The aim of the state’s foreign policy may be to anchor it in a wider system of cooperation, making use of supranational institutions, equipped with powers to impose obligations on member states, taking over some of the rights resulting from sovereignty. In its extreme form, the doctrine of integrationism may even mean the primacy of collective interests (of the integration community) over particular (national) interests.

Integrationist plans usually mature in the face of an external threat (challenge), which requires joining forces and building a community, or as a need for a new beginning, when the old policy based on competition, conflicts, and conquest leads the region (continent) to a state of exhaustion.

The EU project implemented in Europe after the Second World War became the apotheosis of the intergrationist policy. At its source, it was associated with Schuman’s vision of preventing European war by way of strengthening economic ties and submitting economic activities (initially in the field of coal mining and steel production) to supranational management. 

The French offer of 1950 was enthusiastically received by Germany (then only its Western part), who sought a return to full-fledged status in European politics. Over time, the Schuman vision turned the fostering of integration ties into the praxeological doctrine of foreign policy. Especially the German. For years they had a maxim that what is good for Europe is good for Germany. 

European integration was founded on the German-French reconciliation, and the Franco-German motor was (and remains) its driving force. An expression of its wider acceptance is the doctrine proclaimed by some politicians from smaller Western European countries that what is good for France and Germany (reflected in the compromise they have worked out) must by definition be good for the Netherlands or Luxembourg.

The idea of uniting Europe is of course as old as Europe. The political usefulness of the concept of Europe manifested itself already at the court of Charlemagne. And it served for the expansion of his reign and for pushing Byzantium out of Italy and beyond. Controlling Europe, at least its western part, has always tempted the self-made hegemons, and the slogan of uniting Europe has always been a skillful excuse.

Jiří of Poděbrady, a prominent figure and a ruler in Bohemia in the 15th century, is considered one of the first precursors of a noble understanding of common Europe. Although already at the beginning of the 14th century, Pierre Dubois prepared the proposal for a federal Christian republic.

Jiří of Poděbrady, on the other hand, submitted a project to merge European countries (although initially his plan did not include England, Scandinavia, and the Iberian Peninsula) into a federal organism, with a common parliament and commitment to peaceful settlement of disputes. The main political idea of the plan was, however, to stop the Turkish march with the combined forces. And the term Europe did not appear at all in Jiří’s revelations. He wanted to unite Christian nations (and he himself was involved in conflicts with Catholic rulers, the Habsburgs in particular). So if he meant Europe at all, it was synonymous with Christianity. A similar motivation was driven by Prince de Sully, who in the 17th century proposed the creation of an arch-Christian republic of 15 states, united against Turkey.

The awareness of the Christian community has existed for centuries, and the substitute of the Christian political pact were papal congresses, the last of which took place a few years after the fall of Constantinople. The Thirty Years’ War was in its own way an intra-European war, a family quarrel, and the invitation to negotiate the Peace of Westphalia was addressed to the heads of “all” “European” countries (Russia and Turkey were obviously not included).

Richelieu himself tried to propose the idea of a European union at that time, before he, discouraged, devoted himself to practicing the policy of the balance of power. The idea of a peaceful Europe has returned on the Enlightenment wave. It was preached, inter alia, by Castel de Saint-Pierre (he meant the European Union as an instrument of collective security). Kant himself was later included among the spiritual fathers of a European federation. And in this group there was a place for both the utilitarian Bentham, and the conservative Burke, and the liberal (in writing, not necessarily in politics) Guizot, as well as the utopian socialist Saint Simon (with his project of creating a European parliamentary system). 

Romantic idealism and national elan inspired other integration visions. In 1849, Victor Hugo himself presented a project to build a “United States of Europe”. The slogan “Europe” was a form of intellectual opposition to a Europe ruled by the Holy Alliance. No wonder it provoked allergic reactions among the followers of Realpolitik. Bismarck himself in 1876 treated Europe as a politically fraudulent slogan: “Whoever speaks for Europe is wrong. It’s just a geographic term. ” He accused the proponents of Europe of asking for things in the name of Europe that they would be afraid to ask on their own behalf. He complained that they were coming up and ask Germany for concessions, sacrifices, compromises: “Do it for Europe!”. Bismarck saw this as a brazen form of moral blackmail.

