LONDON. Europe announced this week that it is, once again, at a crossroads, a location it has now occupied continuously since roughly 1957, which makes it less a crossroads than a permanent address with a postcode. To mark the occasion, leaders unveiled a bold new plan to rethink the European project, which observers noted bore an uncanny resemblance to the bold new plan they unveiled last year. And the year before. And, frankly, all the way down.
The plan runs to ninety pages and proposes a âreset,â a âdeepening,â and a âreflection process.â These are the three sacred verbs of Brussels, deployed in rotation whenever the previous reset, deepening and reflection process has quietly failed to do a single thing.