The fundamental, long neglected matters of Government and Opposition in the Union are not easily resolved. Nor was that my intention; this book is not a manifesto. I did, however, after a decade of improvisation, want to offer a new perspective on ways of addressing these issues. The events-politics that the Union is learning to engage in under the pressure of crises takes it a long way from its origins in rules-politics. The realization has dawned that the new Europe needs to be in a position to act. Only then can it step into the future with self-confidence and show itself on the world stage. As long as executive power in the Union is continuing to develop – and in light of historical necessity and political determination there is every sign that it is – the Opposition too will find new and, we can hope, better ways of effectively making its voice heard. We have seen an unexpectedly large number of lines of thought along which public dissent can be ascertained and organized. Opposition can contribute to the Union’s set-up of the vital functions of balance, changeover, vigilance and dissent, with the result that the public experiences “Europe” not just as driven by technocratic necessity but ultimately as an outcome of choices freely made.

Europe’s new politics cannot exist without new openness. The contrary voices and loud mouths of recent years have an important part to play: they make tough political choices and dilemmas visible to the European public that has poured in en masse, to all those people who to their own surprise suddenly find themselves in the public gallery of the political theatre. In doing so they break through the sometimes dispiriting logic of depoliticization. The public battle of words enables viewers and voters to see the present-day freedom in which we are creating our future.

Here lies a special task for the media, too, indispensable as they are in giving shape to that public realm, in connecting politics and people.

Checks and balances

The fact that for decades it was impossible to point to a Brussels government of the EU had an important but hitherto neglected consequence: no organized opposition could take shape. Oppositional forces could not be directed to an obvious forum, and so they found expression through other, uncontrollable sites.

For a governing party, the absence of a recognizable opposition – people who make your life a misery, sabotage your plans and aim to get you out of office as soon as possible – may sound attractive, but for a political system as a whole it is catastrophic. Political opposition fulfils vital functions. Here are four of them:

• 1. Balance. The presence of an opposition strengthens a political system’s “checks and balances”. It puts a brake on abuse of power by governments and civil servants, thereby enhancing the quality of governance and the rule of law. This works best when the opposition has a base in parliament, since from there it can make the executive aware of its potential supremacy. It is the existence of an opposition that gives Montesquieu’s separation of powers its full protective and dynamic effect.

No toolkit

When the euro crisis hit, no one knew what to do. Given the chorus of commentators who claimed with hindsight to have predicted everything, it can do no harm to remember that. No one had contemplated a crisis spreading from one eurozone country to another, the risk that drove the subsequent financial turmoil.

What do you do when you find yourself in an emergency and existing habits, rules and agreements prove useless? You have to improvise. Improvising can have the negative connotation of a botched response or a lack of preparedness, but it can also suggest something positive and creative, as in jazz music or the debating chamber, where the best improviser is typically the hero of the hour. A host who serves unanticipated guests an “improvised meal” – certain ingredients not in the fridge, more diners than expected – is unlikely to venture to say beforehand how it will turn out. Here “improvisation” can be negative if you ought to have known better and have failed to prepare, ignoring experience. But if you are forced to act and think on your feet when an unexpected challenge arises, then the ability to improvise becomes a special quality, a gift.

A capacity to improvise is an essential part of decision-making in general. Every major choice in life involves uncertainties: what will you study at college, with whom will you share your life, whom do you trust? Of course, you can try to exclude uncertainty – by making preparations, feeling things out, calculating – but there will always be a crack through which unintended consequences, unexpected reactions or unforeseen developments can squeeze.

During 70 years of peace and prosperity, the political debate in Europe revolved around issues of growth and redistribution, education and healthcare, freedom and identity. Far less was said about state and authority, strategy and war, security and the border, citizenship and opposition. The preconditions for the miracle play that is a free society disappeared from view. A succession of wars, civil wars, dictatorships and military conflicts in other places should have reminded us that Europe’s democratic paradise cannot be taken for granted, but we managed to reason away all those warnings. The rest of the world had yet to achieve our level of civilization: we had arrived at world history’s end. Then suddenly the crises came: banks collapsed, the euro wobbled, Russia attacked Ukraine and annexed Crimea, vast numbers of desperate people attempted to cross into Europe, and in Washington a new president, Donald Trump, pulled the US security rug from underneath the European continent. And so the realization dawned that our order is fragile, our future no smooth highway. Politics matters. “History is back”. We live in a world of conflict and rivalry, of force and counterforce. A reorientation has become a bitter necessity.

