The European Union learns to walk

Every child learning to walk falls. No one would therefore conclude that walking itself was a mistake. We intuitively understand that development consists of attempts, of balance and the loss of balance, of progress, overreach, correction and another attempt. Curiously, we often lose this equanimity as soon as we turn to political entities. We expect them to function even while they are developing; and when they stumble, some declare them failures while others pretend that they never fell at all.

It may therefore be worth taking a sober look at the European Union: neither as a project of salvation nor as a bureaucratic aberration, but as one of the most unusual political experiments on the European continent.

Its beginnings were remarkably concrete. After two world wars, six states did not begin by attempting to impose a European identity, but by jointly administering coal and steel – precisely those industries without which war could scarcely be waged. In 1951, the European Coal and Steel Community was established; the Treaties of Rome followed in 1957. Former enmity was to be transformed into organised mutual dependence. Today this sounds technical. At the time, it was almost revolutionary.

Only a few years later, however, it became clear that common institutions do not simply make national interests disappear. France's “empty chair” policy temporarily paralysed the Community in 1965–66 because Paris opposed an expansion of majority voting. The Luxembourg Compromise defused the crisis – at the cost of greater deference to national vetoes. The Community's first serious institutional stumble thus already revealed the problem that continues to accompany the European Union today: how much common purpose can national sovereignty tolerate, and how much national sovereignty can common action tolerate?

Yet it continued. The customs union was completed in 1968. Denmark, Ireland and the United Kingdom joined in 1973 – in the very year that an oil crisis hit the European continent hard economically. In 1979, citizens were able to elect their representatives to the European Parliament directly for the first time. The Community was thus becoming larger, more democratic and, at the same time, more vulnerable to a world it could not control.

The 1980s perhaps show particularly well how renewed momentum can emerge from stagnation. Greece, Spain and Portugal joined after the end of their dictatorships; European integration thereby also became an anchor of democratic consolidation. The Single European Act prepared the way for the single market, while Erasmus, launched in 1987, began bringing young people together across the member states and across the European continent. Then, in 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. A project that had begun in Western Europe suddenly acquired the possibility of overcoming a substantial part of the continent's political division.

The 1990s therefore became a period of extraordinary acceleration: Maastricht formally established the European Union in 1993, the single market realised its four freedoms, Schengen made borders between an increasing number of member states disappear from everyday life, and in 1999 the euro came into existence, initially as a book currency. The European Union was no longer merely a market. It began to develop elements of a common political order.

Yet precisely this success generated new problems. Those who grow quickly can find their institutional development lagging behind their own expansion. In 2004, ten further states joined, eight of them from Central and Eastern Europe. Historically, this was perhaps one of the greatest achievements of the European integration project: the division of large parts of the European continent that had emerged after the Second World War and the Cold War was politically overcome to a considerable extent. Only a year later, however, voters in France and the Netherlands rejected the proposed European Constitutional Treaty. Integration had advanced far, but evidently not every conception of its further deepening commanded the same democratic consent. The Treaty of Lisbon later found another route towards institutional reform.

Then came the financial and euro crisis. It was not merely an economic crisis, but a test of the construction itself. The European Union had created a common currency without developing an equally sophisticated common economic and financial architecture for all the risks arising from it. The crisis brutally exposed the interdependencies between banks, states and national economies and led, among other things, to the European Stability Mechanism and the banking union. For a time in 2012, even the future of the euro itself was in question; that same year, the European Union was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Rarely have recognition of a historic achievement and doubts about the future of the project stood so close together.

No sooner had that crisis become more manageable than the next arrived. More than a million people sought asylum in European Union member states in 2015. The states responded very differently, and the crisis exposed how incomplete a union remains without a genuinely common asylum, border and migration policy. Brexit followed in 2016: 52 per cent of British voters chose to leave. For the first time, the Union did not grow but lost a member state. Anyone who claims that European integration is historically inevitable should remember that moment. It is not.

