by Aurelien
September 24, 2025
from Aurelien2022 Website

 

After last week's discussion of small-scale, interest-based political cooperation at the national level, I thought it might be interesting to move to the international level, where there is in any case a lot of confusion about multilateral and transnational political activities and what they mean.

I'm going to concentrate especially on Europe today, and I will argue that we shall probably see a drifting of political influence and power away from institutions and back to nation-states.

I will try to explain this by reference to other arrangements and institutions of the past and present.

Some would regard this as dangerous and even frightening:

I would tend to regard it as necessary and anyway inevitable.

Last year, I wrote a substantial essay on how international institutions work (or don't), and I won't repeat all that here.

But the thinking behind that essay, though I didn't pursue it is detail, was based around the principle of what I call Institutional Integrity...

That pretentious-sounding phrase simply means that successful institutions, at any level, have several characteristics:

they should serve a purpose, and be structured to perform that purpose and meet the aspirations of those who established the organization and those who should theoretically benefit from its work.

If this sounds elementary, well it is, but like a lot of elementary things it gets overlooked in the rush.

Let's start with a few brief historical examples of how things have gone right and wrong, to help us understand where we are now.

It's usually a good rule that any kind of cooperation should flow naturally from mutual need and advantage:

indeed, this is how quite sophisticated types of informal international cooperation began in the distant past.

For example,

it turns out that there were sophisticated trade relations all around the Mediterranean thousands of years before Romulus murdered Remus.

 

And for that matter the descendants of Romulus themselves traded extensively with other parts of the world, including the East Coast of Africa, and even India.

 

This required establishing diplomatic contacts with courts and kingdoms from Africa to the Arabian Gulf to parts of India. (A useful reminder that Roman power and influence were not always spread by simple conquest and extermination.)

 

These trade networks among many others were established and then flourished quite simply because they served a useful purpose.

 

This was not "trade" in its moronic modern ideological sense, where nations exchange identical goods trying to beat each other down on price.

 

This was trade in the original sense, where I swap what I have and you want for what you have and I want.

By contrast, many modern structures and institutions concerned with trade (the WTO is the obvious example) clearly see the expansion of trade as an absolute and unchallengeable good in itself, whether or not anything practically useful is accomplished thereby.

Increasing trade between two countries is inevitably presented as an inherently good thing, whether or not the traded goods actually meet a defined need that in each case the other cannot meet domestically.

There, you have a simple example of an organization that has lost its way.

Moving on from trade, historically, individual nations and then empires grew by territorial expansion. Once a centre of power was established, its rulers would seek to bring adjacent areas under their control.

Doing so generated new resources which would make the original entity richer and more powerful, and in turn enabled more expansion.

You can see this effect not only in the growth of nations (France is a good example) but in the growth of empires, which were by far the dominant historical form of polity until very recently.

A time-lapse treatment of the expansion and decline of the Persian or the Roman or the Habsburg or the Ottoman Empires demonstrates this very clearly.

And of course Empires eventually bumped into each other, like the Ottomans and the Habsburgs, or simply encountered particularly strong opponents, as the Persians did with the Greeks, and with all sorts of political consequences.

Sometimes, as with the Romans and Persians, the method of rule was centralized management with imperial governors and military garrisons.

Sometimes, as with the Hapsburgs, the Empire was a much a product of marriage alliances as military conquest.

 

And in Africa, where population density was low, a stronger state would gather weaker tributary states around it, and sometimes raid them for slaves and other commodities.

But in all these cases, we can reasonably say that principle of institutional integrity was respected, and there was some relationship between the expansion of empires, the capacity to generate force, and the objectives of the rulers.

(There are always exceptions of course: Alexander the Great has been posthumously diagnosed with Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and it's striking that his Empire, which seemed to have no underlying rationale but his desire for conquest, fell apart after his death.)

Overseas Empires were a different matter of course, not least because establishing them required lots of money and resources, and significant logistic and transport capabilities.

Fortunately, perhaps, the Romans could not transport an army to India.

Naturally enough, the first countries to establish overseas possessions were maritime powers:

first Spain and Portugal, and then the Netherlands.

The objectives were manifold, and far too complex to go into here, but certainly involved trade, access to mineral wealth and in certain cases the spread of Catholicism.

It's interesting perhaps that the two Empires overthrown by the Spaniards, the Aztec and the Inca, were both tribute-based systems and themselves both in decline at the time...