It is difficult for today’s politicians to find or recall suitable language and gestures for this situation, certainly for those in the European arena. Historically the European Union’s model of cooperation has relied on imagining politics away. The Brussels institutions, working methods and ways of thinking are designed to smother political passions with a web of rules: depoliticization. This is a strength when building a market, when regulating cucumbers and bananas (and the web is powerful, enmeshing as well as connecting, as few things demonstrate better than Britain’s divisive attempt to extricate itself). But depoliticization quickly turns into weakness when there is a need to act and to respond to events, as has been clear almost daily since the financial crisis of 2008.

When danger arises and sudden threats emerge, when stark decisions must be taken and the public persuaded to endorse those choices, other political qualities are needed: speed and determination, a keen judgement of the situation, visible gestures and authoritative words; leadership, in sum.

The magnet and the border

When the Cold War ended, Western Europeans took their leave of History with a capital H. As capitalist democracies, we had attained the ultimate historical goal, as proclaimed by Fukuyama, and no longer faced an ideological rival. It was merely a matter of waiting for the rest of humanity – in Eastern Europe; in Africa; in Asia and the Middle East – to achieve its own salvation. Our task was to help everyone become just like us, through development aid and trade agreements, and by exporting our market rules and democratic values. This became the essence of the Union’s foreign policy: an extension of the politics of rules, an expansive trade policy under the banner of our best values – freedom, equality and prosperity. Rampant good intentions.

In that post-communist climate, Europe acted as a magnet to the outside world, exerting a positive influence on its surroundings. Our model had magnetic force, was perhaps even “sexy” – after all, who would not want to become like us? A flattering thought. Political scientists provided the accompanying theory of “soft power”: the ability to mobilize others in support of one’s own values, culture or reputation, as distinct from the “hard power” that relies on power-politics or military force. While the United States wielded both soft and hard power worldwide, the European Union commanded only the former. In self-conscious Brussels this was not counted as a deficiency but regarded as evidence of our progress and civilization.

This firmly buttressed self-image had one great merit: it stabilized the continent after the shock of 1989. None of the popular uprisings in Central and Eastern Europe ended with a Cromwell, Robespierre or Khomeini, instead they each opened passages to democracy. The prospect of Union membership, offered in 1993, spurred impressive transformations.

Crises and metamorphosis

Banks on the point of collapse, a currency on the edge of the abyss, wars flaring on the continent’s periphery, internal borders closed, a member stuck halfway out of the door – a series of dramas has played out before us in recent years. If a crisis is indeed a moment of truth and if tribulations can bring self-knowledge, then the European Union should have learnt a great deal about itself in a short time.

The first lesson is that when the unity of the Union or peace in the region is at stake, political motives for being together prevail over purely economic interests. In abnormal situations the underlying politics, rarely visible under normal circumstances, actively comes to the fore.

This was a striking feature of the Brexit negotiations. It was brilliantly illuminated when, in late 2017, the then British Brexit secretary David Davis gave a speech in Berlin to an audience of German business leaders, as part of a London charm offensive aimed at securing favourable terms in the withdrawal agreement. Davis warned Germany and other European member states to beware of harming their own economies in the Brexit talks, advising them not to put “politics above prosperity”. His audience greeted these words with laughter and disbelief. The encounter reveals the depth of mutual misunderstanding. German business leaders see the Brexit referendum as an irresponsible political act, a case of economic hara-kiri. How could a leading Brexiteer, of all people, tell them not to put politics above prosperity? The British minister, using a pragmatic win-win argument in the best Brussels tradition, failed to grasp the extent to which his country’s exit from the European order is experienced by Germany and other EU member states as an existential political attack on the foundations of the Union, to be withstood at all costs.