The European Union appears to be a unique and unprecedented political entity, but what exactly is the European Union? Is it a club of aging great powers ? A superpower that never quite manages to emerge? A declining empire? Or a nation in the making? And where exactly is it headed?
To answer these questions, we must first understand how nations emerge, how states are built, and where the great revolutions come from-and what they truly are. We must recognize that, far from being the unprecedented construction we often imagine, the European Union is merely the result, on a different scale, of the same dynamics that produced all the great European nation-states.
These same dynamics now suggest that the EU is preparing-after having constituted itself as an imperial state following the Maastricht Treaty-to collapse under the weight of the energy crisis, the fall of the euro, and the eruption, at its borders, of the most violent armed conflict since World War II.
Will this collapse mark the end of the European dream, or the opportunity for a revolutionary resurgence?
