Forty years of European History: Crisis, Resilience, Development and Opportunity

This chapter is an extract from the book “1985-2025. A BANK LIKE NO OTHER”, published by Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana Treccani (2025) for BFF Banking Group.

Two partially contradictory interpretations confront one another in assessing an unprecedented enterprise like European unification. The first underlines the Union’s incompleteness, and the vulnerabilities that this implies. The second originates in the prophecy of Monnet, according to which European unity will be a product of the accumulated responses to its recurrent crises. Padoa-Schioppa elaborates on this concept, observing that the European Community, as it was called before becoming a Union, is “dynamic ... in a constant state of imbalance and at times displays contradictions”.

The first interpretation is correct to the point of being trite: we clearly do not have the United States of Europe and perhaps never will, but it is also evident that the unification of 27 countries, that for much of their history have been at war with one another, is necessarily a very long and risky process. The second interpretation, while recognizing the Union’s incompleteness, offers a different perspective: has there been sufficient progress, particularly in terms of crisis response, towards greater integration? 

The last four decades of European history provide useful material for deciding which of the two interpretations more accurately describes the reality, while recognizing that both are partially valid.