There was something for everyone in the European elections.

The liberals and Greens did well, with voters backing their pan-European visions for the environment, worker health and safety regulation, and human rights.

So too did conservative groups hostile to the European project, ranging from Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France to Matteo Salvini’s League in Italy and Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party in the UK.

And if the establishment that had gathered around the social and Christian-democrat parties lost ground, at least they were left standing where they were, in the centre. There were fears they’d be wiped from the political map.

And yet the election shows that the irreconcilable forces of the winners and losers from the European project are both gathering strength.

The European Union was intended as an economic solution to a political problem. If the barriers to commerce between the powers of Europe could be lowered, they would acquire a vested interest in the stability and prosperity of each other.

The foundation declaration for a European union by French statesman Robert Schuman in 1950 held that:

The pooling of coal and steel production should immediately provide for the setting up of common foundations for economic development as a first step in the federation of Europe, and will change the destinies of those regions which have long been devoted to the manufacture of munitions of war, of which they have been the most constant victims.

The removal of barriers has gone far beyond the dreams of the union’s founders with the abolition of all internal border controls for the movement of people, goods, services and capital. For 19 of the now 28 member states, national currencies have been abolished and replaced with the euro.

This has transformed the nature of European commerce, as businesses tap a market of 500 million people. Over the past 20 years, trade between member European nations has risen from 12% to 22% of their combined GDP.

The number of European Union citizens living in a member country other than their own has risen from 4.76 million to 16 million.

Companies are better able to deploy economies of scale, and they can eliminate losses from border taxes and improve the calibre of their recruitment.

The European Union has also become a potent regulatory force on everything from climate change to food standards. Although Brexit campaigners fret about the fate of the British sausage before the eurocrats, the stated goal is to replace the thickets of national regulation with uniform rules across the continent, easing the path of commerce.

In principle, these changes should generate higher productivity and stronger economic growth.

In practice, that has been hard to detect. A recent study tried to identify the impact of membership of the European Union, exploring a wide range of data.

It compared the growth performance of recently joined members from Eastern Europe with the outcome for former members of the Soviet bloc that did not join. It looked at the original 21 OECD member countries from the 1960s and compared the performance of the European Union members with the nations that remained outside it (including Australia). It compared different time periods and different measures of GDP per capita. None of these comparisons showed that membership of the European Union brought gains to growth. Most showed the reverse.

The authors emphasised that their results were for Europe’s growth as a whole and conceded that individual members might do better but only if others, to achieve the average, did worse. Indeed, there are reasons to believe this is the case.

Creating a uniform business environment across Europe required a common monetary policy and the creation of a single currency. The idea was that it shouldn’t cost more to borrow in one country than another and that economic borders can’t be eliminated if different currencies prevail. But economic conditions vary: the highly educated workforces in the Northern European countries, for example, achieve higher productivity than workers in the countries with less developed education systems in Europe’s south and east.

It’s the same in any federation. When there have been complaints in Australia about a ‘two-speed economy’, as some states lead and others lag, the Reserve Bank has commented that it can only set a uniform monetary policy for the nation.

However, Australia and other federations all have mechanisms for stabilising the ups and downs of their constituent states. Australia goes further than most with the Commonwealth Grants Commission, which is mandated to ensure that the carve-up of GST revenue leaves all states and territories with the fiscal capacity to provide services of the same standard. In addition, poorer states pay less income tax and GST per capita and receive more in welfare and other benefits.

In Europe, none of this occurs. The European Commission’s budget is less than 2% of EU members’ combined GDP and it has no responsibility for benefit payments or taxes.

To make matters worse, the rich countries of the north have vetoed any European Central Bank bailouts for nations that get into financial difficulty. Taxpayers in the rich countries will not tolerate money being spent in poorer countries.

The single currency exacerbates the differences between the member nations. Between 2002, when national currencies were abolished in favour of the euro, and 2008 when the global financial crisis struck, the higher productivity growth in countries like Germany and the Netherlands meant that their labour costs fell while those in lower productivity growth nations like Greece and Italy rose.

