It will be a long time before national interests and instincts disappear. Indeed, nothing could be more ruinous than to speak and act as if the overcoming of nationality has already been achieved. For the time being, and for a long time to come, the invocation of super-nationality, however sincere, will necessarily be a mask for national purposes. The row in Brussels surrounding the appointment of the European Central Bank’s first president in 1998 offers a case in point. The French president’s horse trading made for a very poor spectacle indeed, but it would be wrong to think that Gallic jingoism conflicted with enlightened super-nationalism. With the selection of Wim Duisenberg, the German candidate, the governing of economic Europe was simply delivered into the hands of Germany. It is true that all other members went along with the German wish; it was thus all the more necessary to raise a cautionary fuss.

I should stress again that I do not speak with any animosity or defiance toward Germany. It is precisely because I consider the French-German bond the palladium of Europe that I fear most of all any estrangement between our two countries. Appearances can be meretricious. And the current French president is not very good at tending to them. But it would be very surprising if France turned out to be the only European country with national interests and instincts, all the others having already reached a higher plane of humanity, where pure impartiality and disinterestedness reign supreme. If we all still belong to the same needy, calculating mankind, then we ought to take our partiality into account. Nothing is to be gained by pretending to inhabit an ideological surreality in which the operation of mundane motives has been abolished.

The European Union already is too numerous by half. The addition of new members could not fail to complete the paralysis of all the European cogs and wheels, without bringing any significant benefits to the newcomers. Can the candidates really feel that, aside from superior wealth, our countries are overflowing with accomplishments in which one should be eager to share? They were submitted by force for half a century to an idea that seemed true and good. I do not mean to compare the communist idea to the European one, but the latter is also a tantalizing and possibly treacherous light in the distance, one of those “vague ideas” to which Tocqueville claimed democratic peoples are particularly prone.

I have just underscored the vague ideological character of the European project, once it has detached itself from its national components. But ideologues accuse one another of being ideological, and the reproach of abstraction is fairly abstract itself. After dwelling on the practical—that is, political—difficulties of its realization, it is high time to try to weigh more precisely the meaning and value of the project itself.

Beyond all political and economic hazards, the strength as well as the weakness of the European project lies in its intrinsic nature or purpose. It seems fair to note that it does not bring any new spiritual, moral, or political principle into the world. If you define it as a purely federal project, a matter of coaxing self-governing political units into a mighty new representative republic and bringing into the world a new nation conceived in liberty, then the United States of America did that a long time ago, and with resounding success. Generally speaking, we are all engaged in the modern democratic project, which ordinarily makes use of pre-existing nations. The European enterprise, on the other hand, distinguishes itself only by its indeterminate gigantism and its animus against nations, or, conversely, by an arbitrary particularism for which it is unable to account: The point on the map at which the enterprise stops will be determined by fiat. The more universalist it becomes, the more arbitrary the limits to that universality will be (and the more humiliated and indignant the peoples waiting across the border). If, in fact, everything develops on schedule, Europe’s growing strength will add new problems every day to the old ones that her weakness prevents her from solving. Perhaps we will become a giant nobody notices, or cares about? Most importantly, the success of which we dream will inevitably put us on a collision course with the United States. Thus, the institutional machine we devised for keeping peace on our continent will decisively disturb the world order that has prevailed since 1917.

It is not that I reject out of hand the idea of a challenge to the Americans. On the contrary, I never shrink from a good fight. And it can even be said that competition is the wellspring of Western society. But I have difficulty descrying what the meaning of such a challenge could be for human beings. Contrary to what reasonable Europeans generally think, there is meaning in old European nations challenging mighty new America. They are legitimately proud of what they have done, of their contribution to the life of the world, possibly even of their contribution to the independence and sheer greatness of America. They are old, sinewy peoples who feel too young to die. In this friendly but real contest, each nation, as part of Europe, opposes its finely articulated substance to the stronger, but perhaps somewhat simpler, substance of America: It stands for the old complexity of human motives against the American disposition, which produces an enormous amount of energy on the basis of individual rights and self-interest. But why try to transform Europe into a second American empire? What good human purpose would this serve? Why unreflectingly disrupt the trying but fruitful dialectics between the Old World and the New World, which thinking persons on both sides of the ocean have never ceased to ponder? Whether by God’s ordinance or mere chance, there is already a place on earth where democracy reigns unconditional and supreme: every suffering, indeed every impatient person in the world is already a potential citizen of the United States. There is a place on earth where rootless democracy has taken root from its own seed. Why try to duplicate this successful experience on a soil that is much less congenial? The great philosophers of liberty have long noticed that European liberty was largely dependent on the complex partitioning of the European domain. In European quarrels, the weakest was, if not exactly a match, at least a hard nut to crack, so that the diversity of our continent was a main cause of its liberty. Why then run headlong (or worse yet, slide uncontrollably) into a gigantism and uniformity in which the thinkers to whom I have just referred saw the sickly marks of Asian despotism? Americans have indeed produced a variant of gigantism and uniformity which is friendly to liberty. But they took possession of a huge, open continent with no internal boundaries. One need only compare the skyline of any major American city to the new buildings in any European capital to understand that the genius of Europe stumbles when it tries its skill at gigantism.

To bring to light the meaning of the European project, I have just now supposed that it could indeed be successful. As I made clear from the outset, however, I strongly doubt it. The project was born in an ideological age, an age in which every dreamer—from the most harmless to the most criminal—has proposed his own version of a New Europe. Terrible experiences have taught us that the only ideology viable in the long run is democracy itself. Democracy furnishes the working mechanism of our nations, and it enlarges the horizon which they are endlessly pursuing. Yet nothing in our old nations prevents us from looking up and away toward humanity itself. Why be so impatient with our dilapidated fences? Why precipitate them into a melting pot? Nothing prevents our old nations from acting together. It is true, our old nations are tired. It is good for them to have a larger perspective for their action, a European perspective. But this perspective must be conceived, and executed, with moderation. Only through moderation will it strengthen both our individual nations and Europe itself, instead of discouraging the former and destroying the latter. The European organization is a useful, indeed necessary, artifact. But if we put our entire soul into it, or if we begin to think that it has a soul, we will surely lose our way.

Pierre Manent is director of studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, where he teaches political philosophy. His many works include The City of Man (Princeton, 1998), and Modern Liberty and Its Discontents (Rowman and Littlefield, 1998).