Is Europe a global actor? The short answer is that the European Union is punching below its weight, and the Europeans have no one to blame for this state of affairs but themselves. European politicians got so good at pretending that the impossible was around the corner—a functioning federal union—that they ended up fooling themselves. The long answer, however, though vastly more complex, is also more enlightening. It is an answer rooted, first and foremost, in history and geography.

The past few months seem to have offered up both bad news and good about the prospects for the European model. The bad news is that the common currency has been cruelly tested, some political crockery has been broken in the course of taking that test, and the outcome is, at best, uncertain. The good news is that the Lisbon Treaty has finally cleared the hurdles. But this success poses another question: Has the Lisbon Treaty opened the road into the promised land of one voice, one foreign-policy telephone number and one common interest in the world at large? Not really. After wandering in an ever-widening wilderness for the past twenty years, we have discovered that there is no land of milk and honey, no truly common foreign policy, after all. The European Union is still the cumbersome and temperamental machine of old, one that will work for some purposes but, the advertising notwithstanding, not for others.