The British historian A.J.P. Taylor wrote that German history was a long series of turning points at which it failed to turn. Likewise, it used to be said of Yasser Arafat and the Palestinians that they ‘never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity’, passing up the many chances for peace in the 1990s. The history of European political integration is a similar story of unseized moments. Understanding how and why these opportunities were missed, and exploring their relevance to the present discussions around the need for European unity in the face of the challenge posed by the second Trump administration, might prove to be productive.

Historically, the establishment of political unions were events rather than processes; they were the products of intense crises, frequently brought on by war. This was epitomised by both the Anglo-Scottish Union of 1707 and the American Union of 1789 – history’s most prominent, and enduring, examples of parliamentary political union. In both instances, a single executive and a parliament emerged out of the crucible of crisis, with responsibility for the common debt, common defence, and common borders – the three key functions of state sovereignty.

Postwar Europe has been rocked by its fair share of crises, yet none of them have served as a catalyst for the creation of a full-fledged political union in the Anglo-Scottish or American mould. Undeniably, incremental progress has over the years produced impressive achievements in the realm of economic integration. Europe has, however, fallen short of the kind of collectivisation of debt that would enable it to fiscally compete at the level of the United States. Its common currency, the Euro, remains vulnerable due to the lack of a joint political and fiscal union to undergird it. Likewise, efforts have been undertaken towards more effective control of Europe’s common borders, most recently with the decision to introduce a Common European Asylum System (CEAS). Yet a brief look at the human tragedy unfolding in the Mediterranean and the growing number of asylum seekers, especially in Germany, will suffice to demonstrate that Europe remains far from genuinely sovereign when it comes to maintaining the integrity of its borders.

Most glaring, however, is Europe’s conspicuous failure to build the capacity to independently defend itself against external aggressors. This fact has been on display once more since the beginning of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. Without prodigious US support, Europe is not in the position to check Russia’s expansionism. This inability to build a common defence capability, more than anything else, has been at the heart of Europe’s failure to achieve political union: a political union that is sovereign in the sense described above, stands and falls with the ability to defend the integrity of its own territory.

Why, then, has Europe never earnestly undertaken an effort to assert itself as a serious military power? One might highlight the national rivalries that constrain efforts to improve interoperability and harmonise defence production, or divergent strategic interests, say in Africa or the Middle East. Yet this misses the larger point. Postwar Europe has been able to afford the luxury of comparatively low military spending and endless bickering between national interests because its defence was taken care of. It was, and continues to be, outsourced to NATO – that is to say, to the United States. Comfortably tucked under Washington’s nuclear umbrella, the Europeans have happily neglected the creation of a common defence, which has in turn hamstrung any progress towards full political union.

Nonetheless, there have been several instances in NATO’s 74-year existence in which a crisis, often in combination with concerns over the reliability of America’s security guarantee, has triggered serious, albeit often frantic, attempts on the part of Europeans to move toward a defence union capable of independently assuring the continent’s security. Indeed, in the late 1940s, European leaders’ commitment to establish an independent defence capability, as part of a wider political union, once the continent had sufficiently recovered economically, had been a precondition for NATO’s creation in the first place. It was only on the basis of the understanding that NATO would in effect stand on two pillars, with the United States not carrying the burden of European security alone, that President Harry S. Truman was able to convince Congress, wary of seeing the United States committed so prodigiously abroad, to ratify the North Atlantic Treaty.

The best opportunity to create a full political union on the mainland was thus immediately after the Second World War. The devastated continent was in no position to resist new ideas. A united Europe seemed the only way of guarding against both German revanchism and Soviet aggression. As we know, however, NATO came into existence in 1949 without the structures in place for a European political union equipped to organise a common European defence. The Truman administration, and subsequently the administration of General Eisenhower, both under pressure from a Congress wary of unlimited commitments to Europe, were keen to shepherd the Europeans toward greater unity, particularly in defence, as originally intended.

