If today, given the new life breathed into the European dynamic, we were to go back over three decades and point to a parallel with the initial links between the German and the European unification processes, we would have to start by recalling the braking effect that German unity put upon European policy. Even if the restoration of the German state was met, to some extent, by the pro-integrationist move of giving up the Deutschmark, this did not exactly deepen European co-operation.

For the former citizens of the German Democratic Republic, brought up within a completely different type of culture and politics, the theme of ‘Europe’ did not have the same importance and relevance as it did for citizens of the ‘old’ (West German) federal republic. Since the (re)founding of national unity the interests and thinking of German governments have also changed. Attention was first wholly absorbed by the unprecedented task of adapting the decrepit GDR economy to the markets of Rhineland capitalism and hooking up a communist-controlled state bureaucracy to the administrative practices of a democratic state.

Putting aside this domestic preoccupation, governments from Kohl onwards swiftly got used to the ‘normalities’ of the restored national state. Historians who vaunted this normality in those days may have somewhat prematurely dismissed the beginning of a post-national consciousness which at the time was emerging in West Germany. In any case, a far more confident foreign policy gave sceptical observers the impression that ‘Berlin’—thanks to Germany’s increased economic weight—wanted to look beyond its European neighbours and to relate immediately to the global powers of the US and China.

Nevertheless, national unity was not really the decisive reason why a hesitant federal government until very recently sided with London in favour of widening the EU as a whole, rather than undertake the overdue task of deepening the currency union’s institutional structures. There were, rather, economic policy reasons which only truly came to light in the banking and sovereign-debt crisis.

Up until the Lisbon treaty, which came into force in December 2009, the EU was anyway preoccupied by managing the institutional consequences and social upheavals of the union’s eastwards extension of 2004.