If we look at a helpful Wikipedia map of the world in 1700, we see largely the traditional patterns of organic expansion.

The world mostly consists of traditional Empires (Safavid, Mughal, Qing, Ottoman, Russian and smaller Empires in Africa) although overseas Empires are making a tiny and timid appearance.

But in most cases, all we can see is a minimal European "presence," largely trade-related and largely restricted to the coast.

Only in the Americas are there any appreciable areas "claimed" by western powers, and even then only parts near the sea. The colonial situation had only developed marginally by 1800.

This made sense given the technologies and the political objectives of the time, and was exactly paralleled in the spread of Islam and the influence of the Gulf States down the East Coast of Africa, which was as much about political dominance and the spread of Islamic commercial law as it was about conquest.

Even by the middle of the nineteenth century, with the Ottoman Empire now in retreat and the newly-independent states of Latin America establishing their borders, the emphasis is still on trade and strategic placement.

The Cape Colony, originally established by the Dutch to support their trade with the East, was taken over by the British as a naval base during the Napoleonic War, and the Afrikaners moved North and East to escape the British and their Liberal political ideas.

Apart from that, the only outside presence in Africa was the Ottomans in the North, and some tiny European coastal enclaves elsewhere.

Not for nothing was the Africa of the second half of the nineteenth century regarded in Europe as just as mysterious as the Moon...

Meanwhile, for the best part of a century Australia was just a penal colony.

The French took the territory we now know as Algeria from the Ottomans in 1830, incidentally putting an end to piracy and slave raiding in Europe which had been a problem in the Mediterranean for centuries. But the logistics of that were not complicated.

The contrast between the situation in Africa in 1880 and that on the eve of the First World War is so extreme that at first sight it seems incomprehensible.

But there are reasons for it, even if some of them seem bizarre, and they led the main European powers progressively away from models of trading routes and strategic presence which had endured for thousands of years, into a full-blown Imperial mythology and competition for status which in the end none of them could afford.

It's another example of the truism that nothing succeeds in international politics like a really bad idea taken up by a major power.

Since this essay is about institutions, I'm not going into detail about the pressures that led to the massive expansion of Empires in the last decades of the nineteenth century. (You can read about the British here and the French here in their wider historical context.)

In both countries there was a "Colonial Party" and in both cases it contained different and conflicting elements:

idealistic, religious, nationalist, strategic, militarist, great power competition, hopes for economic gains and a newly literate and intensely patriotic middle class.

(No wonder popular historians have failed to impose an overarching narrative.)

In Britain, Imperialism represented a significant and controversial break with the Liberal tradition, which preferred trade to war, and which argued (rightly as it turned out) that if you were concerned about raw materials, then being on good terms with the producers was more useful than trying to occupy their country.

Indeed, until late in the nineteenth century,

"Empire" in British politics meant Australia, New Zealand and Canada and possibly the Cape Colony. (India had been British for so long it wasn't even really considered a colony.)

But on the other hand, the Liberals themselves were heavily influenced by the politically-powerful Evangelical movement, for whom colonization was a sacred duty, to abolish slavery, spread the Word of God and establish what we would now call Good Governance. (In France, the equivalent was universalist Republican ideology.)

There were strategic arguments as well, for controlling trade routes, and in France for the acquisition of territories and populations to help 40 million Frenchmen somehow face up to 70 million Prussians.

Some even hoped for economic benefits and, whilst individuals became rich, colonies like those founded by Cecil Rhodes rapidly went bankrupt and had to be rescued by the state.

For Prussia, it was unambiguously all about prestige and "a place in the Sun":

for Belgium it was unambiguously about looting.

The effect, in distinction to earlier empires, was to turn imperial possessions into a token of Great Power status, which of course only wealthy nations could aspire to.

But even Great Powers discovered that maintaining empires is expensive.

By 1918, Britain had an Empire it could no longer afford.

The Singapore Naval Base was built in the 1920s at the then-staggering cost of £60M (Billions, today) but the Navy could not afford to base any ships there permanently, and there were not enough troops or aircraft to defend it properly.

So whereas the Romans and the Ottomans, for example, were able to stage measured retreats and even stabilize the situation from time to time, western empires disappeared rapidly:

many countries in Africa have now been independent for almost as long as they were colonies.

In 1918 the British Empire seemed to bestride the world:

fifty years later it had vanished...

