Europe's Identity Crisis Revisited

ALMOST THIRTY YEARS AGO, I WROTE AN ESSAY for this journal about Western Europe which began by calling it prosperous and disunited. I then stated: "Europe today has no clear identity, no profile other than that which a process of industrializa tion and a process of economic integration have given it. Europe today has no sense of direction and purpose."1 In 1994, this judg ment remains valid, even though so much has happened in the past ten years alone: the relance of the mid-1980s, the end of the Cold War and of Europe's division into two armed camps, and the longest recession since the Great Depression. In 1964, my opening paragraph ended bravely: "This essay laments its absence" (i.e., the absence of a sense of direction and purpose) "and calls for its rebirth." I am more sober now: I only propose an analysis. It is ironic that the crisis of the European Community (EC, now called the European Union [EU]) appears to have begun immediately after the signing of the Maastricht Treaty on European Union, which seemed to promise a major leap forwards. A monetary union, with a single central bank and a single currency, was going, within less than ten years, to crown the enterprise of economic integration begun in 1957 and expanded by the "1992" program of the mid-1980s (the so-called Single Act). The Community's juris diction was going to extend to areas beyond the economic realm: social affairs, police matters, immigration?areas close to the core of domestic sovereignty?as well as to diplomacy and defense. A year and a half later, deep pessimism prevails. The French nation en