Yet the rapid European postwar recovery, fuelled in large part by American support, produced, just as rapidly, European complacency. Traumatised by conflict and infused with strong pacifist sentiments, Europeans welcomed the opportunity to focus on furthering their economic prosperity and expanding their welfare states rather than expending resources on costly militaries.

The shock of the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, which was feared to be a prelude to a Soviet attack in Western Europe, brought the issue of European defence back into the spotlight with renewed urgency. Urged on by their American allies, European leaders drew up plans for a European Defence Community (EDC), which was explicitly designed to act as the nucleus of fully-fledged political union.

Yet in an exemplary case study of ‘death by committee’, foreshadowing the laborious bureaucracy of today’s European Union, what was intended to be a rapid, crisis-driven ‘big bang’ moment for Europe morphed into a protracted struggle between competing national interests. With the immediate military threat receding as the Korean War came to an end, the French, who had in fact initiated the EDC, turned on their own creation and voted down the plans in the Assemblée Nationale in August 1954. They did so despite intense pressure from Washington, where policymakers viewed the EDC as the ideal vehicle to finally achieve balance in the transatlantic relationship. The then Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, even went so far as to declare that an ‘agonising reappraisal’ of US policy towards Europe would be necessary if Europeans failed to follow through with the EDC, implicitly raising the spectre of an American withdrawal from Europe.

It was to no avail. The pressure of crisis ebbed away, the Europeans reverted to the complacency they had adopted after the war, and the Americans, it turned out, stayed after all.

Europe never recovered the momentum towards political union that it lost with the failure of the EDC. Crucially, Europeans drew the unfortunate lesson that they could afford to slack on fulfilling the goal of common defence because the United States would ultimately always come to the rescue. Despite occasional rhetoric to the contrary, Europeans were convinced that the United States had a strategic interest in maintaining European security and would therefore never withdraw. Consequently, despite recurrent concerns over the reliability of the US security guarantee and various geopolitical crises throughout the Cold War, NATO never matured beyond the imbalanced shape it took at its outset.

The longer this state of affairs existed, the more infantilised Europeans became with respect to defence as they remained safely tucked under the US security umbrella. This complacency grew greater as American presidents eventually gave up on encouraging European political unity in the manner that earlier presidents had, focusing instead on getting the Europeans to compensate the United States financially for safeguarding the continent against Soviet aggression.

Just how infantile the western European states had become is illustrated by a statement that Kai-Uwe von Hassel, West Germany’s defence minister in the 1960s, was purported to have made with respect to the notion of reviving a European defence union. One should refrain from such action, von Hassel insisted, ‘for greater European independence might induce the Americans to actually withdraw’. In other words: it was better to take the risk of standing completely exposed, if the Americans ever did decide to renege on their commitment to European security, than undertake efforts of self-empowerment and then risk having to stand on one’s own feet. Henry Kissinger suspected that it was this curious ‘psychological knot’ that Europe had tied itself into that ultimately doomed any prospect of serious steps being taken towards political union in Europe.

Against this background, it was clear that Europe would first and foremost dedicate itself to the task of economic integration through the European Economic Community (EEC), founded in 1957-58. The push for union had been left too late: had it been launched in 1945, with Western Europe on its knees and under Anglo-American military occupation, it might well have proved irresistible. By the time it got properly underway in the early 1950s, the continent was already on the road to recovery and the resurrection of the old nation states largely an established fact. The EEC empowered rather than replaced them. It was this that led Alan Milward to speak of the ‘European rescue of the nation state’.

Europe had to wait nearly 40 years for the next chance for union. The collapse of the Soviet Union, the unification of Germany, and the disintegration of Yugoslavia seemed to provide the impetus to complete what had been left unfinished in the 1950s. It was possible to envisage an intervention to save the Bosnians from genocide, which might have been served as a War of European Unification. The rhetoric was there: the Luxembourgeois Foreign Minister Jacques Poos proclaimed the ‘Hour of Europe’.

