether that's quite like you know, ever closer union or by uh bringing in new member states . And there's this fatal lack of momentum now. Yeah. So then things get incredibly fraught. Financial crisis hits in 2008, and then in 2010, the Eurozone crisis. This is going to really test that notion of solidarity. It's going to really test that sense of democratic legitimacy in the project. It's an after-effect of the financial crash. Greece cannot pay back, which is now a member state, cannot pay back all of its debt. Debt stands at about 115% of GDP . And there is a perfectly obvious solution that most people recognize pretty early on, which is that it requires debt forgiveness to a certain extent, and it requires a European bailout fund of a certain size. However, that core relationship between France and Germany, rather than helping the situation, hinders the situation. Because they have very different circumstances when it comes to Greece. The debt forgiveness idea is a problem because lots of the debt is held by Europe an banks who are on the verge of collapse as a result of the financial crash. And one of those banks with the largest amount of debt is BMP Parabas, a French bank. So when it comes to the French president, Nicolas Sarko zy, he's like, totally up for this European bailout fund idea. Not so up for the debt for government idea because you're going to kill one of my biggest banks. When it comes to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the situation is completely reversed. She's supportive of debt forgiveness. Germany doesn't have much to lose by virtue of that. But she opposes a European bailout fund. Right. Because German voters very opposed to this idea, well, we've been very good with our taxes. Why should we, you know, pump money towards our spendy Mediterranean neighbors? This is this is where that thing that I said about German fiscal rectitude being at the center of uh the European Union is really problematic because it's like, yeah , it's like North v South, rich v poor, sensible with money versus splashing it about. Yeah, it's funny, you know, because obviously these questions ultimately go down to who is the us? Does the us exist? You know what I mean? If if if there's us, there's social solidarity and we're prepared to spend that money on, you know, if we're Europeans, we're all Europeans, we're not Germans and Greeks. And the truth is that within countries, that solidarity often for you know, you'll hear a lot in in Italy about, you know, between North and South and how much money, you know, is in one you Oh yeah. Less less so actually in the UK, it's it's less discussed, that sort of thing of like how much money London gives to to the North, for instance, or whatever. In fact, most of the time it is as if it's the other way around. You know, and London owes everyone. Um so nevertheless, those that now those sort of those strands of solidarity are really fraying at the edges. And Germany and France are just trapped in this mutual headlock. Well like they've both got one part of the puzzle, but they can't accept the other part. So instead of coming up with either of the good ideas, they say it's gonna be austerity. They go back to that easy, easy and yes, quite German way of looking at things. Which but you know, which was also popular all over the place at the time. This is twenty ten, right? There's a conservative austerity government in the UK . I mean, austerity is being disproved as you speak every day, and is the worst possible course of action at the time, and we now recognize that pretty much universally, but at the time, hugely popular idea. So the EU, the ECB, the European Um Central Bank, and the IMF, the International Monetary Fund, loan money to Greece, which sort of barely touches Greece as it although it touches it enough to impose an absolutely punishing fucking interest rate, and then flies off to pay its creditors. No bailout, no debt forgiveness. And Greece is basically forced to undertake one of the most brutal austerity programs in the history of man. Just hammered into the fucking ground. A general strike breaks out, public transport brought to a standstill, running street battles between protesters and riot police. Half of young Greeks by 2012 are out of work. Nearly a quarter of the general population is jobless. The Greek parliament turned into basically little more than a rubber stamping operation for decisions taken by the Troika, taken by you know the ECB, the IMF and the EU. If people wonder why is the Anis Ferrafacis a thing, this this crisis is why. I mean he wasn't the worst thing to come from it. I'd say maybe the third. And to be fair, I mean he is a complete fucking moron. But he was genuinely outraged by the scenario. And this and the situation was absolutely outrageous and intolerable. The Greek Prime Minister, George Papandre, who wants to call the referendum. And then the European Commission president, Jose Manuel Barroso, basically holds talks on replacing Papandreou. He prefers Lucas Papademos, a former uh European Central Bank vice president. And through domestic mechanisms, Papandreyu is removed and Barroso's favourite is put in place . Quite a fucking moment. Suddenly in Italy, similar things are happening. Italy is too big to fail, but you don't want to send it money because at the head of Italy is Silvio Berlusconi, who is just this catastrophic clownish populist idiot. So the European, so Merkel and Sarkozy