[The European Conservative] Ever-Closer Disunion

The EU’s business model has been to put the age-old laws of politics to the test, argues Stefan Auer in his latest book. To survive, it needs to heed them instead.

European Disunion: Democracy, Sovereignty and the Politics of Emergency. By Stefan Auer. Hurst; 256 pages; $29.99.

Herewith, a double paradox. The European Union’s (EU) set of driving motives — its telos, so to speak — are undergoing a two-track inversion. The bloc was initially designed to slide gently towards federalization — “ever-closer union”, per the preamble to the 1957 Treaty of Rome — whilst remaining a largely toothless actor on the world stage. And yet, it has since grown into a geopolitical player of its own that’s internally at peace with the present deadlock of integration. Sometime between the eurozone crisis of the early 2010s and Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, the EU’s entire architecture has been thusly turned inside out. Scholars, journalists, and practitioners in Brussels and national capitals are still at pains to gauge the depth of this sheer revolution.

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