Indeed, It's a general rule of politics that institutions and arrangements developed as a result of different, and often conflicting pressures, work badly and often don't last very long.

The same applies to institutions whose rationale disappears, but which for one reason or another have to try to find a new one.

There is, for example, little logic in,

the deployment of US forces at different points around the world.

Their nature, and even the fact of their presence, owes more to sheer chance and inter-service rivalry than it does to any strategic logic.

Certainly, if anyone had suggested in 1945 that decades later tens of thousands of US troops would be stationed in South Korea, they would have been considered mad.

But then I've never been able to understand the point of keeping a single US Armored Cavalry Regiment in Germany, and an Armored Division in the United States, and I've yet to meet anyone who does.

Which brings us neatly to the present day, where international institutions, once rare, are now ubiquitous:

I seem to discover a new one at least once a month.

Some institutions have such an obviously useful function that it's no surprise to find that they were set up a long time ago:

the International Postal Union was founded back in 1874, for reasons which were obvious even at the time, and is still useful.

Life today would be considerably more difficult without the International Civil Aviation Organization.

The fact that you seldom hear about such organizations indicates, perhaps, that they serve a useful and uncontroversial purpose.

There are many counter-examples, but I'll briefly discuss just two.

One is the International Criminal Court set up by the 1998 Rome Statute.

From the beginning, the Court suffered from a basic structural and conceptual problem.

Its purpose was to try alleged criminals under very specific circumstances where national courts were unable or unwilling to do so. This was usually taken to be when a country had been destroyed by conflict or when the accused stood no chance of a fair trial at home.

The Court operates by exception:

its jurisdiction is complementary to that of national courts.

 

It also proceeds under the normal rules for criminal courts, i.e. guilt has to be demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt.

But these detailed and technical procedures take place in a heightened atmosphere of political and moral agitation, where human rights advocates and the media simply assume that anyone they don't like can be dragged before the Court, convicted and sent off to prison.

This likely internal conflict was pointed out at the time (I was there) but was trampled underfoot in the rush to create an organization that would for the first time bring peace and justice to the whole world.

I remember thinking (and saying) at the time that the Court would rapidly degenerate into a political football. I didn't think it would happen quite as quickly as it did.

The second example is the African Union.

Here, the structural problems resulted from two erroneous beliefs.

First, that it was possible to create an international organization from the top down, as you might start constructing a house by building the roof first.

 

Secondly that it is possible to create a strong organization out of weak states, themselves top-down fiat creations; neither of which seems immediately convincing.

It was further assumed that an enormous and extremely disparate continent with a quarter of the nations of the world, more than twice as many governments as Europe but only a fraction of the wealth, could create something comparable to the European Union, and do so very quickly.

In the event, the structure could not absorb the pressures and tensions caused by leaders like Gaddafi and Mugabe, and was dysfunctional for much of its early existence.

Moreover, 95% of its budget still comes from foreign donors.

It has an ambitious Peace and Security Architecture, which exists in the form of documents and committees, but not so much in operational terms.

The African Standby Force (ASF) was intended to be fully operational in 2010, and was so declared in 2015, but in fact is largely incapable of conducting operations, because of political disputes and problems with logistics and training.

Moreover, the kind of crises it was intended to address (essentially the western interpretation of what happened in Rwanda and elsewhere) have given way to the need to combat organizations such as the Islamic State, for which the ASF was never designed.

The common characteristic of these two organizations is that they have done some good, and it would be churlish to deny that, but that there was never any chance that they would be able to live up to,

the inflated expectations of their boosters, many of whom did not even bother to read the founding documents, but constructed fantasy organizations with attributes and capabilities they could never expect to have.

Those same people are now among the bitterest critics.

The African Union was, for those who conceived it,

an expression of African dignity and self-reliance, and an organization that would establish Africa's place in the world as a continent, not just a Lego kit from which donors could make pleasing patterns.

For their part, western nations put a lot of effort behind the Peace and Security Architecture, in the hope that, crudely, Africans could henceforth sort out their own problems without the need for western involvement, or the deployment of expensive and dysfunctional UN operations which the West largely wound up paying for.

But these two conceptions, not necessarily opposed, came to grief for practical reasons, and when a genuine crisis emerged in 2013 in Mali, the AU played virtually no role, the ASF was nowhere to be seen, and the actual fighting was done primarily by the French, just as the Algerians dominated attempts to find a political settlement.