The reality was different. Europe failed miserably to stop the violence in Bosnia. Again, they could rely on the United States to bail them out. It did better politically over Kosovo, but its complete military dependence on Washington was once again exposed. Many lessons were supposedly learned from this, but no single union ‘event’ followed. Instead, an endless series of conferences in Amsterdam, Nice, and Lisbon set in motion a process without end, during which ‘Europe’ was deepened incrementally rather than unified through a single event.

Twenty years later, there was a fresh opportunity. Russia’s invasion of Crimea and the Donbas exposed the dire need for a full defence union. This message was rammed home again after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. At the same time, the US security guarantee seemed as uncertain as ever following the election of Donald Trump in 2016, who had declared NATO to be ‘obsolete’.

Once again, the rhetoric was there. The then German Chancellor Angela Merkel, following her first encounter with Trump, stepped into a Bavarian beer tent, and declared that ‘the times in which we could rely on others are over. We must begin to take our fate into our own hands’. Yet once again, despite considerable incremental progress, there was no Philadelphia-style moment. European history once again failed to ‘turn’. Instead of undertaking a massive push toward common defence, Europeans bet on the fact that Trump would prove too erratic to follow through on his radical plans regarding NATO and decided to simply ride out the storm. In the end, they got away with it. The US guarantee once again remained intact, and Trump was succeeded by Joe Biden – the epitome of the old pro-European foreign policy establishment. ‘America is back,’ Biden declared during his first visit to the Munich Security Conference as president in 2021, a statement undergirded by Washington’s massive effort to uphold the European security architecture in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Recklessly, Europe took Biden’s rhetoric and policy on Ukraine as cause to return to its comfortable repose under the US security umbrella, unperturbed by the fact that the re-election of Donald Trump remained a distinct possibility. Extraordinarily, even Trump’s not entirely unexpected triumph over Kamala Harris this past November failed to jolt the Europeans into action. In a remarkable display of autosuggestion, European leaders told themselves that Trump would once again prove to be all bark and no bite when it came to challenging the credibility of NATO, and that if push came to shove, they could simply pay him off by purchasing large quantities of American military kit. They remained, despite all evidence to the contrary, like Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s Sicilians: they didn’t want to be improved, for they were already perfect.

Only after the full force of the ‘America first’ sledgehammer, wielded by a radicalised and less restrained second Trump administration, came crashing onto their heads, have Europeans finally felt compelled to act. J.D. Vance’s confrontational speech at the Munich Security Conference, the public humiliation of Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, and the jarring fact that Europe’s security is being negotiated in far-away Saudi Arabia without European participation, has evidently disabused Europeans of their long-held illusions.

It was ultimately not the longstanding external pressure on Europe that produced the breakthrough. There is every reason to believe that Europe would have happily continued to slumber through further crises, no matter how grave, as it has done for decades. The qualitative difference of the present moment lies in the fact that the Damoclean sword of American withdrawal appears to have finally dropped. After nearly 80 decades of American engagement in Europe, the truly unthinkable has now become a very real prospect. There is now absolute clarity on the part of Europe’s leaders that the continent has for decades consistently punched seriously below its ‘weight’ geopolitically, and effectively remains an economic giant but a military dwarf. There is a recognition, too, that Europe’s failure, as one of the world’s three largest economies, to bring even a fraction of its economic heft to bear on the most pressing geopolitical challenges it faces, is seriously problematic in the age of Xi and Putin.

The tragedy may be that Europe has left it too late to act. We are entering what is arguably the most dangerous period of postwar history. The upcoming NATO summit, due to be held in the Netherlands in June, will be of historic importance. Yet regardless of what the alliance agrees at this meeting, its credibility is seriously damaged already. No one really believes that Trump would risk American casualties to defend Vilnius, least of all Putin. The strongman in the Kremlin will be tempted to make a move against Europe before the current steps being undertaken towards collective European defence yield concrete results. One can only hope that the present urgency in Europe to achieve an independent defence capability, unique in postwar history, is sustained. The stakes could not be higher.