Martin Wolf

There aren't any...

nationalists in the sense that vance is a nationalist or trump is a nationalist who are european nationalists it doesn't it's an exciting there are but there aren't many and in political will terms then you have this either mild centralizing desire to pull together be a more effective club which is what

I would like to see.

Or it's, yes, we would like to be a great power, but it's the nation.

And as one famous European politician once said, in Europe, there are small countries and small countries that don't realize they're small.

And so if you honestly ask me how this will play out,

I have no idea, and I don't think anyone does.

I know what I would like to see, I've indicated it, but that may not be what is possible.

What you really need is a European Charlemagne or Napoleon, and that doesn't come out of this, because there isn't a European with that will.

The last European that had the will to make Europe was Hitler.

That's what he wanted to do.

It would have been a German Reich.

And before that was Napoleon.

And before that, Louis XIV, briefly mentioned.

So I think the question of what Europe's future is, what it can be, given its history of fragmentation and the extraordinary life that came out of this fragmentation, I think it's just not at all clear.

But there's no doubt...

that America is helping.

If it does develop an independent sense of itself with its own institutions, sense of destiny, sense of identity, very difficult in a multinational state like this, entity like this, then it will be because the Americans are saying, you can't trust us.

We're going to beat you around the head if you don't sort yourself out.

Maybe that will count.