Europe, as a false idol, had no chance of surviving in political consciousness. The era of imperialism held Europe hostage to the global expansion of its powers. Until in World War I, Europe became its massacred victim. The idea of uniting Europe was naturally revived as a hope for a better future. Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, who created the pan-European movement, grew into its main animator, and in 1923 in Vienna he published Paneuropa, a book-manifesto of the movement. He promoted Europe from Portugal to Poland as a political space between Russia, the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. Without Great Britain and in opposition to Russian imperialism. He developed a vision for the United States of Europe. And he institutionalized the pan-European movement in 1926.

Thanks to Aristide Briand, pan-European ideas penetrated into great politics. In September 1929, he presented a pan-European exposé at the League of Nations. He was even entrusted with the task of preparing an appropriate memorandum for governments. And he outlined his view of Europe as a political and customs union. However, without any attempts at limiting sovereignty of states. Briand’s ideas, however, did not captivate even his native France. Italy frowned all the more, and in Moscow it was treated with open hostility. But the Commission of Enquiry for European Union was set up, which, as was to be expected, was unable to generate any impetus.

Coudenhove-Kalergi fled from the Nazis to the USA, where he founded the European Council. He returned after the war and created the European Parliamentary Union.

Because the idea of uniting Europe had to be revisited under the catharsis after the Second World War. And it blossomed. The Hague Congress of May 1948 set the goal of establishing a European assembly based on democratic values and the rule of law. The European Movement was launched with Churchill, Blum, de Gasperi, Spaak as honorary co-presidents. The first president was Duncan Sandys, privately the son-in-law of Churchill. And the first secretary general – Józef Retinger – “Polish father of Europe”. Thanks to Retinger, years later Poland was able to recall its undeniably significant contribution to the consolidation of the European movement. Because intellectually, the Polish voice in favour of integrating Europe has been resounding for centuries.

We rightly look for pro-European themes in the writings of Paweł Włodkowic, Stanisław of Skarbimierz or Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski. And Maciej Miechownia is given credit for the first political use of the adjective “European” (“Description of Asian and European Sarmatians” pubslished in 1517). Maciej Chabielski, as early as 1615, called on Europeans to close ranks as part of their common existence to fight the Turks. Stanisław Leszczyński presented a memorial with the idea of European federalism. Józef Kajetan Skrzetuski in 1775 made a call to create a “European Republic”, also as a formula for saving Polish independence. In 1831, Bogumił Jastrzębski wrote the articles of the Constitution of Europe. And the great project of uniting Europe was presented by Teodor Szymanowski. Both Kazimierz Kelles-Kreuz and Bolesław Limanowski wrote about uniting Europe. For many Poles, progressiveness and freedom were associated with European unity. And this is what is happening to this day, when we are comfortably at home in the European Union.

The Hague Congress in 1948 also gave rise to the Council of Europe. For its birth, it is impossible not to emphasize the political inspiration that flowed from the lips of Winston Churchill. It was he who in 1946, in the famous Zurich speech, used the slogan of the United States of Europe. The first step in this direction was to be the establishment of the Council of Europe as a regional organization complementing the UN. Great Britain not only cheered on, but even pushed Europe to integrate, but did not see a place for itself in this process. But even after decades of British divisive interventionism in Europe, generating balancing influences, counteracting the domination of any of the European powers on the continent, it was an unquestionable turnaround in British politics.

Integration was understood as the only reasonable instrument to prevent a revival of old feuds and conflicts in Western Europe. An additional encouraging factor was the conviction that only a united Europe (under the protection and care of the USA) could face the Soviet expansion.

For politicians, Europe has never been an end in itself. It has been an instrument for solving specific political challenges. Also the very national ones. And since this resulted in a great political metanoia closing the painful chapter of rivalry, conflicts, and feuds, it is the result of a unique strategic convergence of these interests.

Luuk van Middelaar described that the development of European integration is a synergy of various motivations.

France looked to Europe as a way of its own reincarnation as a superpower. It built Europe à la française. That is why it wanted to endow Europe with its own identity features. Hence, in Brussels Europe, it successfully promoted statism, bureaucratic solidity, political perseverance, but also the desire to give perspective depth to thinking about Europe, practicing rationalist diplomacy.

For the Germans, Europe was a form of historical, moral and political redemption, a vehicle to legitimize its own political role, to alleviate its partners’ fears of German domination.

