The end of history has come and gone for Europe

The end of history was supposed to happen in Europe, not America. As it were, it did neither because there is no such thing.

For a long time, many European leaders, bureaucrats and intellectuals deluded themselves that the European Union (EU) was “post-politics” and “post-state”. As its member states emerged from centuries of dog-eat-dog conflicts, they agreed to delegate much of their decision-making to technocrats and regulatory agencies. It was a long process over decades after the second world war. In the end, they got there, a promised land full of “intergovernmental committees” so loved by bureaucrats in Brussels. Negotiating teams bargain over funding instead of armies fighting over resources.

And why not? People might never have lived in a Hobbesian state of nature, but nations certainly did. And on the European continent, they had slaughtered each other for centuries, from the early modern Thirty Years’ War and Napoleonic wars to two world wars in the last century; and in between, more bloodshed that spread around the world via Western imperialism.

The version of states as defined by sovereignty and territoriality in the diplomatic settlement that ended the Thirty Years’ War virtually guaranteed a permanently violent Hobbesian state of affairs for everyone.

So who wouldn’t want to go beyond state and politics, and have something like the EU? It was a noble and beautiful dream. For a while, it seemed to have worked. But no longer. As W.H. Auden once wrote, “In the nightmare of the dark/All the dogs of Europe bark./ And the living nations wait,/ Each sequestered in its hate.”

Well, the offspring of those dogs have come of age and returned to their birthplace.