If the countries had separate currencies, the German and Dutch exchange rates would have risen and the Greek and Italian rates would have dropped, but with a single exchange rate, the northern economies became more internationally competitive and the southern economies found it harder to make headway in world markets.

A measure of the ‘real exchange rate’, which looks at how much international currency is required to buy a unit of labour, shows that between 2002 and 2008, when the financial crisis struck, German labour became 54% cheaper while Greek labour became 7% more expensive, measured in euros.

Since the crisis, Greek labour has become cheaper, but only because actual wage rates have been slashed.

The European Union creates winners. There are gains for educated people who win career advancement in businesses tapping the vast European market, and for those from poorer countries with sufficient skills to get work in high-income countries.

But a single-currency federation with no redistribution of tax revenue and widely varying productivity generates the losers who are feeding a dangerous political disenchantment.

The need for a strong, unified Europe has never been greater. But enthusiasm for the European project has rarely been so weak, at least among the young. According to a recent poll, about three-quarters of French voters aged 18–24 don’t intend to use their democratic privilege in this week’s European Parliament election. Forty per cent of that cohort didn’t even know the election was taking place.

How can one convince the young that their chances of enjoying the peace and prosperity that have benefited their parents and grandparents may hinge on a single election? Today’s youth have only ever known freedom; historical references to Checkpoint Charlie (the most famous of the Cold War border crossings between East and West Berlin) are too distant and abstract to affect them. Without obvious examples of oppression, the only way to explain freedom to them is to describe its absence. The same challenge applies to peace. Yes, it is the absence of war, but what does that mean to someone who has never experienced bombardment?

In the absence of a satisfactory education about freedom and peace, young people have defaulted to a mixture of indifference and outright rejection of the European project. I recently witnessed this firsthand when speaking at a prestigious French science school on the topic of the election. Many of the students had already voted with their feet: the number of people attending my lecture on the geopolitics of television series was one-tenth what it had been three years ago. Apparently, young people this month were more focused on 20 May, the European broadcast date for the series finale of Game of Thrones, than on 23–26 May, when voting takes place.

When I called this inversion of priorities a profound political and ethical lapse on the part of young people, some of the students who did show up responded rather brutally. They challenged me to explain why anyone should care about a petty play with bad actors. Why, they asked, was I defending a ‘dead utopia’ when the survival of the very planet is at stake? When put in those terms, the defence of representative democracy, or even of peace, becomes a ‘secondary’ concern.

How did we end up here? For starters, the European Union in 2019 suffers from a series of disconnects and fallacies—not to mention the near breakdown of its ‘Franco-German engine’—all of which have been absorbed in the public consciousness. There’s a yawning gap between what the EU was meant to be and what is has become.

After World War II, the European mantra became ‘never again’ and Franco-German reconciliation was key. But now, the EU’s raison d’être is a mix of external and internal goals. When the European project was launched, addressing ecological threats such as climate change and the loss of biodiversity was not—and could not have been—conceived as a priority. But now, the ecological battle has almost been lost. In decades past, European security was guaranteed by the United States through NATO. Today, Europeans are more concerned about terrorism and the flow of migrants across their borders than about threats posed by nation-states.

Beyond these disconnects, it would be an understatement to say that European Commission presidents have lacked charisma ever since Jacques Delors vacated the post in 1995. Seeking to avoid having any rivals at the EU level, national politicians have consistently selected EU leaders for their limitations, rather than for their merits. The EU thus became anonymous and abstract.

The EU’s structural weaknesses have been aggravated by the European Parliament election campaign. Debates about the European project itself were largely absent. In France, for example, the poll has become a referendum on President Emmanuel Macron. The result is that European Parliament elections are increasingly becoming the equivalent of national midterm elections. This evolution is both sad and dangerous, and no doubt explains why voter turnout has been declining for years.

