The EU used to know where it stood on history—it was best kept simple, and in the past. In the early decades, history was about one big thing: the second world war, and the grand project of Franco-German reconciliation. From the outset, the EU was partly meant to make war unthinkable inside Europe. But over the years that miracle of continental forgiveness has ossified into something more inflexible, even smug. Just as pioneering Eurocrats toiled to create single European markets in widgets or wheat, their political masters crafted something approaching an approved single European history (challenged only in awkward-squad Britain, where the war was a matter of national pride). This history portrayed a smooth moral progression from nationalism and conflict (bad) to the sunny uplands of compromise, dialogue and border-free brotherhood (good).
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