Asking the question: why Europe?

What can bind Europeans together when integration is no longer seen as a route to wealth?

What is the point of Europe? The threat of an explosive disintegration of the eurozone – and with it of the European Union – is receding. But the confused outcome of Italy’s parliamentary election has revived the debate about the purpose of European integration.

Europeans struggle to find a positive way of describing the exercise in which they have been engaged for the past six decades. One common interpretation is that integration makes people better off. The Common Market was defended at the outset in terms of the gains that would follow from increased trade. The case for a single currency was similar.

All this recalls arguments made in the 19th century about national integration and unification. In particular, the two countries whose problems drove much of the need for 20th-century European integration – Germany and Italy – were culturally and politically highly diverse. In both countries, early 19th-century romantic nationalism gave way to a sober obsession with economic forces after the failed revolutions of 1848.

On the eve of Otto von Bismarck’s last war of unification, the German journalist Ludwig von Rochau wrote that German unity was not a question of the heart’s desire; it was “a mundane business transaction, in which no one should lose, but everyone should grab as much as they could for themselves”.

Italians shared that belief after the disillusion of 1848. Patriotism could generate business opportunities. The Florentine statesman, Bettino Ricasoli, concluded that Tuscany was simply financially unviable on its own.

This sort of economic nationalism in Germany and Italy briefly produced coalitions of interests. But the credibility of the national project seemed to crumble when growth faltered, leading to movements that championed the confrontational and violent assertion of cultural identity.

Mario Monti is the 21st-century descendant of those 19th-century patriots who argued for the economic necessity of national unity. Now it is European unity that is needed for economic reasons. This vision of Europe is not idealistic; it is simply concerned with how Europeanisation can benefit Italians. And, like its 19th-century precursor, it is vulnerable to backlashes. When today’s Europeans peer into the future, they see only prolonged recession and austerity. Europe means nothing but sacrifice: northern Europeans paying for southern Europe’s woes through large transfers, or southern Europeans repaying onerous – and maybe impossible – levels of debt.

A variant of the economic argument for European unity is the claim that enhanced integration makes it easier to finance debt, because interest rates are lower. A reduction in borrowing costs was a powerful motive in the 1990s for southern European governments to join the monetary union. But the costs of moving into a non-defaulting environment are high.

Here, another historical parallel is helpful. Ancien régime France repeatedly imposed semi-default on its creditors. In the 1780s, a new consensus against such measures emerged. But the impossibility of raising revenue then triggered the French Revolution.

The alternative to thinking about European integration simply as a way of generating wealth and prosperity frequently analogises it to a marriage. In the late 1980s, for example, the European Commission’s then president, Jacques Delors, raising the prospect of a two-speed Europe, suggested that one or two countries might need a “different kind of marriage contract”.

The marriage analogy was used initially to signal that Europeans had a unique relationship with which no one – especially the United States – should interfere. But marriage can be a fraught institution. The British journalist Martin Wolf thinks of Europe as a marriage kept together only by the high cost of divorce. Others see it as a sham marriage.

Traditional marriage vows entail a commitment that binds the partners for richer and for poorer, in sickness and in health. But, enthralled by promises of material well-being and security, Europeans had exaggerated expectations.

The unhappy marriage analogy at least tells Europeans that they are not stuck together only for material reasons. But, until that lesson is really learned, Europe must brace itself for more setbacks, which means that it must still answer the fundamental question: Why stick it out together?

Harold James, professor of history and international affairs at Princeton University and professor of history at the European University Institute, Florence, is the author, most recently, of “Making the European Monetary Union”.