Is it reasonable to believe Europe can exist as an idyllic, peaceful, unified state with one coinage, one flag, many languages, and many groups of people who harbor deep resentments towards each other? From a historical vantage, such efforts will be in vain. The 1957 Treaty of Rome is simply a modernized, slightly rectified version of the 1815 Vienna Convention. The notion of European unity is not something new suggested after the second world war. It is something Europe has grappled with since the end of the Roman Empire.
When the Roman Empire was the dominant global power, economically and politically Europe was unified. Roman legions occupied Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, and sent trade missions to negotiate with civilizations in India and Asia. There are no indications that Rome had diplomatic relations with Incas, Aztecs, or other indigenous peoples of North and South America. The only serious rival to Roman authority was Persia whose empire collapsed at the hands of Roman conquorers.
With the rise of feudalism, Europe became more volatile. The Holy Roman Empire attempted reunification, but since religion and politics are unwise to mix, the Holy Roman Empire (in which the Popes selected the emperors) was destined to fail. By the thirteenth century the emperors perceived themselves as autonomous of the Popes; the Popes considered themselves the final source of legitimate authority. The Reformation shattered that unsuccessful stint at unity.
The modern concept of the state evolved after the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) which laid waste to most of Europe. Ambitions for future unification were abandoned until the 1815 Congress of Vienna which was meant to counter attempts by Napoleonic France to force unification. Precisely as Edmund Burke predicted, the 1789 French Revolution was too radical for Europe and plunged the fixed social order into unprecedented chaos and bloodshed. The Vienna Convention had as a central theme the creation of a consolidated European entity (the "Holy Alliance" as Austrian Prince Metternich called it). Alliance members did not digress from the monarchical state model. Part of the argument was that by maintaining royal leadership, a future uprising similar to the French Revolution could be prevented more easily. Europeans therefore tacitly accepted their tendencies to fight each other for territorial rights and other seemingly innocuous matters.