Friends of Africa, among whom I have counted myself for decades, thought this was all a case of trying to do too much too soon. But when I asked some of those involved in writing early drafts of the Constitutive Act why a mutual defence clause was included when few African states could pretend to defend even their own territory, the answer was a regretful shrug:

for political reasons we have to put it in.

There are many other examples of organizations designed for conflicting purposes, or which do the opposite of what they are supposed to.

An example is the Gulf Cooperation Council, which is dominated by Saudi Arabia, whose population exceeds the rest of the GCC members combined, and whose influence within the organization is often resented.

(It's been suggested to me that the GCC is in fact nothing more than a means of the KSA keeping is neighbors in line, but this may be taking things a little too far.)

And the important thing here, which is the theme of the second half of this essay, is that organizations which don't function, or which don't meet the needs of their members, will start to decay over time, and, if they, survive, will lose their importance.

And when these organizations require political commitment from government, and when governments can no longer persuade their publics to support such organizations, then there are likely to be severe problems.

I would argue that the main institutions that structure collective political life in Europe, including but not limited to, NATO and the EU, are in this situation now.

They no longer do what they were supposed to do, or what their founders intended, and their existence now is something of a zombie one, shuffling forward without any real sense of where they are going.

I've discussed the early history of NATO several times, and I won't repeat all that here.

But one thing that doesn't get enough emphasis is the highly contingent nature of its development. The sense of fear and weakness that was prevalent in Europe in the late 1940s would probably have dissipated, given time.

Whilst the Washington Treaty didn't give the guarantee of military support in a crisis the Europeans had hoped for, it did at least signal to the Soviet Union that the US would take an interest in the event of a crisis, and enabled the Europeans to use the US as a political balancing factor.

It's reasonable to suppose that, as Europe recovered after the War, and in the absence of Soviet provocations and demands, which Stalin was probably too cautious to have made, the situation would have settled down.

What changed all that, of course, and led to what historians call the "militarization of NATO" was the Korean War, and the involvement of Chinese forces.

At the time, this was taken to be at the behest of Stalin (who did indeed keep a rigid grip on the activities of foreign Communist parties and governments) and it was assumed that a similar move of conquest westwards would not be long in coming.

Yet whilst Stalin does appear to have sponsored the war and also Chinese involvement, we now know that he was very concerned to avoid a direct clash with the United States, which also had forces on the peninsula.

At the time, these nuances were either unknown or not appreciated, and it seemed logical to suppose that the next blow would come in the West.

The result was a frantic attempt to deploy forces and set up a command structure for the war which was expected in a couple of years, at most.

The war didn't come - among Stalin's few virtues was that he was naturally cautious - and so for decades there was the bizarre sight of a wartime international command system in peacetime, with international HQs, areas of responsibility, regular training, standard procedures and many other things never seen before.

All that was missing was the war, and any convincing theory of what it might plausibly be about.

Paradoxically, unwarranted fear of the Soviet Union led to pressure for the remilitarization of Germany, which led to substantial changes within NATO (and opposition from France and other western countries) but also to opposition from from Poland and Czechoslovakia,

• which led ultimately to the formation of the Warsaw Treaty Organization in 1955

   

• which led to heightened fears among western states that the Soviet Union was making preparations for "immediate war" (sic...)

   

• which led to the cascade of misunderstandings and mistakes from which I sometimes think we were lucky to emerge in one piece

As the decades passed, there developed a curiously ritual element to NATO activities.

The organization spawned a massive bureaucracy in Brussels and Mons, as well as in subordinate organizations and HQs all around the NATO area.

 

It exercised and made detailed plans for fighting a defensive war (just as the WP made and exercised its own plans for fighting an offensive one) yet there never seemed to be a convincing reason for either side actually to have a war at all.

Both sides knew which forces would theoretically be engaged and how, if it ever occurred (the match between the 1^st (British) Corps and the Soviet 3^rd Shock Army was anticipated by both sides but fortunately never happened.)

Even the ideological edge that might have been expected started to wear off after the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. By the 1980s, NATO was led and staffed by a generation that had simply grown up with the Cold War as an accomplished fact.

It was largely internally focused, arguing about,

defence budgets, "burden sharing," Force Goals, infrastructure funding, endless communiqués, who would get which job, and so forth.

As things developed, nations began to see advantages in continuing with NATO that had nothing to do with its asserted primary function. Chief among these was constraining the United States.

