Barely a decade after the collapse of the Third Reich, half a dozen countries in Western Europe banded together in an experiment in international economic cooperation. Their combined population was nearly 170 million—less than a third of the entire continent—though it was growing at a robust rate. They were, by today’s standards, fairly closed economies with tight regulations governing the movement of capital and strong and expanding traditions of strategic state planning. In their rural areas, a peasant way of life remained much as it had been for centuries, scarcely touched by tourism; traditional customs and clothing were still to be found. Yet there were sources of dynamism and transformation as well: The countries were also trading powerhouses, amounting collectively to nearly a third of the world’s manufacturing exports. Most had sizable trade unions, still accumulating reach and power, and their inhabitants’ lives were improving quickly in material terms. The 1957 Treaty of Rome, which formalized the union of these countries—Italy, Belgium, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and West Germany—was more than just an effort to create a new common market between them; it was also a show of faith in the future and a wager on what collective political action could secure.

And yet, for all their forward-looking belief in the power of rational cooperation, it is surely fair to say that none of the politicians who took the lead in creating the European Economic Community and what eventually would become the European Union could ever have imagined where it would lead. Nearly seven decades later, war between France and Germany has become unthinkable, just as they hoped it would, and the institutions they founded are still going strong.

And not just going strong. History is full of international bodies that fizzle out and disappear or become pale shadows of what their founders intended. But this is not true of the EU. On the contrary, the institutional core of European integration is far more powerful and all-encompassing than anything that was dreamed of at the start. From an original membership of six, the club has expanded to include the vast majority of states in geographical Europe, with a total population that exceeds that of the United States and Canada combined. And these states are interconnected through an acquis communautaire overseen by an immensely powerful legal apparatus and an equally powerful central bank. There is a common currency and fiscal transfers on a substantial scale across the bloc. The European Union that Britain abandoned in 2020 may be something more complicated and difficult to define than the unified superstate Behemoth of the Brexiteers’ nightmares, but it is certainly a bigger and much more muscular creature than the relatively modest EEC that the UK first applied to join back in 1963.

The rise of the European Union has taken place against the backdrop of more than half a century of fundamental social and economic changes. Of these, perhaps the most striking and least expected was the way the Cold War ended. The peaceful regional integration of much of Eastern Europe into the EU has been an extraordinary historical achievement, as well as testimony to its success as the last and perhaps greatest of the 19th century’s peace projects. But while the EU has grown in size and scale, the Europe it sought to unify has become a very different continent than it once was, as well as one that exists in an ever less Eurocentric world. Today, Europe’s population represents less than 10 percent of the globe’s, down from 20 percent or more when the Treaty of Rome was signed. Population growth rates are low and trending negative. Meanwhile, China’s GDP has overtaken the EU’s for the first time, and capital deregulation has allowed for a massive increase in macroeconomic volatility. Per capita income growth in Europe has fallen, slowing dramatically since the end of the 1970s. Or to put it another way: People’s incomes were growing much faster when the integration process started than they are now. It is thus not surprising that the European Union in its contemporary guise is tolerated or accepted rather than enthusiastically embraced. The EU is increasingly associated with uncertain economic performance and stagnant if not falling living standards for much of its population, exacerbated by the significant increase in inequality that has accompanied the weakened place of organized labor and the maintenance of a monetary regime devoted to protecting the euro.

It is at this juncture, and partly in response to this predicament, that two new books about the European Union have recently appeared: Timothy Garton Ash’s Homelands and Loukas Tsoukalis’s Europe’s Coming of Age. Both books combine retrospection and prognosis. Tsoukalis was born in Greece in 1950, Garton Ash in the UK five years later. They thus belong not only to the same generation but also to countries outside the original six that founded the EEC. Both men grew up to become noteworthy analysts and advocates of the European project—insider-outsiders rather than career policymakers, but with access to elites as part of their claim to authority. For both, retrospection means revisiting the time when European unification became their cause. Yet it also means revisiting the challenges of yesteryear and comparing them with the challenges ahead.

A journalist by training, Timothy Garton Ash is more forthcoming about the ways in which his personal experiences have shaped and intersected with his professional commitments. He opens his book at the end of World War II. This was, of course, the moment in which the path to European integration began, but it was also when his father, serving as an officer in the British Army, took part in the defeat and occupation of Germany. His father, a Royal Artillery officer who was among the first to land on the Normandy beaches in the summer of 1944 and later won a Military Cross, was Garton Ash’s link to Europe. He was, on the one hand, a heroic figure who led family expeditions to the continent in their Hillman Super Minx. But he was also, especially as he aged, the epitome of that very British suspicion of Europe that his son wrestles with and devotes his life to trying to overcome. (There is less in the book about his mother, whose wartime work in photographic intelligence at RAF Medmenham also seems relevant to her son’s later curiosity.)

From the 1940s and ’50s, Garton Ash moves his story to the early ’70s. Old enough to remember when the continent really did seem far away, he describes how the reality of Europe’s politics came alive for him only when he was brought face to face with its authoritarian traditions on a trip to Greece. For Garton Ash, the regimes in Greece, Spain, and Portugal led to a realization that fascism was alive and well in Europe and that it was his generation’s task to slay its new manifestations. This also led him, while in his 20s, to embrace the idea of Europe as a set of liberal and democratic values at a time when the prevailing language among insiders in Brussels was technocratic and culture-averse, which made him an unusually outward-looking figure in a Britain that remained locked in its own postimperial introspection even after it joined the Common Market in 1973. As Garton Ash recounts the outlook of key figures in the creation of the European Union, he conveys how the anti-fascist experiences of a generation of Greeks, Spaniards, and Portuguese helped shape their commitment to democracy.