approach the Americans to say, we're thinking about trying to get rid of Berlusconi. Here's Treasury Secret ary Timothy Guytner. The Europeans actually approached us softly, indirectly, saying, We basically want you to join us in forcing Berlusconi out. He takes it to Obama. They have a chat about it, quite tempted, and he says we, can't have Berlusconi's blood on our hands. But then, almost immediately, within days, Berlusconi loses a vote of confidence in the Parliament and he resigns. Former European Commissioner, Mario Monte, replaces him. Like to be fair, these guys Papandre was playing with fire, Berlusconi was hopelessly inept. If either of them had a lot of support at home, these things wouldn't have happened. Merkel and Sarkozy are in an absolutely impossible position . The levels of kind of of pain that everyone is going through in this scenario are quite astonishing. But the EU and leaders within it had basically, started to conspire to remove the democratically elected leaders of two member states. And at that point, you know, eventually policy takes on a more rational form. There's a viable rescue operation that's put into place, the Greek debt is restructured. A bailout fund is provided. Greece is actually in a very good position right now. The bond market was supported. But there's a kind of a turning point. And it's a turning point not just economically, but politically. Because at this point, like the right from you know from the Maastricht period onwards and across Europe, you know, many countries have similar the similar tradition, have that sense of national sovereignty is going, you know, we're being uh any kind of identity is being overridden by this huge faceless bureaucratic machine. But now the left has a story against Europe, which is that it is a massive austerity program and it'll smash you into the ground, you know, and suck up any sense of moral purpose and ethical value that was supposed to be grounded into the project. So that reputation for solidarity and humanism that Europe had feels like it dies in that period. Well Delore, who's in his eighties at this point, complains that the response to the crisis, the sort of general response, was killing Europe. Right. We then get well the the table is set for Brexit, right? So twenty fifteen there's a refugee crisis largely caused by what's happening in in Syria and the Trevor Burrus . I mean it's a crisis. There are many more refugees um coming into Europe. Also there is a terrorism perception of a terrorism crisis. But it it seems to be the Batterclan , for example, and more. So that's obviously fueling the kind of anti-immigrant right and causing countries to cry to kind of water down free movement. Greece, there was a possibil I can't remember exactly at which point in the crisis, but Greece was thinking about possibly leaving the EU rather than putting up with this unbearable bullshit. Um, which produces the word Grexit. So from Grexit, we get Brexit . Owen Jones coins Lexit to describe what you were talking about there. So the point at which um you know the the Tories have to uh call a referendum because they they promise to in their uh manifesto if they got a majority. Europe is summed up in three words crisis, instability, inertia you could probably add more resentment backlash whatever it's not in the best state for the Romaine campaign to go hoora y To be clear, I did vote to remain. But I mean when we talk about so much is put through the you know the British lens, we go, well, you know, Cameron was unpopular pitch man for it. Uh you know, C Corbyn was was too ambivalent. Uh we d he had a terribly organized campaign, blah blah blah blah blah. But also it was like it was quite a bad time to go to the British public on the proposition of of the European Union. Yeah. Well that thing of it's the future, we gotta get involved. That's a harder proposition at that period. I mean everyone was getting spanked back then. You know, the twenty tens, no one was having any kind of fun. But it was y the traditional argument that you would use to get national voters into it was not really there for the taking. Do we need to say anything about Brexit? I mean obviously we're coming up to the the 10th anniversary. Surely people know what happened. Yeah, I mean if you feel that you need more information on this, uh for reference, there's this fantastic old podcast where two people with and others with much more youthful voices at that point. A lot more inner stamina and energy. Talk about Brexit for apparently three to four years. Four years. And in fact, um uh a young up-and-comer called Ian Dunt wrote a book called Brexit What That Happens Now? What the hell happens now? Yeah, no, true. I was much more modest in my language about that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now you could just imagine what it would be. I suppose we should say for people who are not listeners or not in Britain, you know, the British public voted 52 to 48 to leave, uh, creating what, three years of political clusterfuck and many, many more years of econom ic damage. Yes. Does that about sum it up? Which we're still undergoing right now. What I think is interesting is the people's vote movement, which was the attempt by by many um remain ers to find a way back in, to have a second referendum and to not leave the EU, basically. And what happened there was this the spirit of Jean Monnet, the emotional idea of Europe , bursts out