ABSTRACT
What will be said about the European Union when historians come to judge
it in 25 years’ time?
The failure of the EU will be seen as a failure to move beyond an inward-
looking multi-state system of common management to an entity capable of
defining and pursuing its own interests in international society. It will be
seen as an organisation that only just got beyond its role as a facilitator of
enterprise. This judgement may be reduced to one simple proposition: it
failed to develop international power. It certainly developed a knack for providing support in humanitarian crises, and it successfully developed a
capacity to intervene in low-and middle-level civil wars. But it never went
much further than that. It failed to develop an effective procedure for
making foreign policy, it failed to build up a European army that had a
reasonable logistical, command and strike capacity, and it failed to develop
machinery for pursuing its collective economic and social interests in a
coherent fashion across the range of relevant multilateral organisations. In
itself, it remained a multilateral organisation dealing externally with other multilateral arrangements. It failed to add power to capacity.
