What is the point of Europe? The threat of an explosive disintegration ofthe eurozone – and with it of the European Union – is receding. But the confused outcome ofItaly’s recent parliamentaryelection, with an upper house dominated by a party that campaigned on ananti-EU platform and a pro-European majority in the Chamber of Deputies, hasrevived the fundamental debate about the purpose of European integration.

Europeans find it hard to find a positive way of describing the exercisein which they have been engaged for the past six decades. One commoninterpretation is that integration makes people better off. Unity is supposedto be a foundation of prosperity. The Common Market was defended at the outsetin terms of the gains that would follow from increased trade. The case forcapital-market integration, and then for a single currency, was similar.

All of this recalls some powerful arguments that were made in thenineteenth century about national integration and unification. In particular,the two countries whose problems drove much of the need for twentieth-centuryEuropean integration – Germany and Italy – were culturally and politicallyhighly diverse. In both countries, early-nineteenth-century romanticnationalism gave way to a soberobsession witheconomic forces after the failed revolutions of 1848.

The influential German journalist Ludwig von Rochau, who coined the term Realpolitik,described the new German mood on the eve of Otto von Bismarck’s last war ofunification. German unity was not a question of the heart’s desire; it was “amundane business transaction, in which no one should lose, but everyone shouldgrab as much as they could for themselves.”

Italians shared the same belief after the disillusion of 1848. Patriotismcould generate business opportunities. The great Florentine liberal statesman,Bettino Ricasoli, concluded that Tuscany was simply financially unviable on itsown.

This sort of economic nationalism in Germany and Italy briefly producedcoalitions of interests that supported the drive to national unification underBismarck and Cavour. But the credibility of the national project seemed to crumble when growth faltered, leading to theemergence of movements that championed the aggressive, confrontational, andviolent assertion of cultural identity.

Mario Monti is the twenty-first-century descendant of those nineteenth-century patriots who argued forthe economic necessity of national unity. Now it is European unity that isneeded for economic reasons. This vision of Europe is not idealistic; it issimply concerned with how Europeanization can benefit Italians. And, like itsnineteenth-century precursor,it is vulnerable to severe backlashes,especially when it appears to bring only pain and suffering.

Indeed, when today’s Europeans peer into the future, they see onlyprolonged recession and austerity. Europe means nothing but sacrifice: northernEuropeans paying for southern Europe’s woes through large transfers, orsouthern Europeans repaying onerous– and maybe impossible – levels of debt.

A variant of the economic argument for European unity is the claim thatenhanced integration makes it easier to finance debt, because interest ratesare lower. A reduction in borrowing costs constituted a powerful motive in the1990’s for southern European governments to join the monetary union. But thecosts of moving into a non-defaulting environment are high.

Here, another historical parallel is helpful. France in the ancienrégime repeatedly imposed semi-default on its creditors by reducinginterest rates and extending maturities. In the 1780’s, a new consensus againstsuch measures emerged. But the impossibility of raising revenue then triggeredthe French Revolution, with the revolutionaries demanding confiscatory taxes andimpositions on the wealthy elite.

The alternative to thinking about European integration simply as a way ofgenerating wealth and prosperity frequently analogizes it to a marriage. In the late 1980’s,for example, then-European Commission President Jacques Delors, raising theprospect of a two-speed Europe, suggested that one or two countries might needa “different kind of marriage contract.”

The marriage analogy was used initially to signal that the Europeanrelationship was an exclusive one. Europeans had a unique relationship withwhich no one – especially the United States – should interfere. AsDominique Strauss-Kahn, then France’s finance minister, put it in 1997, “Peoplewho are married do not want others in the bedroom.”

But marriage can be a fraughtinstitution (as Strauss-Kahn may know better than most). The British economicjournalist Martin Wolf thinks of Europe as a marriage kept together only by thehigh cost of divorce. Others see it as a sham marriage.

Traditional marriage vows entail a commitment that binds the partnersthrough changing circumstances: for richer and for poorer, in sickness and inhealth. Even if the marriage does not make the partners better off, they stillneed to stick with it. So neighbors who have a quarrelsome or violent past are not always welladvised to reconcile by marrying.

The problem was that the Europeans did not understand what marriage reallymeant and why they should want to get married. Enthralled by promises of material well-being andsecurity, they had exaggeratedexpectations of romantic wedded bliss.

The unhappy marriage analogy for Europe’s current malaise, while depressing, is helpful. Atleast it tells Europeans that they are not stuck together only for materialreasons. But, until that lesson is really learned, Europe must brace itself formore setbacks and backlashes,which means that it must still answer the fundamental question: Why stick it out together,especially at a time when more and more Europeans are choosing not to getmarried at all?