And yet, for geopolitical and ideological reasons, the rest of the world is watching Europe with bated breath. This year’s European Parliament election, after all, is the most important since 1979. While young people in Europe are looking elsewhere, Russian President Vladimir Putin and supporters of US President Donald Trump are eagerly hoping for a nationalist/populist upset that will cripple the union.

A defeat for Macron’s pro-European camp in France, like the defeat for Remainers in the United Kingdom’s 2016 Brexit referendum, would be seen as a victory for anti-European forces. Putin, having supported such forces in France and elsewhere, would certainly welcome such an outcome, as would Trump, as he prepares to run for re-election in 2020.

At the end of the day, Europe matters far more than younger Europeans seem to realise. The European Parliament election is in many ways a referendum on democracy and multilateralism, without which we will never be able to confront global challenges such as climate change. Young voters are right to worry about such issues, but if they really want to address them, first they had better worry about what happens this week.

Five years ago this month, a small force of ‘little green men’—soldiers wearing no national insignia—seized control of a police station in Sloviansk, a small village in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast. Thus began the second stage of Russia’s campaign to dismember Ukraine, following its illegal annexation of Crimea that March. As the Kremlin’s own statements at the time made clear, Russia’s goal was to establish a semi-independent statelet—‘Novorossiya’ (New Russia)—in Southern Ukraine, and reduce the rest of the country into a kind of Greater Galicia.

The pro-Kremlin insurgents comprised an odd mix of nationalist hotheads and ‘volunteers’ from the Russian special forces. Though Russia supplied them with ‘humanitarian aid’ and sophisticated weaponry, the expectation was that they would mobilise popular support to see the Novorossiya effort through to its conclusion.

But Ukraine did not crumble. Following a presidential election in May 2014, it began to repel the invaders and restore order. To salvage at least some of his gains, Russian President Vladimir Putin deployed regular Russian Army forces in Ukraine. And in September, a political agreement brokered by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe—the Minsk Protocol—essentially froze the situation in place, with lines drawn between opposing tank brigades.

The events leading up to the conflict had begun the previous summer, when the Kremlin increased its pressure on the Ukrainian government to abandon talks for a free-trade and association agreement with the European Union. No longer willing to tolerate another neighbour deepening its ties with the West, Putin wanted to force Ukraine into a customs union with Russia, on the way to establishing a Eurasian Union to counter the EU.

The Kremlin pressure campaign went from trade sanctions, financial incentives and political interventions to outright military aggression in less than a year. But six years later, it is clear that none of it worked. Although 7% of Ukraine remains occupied by Kremlin-backed forces, with defence and humanitarian costs for millions of displaced people weighing heavily on the national budget, Ukraine has made remarkable progress on a number of fronts. It now has a robust free-trade and association agreement with the EU. Following far-reaching economic reforms, its economy has begun to turn a corner. And it has just held the first round of a presidential election that meets Europe’s high standards of freedom and fairness.

The EU deserves some credit for this outcome. It has been a decade since the EU launched its Eastern Partnership, which established a more reliable framework for the bloc’s cooperation with Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine. This initiative, it’s worth recalling, was partly a reaction to the Russian invasion of Georgia the preceding northern summer, when the Kremlin tried to dismember that country by recognising South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states. In the event, not even Russia’s closest allies would agree to recognise those occupied territories or legitimise its invasion. And Georgia not only survived—thanks in no small part to the EU—but has since held two fairly contested presidential elections.

Of course, the larger impetus behind the Eastern Partnership was that Russia’s neighbours in Eastern Europe and the South Caucasus had expressed a desire for stronger ties with the EU. Even so, the initiative never posed any threat to the partner countries’ existing arrangements with Russia. Those that had a free-trade agreement with Russia could have one with the EU too.

To be sure, Eastern European countries outside of the EU still have serious economic and security issues to address. Each must do more to fight corruption, ensure the rule of law and open up its economy. And, obviously, frozen or semi-frozen conflicts in Georgia and Ukraine—as well as those involving Transnistria and Moldova, and between Armenia and Azerbaijan (over Nagorno-Karabakh)—will need to be resolved.

