A Europe Split Apart by World War II, a Community That Was Never Real

June 24, 2016. What did that historic moment the British made yesterday actually mean?

The Brexit referendum has settled. But the EU's real test has only just begun. What matters is not the result of the vote, but the fact that it was held at all.

This is not the first time European voters have used a referendum to reject the EU's direction: the Netherlands and France both voted on the EU Constitutional Treaty in 2005, and Ireland voted in 2008 on the redesigned Lisbon Treaty. All three failed.

But those votes mainly exposed disagreements about the EU's future. No one expected a referendum on actually leaving, least of all in a founding member like Britain. People had assumed that the country to quit the EU, by choice or under pressure, would be a peripheral one like Greece — since it seemed to be exactly that kind of "irresponsible" eating through one's own reserves that had made the European debt crisis worse.

Brexit was the first time people had to face a shadow that had hung on the horizon ever since the debt crisis: could the eurozone collapse? Could the EU dissolve?

What a Fragile Europe

Perhaps when people look back on this history years from now, along with their regret that the EU's founding purpose went unfulfilled, what will strike them more is that a "small Europe" — born out of the Coal and Steel Community, its territory oddly close to that of the Carolingian empire — got as far as it did: an overstated founding ideal, expedient steps taken one at a time, integration pushed along by carrying single economic policies across borders. For a long time this let people treat the EU's enlargement as the advance of European integration, and believe that once the EU could take in every European country, a new Europe without war, poverty or division would be born — while ignoring, deliberately or not, the questions that never go away: what is "Europe," and what counts as a "European country"?

Ever since Rome fell, the dream of a "united Europe" has been lit again and again — which is why Charlemagne called his empire the "Holy Roman Empire," though to later generations it was not especially holy, was not Roman, and was hard to call an empire. The paradox is that it may be precisely inside the dream of uniting Europe, or of defending Europe's unity, that Europe's divisions have been marked out over and over, and its inheritance has grown more and more mixed — so much so that what Europe is remains unclear to this day: Frankish Europe grating against Byzantine Europe, the quarrels among Catholicism, Protestantism, Eastern Orthodoxy and Islam, the wars fought among the great empires. All of it left marks on Europe, a jumble of them, that can still be felt.

Even now, the hesitation and wariness the EU shows toward Turkey and Russia, and the guilt and rejection it shows toward the Middle East and North Africa, keep reminding people how many times Europe's glory and its dreams have passed through challenge and triumph, setback and retreat. Europe has never been a settled, clear-cut thing; "Europeanness" has always been under construction and deconstruction at the same time.

Empire, Ideology, Capitalism: Every Attempt to Assemble Europe Has Failed

Jan Morris thought Europeans suffer from a "recurrent urge to unify," one that had already flared five times before the EU: from Charlemagne of the Holy Roman Empire, to the Habsburg emperors, to the ambitious little Napoleon, to Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm, and finally to the infamous Hitler.

In fact it was the Third Reich's constant talk of "European unity" that tainted the idea of a united Europe, much as any argument for Asian integration today has to step carefully around the "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere." So when France's hunger for German coal, the Netherlands' need for the German market and Germany's eagerness to stop being Europe's second-class citizen brought the three together for warmth, both the EU and a united greater Europe were still a distant dream.

NATO's protection, the dividends of economic integration and the post-Cold War boom in globalization let "developed Europe" expand faster and faster, with swelling ambitions and a growing tendency to ignore its own structural contradictions. What gave people the pride of making a new European history was a belief: that they had at last got past their infatuation with force and with "heretical" ideologies of every kind, and had seen that only capitalism and democracy could unite Europe.

But it was this naturally contradictory pair — a "capitalism" that crosses borders and a "democracy" that stops at them — that left the euro and the EU expanding without strength. As former Luxembourg prime minister Jean-Claude Juncker put it, "Business people seek to maximize profit. Politicians seek to maximize votes. The euro makes it easier for shrewd business people to earn higher profits, but for politicians the euro makes the goal of maximizing votes harder and harder to reach."

A successful currency requires political union first, yet political union in the eurozone never came about, and it looks less and less likely to. At the moment when political integration was needed to lock in the gains of economic integration, Europe's leaders chose instead to keep the EU going by taking in more members, on the belief that a bigger market and freer movement of people and capital across a wider area would be bound to bring new dividends, bound to ease the tension inside the EU, and so bound to supply fresh momentum to push the EU forward.