in a way that it really didn't during the campaign. You know, and all the kind of European, you know, the literally the European movements and all those kind of groups were obviously campaigning to remain, but the emotional heat was quite low. All the kind of passion really was on the leave side. And then suddenly you get people embracing the European flag and the tradition of it and waxing lyrical about the ideals of Europe. Uh you know , not not the utilitarian technocratic argument for it, which was largely what was put during the referendum campaign, but the kind of stuff that was deleted from the uh from the draft constitution, right? All the stuff that you, you know, that goes back, I don't know, to Kalurge in the 1920s or whatever. You know, the that that spirit of Europe. And I actually found that, even at the though time a lot of people found that rather cringe . And they oh God, you know, people too into Europe. Not me, obviously. But it's now the consensus, I think, is almost that the people's vote movement failed and it was all a bit much, and people were being too Europhile. In the context of this history we've been describing, I actually find that really moving because it was the first time in Britain that there was a genuinely passionate pro-European movement, which was not about selling washing machines to Disteldorf. Yeah. But was about the dream. Why go small? When you can go grand Striking alloys, sleek black roof, heated front seats, and 10-inch touchscreen. Everything you need for life on the move. Grand on style, grand on tech, grand on value. And during the Vauxhall sales event, get a grand off the new Grand and Griffin. Or any other new Vauxhall. On top of all other offers. Search Vauxhall Car Offers. Offer to private individuals £1,000 including VAT saving on new car orders between 15th to 31st of May must be registered by 30 June 2026, 18 plus CC Supply . 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And I think that's the case in any country. You know what I mean? Like that's the that's the language that you use in order to win political campaigns, elections, referendums, that's the language you use. But that it is healthy and inspiring and good to see people have that access to that broader European identity, to have that sense of meaning about them. And for them to suddenly be able to articulate it. Most of the time in that period, what I remember is people would just sort of, it's as if they hadn't used these words for so long that they barely remembered how to form them with their lips. You know what I mean? And then they're looking at their relationship, you know, their romantic relationship, their kids, you know, they could be like half French, half British, or whatever, or the years that they had, like, you know, working in Germany in their twenties, or their colleagues that they had at work, they looked at these kind of like this shared experience and shared values and were starting to politicize it in the best possible fucking way. You know what I mean? And for the I didn't think anything was cringe about of course that was a thing that was always because basically the left would always say that anything that happens, you know, anywhere to the right of it, you know, is cringe and on the street. That's that's what those things are gonna look at. It's like the people that say cringe about you know, the sort of feminist protesters against Trump because it seems a bit twe and it's just like no this is just good protests. It's not cringe to sort of endlessly go around going socialism or barbarism or nope has a rand om, you know what? Political idealism is cringe. Cringe is good. Cringe is vastly uh underrated. Yeah. Um so it was I think like a really profound moment and you suddenly get that thing of no, y there is a sense of meaning and identity in the loss. And that was not just in Britain. Because of course, what takes place in Europe then, you know, it it would not have been impossible for countries to take an individual rational course and do negotiations or or allow some movement there. But instead the European Commission takes over, they hold a united front. And because Britain makes such an unbelievable big zer of it, it really starts for the first time in a long time in Europe to confirm. Now hang on a minute, there's something quite good about this. And maybe leaving this thing would be an absolutely terrible fucking idea. And if Britain provides any service to Europe, you know, in the twenty-first century, it's in that very vivid demonstration of the consequences of leaving. Do you remember all that kind of Brexiter talk where they were going like just and at this point really the the idea the portmanteau word was really breaking down because it was like Frexit, it exit, which is Italy's exit. And nobody's ever going to say the word it exit. Anyone that you know was too young for this period, what you have to know is it was basically like what if Hellraiser but portmanteaus? It was just this kind of a terror of portmantea's but nobody else wanted to leave. I think even the uh Front National has has taken that off itself. Yeah, the one step back. Yeah. So just before we do the wrap-up, I think the other important country to talk about, uh not a member of the EU, famously is Ukraine. And it was in fact the refusal to sign an association agreement with the EU in twenty thirteen, which as we've seen can just take decades before you become a