In British thinking, Europe was a way of securing a seat at the table where decisions about the future of Europe were made and where Britain could prevent events from unfolding contrary to Britain’s interests. It was no longer able to return to the traditional role of balancing the European balance of power. It only wanted to control the processes in a general manner, and when it could only be done from within the project, Great Britain joined it in the mid-1970s, but it was always there knowing that spiritually the project of ever-deepening integration was rather out of its way. After all, Great Britain always felt different. It has never treated Europe as a political project in the strict sense. So it was so easy for its native populists to lead Britain out of the integration project.

For the smaller countries of Western Europe, it was a tool for solving large and even geopolitical European dilemmas, taking into account their interests, a formula for avoiding the answer to choosing a patron in disputes between the dominant actors (France, Germany, Great Britain).

And for Eastern Europeans, whenever they could sovereignly decide their fate, Europe served as an instrument to break free from Russia’s geopolitical grip and legitimize belonging to Western civilization.
France has always aspired to be the main actor in the European process, the strategic brain of the project. And so it is to this day, whatever the real importance of Germany and the role of Berlin in pushing forward the integration car. For France, the most important challenge was initially to prevent a resurgence of the German threat. After the war, Germany was divided and occupied, but it was able to quickly rebuild its industrial potential.

The French vision of control over Germany presented by de Gaulle in December 1945 in Baden Baden was truly a police-type supervision. It assumed a permanent French presence in a strip of territory along the Rhine, including Cologne, and permanent control of industry in the Ruhr. De Gaulle’s ideas diverged overwhelmingly with the American and British approaches, which was demonstrated with full force at the London Conference in 1948, when the West (in the format of the USA, Great Britain, France and the three Benelux states) discussed the future of Germany. 

For the United States (and Great Britain), the expansion of the USSR was a much more serious challenge than the possibility of a revival of German revanchism. And the rapid recovery of the German economy became indispensable to the strategy of containment of the Soviets. In June 1948, Paris accepted the prospect of a West German state in exchange for international control of the Ruhr. France, however, remained alone in insisting on deindustrialization and demilitarization of Germany. The Ruhr International Administration, in which the French voice would be an isolated voice, could not please Paris. 

This is how the space for Schuman’s vision emerged (incidentally, it was definitely inspired by the proposal of a talented official – Jean Monnet). He placed the project of creating a supra-national system of regulation of coal mining and steel production in the broad framework of European unification. But at the same time, Schuman’s plan was a kind of journey into the unknown, because fears about its failure were strong.

At the same time, Western defense communities were being built under the auspices of the Americans. France, UK and the Benelux states, signed in March 1948 the Brussels Pact (a few weeks after the communist coup in Czechoslovakia), even if it could initially be motivated by the potential threat of a revival of German militarism, it quickly had to be included in the context of the Soviet threat as an absolute priority, and this required an organic ingremination of Europe to the US-built military containment system against the Soviets. And already in April 1949 it led to the creation of NATO. The Brussels Pact, however, remained a helpful political forum for discussing Europe. The ideas from the memorandum of the International Committee of Movements for European Unity, prepared in August 1948, landed on the table of the Standing Committee of the Brussels Pact. France and Belgium became their promoters. The core of the proposal was the establishment of a European assembly, composed of persons appointed by national parliaments, and which would have an advisory power. The British had a different vision. There, the central place was occupied by a ministerial committee, formed by government representatives in various configurations. In October 1948, the Pact Advisory Council set up the Brussels Committee for the Study of European Unity, chaired by Edouard Herriot. In January 1949, compromise solutions were developed, from which the Council of Europe institutionally emerged. The Brussels Pact Five invited Italy, Ireland, Denmark, Norway and Sweden to the Council’s founding conference held in London in May 1949. In 1954, the Brussels Pact itself turned into the Western European Union, which practiced a fairly non-consequential activity until it was absorbed by the European Union in 2010, after the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty.

The Council of Europe embodied an alternative path of European integration. Based on a shared cultural identity and human rights. All military aspects were excluded from its competence. It has an excellent record in the field of human rights. It was under its banner that the European Court was established, which gave all European citizens the opportunity to sue their own governments for failure to respect rights. But politically, the Council weakened more and more. It has crawled to the complete margin of European politics.