Since the late 1940s, the European fear had been of an agreement between the US and the Soviet Union about Europe where the Europeans were not consulted. US personnel deployed in Europe, even in relatively small numbers, and the bureaucratic need for the US to consult its European partners did not entirely remove this risk, but it did limit it.

Another was that NATO was an acceptable umbrella for rearming Germany, under effective international control, and so reassuring Germany's neighbors, as well as a way back to international respectability for Germany itself. (In reality, the Bundeswehr in the Cold War was the most anti-militarist army in history, with the possible exception of the Canadians.)

Smaller nations saw NATO as a counterweight to potential German and French domination of Europe, and a chance to influence the US and their European partners more than would otherwise have been the case.

Larger nations (notably the UK) saw a structure within which they could put a lot of effort into discreetly trying to influence the US. Beyond that there were prestigious command positions, and international institutions to host.

And there were lots of other factors as well, which meant that at the end of the Cold War when the future of NATO was in question, there was a consensus for keeping it, but for reasons that largely could not be articulated, and which were often in opposition to each other.

Amongst the multi-faceted chaos of the end of the Cold War, an organization built up to fight an imminent apocalyptic war in the 1950s found itself essentially out of a job.

It survived partly for the unspoken reasons given above, partly out of sheer inertia, because nobody could even begin to imagine how to replace it.

And then people started to look at maps, and realized that a new and more powerful Germany was in NATO and Poland wasn't, so that in the event of a frontier dispute that might turn nasty, Portugal and Greece would have to support Germany, perhaps militarily.

Wait a minute...

This was only one of many reasons for the shambolic process of NATO enlargement (and at least as serious was the central European states' fears of being left stranded in a strategic vacuum between a unified Germany and Russia), but that whole process conformed to the general model of ad hoc, short-term decision-making where decisions are taken primarily because they happen to satisfy the conflicting requirements of different states, rather than for any intrinsic virtues.

To those of us who expressed concerns about the consequences, the reply was,

"we'll worry about that later."

Later, the question arises of,

whether an organization that was founded in panic, continued by inertia and has struggled to be relevant for thirty years is going to survive much longer. I personally doubt that it will, at least in its current form.

That's not to say it will disappear as the Warsaw Pact did, but rather that it will slowly fade into irrelevance and become just a political consultation mechanism once more, while the real action is between nations

Why?

Well I would suggest that there are two basic conditions for NATO to be useful, and each of them is in the process of disappearing.

The first is that it provides Europe with a counterweight to Soviet and later Russian power, in the form of the United States. This was not, as I have explained many times, primarily a military question, not was the US "protecting" Europe.

The idea was that Europe was clearly an area of great strategic importance to both countries, but not necessarily one that they were prepared to go to war over.

There was thus the risk of an isolationist US government coming to a tacit agreement with Moscow that Europe would live to regret.

Preventing this was the main, unspoken reason why European states supported NATO membership, and why US troops were based forward enough that they would be involved in any fighting, and the US would not be able to get out of its obligations.

This argument no longer applies.

-  First, it is clear that the fears and expectations of the US political class are now focused elsewhere.

 

Partly this is a generational thing:

until recently the cultural cringe in Washington towards Europe was still exploitable, and many top people in Washington had fond memories of a year at Oxford or the Sorbonne, time spent in European institutions, or just the food, the culture and the history.

The British, who additionally spoke the same language as the Americans but better, exploited this particularly well, as I know from personal experience.

 

But that's in the past.

 

Mr. Trump may be a caricatural case,

but more generally US policy is in the hands of post-cultural class which eats only hamburgers and knows no history.

This is likely to endure...

 

In any event, the practical ability of the US to influence events in Europe has now dwindled to almost nothing, and its military forces would not be an obstacle to Russia doing basically what it liked.
 

-  Second, NATO itself is no longer a serious military organization, nor can it become one again.

 

Money is the least of the problems:

European decision-makers are now discovering that the world is not a gigantic Amazon store from which you can order anything you like.

Only marginal improvements can be expected in European capabilities, and the US will never again be able to deploy more than a token military capability in Europe itself.

 

A military alliance without a serious military capability (such as the de facto alliance in the African Union) is only feasible when there is no competition.

 

But the military dominance that Russia already exercises in Europe makes NATO effectively pointless.

 

This is not to say that all is lost (and I'll tackle the question of what Europe might do next week) but rather that a military alliance without a serious military capability is at best an anomaly, and NATO is likely to slowly revert to nothing more than the political consultation mechanism it started as, possibly shedding members along the way.

