Reading the cards

LITTLE ABOUT Europe is simple. The EU is a sprawling, labyrinthine, many-centred thing. It tends to move either very slowly or very fast, with shifts creeping forwards over years or suddenly flashing past in hours at late-night summits. National capitals can feel like different universes, with their own electoral and economic cycles, personalities, in-jokes, taboos, histories, myths and ideological constellations. So it can be tricky to identify and explain continent-wide trends, and even more so to anticipate them. No wonder that confidently sweeping analyses of Europe often get the big calls wrong.

Early in the new millennium, the EU’s eastward expansion, transatlantic rifts and a mild economic climate together produced a wave of grandiose claims about the European model’s sunny future. Books with titles like “The European Dream” and “Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century” hit the shelves. A convention of grandees drew up a blueprint for the EU called a Constitution for Europe. But then the blueprint was rejected at two referendums, economic crisis set in, the euro zone started to wobble, migration soared and the union ended the decade much less struttingly than almost anyone had predicted.