Well, for once, I can claim to have some actual competence on the subject. The “Balkan house” analogy is brillant, and the post itself is very good. Let me try my own explanation of this oddity in just a few lines (sorry for the redundancies).
First, as noted in the post, forget about the Council of Europe, that’s a completely separate institution, born from an independent treaty dealing with human rights and justice (and Russia is in, believe it or not).
Now, as for the European Union, it began merely as an international economic treaty in 1952, a pact between fully sovereign states, each with a long history of independence (and, well, frequent wars) behind them.
But the founding fathers, Jean Monnet (French) and Konrad Adenauer (German), and others, in true Montesquieu fashion, hoped that strong economic cooperation would finally put an end to centuries of conflict among European nations. And remarkably, it did!
From there, two opposing camps gradually emerged:
The progressive camp, eager to push European integration ever further, aiming ultimately at a genuine federal state, the United States of Europe, in which national sovereignty would be largely dissolved into a single political, military, and economic entity, after the american model.
The conservative camp, resisting this “European construction” and preferring the original idea: independent sovereign nations bound by an international treaty focused on trade and economics. The malicious tongues (French ones ?) would even say the UK joined the Union only to slow the progressives down, if not sabotaging the all project.
Note that no State has ever been all progressive or all conservative on this matter. It’s not even a left wing against right wing opposition. Center vs borders is a better match.
Anyway, from 1952 up until 1992, the progressives more or less trampled the conservatives. The construction went fast and the Union attracted more and more members.
The Maastricht Treaty of 1992 was maybe their last great victory, a huge leap toward a federal Europe, especially as it required member states, among other things, to surrender monetary sovereignty to the Union (the euro € became effective a decade later). Also that was just after the USSR collapse, and many states from the East filed their membership application in this period (but integration process is long).
Yet some members, predictably the UK, opted out euro and from that moment on, the rivalry turned into a real crisis and the progressives began to lose momentum. EU started to appear as that complicated bureaucratic elitist thing than nobody really understands under IQ 120, so it became the perfect target for populist politicians, the source of all ills (and what was even more convenient, it had at this time no clearly identified spokesperson that could object).
In 2005, the failure of the The Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe was the first victory of the conservatives. It was even rejected (by universal direct suffrage !) in France that was supposed to be in the progressive camp. The text was elevating economic rules of liberal orientation at a constitutional level, something that was unacceptable for the left wing. While they were still some late joiners from the East, in reality the “construction” sort of stalled after the Lisbon Treaty of 2007 (a watered down version of the former).
UK eventually Brexited after a long and dramatic divorce that ended in 2020. That might have been a chance for the progressives to relaunch the project. But instead, it revealed something deeper and darker, an ancient evil. Sauron Palpatine Nationalism was back, rising from its ashes across the world. Boris Johnson was just an avatar among others. Putin, Xi Jinping, Bolsonaro, Trump, Viktor Orbán, Giorgia Meloni… Even at parliamentary level the AfD in Germany and the Rassemblement National in France. And of course, nationalists viscerally hate the EU as much as they despise NATO or any supranational framework that dares to exceed a mere bilateral treaty.
So, what we’re left with is indeed a Balkan house : half-built, with scaffolding rusting in the wind. You can clearly see the skeleton of a federal state, and yet, it isn’t one. The EU is stuck somewhere between a mere economic alliance like NAFTA and a true federation like the USA. Like the platipus, it’s something in between, a strange thing, a sui generis object.
My prediction? It will remain so, unless, somehow, nationalism goes out of fashion...
NB : dates depends wether you consider adoption at different levels, entry in force, et cetera.
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I plead guilty to not being neutral about nationalism in my previous comment. So far, reality has provided me with very little Bayesian evidence in favor of it.
On a personal level, my great-aunt (whom I knew) was tortured by the Gestapo, my grandfather had terrible experience in a labor camp in occupied Poland, never recovered, and died prematurely from alcoholism. And in the generation before, most of my great-grandfathers and great-granduncles fought for years in the trenches, were wounded, and some died, essentially for nothing.
On a less personal level and in a register more suited to LessWrong standards, the two World Wars together caused around 60 million deaths in Europe alone (up to 15% percent of the population in some countries during WWI). Vast, ancient, and beautiful cities were destroyed, invaluable cultural heritage was lost, and, of course, there were the horrors of the extermination camps. The destruction of wealth in Europe is also beyond comprehension : for WWI, roughly trillions of inflation-adjusted 2025 dollars in war expenditures and more than one trillion in material damage. For WWII, over ten trillion in war budgets and several trillions in destruction.
Nationalism was almost directly and wholly responsible for all of this. So yes, it is difficult for me not to see nationalism as a form of genuine Evil. Not only Nazism, but also the more ordinary, everyday nationalism we still see today. Let us not forget that there were no Nazis in 1914. In contrast, it seems self-evident to me that the humanists who launched the NATO project and soon after, the European project, were the good guys in the story.
I can acknowledge that rational arguments in favor of nationalism exist. I understand how so many people can be drawn to such ideas. Most nationalist leaders are democratically elected. “Make [your country] great again” or “[Your country] first!” is perhaps the most effective political slogan ever devised. It may even appear entirely legitimate and efficient at first glance. You can certainly achieve good short or medium term results. But since every country is equally entitled to make itself “first” and “great again,” the only long-term outcome is conflict, tragedy, and destruction, a net negative, as predictable as stepping off a cliff.
That being said, no extreme worldview is likely to be true. I suppose that an extreme cosmopolitan, pacifist, anti-nationalist project would also end in failure. No borders, no armies, no economic patriotism, no incentive to compete, no shared identity, total relativism regarding values, no local decision-making, all sovereignty delegated to a single global government… I simply cannot see how that could work with real human beings.
Still, just as the “conservatives” opposed to European integration are not all true nationalists (some belong to the far-left camp opposed to Brussels’ white-collar bureaucracy), the “progressives” I refer to are not all naïve cosmopolitan idealists. Their initial goal was a federal project modeled after the American example. That hardly seems unreasonable. In a federal system, individual votes are more diluted and each state’s sovereignty is limited. Yet there remain local elections, local decision-making, and a sense of local identity. It would have been harder to achieve in Europe given history and diversity, but I can imagine such a federal system functioning. Perhaps even better than the half-working Balkan house Europeans currently enjoy, courtesy of the “conservatives”, or if you prefer, “euro-skeptics”.