Then came Covid. Borders that had become almost invisible to millions of EU citizens suddenly reappeared. Health policy proved to be a national competence, while the virus naturally showed no interest whatsoever in jurisdictional boundaries. Yet the crisis again produced more common action: the EU organised joint vaccine procurement and adopted what was then the largest recovery and stimulus programme ever financed through the EU budget. Two years later, Russia's attack on Ukraine once again forced the Union, within a matter of months, to take decisions on sanctions, energy, weapons, refugees and security that would scarcely have been imaginable only a few years earlier. War thus returned to the European continent in a particularly brutal form; it did not, and does not, take place “in the EU”, but in a European state outside the Union, whose relationship with the EU has thereby become more political still.

I recognise a pattern in this. The European Union does not develop despite its crises. It frequently develops through them. That is no excuse for bad decisions. On the contrary: some problems arose precisely because integration was badly designed, pursued too slowly, too quickly or at too great a distance from citizens. Growth, after all, is not the same thing as maturity.

The European Union therefore finds itself at such a point once again today. The principal question is no longer whether we can trade with one another or travel to France without a passport check. The world around it has become harsher. There is war on the European continent, the United States is realigning its interests, China is an economic and technological competitor, artificial intelligence is transforming industries, and the EU's own competitiveness is under pressure. The Draghi Report identified the innovation gap, the challenge of competitive decarbonisation and dangerous strategic dependencies as central challenges. For 2024–29, the EU itself therefore places three objectives alongside one another: a free and democratic, a strong and secure, and a prosperous and competitive Europe within its sphere of political responsibility.

Perhaps it is precisely this combination that matters. Freedom without security becomes vulnerable. Security without freedom becomes authoritarian. And both eventually become politically hollow if the European Union is no longer economically capable of generating its own prosperity.

A mature European Union therefore need not do more everywhere. It must learn to do the right thing at the right level. Where individual states are plainly too small to act effectively alone – in trade, defence, large parts of foreign policy, migration at common external borders, technological sovereignty or the regulation of global markets – the EU needs greater capacity to act. Where municipalities, regions or states can solve problems better themselves, Brussels should not infer from the existence of a European institution that a European rule is therefore necessary. Subsidiarity is not the enemy of European integration. It may well be one of its preconditions.

After more than seventy years of European integration, it would therefore be strange to judge the European Union by whether it has ever fallen. Of course it has fallen. It will fall again. The more interesting question is whether it learns from its falls.

Six states became twenty-seven. Coal and steel became a single market, freedom of movement, common institutions and a currency. From centuries of wars between European states emerged, within the European Union, a political space in which France and Germany now conduct their conflicts in meeting rooms. This is neither a law of nature nor a guarantee for the future. Precisely for that reason, it should neither be romanticised nor belittled.

And perhaps, at the end, it is worth looking at the map as well. The European Union is not Europe. Europe is the continent – larger, more diverse and extending politically far beyond the boundaries of the Union. Yet the EU's 27 member states already encompass almost 40 per cent of its territory and nearly 450 million people. From an association of six states there has thus emerged a political space of a scale that itself creates responsibility: towards its own citizens, towards the other states of the European continent, and towards a world in which decisions taken by the European Union have consequences far beyond its external borders.

Size alone creates neither legitimacy nor, still less, wisdom. But anyone who politically organises such a substantial part of a continent cannot indefinitely behave as though it were a small economic cooperation project. Greater significance has brought greater responsibility: to protect peace and freedom within its own political space, to enable prosperity, to act reliably towards its neighbours, and to assume responsibility where the member states together can genuinely achieve more than they can alone.

The European Union is not a finished house into which we moved at some point. It is a political development on the European continent to which every generation continues to contribute. Our task is not to defend every step taken so far. Our task is to determine what the next right step should be.

A child, after all, does not become an adult by ceasing to fall.

It becomes an adult by learning why it fell – and then walking differently.