The Korean War aroused fear of transferring the global inter-bloc conflict to the European ground. France feared that the inevitable reconstruction of Germany’s armed forces would undermine the plan of European control over coal and steel. These were the motives behind the Pleven plan, announced in October 1950, for the creation of a European army. UK took a wait-and-see position, Benelux had concerns, and Germany supported the plan (although it did not like the role assigned to Germany, perceived as handicapped: German forces were to be organized only within small combat units up to the battalion level). In May 1952, the signing of the European Defense Community took place after all. But the French themselves killed the French plan. The Gaullists were able to inflame feelings of sovereignty to such an extent that the Pleven plan, under public pressure, was defeated in the French parliament. 

And France abdicated in the following years from the role of the leader of European integration. In the mid-1950s, this role was taken over by small states, with the apparent primacy of the Netherlands. It was just from the Hague that Beyen’s plan to create a common market emerged. Together with Belgium and Luxembourg, the Netherlands submitted a package plan, complemented by Monnet’s plan to create a nuclear cartel based on the pattern of the coal and steel community. After painstaking negotiations, the Treaties of Rome were signed in March 1957, which established the European Economic Community. The core of the project was the creation of a common market within 12 years. And thanks to the unprecedented economic growth, solid support of the governments and enthusiastic support for the idea of the common market by entrepreneurs, the goal was achieved. And on time.

Not without painful concessions. The most important one was to maintain the right of veto, which, according to the treaty, was to disappear, giving way to the principle of majority. The French boycott of EEC meetings in 1965-66 led to the so-called Luxembourg compromise, which kept the veto law alive, and to this day.

The procedural crisis, of course, resulted from de Gaulle’s obsession about sovereignty. It is because of him that the EEC fell out of all big political considerations at that time. It took up “petty politics”. Only in the margins of technical meetings did the ministers use it to discuss broader topics. The then vision of a common Europe within the EEC had to be reduced to the mundane goals of economic supervision, direct management of agricultural and fisheries policy, as well as ensuring the efficient operation of the trade regime.

De Gaulle took up building an independent and independent Europe outside the EEC, practicing the vision of a superpower and assertive France. This was the French conclusion to the humiliation in the Suez crisis. The British chose to subjugate themselves to the United States, and France to manifest a para-independent (from the United States) security status (having its own force de frappe was a natural consequence of this choice). And de Gaulle wanted to build the political community of Europe outside the EEC as the so-called Europe of Nations. This was also the meaning of Fouchet’s 1961 plan for the Union of the European Nations (even in its revised 1962 version). But the EEC, relieved of ambitious expectations (and political controversies), could focus on consistently building its “success story” and maybe this only worked out for its health.

De Gaulle’s departure from politics unblocked productive integrative thinking within the EEC. At the Hague Summit in 1969, the Great Britain was finally admitted to accession negotiations. Back in 1948, Great Britain openly questioned the sense of participation in the coal and steel community, and left the negotiations on the common market, not believing in their success. Later, seeing the growing potential of the community, it applied twice without success – blocked due to de Gaulle’s prejudice. Although from today’s Brexit perspective, de Gaulle was surely right. Great Britain, already inside the Community, used the brake pedal rather than the gas pedal in discussions about its future. The Hague Summit of 1969 enriched thinking about the community with the area of foreign policy, the project of a monetary and economic union. And in 1970 Pompidou declared his support for the long-term creation of a European Union, still a foggy vision then.

Thanks to France, European Political Cooperation began to function in 1970. The oil crisis of the seventies from the economic point of view, and the détente in Europe from the political point of view, made Europeans realize the need to shape a European vision for the continent that would go beyond the current paradigms. Integration was considered a way of European emancipation, including political one. Europe wanted to secure itself a place at the table of strategic decisions. It became painful to her, especially to France, that during Kennedy’s time, East-West dialogue was reduced to a dialogue between two superpowers. Giscard d’Estaigne wanted to take European cooperation to a new political level, already with the participation of the UK. The institutionalization of European summits (starting in 1974), which took the form of the European Council, made European integration an open and political project. A project of even a civilizational dimension, as evidenced by the Declaration of the European Identity adopted in 1973.

France once again took over as the conductor of the European project. Mitterrand was always convinced of the need to pusue ambitious goals. Introduced in 1984, the federalist project of Altiero Spinnelli was politically co-sponsored by Mitterrand. The French president threw up the slogan of the European Union, already written in capital letters, because it was to be of institutional nature. However, at the Milan Summit in 1985, the joint German-French concept of unionization was stopped by Thatcher. Italian Prime Minister Bettino Craxi, despite the negative opinion of the British, pushed through, however, the convening of an intergovernmental conference for the new treaty.

