Europe’s handling of war on its doorstep breaks a decade-long streak of fumbled crises

IT TOOK FOUREUEUEUEUEU horsemen to mete out God’s apocalyptic punishment. The biblical wrath conveyed by two of them will sound familiar to Europeans worn down by disease and now war in Ukraine. But a mere quartet of steeds would not have sufficed to deliver the calamities the has had to contend with in the past decade or so. No fewer than five crises have befallen the continent in that time: in addition to covid-19 and fighting on its doorstep, Europe has been visited by the protracted euro-zone slump, soon followed by a migration emergency and then Brexit. Any normal polity would be worn down by living in near-perpetual crisis mode for so long—not least since the episodes rarely showed the at its best. It is only the war in Ukraine that the bloc has handled remotely deftly. Is it possible that the has learned how to avoid turning problems into existential dramas?Crisis holds a special place in the hearts of believers in the European project. Jean Monnet, one of the ’s founding fathers and the nearest thing Brussels has to a patron saint, thought the continent’s political arrangements would be “forged in crises, and will be the sum of the solutions adopted for those crises”. Like most religious parables, this is not wholly true. The bloc’s most notable shunts towards ever-closer union, from the euro to the single market by way of open borders, were agreed on without the spectre of impending meltdown. But crises help to disrupt the status quo. The temporary chaos they bring about allows new ideas to emerge. Apply enough pressure—and in Europe that can mean the prospect of the entire edifice of the collapsing—and what was politically unthinkable yesterday becomes inevitable tomorrow.