Of course, the euphoria couldn’t last. The politicians proved in many cases to be corrupt. (In Poland, the dissidents were succeeded in power by a pair of risible former child movie stars, devout Catholics with chauvinist views about Polish greatness.) But crude democracy is better than no democracy, and we democrats are always being told to accept the fact that there is no utopia, only many ways, more or less bad, of running your life. I once stood in Warsaw holding in my hands the green-bound volumes of the acquis communautaire — the 30,000-odd statutes required to be met before a country could join the European Union, covering not just the right of the EU to impose standards on any number of pork and poultry products, but also the true reach of the various overlapping authorities that comprised the Union, superseding national parliaments. These laws passed within just over a decade, in ten countries once part of the Soviet bloc — in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, and Romania. A new Europe seemed to be forming.

Perhaps understandably, the identity of this new Europe has proven difficult to grasp. In North America, expectations vary from year to year, and, depending on fashion or ideology, commentators praise or revile Europe for its social democracy, its environmental bent. They display the same alternating attitudes toward the European treatment of foreigners, particularly Muslims. Liberal American writers don’t really think Europeans have tried hard enough to accept immigrants, contrasting European efforts with their own tradition of generosity to the poor and huddled, whereas neo-cons feverishly utter warnings about Europe as if every cathedral were about to be deconsecrated and, with the hasty addition of minarets, turned into a mosque, from which sharia law will be proclaimed.

The continent’s failure to develop a collective identity based on its shared democratic principles should perhaps come as no surprise. The early European institutions, built atop the wreckage and despair of World War II, were seen as a means of preventing the kinds of horrible wars that had destroyed the continent. But the means of rescue were primarily economic. Europeans, it was reasoned, would be less likely to fight if they were hooped together under an integrated economic system. And indeed, the best books about the EU ideal, like Tony Judt’s Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, recount a long march of sorts, from one resolution to another, but also from poverty, atrocity, and darkness to unabashed prosperity.

Open markets may generally coexist with open societies, but democracy has always seemed to remain in second place for the EU. Europeans have found it hard to translate their affluence and new-found security into a spirit of principled, collective internationalism. They may inhabit an international space, but they remain Dutch, French, or Brits, arguing for Dutch, French, or British solutions to human rights crises while the EU’s leadership concerns itself with such matters as blocking the import of tomatoes from the developing world.

It’s not merely individual culture or bureaucracy, however, that shapes our inability to speak and act with one voice. Our past is significant, too, in a way that outsiders find hard to comprehend. The last vestiges of the awful European twentieth century have been consigned to what the French historian Pierre Nora calls “lieux de mémoire,” but our memories have made us cautious. One not wholly desirable bequest of our violent past is the tangled, contradictory set of attitudes Europeans have developed, not just to defending ourselves from acts of terrorism, but toward the use of force in the world, even when the cause is something we view favourably.

Europeans have retreated to what one American historian calls “a super civilian state” — a haven from which we felt free, during the Bush years, to express a great deal of hostility toward Americans and American imperialism. I was in Germany on the eve of the Iraq War. Almost alone, the German foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, confronted Donald Rumsfeld, expressing his view that war would be a gross stupidity. The Germans I met didn’t think Fischer had gone far enough. They believed that Europe, given its past, should never again fight any war — something they probably still believe. Similar, if less extreme, sentiments litter the texts of European theorists and politicians. Robert Cooper, who advised Tony Blair during Blair’s brief flirtation with the euro and later became a Eurocrat, has depicted Europe as a “postmodern” state. Cooper believes, reasonably enough, that no state can afford to stand alone today. For him, politics, like life, consists of often-jostling, multiple allegiances. The EU is a means of expanding a nation’s choices and loyalties. But it also means choosing to rely on laws, declarations, and the like, as if the world could be remade along the lines of the European Union, if the EU simply set a good enough example.

The neo-con Robert Kagan was much criticized for his observation that Americans came from Mars and Europeans from Venus, but his analysis was correct. By advocating small armies, humanitarian intervention, and diplomatic overtures, Europeans on the one hand speak to a utopian longing for a world in which the notion of “soft power” can lead to the democratic communion it ostensibly wishes to see and to represent. On the other, they ensure that they — and their ideals — will continue to be defended by an America still prepared to countenance military adventures. The result is a Europe that refuses to take sides. I recall a 2008 interview with the exasperated president of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, whose country was about to be invaded by the Russians. “Europeans like to sit in the middle as if nothing was anything to do with them,” I remember him complaining. “It is the greatest decadence.”

In the absence of a robust, democratic internationalism, the EU has fallen back on its bureaucratic achievements. It would be cruel but not inaccurate to suggest that when you can’t accomplish something in Europe you just come up with another piece of paper. Kicking my heels at dreary summits while covering the hundredth attempt to reform Europe’s wasteful agricultural policies, I’ve had plenty of time to ponder the paper malaise that obscures the EU’s potential. An irony of European history is that the EEC was designed as a counterpoint to socialist ideology, yet many of today’s Eurocrats believe in what political scientists call “economism”: if you organize what Marxists referred to as the “infrastructure,” all the rest — political ideals, unity, prestige — will follow.

With a persistence that sometimes borders on folly, European politicians have applied these principles to the construction of their multi-nation democracy. Then they’ve acted surprised when Europeans, given the option, have ignored or rejected their proposals. This explains the sorry history of the European constitution. Mooted in 2004, the document was sold as a way of formalizing the status quo without claiming any greater importance or influence for Brussels. It offered some innovations, most notably a president, though one without any significant powers. However, the Dutch and the French turned it down, and it was abandoned. Its successor, the less than imaginatively renamed Reform Treaty, was substantially the same as its antecedent, with a few provisions eliminated or watered down. Some Eurocrats argued that the treaty shouldn’t have to be subjected to a popular vote. But Ireland’s constitution specifies that all significant changes to EU treaties must be voted on, and last year the country rejected the Reform agreement. (Rebuked for being ungrateful, given the subsidies they have received from Brussels, the Irish have agreed to hold another referendum, which will take place by November.)

The constitution’s failure seemed to mark the end of the old top-down experiment of Europeanism. In its place have come no ideas about Europe, only gridlock, and, here in Britain at least, the return of national sentiment. Promises notwithstanding, Tony Blair did nothing to reconcile Britain with its real role in the world — middle-sized European state — while the Tory government-in-waiting is mainly composed of Euroskeptics. Throughout Europe, skeptics and new nationalists are adroit when it comes to using the tools of democracy against Europe. They don’t want to destroy it, but they’re content to gain support by critiquing and exploiting the contradictions of European multiculturalism or pointing up the lack of democracy in EU proceedings. The continent’s divisions offer a happy field for such endeavours. A referendum regarding the admission of Turkey, a large, dynamic Muslim country with a messy but thriving democratic culture, has been bandied about for some time now. Ten years ago, Europeans told the Turks that their human rights record wasn’t good enough for them to qualify for admission. Now Europeans mutter inconsequentially (and misleadingly) about how they belong to a Christian civilization and the Turks do not. It might be better if they either resolved to admit the Turks or turned them down, but one can be certain they will do neither. So much uncertainty has radically altered the mood in the European café. Ebullient, prepared to countenance expansion ten years ago, Europeans now seem fearful, cowed by the future.