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Abstract:
With hindsight, one might consider Brexit, consummated after long haggling in 2020, the last, and lost, opportunity for the European Union to mend its ways and become a viable political entity, if not community. The departure of the United Kingdom did not register as a warning that the Union had become too internally diverse to hold together, having rapidly expanded both territorially and functionally. To the contrary, Germany under Merkel and France under Macron saw an opportunity, or pretended to see one, to push the old integration project—the “ever closer union of the peoples of Europe”—forward, now that “Euroskeptic” Britain, one of the Union’s Big Three, had left. But then, they arguably had little choice as the EU’s de facto constitution (two international treaties each hundreds of pages long) is practically unchangeable as any amendment has to be agreed by all member states, which some can do only after a referendum. One may assume that this rigidity was exactly what was desired when the treaties in their present form were signed in Maastricht in 1992 and Amsterdam in 1997, to cast in stone the logic of neoliberal political economy that was at the time considered the ultimate stage of economic wisdom…