member, led to the demonstrations in the Maidan, the Yes. And terrorizing the fuck out of people. And people talk about, you know, him being very anti NATO. It's all about NATO coming up to the you know the boundaries of Russia. We've seen kind of why that happened. Yes. That it was really more about politics than defense. He's as much anti-EU as anti-NATO. You're 100% right. And I God knows why I haven't put this together. People constantly, when they're trying to excuse him, bringing up that NATO thing as if, oh, it broke a deal, which never fucking existed. But actually what sparked this? People wanting to join Europe. It's not really ultimately a NATO thing. It's a European thing, which is also partly why Europe is so deeply invested in Europe. Look at how much Putin hates the EU. Look at how much Trump and J.D. Vance hate the EU. The EU is really demonized by the international authoritarians . So that's sort of. I mean, there aren't really any exciting kind of new tre aties or new members to speak about in like the last in the last decade? But maybe what we have seen is a lot of people being reminded of the value of being part of this, not wanting to leave, some countries desperately very much wanting to join. Aaron Powell Well, I mean, the place that we get to when we get to right now is, you know, Europe basically s fighting for its survival against a Russian invasion, yeah, on one flank, against the most powerful country on earth, the United States, which explicitly is trying to undermine and destroy it. You know, which will say it openly, which will fund parties that want to destroy it, which will How did that work out? This will this will be old news, but we're recording it very soon after the exciting news from Hungary. Yeah. Which I think is part of what's of this story, right? Like this is it feels as if I think even if we'd even if we'd recorded this a year ago, you know, you'd really feel like you're leaving it in a terrible place . In each country, hu like thrusting populism of people who are critical of to some extent the I mean you have a Giorgio Maloney who's sort of find an accommodation with it in Italy, but you know the Dow in in Germany, Marine Le Pen, France, Wild ers, Netherlands, over and over, that kind of figure. Usually they learn to temper it basically because of Brexit, you know, and go, oh, we won't do that. But they're clearly and patently anti-Europeans who will disant it when they can. And then Victor Orban sitting in the middle of it, just acting as a sort of Putin puppet, essentially sabotaging the EU from within, using that veto. And that's the thing that story of the veto, you can carry it all the way through the twentieth century to Auburn, just sitting there pressing the fucking veto button, preventing European solidarity in the face of a Russian. I think it was to do with like foreign policy in Ukraine, right? Yeah, and loans. Yeah. And loans. So the EU sort of seems doomed in that situation. But weirdly it isn't really. Actually something about the furnace of the scenario provides two things. Firstly, a sense of much greater flexibility and sort of like we have to make this work. We can't be complacent. And secondly, a sense of inspiration about what the purpose of Europe is. Yeah. And this is where I'm really I'm really sort of ambivalent about it not in terms of how I feel about Europe, but in terms of my optimism and my pessimism about it. Right? Because I wanted to to y to another line from from Tony Jutt. It is true that people can forget to remember and that as we move further away from nineteen forty five, the reasons why it seems so important to build something different will be less pressing. And I think that's definitely true. The people don't really in in so many ways, I mean, the right, the return of fascism or whatever, is people just no longer thinking the Second World War was bad and we shouldn't do that again. And yet we find ourselves, because of the hostility of Putin and Trump, sort of in that post-war space as well, the idea that, and even before the Second World War, people were talking like this, the idea of Europe as this third force, oppressed in different ways by Russia and America, even though in reality America was you know, in the post war very encouraging of European unity and and and kind of doing quite a lot to um uh to push it. Yeah. Now it's actually more like the caricature of America as as something very hostile to Europe. And so particularly with the removal of Or ban, who was such a big roadblock, and and I remember a few years ago saying, Oh my God, I wish you could just kick countries out and we should kick Hungary out. Now of course I feel like oh maybe that was just me thinking Orban would be there forever. I was having the same thing. Would they just sort of eradicated any sense of democracy at all? Yeah. And yeah, exactly. Would all men still be there? So so it's sort of weird. In some ways you think, oh my god, it it sort of has it has lost momentum. It hasn't resolved a lot of these crises. Of course, anti-immigrant populism is such a big force in all of, you know, mo most of these countries. And yet, it feels at the moment like, it is a something very strong standing up for certain values against authoritarian regimes. And so in so it's if you look at it in a from a certain angle, it's it is fulfilling that role that the people that people wanted it to fulfill. And the European identity, which is