And inside the EU, Jacques Delors took the initiative as chairman of the committee. In 1985, he moved the EEC towards creating a single market. The Treaty of 1986 (Single European Act with the mentioning of the “Union”, admittedly only in the preamble, but mentioned for the first time in a common document) sanctioned the “politicization” of the European project. 

The fall of communism and the Eastern Bloc was an epochal challenge for the Union. Firstly, soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the problem of Germany’s economic hegemony in Europe emerged in the perspective of its reunification. This time, Paris led a behind-the-scenes game together with the UK to force Germany to agree to introduce a monetary union in exchange for consent to the absorption by the EU of the former East Germany. Compromise was reached at the Paris summit in December 1989. 

The geopolitical breakthrough encouraged bold initiatives. Delors himself stepped forward by proposing in January 1990 a project to transform the community into a real federation by the end of the century. It was the last bold initiative on the part of a Commission official. In April 1990, in a joint letter, the President of France and the Chancellor of Germany threw up the slogan of building a real Union out of the Community. In December 1990, the IGC began to work on both monetary and political union. In December 1991, at the Maastricht summit, the Treaty establishing the European Union, signed in February 1992, was agreed. It was placed on three pillars: community (economic), law and internal affairs, and foreign policy.  

Europe’s integration faced a new challenge. It was to be used as an instrument to stabilize the whole of Europe. The wars after the collapse of Yugoslavia and the prospect of a resurgence of Russian imperialism did not leave the EU much room for maneuver: it had to expand. In 1993, a strategic decision was made to expand to the East. The Union, which so far was a union of generally wealthy countries, and certainly relatively wealthy countries (even after Portugal, Greece or Ireland were absorbed), was to open up to impoverished countries, and worse, countries for decades cut off from the Western stream of political and economic culture. The Treaty of Amsterdam of 1997 was supposed to prepare the Union for the enlargement, but the functioning mechanisms had to be made more precise in the Treaty of Nice in 2001 (including voting rules in the EU Council; let’s mention the famous exclamation of Poles at that time: “root or death” ). And in 2004, the Big Bang expansion could finally be done.

The introduction of a common currency, the opening of borders, and the territorial expansion of the Union encouraged the forging of new integrationist ideas. Discussions about the so-called finalite inevitably led to a dichotomous polarization between federalists and confederationists. An attempt to overcome old disputes was the “constitutionalization” of Europe, inspired by the ideas of Juergen Habermas and promoted by Berlin. The 2004 constitutional treaty, however, shattered on the reef of discontent with the social consequences of globalization. Rejected by the French and the Dutch, it buried the idea of constitutionalization for years, if not forever.

The intervention in Iraq caused a serious political rupture within the Union in 2003. Its members realized that it was necessary to introduce mechanisms within the Union that would guarantee greater coherence in the field of foreign and defense policy. Some commentators have even said that, in this sense, Bin Laden has done more for Europe than Jacques Delors.

The Treaty of Lisbon of 2007 gave the Union international legal personality. It sealed the status that made the Union more than a classic intergovernmental organization.

The neighborhood policy pursued since 2004 was an area of shaping the stabilizing influence of the European Union on the international environment.

The signatures to the Treaty of Lisbon had barely dried up, and existential tests fell on the Union. The Union has entered a decade of crises – the financial crisis in Greece (2008), Russia’s aggressive policy and its intervention in Ukraine (2014), the migration crisis (2015), Brexit (2016), COVID (2020), Russia’s invasion in Ukraine (2022). The tensions caused a wave of populism and anti-EU sentiment. The EU was threatened with the loss of public support. Integration plans, also because of the real and imagined consequences of Brexit, had to be hung on a peg. Donald Trump described the Union as the American enemy (“foe”) in the field of trade.

There is no doubt that the Union has fierce enemies. The disintegration of the Union is a strategic goal of Putin’s Russia. A strong and efficient Union is the most dangerous obstacle to Russia’s pursuit of its policy The so-called concert of powers, in which Russia would decide about the future of the entire continent on together with Paris, Berlin and London. Understandably Russia in 2021 decided to blackmail Brussels with the total freeze of relations with EU and staged the humiliation of Borell during his visit to Moscow. Nor should one be surprised by Russia’s impetuous reaction to the Union’s association agreements with the Eastern Partnership countries in 2013. The Union is often disparaged in Moscow as a weak entity, commanded by the USA, consumed by the disease of liberalism and decadence, but it is seen there as the most serious threat to the influence of Russia on the so-called post-Soviet area.