But the important thing is that the independence of each of the ‘Eastern partners’ has been preserved. Though countries such as Azerbaijan and Belarus are on very different domestic trajectories, they all have continued on the path towards democracy.

This represents a remarkable victory for the EU, given the Kremlin’s massive efforts to force these countries in another direction. Today, a Ukrainian flag flies in Sloviansk and the little green men who led the attack on its police station five years ago are probably back in Moscow, drunk, disgruntled and wondering what it was all for.

French President Emmanuel Macron recently launched his platform for the upcoming European parliament elections. Official reactions to his approach—outlined in a commentary published simultaneously in every European Union country—were mostly positive, with even the Eurosceptic prime minister of Hungary, Viktor Orbán, and president of Romania, Liviu Dragnea, endorsing his agenda (for tactical reasons). But, in the chorus of approval, one notable voice was missing: Germany.

Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer (known as AKK)—the Christian Democratic Union’s new leader and Angela Merkel’s likely successor as Germany’s chancellor—believes that Macron’s vision is overly ambitious and insufficiently pragmatic. Her response to his platform implicitly challenged France’s commitment to a more centralised Europe.

First, she advocated for the EU to have a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council—a privilege that, in Europe, only France and the United Kingdom currently enjoy. Second, she emphasised the need to ‘abolish anachronisms’, including by having the European parliament meet only in Brussels, rather than continuing to hold monthly sessions in Strasbourg.

But, if any anachronism is doing harm to Europe, it is Germany’s commitment to the status quo. Beyond some ideas for what France could sacrifice for Europe, AKK’s proposals brought nothing new to the table—certainly no ideas about what Germany could offer in return. As a German friend who played an important political role in his country in the 1990s put it to me: ‘There are too many ideas on the French side, and too few on the German one.’

Whatever marriage of reason might have existed between France and Germany previously, it has given way to estrangement. This is a clash not just of personalities or even political imperatives, but of nostalgias: France craves the grandeur of the Charles de Gaulle era, while Germany recalls fondly the comfortable stability of the Bonn Republic.

In September 1989—just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, when European communism had already begun to unravel—I attended a conference in Frankfurt, where I told an audience of German bankers that, within a few years, Europe, and Germany, would be reunited. Their disapproval was palpable. Even if reunification were possible—not likely, in their eyes, since the Soviet Union would never agree—why would anyone want to take risks with history and change a policy that was working so well, at least for West Germany?

While Germany laments its loss of comfortable stability, France finds its nostalgia for grandeur being fulfilled. France cannot recapture its former glory alone. But it can as a leader of the EU. The key is for Europe to remain ambitious—an imperative that Germany’s obsession with the status quo continues to impede.

The question, of course, is which country is backing an approach that better serves Europe as a whole. The answer is unambiguous: France.

At a time when the United States is embracing isolationism, Europe can no longer count on its most important international partner. Meanwhile, (re)emerging players, especially China and Russia, are working hard to build up their power and influence.

In her response to Macron, AKK seems to recognise the challenges this implies. She asks, for example, ‘Do we want our future to be determined by the strategic decisions of China or the United States, or do we want to play an active role in shaping the rules of future global coexistence?’

What AKK fails to recognise is that an ambitious Europe has a much better chance of competing in this environment than a stagnant one. In this sense, Germany, once the star pupil in the European class, is acting like its laziest and most stubborn member.

For nearly 30 years, Europeans have been seeking a new narrative, one that is less about resisting the negative than about embodying the positive. Europe’s leaders sought it in integration. By the time the EU succeeded the European Economic Community in 1993, the goal of Europe had become to create Europeans, united by values, interests and even, to some extent, identity.

The Erasmus Programme, created in 1987, was supposed to advance this goal. At a dinner I attended in the mid-1990s, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl was enthusiastic about the plan. He believed that exchanges by young people—the sharing of ideas and cultures, along with pizza and beer—would create a generation of Europeans. They would create European families, with European children. War among them would be inconceivable.