sometimes can feel very fragile, maybe feels less fragile when there's something to set it against. I I see I think this is spot on. And this furnace, this moment in history, I think is actually where the sort of new personality of Europe is going to be forged. And actually, in it, this is an interpretation because these are current events. I mean, shit, for us. I don't think we've ever cited something that's just happened like a couple of days before we started recording. This is insane for Origin Story. But actually, you get a sense that these events are produ they're gonna be the bit that we talk about in future as this crucial moment for like the destiny of Europe. So like have a look at some of the themes that we've had throughout this story and what's happening now. For instance, what's going on with the with the institutions? Who's in charge? Is it the council? Is it the commission? Is it the parliament? Well, we have answers for that now, and it is the Commission. You would not have expected that. Right. We would have expected it would be the Council. That's where the heads of nation states were. We thought maybe the Parliament. No, actually, uh almost as if we're going right back to the original sort of dream to the money thing. It's the commission. There was this real period of sort of French and German weakness, the French complete shit show, the sense of uh McCrom being a sort of lame duck who's done Schultz for ages in Germany, just a sort of weak leader with an outdated mandate in a coalition that didn't really have a vision for the world. And then during this period, these rolling series of crises. And when you have crises, you tend to think about universal responses, institutional responses, rather than nation-state responses. So what's the response to Brexit? Pan-European response. What's the response to COVID? The Commissioner The joint European facility for financing. What's the approach on Ukraine? Joint discussions on sanctions. What's the approach on defence when you know that the US , you know, is is demanding that you spend more, but also is pulling away with the need for joint procurement. That all speaks to in that long story of the nation versus the international sort of element in Europe, that pushes you towards the international element in Europe. And that's what's seeing the Commission come out triumphant. Like right now, that question, that old Kissinger question, who speaks for Europe? Well, the answer is Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the Commission. Yeah. There is no question that it's it's not Antonio Costa, the president of the European Council, right? Like no one would claim that it was. You get this weird scenario where von der Leyen's messaging and her whole approach, particularly with Trump, which uh uh you know obviously for my preferences is far, far too weak, partly as a result of that's the way that Germany wants to approach it, um, is very different to the one you get from Kallas, the vice president of the European um Commission. So there's a disparity there, but ultimately both Callas and Costa are just trying to find a way of saying anything because Asylum the Villain just dominates completely. There's a trade deal. She's an Australia to sign it off, you know, part of the press conference afterwards. Carney, Mark Carney in in Canada does a speech on middle powers working together. She's right next to him, having meetings with him, off she goes. She's basically taking on that role in a way that we have never seen anyone manage. And there's loads of things you can criticize about the content, and that I would have to criticize about the content and how she does it. But institutionally, and in terms of encapsulating authority, in terms of finally answering that question, in a way that even Donald Tuss didn't when he was head of the council. Finally answered that question, who speaks for Europe? I don't think anyone would quibble about what the answer to that is now. Well you mentioned Canada, and funnily enough, people were talking, I mean I I don't think this is gonna happen, but people were talking about Canada joining the EU, weren't they ? And I thought Oh no, people seriously are talking about that. Oh my lost the idea of what the words mean. At least Eurovision, it's it's a it's a TV broadcasting deal, right? This is but the but I thought, oh my god, if you ever wanted a demonstration of Europe as a as an idea, as a spirit, rather than a geographical location, the idea that Canada would join because it was kind of relatively still liberal democratic, you know, anti-authoritarian. You know, I mean I'd love to know what Jean Monet would have thought if someone had just gone. How about Canada? Absolutely fucking enormous and really far away . But how about that in the EU? I mean just like it's sort of uh mind boggling. Yeah. Um we've obviously seen like a complete death of any kind of revision of the treaties. You can't have any of that shit, but you can't have referendums because everyone's fucking terrified, basically, of having referendums uh because they're scared that they're gonna vote the wrong way. And anyway, any kind of revision of the treaty requires unanimity, which is basically impossible. So populism has that thing that it does, right, where it creates stasis and dysfunction. You can't have change because you're scared of it, but then it presents itself as the solution to the stasis and the dysfunction. But