It's all there in that one moment: The glory and the silliness. The historic destiny and the middle-management preposterousness. Europe in all its necessity. Europe in all its nonsense.
At a key moment yesterday, German chancellor Olaf Scholz asked Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban to leave the room. And that, after months of build up to a Hungarian veto over Ukrainian membership of the EU, was what it came down to. The great tides of history were crashing over the European Council. And they responded to them by telling someone to step outside.
It's comical in a way only the EU could possibly achieve. Evidently it was a pre-prepared gambit, designed to get over Hungary's veto power and save face. Orban was "momentarily absent from the room in a pre-agreed and constructive manner", an official said, in one of the most farcical EU lines we've seen for a while. I've now made the executive decision that anyone using the loo in this household has to use the same linguistic formulation.
Underneath yesterday's news, there was all sorts of grubbiness going on. Earlier this week, the European Commission unfroze over €10 billion in EU funds for Hungary. Ostensibly this was in recognition of judicial reforms. In reality the timing was just a bit too neat - and Orban's reforms too superficial - for it to be anything but a bribe to get him to play ball last night. And even then, he managed to veto a €50 billion Ukraine aid package, which will now have to be negotiated in January.
Putin's man in Europe wasn't destroyed out there. He secured some of the things he set out to do. But overall, he was diminished. He seemed smaller, weaker, more of a buffoon than he had before. There was something deliciously stupid about him releasing a video berating the EU for a decision it took on Ukraine when he himself had the power to stop it. It's hard to convincingly argue that you're under the yoke of a foreign power when you choose to leave the room at the moment it makes a decision.
For weeks now, we've awaited this summit with despair and trepidation. "He has maximum leverage," I wrote in this newsletter last month. "He seems likely to remove any hope of progress at the Council meeting in December." Well it didn't happen. He got slapped back. Ukraine's path to European membership is on track. There's a lot still to do, but it is on its way home.
It all came down to Scholz's request for Orban to leave the room. And that's perhaps not quite as stupefyingly bizarre as it first appears. It is, after all, a kind of compromise. It's an example of progress despite competing demands which seem impossible to reconcile. It's ultimately what the EU is all about: finding solutions.
The EU has never been more popular in Britain. We've all seen the polls: Record levels of regret for Brexit, record levels of support for rejoining. But it's a curiously parochial picture. Our view of the EU is framed not so much by what's happening in Europe, but by our assessment of what's gone wrong in the UK since Brexit.
Look at Europe from outside the UK, however, and things seem pretty bleak. What is the EU, at its heart? It is the idea that we mould economies together so that war becomes unthinkable. It is the product of a decision in 1951's Treaty of Paris that Europe must never go to war with itself again and that the best way to achieve that is to bind together coal and steel industries - the two products required for conflict. It is an end to the zero sum days of take-what-you-can-by-force. And it is the start of the mutual advantage days of benefiting-together-by-negotiation.
Institutions create cultures. Once those moulded-together institutions were established, they required a political culture dominated by pragmatism and cooperation rather than commandments and bellicosity. Commentators hate it. We like big powerful expressions of moral sentiment. But that isn't how the EU works. It is quiet and tucked away - fussy, cautious, painstaking and, ultimately, effective.
Look at the world today and the EU vision of the world is in retreat. It is in retreat everywhere. Putin's war on Ukraine is just the most direct and explicit challenge to it: a return to the take-what-you-want imperialist era, a trip backwards in time to the world of might-is-right. It's no coincidence that Putin's entire image is grounded in a sense of personal strength. This is the old way, which holds up the leader as a representation of the virility of the people and can express national glory only in demonstrations of aggression.
But we see similar trends even among friendly countries. US president Joe Biden's trade policy prioritises the creation, consolidation and protection of domestic supply chains over those provided by globalisation. This has recently been expanded to more emphatically include its allies, but it is really quite distinct from the universal global rules based order approach that defined the US approach to trade since the Second World War.
The reason for this change lies with Russia and China. We've seen the security implications of allowing hostile authoritarian states extensive influence over our material life. Democracies are now in the business of trying to insulate themselves from them. But when you separate out your trading relationships, according to the logic of the EU, war becomes more likely, because the consequences of doing it are less ruinous.
Look at immigration. The European dream of free movement of people without border checks is starting to unravel. Not so long ago, the Schengen area stood as an example of what could be achieved if we eradicated the bother and severity of border controls within a trading block. Now it seems to be falling apart, under the pressure of trying to stop refugee flows. Germany recently reinstated border checks with Poland, the Czech Republic and Switzerland. Austria has basically suspended the borderless travel system on its southern and eastern borders. One third of Schengen states have now enacted border controls.
Populism itself is a rejection of the EU's way of doing things. It trades in bellicose rhetoric over negotiation, in primary colours rather than shades of grey. It doesn't work, of course. Rishi Sunak is proving that now with his self-imposed Rwanda catastrophe. Insisting with ever-greater zeal about your sovereignty doesn't actually achieve anything but your own irrelevance. And yet in country after country, we see the same political pattern - Giorgia Meloni in Italy, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands.
That's why Scholz's gambit yesterday was so satisfying. It's a sign - even now, as things seem to slope towards disaster - that the European way can still work. We expected the worst, but it was avoided.
It seems absurd. It quite literally is absurd. But it is also vindication for a general approach to politics: Careful, tortured negotiations, alleviating concerns, addressing competing demands, seeking compromise instead of triumph, finding ways for everyone to save face. It is the business of what works. Unsatisfying, unflashy, easy to mock, but the only thing that provides true peace and plenty.
It doesn't have the visual or the linguistic power of populism. But it is what true freedom and control look like. It's what Ukraine aspires to. It's what countless Ukrainians will today risk their lives to fight for. It's what they're dying for. It's what they've died for since that moment a decade ago when they took to Independence Square to demand a better future than the one Putin offered them.
Ukraine is Europe. And Europe is freedom.
Odds and sods
I finally turned on paid subscriptions this week. As promised, it comes with a special offer of fuck all: those who sign up receive absolutely nothing at all, except for the moral assurance that their contribution allows this newsletter to continue.
Maybe consider giving someone the gift of fuck all for Christmas. I provide free delivery on all orders of fuck-all and if you do it now your loved ones will be able to open their wrapper of nothingness on Christmas morning.
About half the pledges have now converted to paid subscription. I know some of the rest of you have been struggling with the card system. It's frustrating and needless to say I can't do much to fix it. But do give it another go if it pissed you about last time. It should hopefully be working this time. And yes, I know. Captcha can absolutely fuck off.
I'm enjoying my fuck all in the pub right now. Hope it works out for you.
Tell you what, the fucking _substance_ of all this stuff gets lost in discussion of the manoeuvres far too often. It's the same with Rwanda too, all that five families stuff allowing us to elide the fact that there are real people involved. Or even on their level, that there's a bill here with actual measures in it that should be discussed and demolished. So cheers for helping out with that.
I wonder if there might be a better description of the Schengen agreement the "free movement of people without border checks" because otherwise it could easily be be mixed up with one of the EU's single market's four freedoms (Freedom of Movement of People).
They are orthogonal concepts, not all countries are party to both and they have very different implications for the individuals who they apply to.
Of course their strength is amplified when both are applicable but each by itself is already quite valuable.