Nearly three decades later, Europe may not be back to square one, but it is certainly regressing. Whereas the Europe of the 1950s was desperate to ensure peace and freedom, underpinned by liberal democratic systems and values, the Europe of 2019 is electing nationalist and populist parties that are actively undermining that effort. This is not a status quo anyone should be defending.

Suddenly, the debate about creating a joint European Union army has gained real momentum. After French President Emmanuel Macron recently proposed the idea, US President Donald Trump disparaged it (in a tweet, of course), but German chancellor Angela Merkel endorsed it (while urging caution).

The issue came to the fore this month with the centennial of the end of World War I, which naturally focused Europeans’ attention on matters of war and peace. While touring WWI battlefields, Macron observed that ‘peace in Europe is precarious’, and that ‘we will not protect Europeans unless we decide to have a true European army’.

The goal of establishing a European army dates back to the earliest stages of European integration after World War II. In 1954, the French parliament refused to ratify a treaty that would have established a European Defence Community and joint military force comprising West Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. After that, the structures of integration that would eventually underpin today’s EU tended to be more economically oriented, and territorial defence was left to NATO and the US security umbrella.

But over the last few decades, there has been more movement towards establishing a common EU foreign and security policy, and new structures and institutions have been developed with that goal in mind. Still, today’s discussion of European defence is truly novel. Until now, the EU has primarily fostered cooperation in the area of research and development, while various country groupings have worked to establish different defence and security capabilities. In the next seven-year budget, there will likely be substantial funding for such projects.

Macron is right to think that the EU’s strategic environment has become increasingly fragile. Europeans today are confronted with a revanchist Russia, an assertive China, and a disruptive US. Although the US has expanded its military capabilities in Europe in recent years, it has previously regarded the continent primarily as a platform for operations in other theatres. And now that Trump has cast doubt on America’s commitment to defend Europe, renewed proposals for a European army should come as no surprise.

Still, Europe is home to only three countries with a robust strategic culture: France, the United Kingdom and Russia. All three have a deep-seated institutional understanding of geopolitical power dynamics and the use of military force. Indeed, Russia’s own program of military modernisation suggests that it is becoming increasingly reliant on hard power to pursue its interests.

Meanwhile, France has launched the European Intervention Initiative, a new framework uniting countries with real defence capabilities and a willingness to use them. Most important, this new grouping will include the UK even after it leaves the EU. That said, Macron’s vision of a European army under a central EU-level command will remain aspirational for the foreseeable future, for the simple reason that countries seldom give up their armies voluntarily.

Nonetheless, it is worth considering Macron’s broader goal, which extends well beyond immediate concerns such as Trump and Brexit. In short, Macron is calling on Europe to develop a more coherent and autonomous strategy for pursuing its security and defense interests in the twenty-first century.

Needless to say, this project will encounter many hurdles. Russia’s use of nuclear forces can be deterred only by those of the US. The French and the British don’t like to admit it, but their nuclear arsenals are simply insufficient, especially now that Russia is upgrading its own. Beyond nuclear deterrence, the US will also likely remain at the center of command, control, and intelligence when it comes to continent-wide operations.

Moreover, Europeans will also have to resolve a number of internal tensions. Germany will insist that all new programs be housed within EU structures, while demanding parliamentary approval for all operations. But the British will no longer belong to the EU, and will remain sceptical of French talk of strategic autonomy, which could imply a weaker NATO. The same goes for eastern EU member states, which are even less willing to countenance a delinking from NATO or the US.

Despite these difficulties, there is an emerging consensus on the need to restructure European defence. The ostensible impetus is the growing threat from Russia, China and the broader Middle East. But the uncomfortable reality is that renewed interest in military integration also reflects the erosion of Europe’s strategic position as a result of Brexit and, in some respects, Trump.

I expect that a French army—not a European one—will be marching down the Champs Elysées on Bastille Day for decades to come. But I also expect European countries to become more assertive in defence of their sovereignty, and to act collectively when it comes to security.