what have we seen instead? It's not it's not that it's just fallen apart, it's that basically these highly informal, flexible responses have taken place. So hugely organic. You've had at least one, maybe two active vetoes, Hungary and Slovakia, especially on foreign policy issues, especially on taking on Putin. They're essentially operating as as Russian sabotage units. You know, killing Ukrainian loans. Now, Orban managed to do that for quite some time. It's a community competence. It needs unanimity . But they did find ways of working around him. I mean, they used bilateral loans where there wasn't any need for unanimity. They worked intergovernmental when they needed to. European Council conclusions started coming out regularly, taking place without the consent of all 27 . Essentially taking on this kind of coalition of the willing format, just working with the avenues that are available to you given the situation. That's all quite striking. And then you get to actually Orban being taken down on an explicitly pro Europe an mandate. Yes. You know? And that provides you finally with this opportunity of maybe even you don't need those flexible mechanisms now. We can just have a return to European unity and solidarity, particularly when it comes to Russia. And then you look at that Russian battle, right? Like , for ages , there's been this argument simmering in Europe throughout this story, throughout all three episodes. What about the European army? What about European defense? Yeah, yeah. You know, that was there right at the beginning of of of the idea. And it's constantly too much for people to accept. The person, the only leader who really had the confidence to speak about that was Emmanuel Macron . And people didn't want to listen because he's a pompous ass, and anything he says will kill any potential allies in the room around him. But he has been proven comprehensively and completely right by events. What is Greenland? What is Trump? What is Ukraine? These are all arguments for strategic autonomy, defense of strategic autonomy in Europe. So the big debate now is not do we need to be strategically autonomous, it's how aggressive does Europe have to be in the short term to get there? Well that tragedy of uh America saying to uh Britain and France, why don't you you know pool your kind of nuclear defence And because of that mutual distrust and then oh we don't want Germany involved. They were just like, no, no, no, it's fine, we'll just stay under your nuclear umbrella. And that seems less wise now . That whole thing of like the story of Europe for decades and decades was just like uh you can rely on America.. Yes And now look at what France is offering. I mean, France is basically offering we're going to take the whole of Europe under our nuclear umbrella. You know, that is an extraordinary offer which has very few precedents in human history. And then you get what is the r what is the response? And of course, if you really want to talk about having a European foreign policy, we're still in that impossible space we're in when it was talked about in Thatcher's era. You know, which is countries don't want to give up that power. Von der Leyen was literally calling this week to give up the veto on foreign policy. I don't think she's going to get very far. So, what has Europe done? It's gone back to its disingenuous approach, but highly effective approach, which is to essentially camouflage defense policy under a procurement initiative. It's to take the single market and be like, you know what, we'll treat it as a defense industrial policy portfolio. We'll leverage the EU budget, we'll leverage the single market for arms purchases, and we'll scale up purchases of drones, of strategic enablers, et cetera. You're taking the thing that you're too scared to talk about, essentially seriously leveling up European defense, and doing it through the thing that you're used to talking about, which is oh, it's just procurement policy. But it's just a single market. That's money. Yeah, 100%. This is the European this at this point is the tradition. But where does that get you? I mean, I honestly think that the leveling up of European defence, particularly in Germany but across the continent, is like going to be one of the most important developments in geopolitics for our generation. Because when is it going to be? Five years? Ten years? Fifteen years? That there's going to come a point where Europe really will be able to behave with a level of confidence on the world stage that it has never previously had on the basis of not having that defense capacity. And when it happens, the Americans and the Chinese and the Russians are not going to like that very much. And they're just gonna be like, what the fuck is this? The Americans particularly being very used to leadership of the West. But that is the inevitable end result of the decisions that are currently being taken. And being distaken, by the way, not just in terms of the end result, but in terms of the method, that bi-European rule of not only are we going to level up, but we're not going to do it using American tech, we're going to do it using our own defense equipment. That is where that leads you. And it starts to hint, you know, no guarantees on that, but it starts to hint at finally achieving that European army or more broadly the European defensive potential that was there at the very beginning of the project. The final thing I think there is