It is possible to pinpoint the moment it became clear that Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party was not going to try very hard to repair the economic damage done by Brexit. It came on the evening of 18 April 2024 when the European Commission published an expansive proposal for a youth mobility scheme to allow young Brits and Europeans to live, work and study freely in each others’ countries for two or three years. One EU official in Brussels – keen to emphasise the willingness to rejuvenate the EU–UK relationship under a future Labour government – excitedly described the envisioned scheme as ‘like free movement for young people’. Several European governments, including the mighty Germany, had even suggested that a youth mobility scheme could even provide a gateway to easing restrictions on the movement of business professionals. But the excitement didn’t last out the day. Within hours the Labour Party, then in opposition, rejected the idea out of hand. ‘Labour has no plans for a youth mobility scheme,’ it said in a statement. There was no hedging or hesitation.

This volume sets out to provide a concise and accessible overview of the history of today’s European Union. A brief account of such a sprawling topic obviously cannot be comprehensive. Instead, I hope to lay out the broad sweep of developments, without getting bogged down in the details. These days all the EU’s significant moves are documented online, including all its treaties, major decisions, national positions, specific policies, and other technicalities. The institutions themselves provide deep insights into their ongoing work, often also supplying snapshots of historical developments. Even more importantly, there are entire libraries of books on specific policies and the roles of institutional actors such as the European Commission, the Parliament, the Council, and the various member states. Amidst such a wealth of information, it is all too easy to get tangled up in the details. In response, this book seeks to provide a coherent survey of the EU’s history for the general reader.

The media tends to portray a European Union lurching from one crisis to the next. And in this brief history I have had plenty to say about problems, dangers, risks, and threats in the decades-long process of European integration. The founders were well aware of this aspect. Jean Monnet always believed that ‘Europe would be built through crisis, and that it would be the sum of their solutions’. Indeed, the European Union – as the European Communities before it – does seem to have a knack for turning crises to its advantage. Rather than leading to any kind of reversal, challenges have tended to reorient and expand the European project. So, we should not get carried away by excitable headlines, which often fail to do justice to the EU’s complex and sometimes contradictory trajectory.

The 1920s saw hope as well as gloom. Coexistent temporalities comingled. Key themes overarched: (a) novel metropolitan life; (b) shifting class differences; (c) changes in the state; (d) gendering of social relations, social practices, and political action; (e) Europe’s relation to empire; (f) cultural life and ideas; (g) democracy’s uneven fortunes. The welfarist complex crossed regime differences (democracy versus dictatorship), embracing population and national health; a normative family; social services delivery; goals of national efficiency. Eugenicist ideas claimed an appealing coherence, whose refusal presumed key enabling factors: intact democracy; strong labor movements; liberal systems of law; and pluralist public spheres. By 1939–1940, that left only Sweden and Britain. Widening of democracy brought the welfarist field distinct cohorts of educated young men and freshly enfranchised young women. The 1880s generation passed 1914–1918 as young adults; the “war youth generation” missed the war but craved an equivalent; interwar cohorts joined the post-1918 world as it started collapsing. Those lives turned on an enabling modernity. They knitted together the “modernist wish.”

Chapter 1 traces the emergence of the social wife in late Qing diplomacy, showing how concubines became the earliest Chinese women to assume this role. By focusing on chahui, an important form of Western social gathering typically hosted by officials’ wives, it demonstrates how Qing diplomats observed the significant role of the social wife in the West. It begins with the first well-known case of an official, Guo Songtao, bringing his concubine abroad and attending public functions with her during their stay in London (1877–1879). Ambassador Guo was criticized by conservative factions at the Qing court and later recalled as punishment, partially for breaching Confucian gender propriety. It then examines how other diplomats, such as Guo’s successor, Zeng Jize, and his family adjusted to the expectation of a social wife’s presence in diplomatic functions in Europe. Finally, it shows how chahui and its gender-related etiquette were adapted to suit the cultural contexts of late Qing China to entertain Western dignitaries, enabling Chinese officials’ wives to attend without violating the Confucian norm of gender separation.

The opening chapter recasts a central puzzle in European political development during the so-called first wave of democratization. The puzzle is not that democracy was so successful over this period, but that the transition to some form of mass politics in the birthplace of both the Enlightenment and industrial revolutions produced so few democratic successes. If there was indeed a democratic first wave, it was an extraordinarily small one. And if this is true, then it is not the democratic achievements of the first wave, but rather the successful blocking strategies of the old regime that deserve our attention today.

The study of European capitalism since 1945 has revealed three key findings. First, Europe’s governance of capitalism has been marked by four main periods: : 1) embedded liberalism (1945–73); 2) global attempts at mixed capitalism (1973–92); 3) high neoliberalism (1992–2016); and 4) the return of community capitalism since 2016. Second, Europeans have invented an original system to reach compromise between both states and the three types of capitalist governance, thereby offering choice, far from the image of a neoliberal technocratic dictatorship. The European Union is a mix between the influence of many countries, including Germany, France, and Britain, in addition to Italy and many others. Third, the trinity points to three alternatives that were – and still are – present: the neoliberal free-trade area, the socio-environmental alternative and the challenge of the return of community capitalism, between protectionist tensions, Fortress Europe and the possible hollowing out of the European Union from the pressure of growing nationalism.

Chapter 7 presents the first analysis of the abolition of the death penalty in Britain’s Caribbean Dependent Territories in 1991 based on recently declassified government records. The decision to impose abolition reflected the broad changes in crime and governance in the Caribbean over the preceding decade and the new diplomatic significance of British death penalty policy, but in the short term it was entangled with a scheduled execution in Anguilla and a dozen more capital cases that were pending in other Caribbean Dependent Territories and Bermuda. Britain was forced to abolish the death penalty in part because the likelihood of an execution seemed higher than in many years. The appointment of Douglas Hurd, an abolitionist, as Foreign Secretary was also important, but even so the change of policy was motivated by politics rather than principle. Abolition had been forced on the government as the only sure way to prevent executions that – it had become clear – posed intolerable risks to British interests, but Britain was still far from adopting a consistent abolitionist foreign policy.

The twentieth century saw a considerable number of rewritings and adaptations of the Arthurian legend, in as many styles and purposes as there were writers, cultures and national heroes. Two main and sometimes paradoxical tendencies appeared: a quest for a supposedly deeper historical knowledge, and a need to popularise Arthurian themes. As Nazis launched their own quest for the Holy Grail, a subsequent need to re-enchant the world was expressed throughout the century. By adapting medieval texts to insist on their modernity for a contemporary readership, authors, artists and creators insisted on the universal aspects of the Matter of Britain, using it to emphasise the disillusionment in our modern Western societies, or on the contrary to expose the alleged wonders of an immutable human nature. The twentieth century confirmed this wide malleability, as Continental Europe regularly found in King Arthur a symbol of its own preoccupations.