You all know where these came from:

  • Art never expresses anything but itself
  • All bad art comes from returning to Life and Nature, and elevating them into ideals
  • Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life
  • Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art

Remember this vivid argument last year? Thus:

The slide asks some questions:

EU in 50,000,000 years’ time?   No

EU in 5,000,000 years’ time?     No

EU in 50,000 years’ time?         No

EU in 5000 years’ time?            No

EU in 500 years’ time?              No

EU in 50 years’ time?                Maybe

EU in five years’ time?               Probably

This is a striking idea. It reminds us that over time things just come and go.

I enjoy giving presentations featuring maps of Europe and national borders over the past 800 years, one century at a time. These maps show countries, peoples and powers waxing and waning. Now that the Polish, Holy Roman, Russian, Austrian and Turkish empires have disappeared, in some areas of Europe the map looks quite like what we had many centuries ago.

Why should not this pattern continue? In particular, is not the European Union as presently constituted Too Big to Fail – and thereby doomed to Fail in the not too distant future?

In other words, it is likely that within the lifetimes of the sassy young Poles who comprised much of the audience in Krakow last week the European Union will change into something completely different. Not necessarily worse, not necessarily better. Just different.

This change could come slowly. Or abruptly. The state of the EU’s finances because of ill-discipline within the Eurozone means that important parts of the EU financial sector across different countries are vulnerable to sudden crashes in global market confidence which, as we have seen, can come out of a clear blue sky.

All of which is simply to say that any talk of opening the Pandora’s Box of Treaty Change brings forward to the day when the current arrangements start to dissolve.

The political and operational problem in trying to bring about any organised change is that there is now huge weight of people, money and prestige invested in the current ungainly structures: European Parliament, European Commission and countless funding arrangements for all sorts of activities. So trying to take a proper radical look at what is happening now – and identifying something simpler but better – will be next to impossible.

This is dangerous, since it implies that only a really stupendous crisis will force national governments to confront reality and take the genuinely difficult decisions needed to change course.

In such a situation there is no reason to think that national governments will have too much time for an elusive Europe-wide common interest. Instead it will be sauve qui peut.

Art indeed.

Yet look at this amazing piece from the Guardian’s Martin Kettle today, showing how Life is fast catching up:

… just the other day, I heard Sir Stephen Wall say something so similar. Here’s what Wall said, at a seminar run by the Policy Network thinktank in London: "We have seen the high point of the European Union. With a bit of luck it will last our lifetime [Wall is 64]. But it’s on the way out. After all, very few institutions last forever."

Ferguson is a Eurosceptic. His dismissive view of the EU is not a surprise. But Wall’s view that the EU is on the way out marks the death of the old faith. For Wall was the most influential British pro-European diplomat of his time: our man in the negotiations of most of the EU treaties of the modern era; Tony Blair’s longtime European policy adviser; and the author of a book on the EU that begins with the words: "I am convinced that wholehearted participation in the EU is strongly in Britain’s national interest."

First the Berlin Wall. Now Stephen Wall. European collapses don’t come more dramatic.

Yet the remarkable thing about Wall’s pessimism is that it no longer seems so remarkable. As EU leaders gathered in Brussels on Thursday to grapple with the Greek crisis, the airwaves were awash with existential debates not just about Greece or the eurozone but about the very future of the EU itself.

Though most EU-watchers still talk of muddling through as the most likely policy response to Greek bankruptcy, it is a muddling without momentum, direction or real agreement, let alone enthusiasm.

NB the famous ‘muddling through’ idea. One of my very first posts here was all about what the Muddling Through Somehow (MTS) idea means in itself, as it were. MTS makes sense only if there are categories of events which do NOT amount to muddling through – non-MTS events:

The Muddle Through Somehow (MTS) metaphor conveyed a number of interesting assumptions:

 

"… general notions of pragmatism; a certain degree of homely confusion; perhaps an absence of precise planning and control (“muddle”) but at least a broad sense of direction (“through”); … an absence of drastic, shocking, violent or cataclysmic change”.

 

But, I asserted, MTS as a very concept made sense only if it did not cover everything. World War Two had not exactly been a MTS event. In each case there had to be agreed non-MTS events (for Yugoslavia eg civil war or Soviet military intervention to prop up communist rule) whose likelihood also had to be assessed hard-headedly.

 

I tried to weigh all this up, and concluded that there was a serious chance of drastic non-MTS internal tensions escalating across Yugoslavia in the years to come as the various republican leaderships diverted attention from the country’s grim economic problems and played the card of mass nationalism. Kosovo was a particularly likely flashpoint. “One has an eerie feeling of being perched on a sandcastle with the waters of economic logic slowly but surely eroding the base.”

 

These exchanges read rather well now from my point of view – after many tens of thousands of violent deaths, plus billions of international taxpayers’ dollars thrown not very successfully at the problem. Oh, and look: here comes Kosovo again.

 

Yet it took a while for all that to unfold. Yugoslavia did Muddle Through Somehow. Until it didn’t. Hence the core diplomatic policy conundrum: over what timescale is success measured?

Could we just be seeing an extraordinary opportunity for redefining the whole European project: summarily demolishing a lot of the institutional hulks now cluttering the landscape and creating instead a simpler and, yes, less ‘ambitious’ framework for peaceful cooperation built on much more solid and legitimate foundations?

And if so, does someone in Whitehall have a plan?