The largest group most people can think of themselves as belonging to is the nation-state. Here, even in the midst of great diversity, a certain level of common interest and identity is given: the land we share, the laws that govern our lives, the police and armed forces that protect us, our history, our culture. When circumstances change drastically for the nation-state — a famine, a belligerent neighbor, a loss of empire, the discovery of huge natural resources — there is often an intensification of identity, albeit in a process of change.
Unless of course the state was largely an invented entity with no strong internal ties. Then change can bring break-up and a return to older, stronger identities. As it did in Yugoslavia or Czechoslovakia. As it threatens to do in Great Britain or Spain.
What about international organizations? The USSR collapsed under the pressure of economic change and a loss of ideological purpose. It had been imposed from Moscow. The Warsaw Pact went with it. Since then NATO has looked like a military alliance dangerously in need of a cause. Everything knocks on. Even victory can be traumatic. Only organizations with a clear and necessary role in world affairs — the United Nations, the World Bank — seem guaranteed a long life, however badly they perform. Even if they were to fold, they would, arguably, soon reappear in some new manifestation. They oil the wheels of world governance. Somebody has to.
What about the European Union?
Is it or is it not the most unwieldy, cumbersome, ill-defined and confused organization in the world? A monster so torn with internal contradiction it seems impossible it can survive; at the same time such a huge and determining presence in the lives of 500 million people that its demise would be dense with consequence for centuries. And likely bloody.
How was this improbable hybrid born? Neither state nor federation, yet sucking sovereignty from all its members, it defies definition. Those of us who live in it are utterly bemused; all we can say with certainty is that it is not a union in any meaningful sense of that word, and that it is European only in the sense that its 28 members are European, but not because it is coextensive with Europe, let alone congruent with any myth of what Europe might mean or have meant. If the designation “Europa” conjures up antique intimations of beauty, purpose and cultural strength, then it has nothing to do with the European Union.