For decades, entire European integration in Moscow has been underestimated, misunderstood and disregarded. In the declining years of the USSR, Ambassador Lev Mendelevich, director of the policy planning department at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, visited Warsaw for consultations. Perestroika and glasnost were at their best. They forced many to reflect on mistakes in foreign policy. Mendelevich, a man with an extraordinary mind, was already getting ready for his retirement, so his reflections on his own diplomatic past sounded honest and credible. And he considered underestimating the effects of European integration as his most serious cognitive and political mistake. In 1957 he was entrusted with the task of drafting a TASS statement commenting the signature of the Treaties of Rome. Years later, he stated that he wrote and expressed many theses that, under Gorbachev, he would never have ventured to repeat, but that TASS statement was the one he felt most ashamed of. For, blinded by ideological orthodoxy, he did not see that Western Europe could not only overcome conflicts and disputes, but would be able to build a geopolitical (not only economic) community in the future. And the TASS agency prophesied to Europeans the inevitable collapse of the project. Mendelevich believed in Europe under Gorbachev, years before the euro, Schengen, enlargement and the common foreign and defense policy.

Faced with these challenges, the federalists continued to argue that the only sane answer to any crisis is “more Europe.” In 2013, they presented a comprehensive and unequivocally federalist project of the so-called Bozar Treaty. The European Commission was looking for (pragmatic) ways to develop the project. Its ideas did not arouse, however, much interest among the Member States. Even Juncker’s concept of combining the functions of the head of the commission and the council (“one captain vision”) presented in 2017.

Emmanuel Macron, elected President of France in 2017 to the accompaniment of the European anthem and the flap of European flags, threw himself into the vortex of creating initiatives to enliven the debate about the future of Europe. In September 2017, during a lecture at the Sorbonne, he submitted, inter alia, a proposal to create a budget for the euro area, which already materialized in 2019. In March 2019, in a letter to Europeans, Macron described the entire catalog of ideas, including the idea of a democracy protection agency, an asylum office, a joint border guard force, the conclusion of a defense treaty, the constitution of an internal security council, the establishment of a climate bank, the introduction of a common social protection. And he persuaded partners to start a formal debate as part of the Conference on the Future of Europe launched on May 9, 2021. The Conference produced after a year a rich collection of recommendations and proposals. Will the political situation in the EU members allow for a constructive follow up to the results of the Conference?

The future of Europe, however, was rarely built in intellectual and political ivory towers. Europe’s sometimes mundane needs and weaves of circumstances fueled Europe. But a thought will not hurt. Otherwise, the Union will be continuing its role as the Mädchen für alles when something needs to be repaired and the scapegoat on duty when something goes wrong. The best example is the Strategic Compass adopted by the Union in 2022. On the one hand, it contains the right and necessary initiatives for cooperation in the field of defense, and aspires to the role of a qualitative step forward, and on the other hand, it dispassionately states that if there is a real threat of war confronting a Member State, the action of other members action will be based on Art. 51 of the UN Charter, and secondly, on the principles of cooperation and solidarity described in the European treaties. Is this why we are supposed to integrate foreign and defense policy, so that when it comes down to the real test we should remain in uncertainty? Sure, there is resistance in most European countries to turning the Union into a defense alliance today, but the integration process must have some logic.

From the urgent need to deal with the effects of COVID, the so-called the Macron-Merkel plan and the Reconstruction Fund at its core emerged. It includes the so-called debt communitarisation which was treated almost universally as the so-called Hamiltonian moment, i.e. crossing the critical frontier towards the federalisation of Europe.

