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No union for the European Union?

Stephen Walt on his blog on FP has an interesting extract from a book about to be published on the EU and its questionable future. In fact, the author of the upcoming book asserts that the unified Europe which was supposed to happen hasn't been so for some 20 years now:

"Everyone, it seems, has an opinion about Europe's debt crisis. Optimists, such as Princeton political scientist Andrew Moravcsik, declare that "it is too soon to count Europe out." The European Union has survived plenty of crises in its time and will get through this one as well. Pessimists like Harvard historian Niall Ferguson disagree, arguing that what has happened in Greece is likely to happen elsewhere. To his mind, Europe could be on the verge of a "disastrous Europewide banking crisis" that has the potential to bring down the euro.

Given the amount of ink spilled on the Greek drama, it's easy to lose sight of the real tragedy here. Regardless of how the EU navigates the current mess, the dream of a United States of Europe -- a political, military, and economic union from Lisbon to Latvia and the Baltic to the Balkans -- is over. What most people don't realize is that this has been the case for almost twenty years.

Nothing can be done to salvage the dream because deep structural forces are at work. The Europeans formed their union during the cold war to counter the awesome power of the Soviet Union. So when the USSR collapsed in 1991 there was suddenly no need for a United States of Europe.

The events of the past two decades show clearly that the end of the cold war also signaled the end of the European dream. EU member states have made no significant move toward political or military union and have begun to unravel their economic union. Absent a serious external threat to Europe, this process will continue. In the future, the current crisis will be remembered as just another warning sign that the dream was ending."

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