It has serially failed to construct if not a coherent defence and foreign policy for Europe, then at least a robust response to successive crises in the Balkans. That's been left to the Americans. It is now a matter of near-global consensus that the policy is broken, an absurdly dated subsidy for farmers. Yet on it goes, sucking up half the EU budget and one in five ministerial meetings. Last week's attempt to solve it ended in a trademark EU pile of fudge.
Paralysis seems hard-wired into the Brussels mindset.
The European Central Bank is condemned for peddling 1980s solutions to 1990s problems, for presiding over slower growth in Europe than in the US, but no one seems able to do anything about it. Like the CAP, it remains trapped in gridlock. The famous 'democratic deficit' has given us a Commission which is wholly unelected and a Council of Ministers which meets infrequently and in secret. Since its foundation, it has been the mandarins and bosses who have plotted this adventure, doing next to nothing to win public legitimacy. In Britain, the strategy for too long was entry by stealth, hoodwinking the electorate to join a scheme whose merits were never properly argued.