At Bottom, the Conflict Between Developed and Undeveloped Europe Goes Back to the Two World Wars Cutting European Civilization in Half

But enlargement brought more than rising costs and the question of how to spread them — that is, who pays for enlargement. It also sharpened the contradictions that already existed inside developed Europe, and made the discomfort between developed and undeveloped Europe plainer.

Pre-war Europe had a history of many peoples and many cultures. Then the collapse of the empires after the First World War and the rise of national self-determination made the homogeneous nation-state fashionable, and wave after wave of ethnic cleansing and racial killing during and after the Second World War made the fashion real.

The result was that the thread of European civilization that ran unbroken from Western Europe through Central Europe to Eastern Europe was cut through the middle, communities that had lived side by side for generations were pulled up by the roots, Central Europe ceased to exist, and the gap between East and West grew clearer by the year. After the long separation and standoff on either side of the Iron Curtain, when the two Europes embraced again, the hypocrisy carried in their surface warmth and their deep-down resistance was startling.

On top of that, the national identities that Eastern European and Balkan countries built on purpose, in order to shake off what was left of being "imperial subjects" of the former Soviet Union and former Yugoslavia, conflict at root with the EU's supranational character: in Western Europe, stressing nationalism had been out of step with the times ever since the war ended.

Eight years have passed since the 2008 global financial crisis and the eurozone debt crisis broke out. In those eight years consensus inside "developed Europe" has been hard to find, integration between East and West has stalled, the pressure of new migration has jumped, the children of older immigrants have drifted away, and the EU has arrived, for the first time, at a crossroads where it truly does not know the way.

An EU Without Britain Leads to a Europe Without the EU

Whatever uncertainty it sets loose, Britain's referendum has at least made people see that the days of muddling along and hoping problems would solve themselves are gone. With Britain leaving, a post-EU future no longer looks unimaginable. And once people begin, calmly, to think about Europe's future from a post-EU standpoint, every self-satisfied version of history, every rock-solid piece of reality, every glorious vision of the future seems unable to bear much scrutiny. Worse, a Europe without the EU seems to face nothing but a more unsettled future.

Those who explain the historical roots of this vote through Britain's "glorious isolation" forget that Britain has been both a chief driver of European integration and a chief beneficiary of it, even if, for various reasons, it always insisted on asserting a bit of independence along the way. Britain has also been ahead of many European countries in economic restructuring, economic competitiveness, and ethnic and cultural diversity.

So the British public's choice to leave may mean more than that the EU is no longer, in their eyes, the right tool for pushing European integration forward; it may mean that European integration itself is no longer something worth wanting. Is the dissolution and disappearance of the EU now a high-probability event?

For a long time what held up public enthusiasm for the EU, for enlargement and for the integration process was not only the vision of a united, prosperous, powerful Europe, but also the nightmare future that a split EU and a collapsed integration project stood for. Does Brexit show that people are no longer held by an illusory vision of the future, and no longer afraid of a future without the EU?

The next question: what kind of Europe, and what kind of world, would there be without the EU?

The break-up of the EU would mean the migrant and refugee problem getting worse.

With no rich partners left to cover the costs, and their own ability to send labor to more developed parts of Europe restricted, the Eastern European, Southern European and Balkan countries — already unable to look after themselves — would bar migrants and refugees from the Middle East and North Africa as tightly as they could. That would sharpen the conflict between these frontline countries and the Middle East and North Africa, and speed the rise of extremist forces inside moderate Islamic countries such as Turkey; it would also widen the rift between Europe's rich and poor countries, and at the same time strain relations between ethnic groups inside individual European countries. Such a turn would push globalization further into retreat and, on a larger view, make people worry more about Samuel Huntington's prophecy of a "clash of civilizations."

The break-up of the EU would mean the Franco-German alliance becomes history. Ever since German reunification, France's main purpose in keeping the EU going and pushing enlargement has been to hold Germany inside the EU framework and so keep it from growing too strong. Germany, for its part, hoped that continuing to play its assigned role in the EU would calm others' suspicions. But an elephant cannot hide behind a tree and dance. However "low-key" Germany tries to be, a France short on strength and long on posturing has long been unfit for the EU's leading role, let alone able to decide Europe's future.