Of course, the future of the Union is not a foregone conclusion. As long as they want an “ever closer Union”, the French and Germans, the direction towards greater integration is a foregone conclusion, be it for some of the elites in countries such as Poland, whether they like it or not. The vision of returning to the concept of “Europe of Nations”, with the help of which the rulers in Poland since 2015 have dazed Polish society, makes Europe embarrassed by its anachronism. It proves that its proponents cannot understand the essence of the integration process. Among them there are those who base their pro-Europeanness on the ATM vision of the European Union, and who want to reduce Poland’s participation in the Union to taking every penny from Brussels. And when the penny stream starts to dry up, they will be able to get Poland out of the EU without the slightest confusion. And from the point of view of Putin, they were no longer even useful idiots, but his undisputed agents of influence. No one, like PiS (because with all due respect to Orban, the importance of Hungary in the EU is rather marginal) has contributed more to the implementation of Putin’s vision of Europe.

With each day of the PiS rule, Poland’s position in the EU deteriorated. We have dropped out of the bodies that could have influenced the decisions taken in the European Union. In a book published in 2021, one of the former political directors of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs presented an idealized picture of the functioning of the so-called group of six, i.e. France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Spain and Poland. The truth was that the format of the big three, i.e. France, Germany and Great Britain, was decisive, at least in matters of common foreign and security policy. Consultations in this configuration took place on many levels and in relation to many issues, but always in full discretion. I myself decided to use the term “directorate” referring to this format in public. Its functioning on the forum of the Council of Europe led me to a passionate state of mind. Every Monday before the usual session of the ambassadors of the EU countries (the so-called HOMs), the three ambassadors of the “directorate” gathered for a working lunch, and tried later to push through the arrangements agreed there as the position of the entire Union. Often, however, especially in matters of policy towards Russia and Eastern Europe – unsuccessfully, because Poland, the Czech Republic or Romania were able to frustrate the planned game plan. The problem was not that the ambassadors of Germany, France and Great Britain met and talked. The problem was that they were so preoccupied with each other that they didn’t have time to talk to other partners. One of British diplomats confided in me when we were joining the Union, and he made me realize what the political kitchen of making decisions in the field of foreign policy looked like, that the British agreed to this directorate, but stipulated that it should have an open formula, and Poland should be invited when it was necessary in matters of Eastern policy. 

I raised the issue of the “directorate” provocatively at the meeting of Polish ambassadors in 2008. Nobody took it up in the discussion, and I was even rebuked by one of the top managers of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at the time. But the matter was discreetly reported to President Lech Kaczyński, and he discussed the problem of “narrow bodies” within the EU and the Polish attitude towards them quite extensively at his meeting with ambassadors. 

The Weimar Triangle allowed us to at least have an insight into some aspects of the political kitchen of the EU, and good relations with Germany fostered positions favorable to us. After 2015, “Weimar” plunged into a deep hibernation, and the French and Germans invite now Italians, and sometimes also Spain, to talk about the future of Europe. The PiS rule effectively pushed us out of “narrow circles”. Because even the so-called “Group of Five” is a slender echo of the voice of the former “Six”.

The exit of Great Britain means a significant shift in the paradigm of integration. It is no longer a pan-European project. It was like that even without Switzerland or Norway. It is not without Britain anymore.
In today’s thinking about the future of Europe, the resonance of a united Europe as a geopolitical project is more and more frequent. Integration is to strengthen Europe’s chances of competing with China and Russia, and make it globally independent from the United States. The global role of the European Union means to inevitably federalize it. There are, of course, significant forces that count on its internal decay, a widespread anomy caused by anti-Brussels sentiments that will drive European societies to reject integration. After all, the return to the Europe of Nations is the greatest phantasmagoria of the Polish and European populist right. An integration project cannot be “rolled up” in a controllable manner. It can only be politically shattered to a state of total failure and replaced with a ring of free battle of national selfishness. 

The integration project has always been seen as more than a political project. Europe has always had many dimensions. There is a philosophical Europe (rationalist, universalistic, transformational). There is a cultural Europe (tolerant, liberal, empathetic). After all, the integration project was always about values.
Will the geopolitical telos prevail over the civilization and axiological telos? I hope not. Not only because the coherence of the entire project depends on the factor of values. Because the European Union has a mission also in the world. Today, the common foreign policy is built around praxeological doctrines such as “effective multilateralism” or the “rules-based world order”. It should be about something more: strengthening the elements of shared global governance, global justice, civic participation in deciding on world politics, and attempting to replicate on a global scale successful European integration projects. It is about proclaiming truths that the old-age powers, born of the nation-state model (USA, China, India, Russia) are not genetically programmed to preach. Macte animo, Europe!

And for those interested in deepening the discussion a bonus to watch: