Why is the European project facing an existential threat this week? In the recent words of European Union president Donald Tusk: “The spectre of a breakup is haunting Europe.” In perhaps the frankest admission ever to come out of Brussels, he said: “Obsessed with the idea of instant and total integration, we failed to notice that ordinary people, the citizens of Europe, do not share our Euro enthusiasm.” Thus did he dismiss the utopian dreams of the forerunners of the EU and the subsequent “naive Euro-enthusiastic visions of total integration”.

The origins of the EU lie in the second world war, but not in the way many people on both sides of the debate assume. Brexiters try to imply that European unification descends from Napoleon and Hitler, even though membership has hardly been imposed at the point of a bayonet. At the same time, defenders of the EU like to believe that it somehow prevented a third world war, when in fact peace depends rather more on good governance. Proper democracies do not fight each other.

Because Britain was not involved at the start we do not have a clear idea of the EU’s development. Few in this country have even heard of Jean Monnet. He was an extraordinarily important Frenchman who neither went to university nor was ever elected to public office. Born into a family of cognac merchants, Monnet became the greatest behind-the-scenes fixer in modern history.

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It was Monnet who, while based in London in the dark days of June 1940, working on the integration of the British and French arms industries, came up with the suggestion of an Anglo-French union to continue resistance to Hitler. The idea excited both Charles de Gaulle and Winston Churchill, but was crushed by Marshal Philippe Pétain, who described the plan as a “marriage to a corpse”, since France was about to surrender. It was Monnet, now in the US at the behest of the British government and acting as an adviser to Franklin D Roosevelt, who persuaded the president to turn the US into the “arsenal of democracy” and to introduce the “victory plan” for the mass production of armaments to defeat Nazi Germany. And it was Monnet who, in 1943, ensured De Gaulle’s ascent to power as head of the French government in exile in Algiers, despite Roosevelt’s opposition.

That August of 1943, Monnet also decided that European states would be so enfeebled after the war that they must unite into a federation. And yet the Monnet plan, which he expounded in 1945, proposed the French takeover of Ruhr coal production to rebuild France at the expense of Germany. De Gaulle supported the idea fervently, but then resigned because the infighting of French politics failed to live up to his own impossible dream that the country’s conflicting views would become unified under his leadership.

On 2 January 1946, just before his departure, De Gaulle appointed Monnet to head the Commissariat Général du Plan. This was to provide centralised planning writ large. Monnet brought in almost the whole team from the Délégation Générale à l’Equipement National, even though it had been created by the collaborationist Vichy regime. These bright young “technocrates” from the top schools of the French administration had worked on projects to modernise France within the “new European order” of the Third Reich. After the war they were the very same people who were to run the European Coal and Steel Community, headed of course by Monnet, and then in 1958, the European Economic Community. Thus the top cadres of the European bureaucracy were not merely elitist from the start, they had little patience for democratic consultation. They knew best what was needed.

The Marshall Plan in 1948 saved western Europe from economic and political collapse. The formation of Nato the following year also provided the first measure of unity as the sudden intensification of the cold war imposed a form of geopolitical straitjacket. The development of the EU in subsequent years was not a rival to Nato, as some seem to imply. The two organisations existed perfectly well in parallel, while the EU greatly encouraged and aided the emergence of countries such as Portugal, Spain and Greece from reactionary military dictatorships. It also contributed to the return of democracy in central European nations after more than 40 years of Soviet dictatorship.

So why this current existential threat to the EU project? The principal insoluble problem comes from the disastrous decision to accelerate unification through a common currency across countries and economies that were fundamentally incompatible. The European currency unit, or ecu, in 1979 was the first step towards the dream of full unification, and would eventually turn into the euro. To prepare for the new system, currencies were to be stabilised within the European exchange rate mechanism (ERM). This meant that individual countries would lose all flexibility since they could not allow their currency to rise or fall beyond narrow parameters. (This was what led to Norman Lamont’s humiliation on Black Wednesday, 16 September 1992, when Britain had to pull out of the ERM.)

The principal insoluble problem comes from the disastrous decision to accelerate unification through a common currency

Optimism following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the cold war encouraged more detailed planning. Exchange controls were abolished in 1990. The Treaty of Maastricht in 1992 established economic and monetary union as a formal objective. By 1998 the European Central Bank had been established, and on 1 January 2002, euro notes and coins replaced existing currencies in 11 countries. But during the whole of this preparatory period, intense discussions had been held behind closed doors between central bankers and political leaders. Private doubts about the system’s potential weaknesses were dismissed as a failure to believe in the great project. The idea that a united Europe would be economically and politically powerful enough to overcome any problem assumed unwisely that all countries had the same interests.

German doubts about abandoning the Deutschmark for the euro were overcome, mainly by the argument that it was the only way other members could be relieved of fears that the newly unified country would dominate the continent. And the Germans themselves were promised that the euro, through stringent discipline, would be as hard a currency as the Deutschmark. All the promises proved false, and the reactions were acrimonious. Later, the tensions between a “frugal” Germany and the free-spending Mediterranean belt were inevitably exacerbated by the migration crisis. Brexit, as Tusk rightly warns, could be the last straw after such a fraught period.

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Clearly the EU has not fulfilled its objective of “ever closer union” and now, as Tusk acknowledges, it never can. That raises the interesting question of whether any ideology – of the left, the right or, in this case, the centre – could ever achieve its founding purpose. I doubt if any utopian plan has survived contact with the unpredictable reality of events. Ideals may inspire, but all too often they contain a self-defeating element. In the case of Europe, the very process of unification was bound to excite the nationalistic reactions that the whole project was hoping to eliminate.

But the EU’s flaws do not justify its destruction. Alliances are fragile entities. They take time to create and are always vulnerable to vicious circles of suspicion and resentment. Whatever we might think of the EU – whether we love it or loathe it – one thing is certain. If Britain pulls out and thus provokes or accelerates its disintegration, we will instantly achieve most-hated nation status, not just in Europe but far beyond. It could well turn into the worst example in history of cutting off your nose to spite your face.