I've also discussed the origins and problems of the EU several times before.

Here, I think the key point is that there are two Europes, and the confusion between them is at the heart of the disillusionment and alienation which is so widespread today among ordinary people.

- The first Europe is the physical Europe, the Europe of history and geography and identity and culture.

 

It was this Europe that the fathers of European unity were thinking off, as long ago as the 1930s, but most importantly in the decade that followed World War 2.

 

The War had shown what Europeans were capable of doing to each other, and to their continent.

 

The resulting feeling of sheer despair was probably as serious as the physical destruction, and that was impressive enough:

think of Gaza on a continental scale.

There was a sober realization that if the demons were allowed to escape again, there would be no Europe left.

If you take the trouble to read the speeches and memoirs of the time, it's immediately evident that the real objective of the fathers of Europe was the symbolic recreation of the Holy Roman Empire, which was to say a political space with rivalries, to be sure, but fundamentally united in terms of culture and historical assumptions.

 

In some ways, it was also an attempt to finally overcome the splits of the Reformation:

the Christian overtones of the speeches of people like Monnet and Schuman are unmistakable.

Beyond the surface idealism, there was also a brutal choice:

accept some measure of supranationality, or accept the serious risk of the destruction of Europe itself.

But at that stage, "Europe" was small and homogeneous, consisting only of six nations whose histories had been intertwined for centuries, and whose cultures were deeply interrelated.

 

Even the addition of the UK and Ireland did not fundamentally change things at first.

 

What was critical was to have France and Germany, whose competition for power had divided Europe in different forms for hundreds of years, inside the same tent.

 

Everything else was secondary...
 

This is the type of Europe, even expanded, that almost all Europeans would be happy with today:

the idea that chauvinism and bigotry are widespread is sheer nonsense.

National cultures are in any case not uniform:

the France of Strasbourg, the France of Nice and the France of Toulouse might just as well be in foreign countries, not least because boundaries have moved around frequently, and languages interpenetrate.

 

A Europe which took its immense cultural and historical legacy and celebrated it would be a Europe which almost everyone would be happy to live in.

 

-  But the Europe we have today is not a real place, with history and culture, but a normative idea.

It is an artificial creation, an attempt on the one hand to forcibly yoke together different countries whilst forbidding discussion of real historical differences, and on the other to encourage the growth of a deracinated European elite, served by a disposable and replaceable immigrant population whose presence also helpfully dilutes the sense of community and history which, in the eyes of Brussels, can only provoke conflict.

(The irony that it is precisely this mass immigration that has provoked conflict is almost too much to contemplate.)

 

In parallel, it is necessary to turn the many different cultures of Europe into a single grey soup dispensed by Brussels, and stamp firmly on any sense of engagement with, let alone pride in, the past.

 

Moreover,

rather like NATO, the EU found it had no idea when to stop...

I've several times mentioned Iain MacGilchrist's argument that the Left Brain has escaped control and now dominates our culture.

 

You can certainly see the original concept of a united Europe as a Right Brain idea:

revulsion at the continent's bloody history and the hope of building something better.

But Europe is now Left Brain dominated:

ever more members, ever "deeper" integration.

Classically, the Left Brain never knows how to stop.

 

It's hard to see how this can last, and the greatest contribution of Mrs. von der Leyen may well be to run the whole supranational grey-soup van into the wall.

The fact is that, shorn of the rhetoric, Europe's nations are starting to recognize that their interests are often very different, and in many cases opposed.

It's a fallacy that membership of the same organization encourages unity and agreement.

In fact, it does the opposite, because countries with different interests, or even countries that normally would take no interest at all, are obliged to battle over words and policies in a struggle to to find common ground which would otherwise not be necessary.

This is likely to apply to pretty much the whole of Europe, whether the countries are wearing a NATO hat or an EU one.

In brief, and there is much more to say,

institutions do not last forever...!

Even Empires hundreds of years old fade away.

Institutions disappear, with more or less fuss, when they can no longer perform, when they no longer correspond to a felt need, and when they have drifted too far from their original objectives and are just free-wheeling.

The result can only be a move to re-nationalization of many political and economic functions.

Brussels does not have many Divisions (though plenty of divisions) and in the end will not be able to stop countries from working collectively on issues that interest them.

The trick will be to do this without breaking everything...