In fact the eurozone's poor working has much to do with the reversal in strength between France and Germany. People once hoped that northern European capital and southern European labor would meet more smoothly under one currency. But for cultural, historical and geographic reasons, southern Europeans were unwilling to go north for work, and the places they did prefer — northern Italy, France — had fairly limited capacity to employ them, while German capital preferred Austria, Poland, the Czech Republic and other places close to Germany and tied to it by history. And when the eurozone debt crisis broke out, France and Germany fell into serious discord over whether and how to rescue Southern Europe's "PIIGS" — Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain.

With the Franco-German alliance gone, the rise of a powerful bloc across northern Europe with Germany at its center would be impossible to stop. Would that wake the old historical fear of Germany and set off a new round of geopolitical rearrangement? Would people see the return of an old Europe of shifting alliances and open and hidden rivalry?

Britain Back to Britain, America Back to the Americas, and Europe Left With a Powerful Germany

The next question: without the EU, would NATO still need to exist? One important reason NATO survived the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact was that a demilitarized, steadily enlarging EU needed NATO to escort it — unless the EU built a defense alliance of its own. Such an alliance would raise the question of German rearmament, an especially delicate matter when Germany had only just reunified. So from a low-key Germany, to an uneasy France, to an America that did not want to pull out of Europe, everyone then saw NATO's survival as the perfect solution.

Even while the EU existed, clashing interests between Europe and America had already cast a shadow over NATO's mission, but for the reasons above both sides could usually put up with each other and keep the peace. Once, in a post-EU era, each country took back responsibility for its own defense, NATO's existence would be awkward. The US might join hands with Germany to meet threats from the east, or with France to meet threats from the south, but such cooperation would be mostly a partnership between two states, and could no longer be the foundation for NATO's survival as a collective security body. And a Germany free of NATO's "restraints" would be more frightening than a Germany that had merely left the EU. It is like the way some Asian countries hate the existence of the US-Japan alliance and, at the same time, worry even more that a Japan no longer held by it would go its own way.

On the surface Russia would look like the biggest winner: the break-up of the EU and NATO's fading will would seem to take much of the geopolitical pressure off it. But a rearmed Germany, and the small Eastern European states whose sense of insecurity would jump once they lost the EU to lean on, would both become strategic liabilities for Russia. Set against a demilitarized EU and a NATO too divided inside to coordinate any action against Russia, facing a scattering of opponents of uneven strength and unpredictable behavior is clearly not the better option.

Facing the break-up of the EU, the loneliest party might be the United States. Twenty years ago the American grand strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote in The Grand Chessboard that the US had to keep the EU from growing into a real rival, but had even more to keep the EU from collapsing. Brzezinski warned, anxiously, that if Europeans were left to drift they risked sinking into internal social problems they could not climb out of — problems that extreme nationalists and fundamentalists could put to use.

On the future of a Europe without the EU, Brzezinski predicted this: as long as Europe's continuing effort at unification fails, people will be uneasy about the stability of European geopolitics and about America's position in Europe, because any failure of European unification could make Europeans feel they must go back to some fairly traditional methods, which would certainly give Russia or Germany an opening to act on its own in geopolitics. To him this was a dispiriting prospect, because "if modern European history teaches any lesson at all, it is that neither Russia nor Germany is likely to achieve lasting success along that road." He did concede, though, that Germany might become more "self-willed and blunt," at least in defining its own national interests.

Brzezinski patiently "advised" Europe that whether the challenge is immigration from outside or economic and technological competition from America or Asia, both can increasingly be met only at the scale of Europe as a whole. A Europe greater than the sum of its parts is far more likely to be a Europe that draws a clear line against political extremism, narrow nationalism and social hedonism.

But British voters — and perhaps a growing number of voters in other countries too — do not appear to see it that way. On Brzezinski's "grand chessboard," only by controlling the Eurasian landmass could America gain real strategic security. Now it looks as though the isolationist Trump at home and the British ally that has "brazenly" voted to leave the EU are joining hands to tip over Brzezinski's board.

Cover image from marketingland and compositestoday; some in-text images from Visual China Group.