Adam Tooze

The EU employs fewer people than most medium-sized cities.

Germany’s terrible history forbids strategies of domination or even overly assertive leadership. But the success of the Federal Republic gives it the right to insist that European solutions meet its standards, and Berlin will apply those standards as it sees fit

Left-wing hostility to the promarket character of the EU and nationalist hostility to Brussels united to deliver solid majorities against it. It was a profound shock. The permissive consensus was dead. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the constitution, popular democracy had asserted itself

European integration and NATO were born together in the cold war. Their joint eastward expansion since 1989 was the result of the defeat of the Soviet Union

Habermas and Derrida’s 2003 vision of a distinct “European identity” was directed as much against the East Europeans as it was against the Anglo-Americans. It was core Western Europe that counted.

All the indicators looked good. But the entire constellation—the booming domestic economy, the appreciating exchange rate, the rising reserves—could all be traced back to a common factor: the huge inward surge of foreign capital. What if that surge reversed? What if there was a sudden stop?

Furthermore, whatever the differences over Iraq, Europe’s pose of geopolitical innocence is a historically recent phenomenon. Though it balked at Iraq, France remains a hardened postcolonial war fighter. Nor does Europe only do “small wars.”

Russia could thus seem the very model of a national economic powerhouse, with a huge trade surplus, surging foreign reserves and a strong state. But the paradox of Russia’s position was that its new prosperity was associated not with independence from the world economy but with entanglement with it

With the global commodity boom fueling Russia’s resurgence at the same time as West European money flooded eastward into the territory of the former Warsaw Pact, it was as if the two great weather fronts of global capitalism were charging toward each other across Eurasia.

Despite, or perhaps because of, its spectacularly provocative nature, President Bush immediately threw his authority behind the NATO membership bid. Welcoming Ukraine and Georgia into the MAP would send a signal throughout the region, the White House announced. It would make clear to Russia that “these two nations are, and will remain, sovereign and independent states.” It was a proposal that was bound to please the new Europe. Poland’s government was delighted.