The past decade has not seen much celebration of the EU's achievements. EU headlines have been captured by crises in eurozone debt and austerity, in-fighting over migration, Eastern European proto-despotism, and the demagogic circus of Brexit. Even the core EU project to erase barriers to exchange and mobility – the famous “single market” – is perceived as faltering. “In parts it is incomplete and in others actively going backwards”, complained The Economist in September 2019. In their view it falls well short of its aspirations to “a single economic zone much like America, with nothing to impede the free movement of goods, services, people and capital”.

Some good news for Europe, however, is that this gloomy narrative is disconnected from certain aspects of reality on the ground. That is not to say that the headlines get it all wrong, of course. Europe's crises have been severe. Moreover, North–South economic divergences, contestation around free circulation of people, democratic struggles in Eastern Europe, and English nationalism are not going away soon. Also true is that the single market is incomplete in many areas and hitting obstacles in others (without mentioning other gaps in EU economic governance). The crucial correction, though, concerns a clear-eyed assessment of what the EU has done relative to what it concretely set out to do. On its core ambitions it has achieved far more than even most experts seem to recognize.

The concrete goal to which Europeans committed in the 1950s was to change their laws, regulations, and administrative processes to encourage free movement and exchange across national jurisdictions. In the 1980s they reconfirmed and deepened that commitment. Over time they also gradually extended border-opening goals across an increasingly large and diverse group of member states. What today's main narrative overlooks – and even The Economist, usually well-informed, gets wrong – is that the EU's single market has gone well past the United States in removing interstate barriers. It has also done so across far more diverse and powerful states than the US government ever faced.

This is a truly extraordinary achievement. Characterizing it accurately alters our sense of the EU's present and future. The EU attracts so many challenges today mainly because its core project has gone so far, not because it is weak and incomplete.