to say about like the period that we're in is basically what countries like Ukraine and Georgia, although people talk much less about the protests that go on almost every day in Georgia, have done for Europe's memory of itself. It's just like that flag, it's not a fucking logo when it's held up against the water cannon. You know? Like it's not a logo when it is the reason that people dig trenches and go to war to prevent Russian aggression. It becomes something else. It becomes a dream of Europe, like a dream of the potential for cooperation between nations and rapid rationality in the way that countries relate to one another, and the idea that you would sacrifice something of your individual self-interest for the good of the whole. That is a powerful, beautiful dream that can kill war. And to watch people get into the mud and the trenches and the streets over it against rubber bullets and water cannons and sniper rifles. It's something that finally, I feel, for the first time in time a in a long, way that was inconceivable during the Eurozone crisis, reminds Europe of what it is for and why it exists. Yeah, and and that I mean that's what I found so interesting just doing these episodes is that um what we didn't want, what we wanted to do was tell a story that was sort of more about ideas and emotions and not like, you know, the sort of the textbook version of Europe, which is very much about it's sort of like, is it too bureaucratic? U h you know, is it democratic enough? Et cetera, et cetera. It's very, very institutional. And I think one of the problems of Europe as a political project is that it often seems kind of boring and a lot of what it achieves is taken for granted. The benefits are taken for granted. The costs are more obvious. It's all like we're paying in this amount to the European Union. What are we getting back? And it's like loads of shit that you just take for granted, despite the fact that they've tried to put their kind of logos in it, you know. And now you're seeing the problem. And so I feel like whether it be Brexit, you know, whether it be Ukraine, whether it be America losing its mind, you can't you are actually taken back to you know what where it came from, which was the aftermath of the war. And it's just like when you're really up against it and you realize, oh yeah, we really do need to celebrate these values? We really do need to bond together. So the great message that we have right now is: do not take this thing for granted, because whatever problems it may have the alternative is worse. Yeah. And maybe if you want to see what that alternative looks like, look on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean and decide whether that looks something that you want to participate in. So wave that European flag, b aby. We don't think you're cringe. No. Also the more that Dorian and I talk like this, the more we're gonna feel like we're ten years younger than we have tried to I know, we're back, back, back, baby. People's vote now. Back in Soho Radio. Tiny, very hot rooms. Rejoin. Rejo in. Thank you for listening and supporting our work. And I would like to say a very special thank you to Muchtaba Rahman. He is the Managing Director Europe and co-head of the London Office Eurasia Group and Senior Research Fellow at LSE European Institute. He really taught me through like a lot of these issues and especially what's going on now and gave me a sense of like how things are in Europe. He's probably I mean he's the person that I turn to most when it comes to li Okay, so what exactly the fuck is going on there? Pretty much as soon as something does go on there, he's the person I'm DMing being like, mate, can we chat on the phone please? He's very funny, he's very cogent, he has very, very good judgment. If you follow him on Blue Sky, you'll have access to all of those things and I would strongly advise you to do so. All our sources are in the show notes. We're going to discuss some of them in book club for Patreon supporters. Yes, yes, Patreon supporters stay there because the book club is incoming guys, if you just cannot get enough of listening to our dulcet tones, then you should become a patron as well so that you can stick around also and listen to us talk about all the books on the subject, what you should read, what you shouldn't and just generally how much we lost our fucking minds while doing so. Lots of benefits. You get episodes a week early most of the time, exclusive QA episodes. There's merchandise, there's cut price priority tickets to the live shows, and you're just enabling us to do all of this work. Um and it really would be it would be logistically impossible for us to do the volume of work that we do on these episodes without your support. So thank you. And if you're not one of those, please consider joining them. It's not quite at the moment it's more of a European coal and steel community. But we're hoping to move forward to ever closer union uh with the rest of our listeners. It's like money, baby steps. Uh see you next time for the strange journey of JK Rowling. Bye guys. Security program on spreadsheets. New regulations piling up. An audit dread. It's time for Vanta. Vanta Automate Security and compliance, brings evidence into one place and cuts audit prep by 82%. Less manual work, clearer visibility, faster deals, zero chaos. Call it compliance or call it cal m fliance. Get it? 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