I am not sure when “the vision thing” became politically modish in Europe, but it has certainly gathered steam as a communications tool over the past 20 years. It was road-tested at the European level by the single currency goal adopted at Maastricht in 1991, and was proven a vote-winner by Tony Blair at the 1997 UK general election.

Now, visions are two a penny. Industries regularly produce them in a bid for policymakers’ attention. Europe 2020, the European Commission’s strategy for economic growth, is meant to be both visionary and practical. The European Round Table of Industrialists recently produced its own vision of a competitive Europe in 2025.

Many visions seek to inspire ambitious aspiration, while others are depressingly dystopian, darkly describing a continent doomed by its demography to falling living standards and global irrelevance. Journalists swarm over nightmare predictions for their headline value, even when embarrassingly divorced from reality.

Politicians like to peddle visions that are intrinsically optimistic, even when the grounds for optimism are as convincing as a banker pleading poverty. The UK general election campaign now under way could not be more divorced from reality – the politicians are pretending to optimism for the country’s future when everyone rightly fears that tax increases and cuts in public services followed by years of low growth are just over the horizon.

With similarly scant regard for scruple, politicians on the European mainland are also attempting to minimise the difficulties of the present. They struggle to counter the decline in the public’s faith that mainstream political parties have real solutions to offer.

Somehow or other, mainstream politicians have to stem the haemorrhage of votes being cast for simplistically attractive and frequently extreme solutions. Geert Wilders will prosper in the Dutch general election in June with his cures for the “immigrant problem”, while in Rome a recently elected right-wing mayor is re-locating long-standing Roma townships with little regard for their occupants’ human rights or their social and educational needs.

Surely, at this, the beginning of the century’s second decade, any vision for Europe and its countries must start by acknowledging the gravity and difficulty of the continent’s economic and social challenges and continue by plotting convincing strategies to solve them.

We shall shortly be celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Schuman Declaration. The French foreign minister and his fellow founding fathers believed it would be the first step towards a federal Europe, but it was not a plan for a federal Europe. Instead, they proposed a very specific blueprint whose aim was to bring about a permanent Franco-German reconciliation through, as a first step, the pooling of their coal and steel industries within a supranational structure. It was a practical but visionary response to the challenge of rebuilding Europe’s economy and of establishing a stable framework in which to manage relations between European states. The vision was of a Europe free from war. “Europe will not be made all at once, or according to a single plan. It will be built through concrete achievements which first create a de facto solidarity,” said the declaration. This was Jean Monnet’s vision for the European Coal and Steel Community, which, in just a few years, hastened the birth of the European Economic Community.

The late 1950s and the 1960s should not be looked back on as some kind of golden age. Disputes between the founding six member states were frequent and the Monnet vision was tested almost to the point of destruction by France’s president Charles de Gaulle. He did not share their vision of a federalising Europe and confronted it with the indissoluble reality of the nation state. The nation state was a discredited concept in much of continental Europe after 1945, for, in less than half a century, it had twice been the agent of death and destruction on a previously unimaginable scale. But 50 years ago, few could have anticipated – least of all de Gaulle – that European integration would be the saviour of the democratic nation state in continental western Europe and the framework for its renaissance in central and eastern Europe.

This is as relevant to understanding today’s European Union as is the passing of those generations that had experienced war and were determined to banish it. Angela Merkel is no Konrad Adenauer, because she leads a re-united nation with ‘normal’ interests defined by geography, 20th-century traumas and an economy whose strength and vitality others in Europe struggle to match. Poland’s Donald Tusk is no Alcide De Gasperi, because his country now enjoys a political independence denied it for most of Europe’s modern history.

Constructing a vision of political union that can win the allegiance of the peoples of 27 disparate countries anxious to protect and defend what remains of their national sovereignties is an impossible task for Europe’s present generation of leaders and may remain so for decades. This will not prevent them working together to confront the formidable challenges imposed by globalisation. Read the headlines of any edition of this newspaper and we will find unpredictable and confusing variations of the Schuman/Monnet vision. It is impressive, but it is not pretty, and it commands little popular affection. And it will have to deliver more obvious benefits more quickly if Europe is to be seen as the solution to current problems and not their cause.

John Wyles is the chief strategy co-ordinator at the European Policy Centre in Brussels.

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